He had a history of abusing women stretching back to his Arkansas days. He grabbed Kathleen Willey by the breasts and crotch and forced her hand onto his genitals. He summoned Paula Jones to his hotel room, dropped his pants, and demanded that she kiss his penis. This is the man Gloria Steinem claimed was just making clumsy "passes" at women.
In 1995 he turned policy matters over to former Jesse Helms adviser Dick Morris, assigning him additional duty as the presidential pimp. After that, the horny and hypocritical duo passed many pleasant days indulging their lust at public expense while refining torture of the poor. "The Monster," Morris called Clinton while consorting with his prostitute. "The creep," she said of Morris, escaping for a sterilizing bath.
In the banana republic of 1990s Washington, bodyguards delivered women to Bill Clinton, who claimed the Oval Office as his "private" sanctuary at the same time as he auctioned off the Lincoln Bedroom as a six-figure overnight flophouse for fat cat donors. While speaking to teens of the importance of chastity and personal responsibility, he bullied his sexual victims into silence, employing semi-official detectives to dig up blackmail data to be used in extracting false testimony absolving him of responsibility for his predations. Kathleeen Willey found her car tires punctured and a stranger inquiring after her children by name. "Don't you get the message?" the man asked.
Cabinet members and other subordinates were pressed into service to deliver plausible deniability and exculpatory lies. Lawyers famous for devising loopholes for rich thugs made sure the chronic deceit was all "legally accurate."
When all else failed, Clinton eagerly slandered women who tried to get the truth out. He dismissed Gennifer Flowers as a lying gold digger. He insinuated that Paula Jones was a common slut who might secretly have enjoyed a sleazy encounter with him. He discarded Kathleeen Willey's accusation on the basis that, "It's ludicrous to think I would come on to a small-breasted woman." He portrayed Monica Lewinsky as a stalker, and would no doubt have smeared her far dirtier had she not retained the presidential seal on her most famous dress.
An Arkansas nursing-home supervisor (Juanita Broaddrick) claimed Clinton raped her in 1978. Her story checked out. The Great Dissembler, who "tried" marijuana without inhaling it, failed to offer the obvious excuse: She was asking for it, but I didn't ejaculate.
Sources:
Christopher Hitchens, No One Left To Lie To, (Verso, 1999)
Bill Clinton: "A Reckoning," The Atlantic, November 13, 2017
Barbara Ehrenreich, "Study Guide," the Progressive, November, 1998
Saturday, November 25, 2017
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Sunday, November 19, 2017
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Weapons of Mass Distraction Get More Destructive
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience
of the U.S. media." -Noam Chomsky
The daily attacks on american consciousness – not an
oxymoron if you continue hoping for the best while preparing for the worst –
via the treacherous fairy tales and homicidal gossip sold as news, not only
continue unabated but get worse. If that’s possible.
The American Un-Intelligence community, according to our consciousness
controllers at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Marvel Comics, has
proved that Putin and the evil Russians interfered with our cherished democracy
in which the majority of eligible voters never vote. Their department of mental
constipation has done this by indulging in estimates of how many people might
have viewed possible ads run by suspected Russians. These may have made totally
absurd claims about America, like unarmed black men being killed by the police.
Who could believe such nonsense? And they back up their charges of Russian
evil-doing in our sacred markets based on revelations from paid political-academic
spin doctors, all not only instantly accepted but spread far and wide by our
corporate media mind managers. Who could doubt the story? Well, maybe little
children not yet brain dead as a result of lifetimes of social conditioning based
on psychocratic theology about free markets and individual egos fed by mind
numbing drugs and commercial therapy.
The only distraction from this fable is the almost daily
parade of celebrity and political figures confessing to sexual abuses committed
many years before but owing to market legal and moral forces kept secret until
election dates, film openings and other entertainment spectacles were on the
agenda. The righteous anti-commies of the past have been replaced by righteous
anti-rationalists of the present and conservative know-nothing-ism is now
balanced by liberal no-thinking-ism.
As always, you have to laugh to keep from crying, fearing native or foreign terrorist attack and wondering if we might have been better off when we were hunting meat and gathering veggies in nature instead of hunting parking and gathering commodities at the mall. Sometimes the only solid thing we have is the plastic we use to pay for those commodities, even if the alleged dollars we spend don’t really exist and are only electronic blips with slightly more material foundation than the angels on a head of a pin or the pinheads we still accept as rulers because Russians have taken our fictional democracy away. Of course. Profitable films and fantasies to the contrary, the one thing we Americans need not fear is invasion by zombies. They feed on brains.
As always, you have to laugh to keep from crying, fearing native or foreign terrorist attack and wondering if we might have been better off when we were hunting meat and gathering veggies in nature instead of hunting parking and gathering commodities at the mall. Sometimes the only solid thing we have is the plastic we use to pay for those commodities, even if the alleged dollars we spend don’t really exist and are only electronic blips with slightly more material foundation than the angels on a head of a pin or the pinheads we still accept as rulers because Russians have taken our fictional democracy away. Of course. Profitable films and fantasies to the contrary, the one thing we Americans need not fear is invasion by zombies. They feed on brains.
Monday, November 13, 2017
Bulletin From The Corporate Fake News Internet Toilet
Jesus, Belatedly, Charged With Sexual Assault
World famous feminist lawyer Gloria Allbucks revealed
shocking details contained in previously unread biblical blogs from the Dead
Ocean Scrolls which show that Mary Magdalene suffered outrageous sexual abuse
from Jesus but was too frightened of his power to say anything at the time.
“Now that times have changed and brave people are coming forward, we can speak out for her and finally show the world what really went on in the days before TV, the internet, and lucrative litigation” said Allbucks, whose press conference was attended by hundreds of elected officials, dozens of Papparazzi, several former clergy, and six members of Girl Scouts of America who had come to the wrong press conference.
Calls for re-crucifixion came from Atheists, Agnostics,
Jews, Muslims, Democrats, Republicans, the Little Sisters of the Poor and the
Big Brothers of the Rich, while many devout Christians asked for restraint and listening
to both sides before rushing to judgment. Informed that both sides had been
dead for thousands of years, they urged prayer and that Catholics conduct a
second collection for all the suffering children in America’s charter schools.
Allbucks said she was dropping her case against statue
defilers for their vicious cruelty to animals in removing bird toilets from
public places and would put the full force of her skill into this case to
finally reveal the untold story of a sexist criminal who fooled the world for
far too long.
“When this case is over, things will never be the same for
men, for women, and for all the
other sexes”, she said.
Several of the elected officials were later accused of
sexually molesting the Girl Scouts in attendance and another lawsuit is
expected.
Sweet Land of Liberty
"Mass shootings can happen anywhere, at any time. When you're out in public, before settling into your seat or spot, ask yourself, if there's an attack, what will I do? At theaters and concerts, consider choosing seats on the aisle and close to exits. At restaurants, sit with your back to the wall and face the entrance. Before you relax, identify your escape routes and exit points, including turnstiles, doors, scalable fences, and accessible windows. Get out of the kill zone. It's your best option."
---Security expert Ed Hinman in WashingtonPost.com
Friday, November 10, 2017
Support Our Vets: Promote Social Revolution
If love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses.
-----William Blum
Tomorrow is Veterans Day, which used to be called Armistice Day, and differs from Memorial Day who knows exactly how. All we are supposed to know is that military service makes one a national hero, not (as used to be the case) for having demonstrated courage on the battlefield, but merely for signing up. We are well into the era of grade inflation, and as public school officials like to say, "everyone is above average."
Whatever respect is owed the martial virtues, it is not clear how much longer the human race can survive the era of super-patriotism. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock is set at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, the closest we have been to self-inflicted doom since the Reagan administration installed first-strike Pershing missiles in Germany (1982) while babbling about "winnable" nuclear war.
Though it is only by sheer blind luck that military brinksmanship has not terminated the human race, we are still encouraged to believe (especially on Veterans Day) that we should be grateful to the military for defending "our freedoms" around the world. The suggestion juxtaposes itself incongruously to the realities of the "war on terror" era: preventive detention, institutionalized torture, the "right" of the president to kill American citizens without due process of law, universal snooping and data mining by corporate behemoths and the national security state. True, this is no fault of U.S. soldiers, but it is hardly sensible to congratulate the military for defending our freedoms when they are constantly under attack by the very national security state that claims to be protecting them.
Furthermore, well prior to the launching of the "war on terror" it was impossible to believe that Washington's endless interventions and invasions had much to do with defending our precious Constitutional freedoms. Just how did the 1983 invasion of Grenada, for example, shore up our Bill of Rights?
In the name of patriotism we have turned a small al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan into a world-wide terrorist menace, although death tolls from its murderous attacks in the "homeland" are frequently eclipsed by random sociopaths mowing down dozens of people in church, at concerts and movies, or on school grounds. But surely ISIS stands a good chance of winning our permanent attention with a carefully planned WMD attack in a U.S. city. After all, it has been more than a generation since journalist Robert Fisk discovered that two themes were dominating titles in the bookshops of Algiers: fanatic religious tracts and nuclear, chemical, and biological engineering books. (Doesn't anyone read for pleasure anymore?)
Veterans Day often tends to go with "We're Number One" nostalgia, though it won't do to mention that the U.S. is first in the world in per capita prison population, financial bailouts for corporate looters, homicide and death by guns, and massive imperial bloodshed. Such dismally routine features of American life cannot be said to embody love of country any more than the many schools that are falling apart, public hospitals that are closing down, and essential public services that are being cut so plutocrats can have yet another huge tax cut. Thus, we avert our gaze and praise our soldiers, whose job it is to protect U.S. corporate "interests," not the United States itself.
These perverted values obliterate our capacity for basic moral judgment. For example, when the USSR basketball team beat the USA team at the 1988 Olympics, political scientist Michael Parenti reminds us, the American media treated it as though it were an "end to civilization as we know it." In post-game commentaries NBC lamented how the Americans had been seriously handicapped by lack of practice time and the loss of a key player, and thus had been unable to overcome the "the Soviet onslaught." The evil Communists "never let up their attack" and were a "relentless juggernaut." "The impression left," comments Parenti drily, "was that the Americans were facing the Red Army rather than another basketball team."
By 1992, the U.S. had arranged for professionals to play in the Olympics, so Americans were able to delight in NBA all-stars slaughtering a ragged team from Zaire, composed of kids who had to work for a living and barely raised enough money to get to the games, and who had only begun to practice together a few months before the Olympics began. In short, a heavily tilted playing field allowed an orgy of jingoism to masquerade as normal pride in legitimate national achievements. It wasn't the only time.
There are many fine men and women serving in the U.S. armed forces, motivated by a genuine desire to give their lives if necessary to defend their country. Unfortunately, the mission of the U.S. armed forces is not to defend the country, but to protect and expand the far-flung empire. The U.S. presides over an armed planetary force vastly beyond the capacities of any other empire in history. This includes over half a million troops stationed at over 700 military bases around the world, and many more within the 50 states, including enormous recent constructions in Central Asia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Colombia. It boasts an arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads, a small fraction of which could eliminate human civilization, plus a naval strike force possessed of more tonnage and firepower than the rest of the world's navies combined, patrolling every ocean and stopping on every continent. It also has, or will soon develop, space vehicles with capacity to strike both terrestrial and outer space targets, and send reconnaissance and attack drones back into the atmosphere. This is in defense of an international network of client states (satellites is the more blunt term) that generates huge profits for a plutocratic minority at direct social cost to the world majority.
Meanwhile, the U.S. troops that are constantly praised as "heroes" are treated rather poorly. Since 2001, over six thousand of them have died in Afghanistan and Iraq for no legitimate purpose, with tens of thousands more wounded or disabled in fulfillment of an apparently endless mission that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis as well. Suicide rates among U.S. veterans of these two wars dramatically exceed the corresponding rate for the rest of the U.S. population, with mental issues exceeding physical injuries as the cause of veteran hospital admissions. And on any given night in the USA tens of thousands of homeless veterans are found living on the streets.
In short, our nation is bled to feed the imperial vanity of our rulers. "Support our troops" is a cynical veneer designed to disguise a shameless policy of "cut their benefits."
Sources:
Michael Parenti, Superpatriotism, (City Lights, 2004)
Michael Parenti, The Face of Imperialism, (Paradign Publishers, 2011)
-----William Blum
Tomorrow is Veterans Day, which used to be called Armistice Day, and differs from Memorial Day who knows exactly how. All we are supposed to know is that military service makes one a national hero, not (as used to be the case) for having demonstrated courage on the battlefield, but merely for signing up. We are well into the era of grade inflation, and as public school officials like to say, "everyone is above average."
Whatever respect is owed the martial virtues, it is not clear how much longer the human race can survive the era of super-patriotism. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock is set at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, the closest we have been to self-inflicted doom since the Reagan administration installed first-strike Pershing missiles in Germany (1982) while babbling about "winnable" nuclear war.
Though it is only by sheer blind luck that military brinksmanship has not terminated the human race, we are still encouraged to believe (especially on Veterans Day) that we should be grateful to the military for defending "our freedoms" around the world. The suggestion juxtaposes itself incongruously to the realities of the "war on terror" era: preventive detention, institutionalized torture, the "right" of the president to kill American citizens without due process of law, universal snooping and data mining by corporate behemoths and the national security state. True, this is no fault of U.S. soldiers, but it is hardly sensible to congratulate the military for defending our freedoms when they are constantly under attack by the very national security state that claims to be protecting them.
Furthermore, well prior to the launching of the "war on terror" it was impossible to believe that Washington's endless interventions and invasions had much to do with defending our precious Constitutional freedoms. Just how did the 1983 invasion of Grenada, for example, shore up our Bill of Rights?
In the name of patriotism we have turned a small al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan into a world-wide terrorist menace, although death tolls from its murderous attacks in the "homeland" are frequently eclipsed by random sociopaths mowing down dozens of people in church, at concerts and movies, or on school grounds. But surely ISIS stands a good chance of winning our permanent attention with a carefully planned WMD attack in a U.S. city. After all, it has been more than a generation since journalist Robert Fisk discovered that two themes were dominating titles in the bookshops of Algiers: fanatic religious tracts and nuclear, chemical, and biological engineering books. (Doesn't anyone read for pleasure anymore?)
Veterans Day often tends to go with "We're Number One" nostalgia, though it won't do to mention that the U.S. is first in the world in per capita prison population, financial bailouts for corporate looters, homicide and death by guns, and massive imperial bloodshed. Such dismally routine features of American life cannot be said to embody love of country any more than the many schools that are falling apart, public hospitals that are closing down, and essential public services that are being cut so plutocrats can have yet another huge tax cut. Thus, we avert our gaze and praise our soldiers, whose job it is to protect U.S. corporate "interests," not the United States itself.
These perverted values obliterate our capacity for basic moral judgment. For example, when the USSR basketball team beat the USA team at the 1988 Olympics, political scientist Michael Parenti reminds us, the American media treated it as though it were an "end to civilization as we know it." In post-game commentaries NBC lamented how the Americans had been seriously handicapped by lack of practice time and the loss of a key player, and thus had been unable to overcome the "the Soviet onslaught." The evil Communists "never let up their attack" and were a "relentless juggernaut." "The impression left," comments Parenti drily, "was that the Americans were facing the Red Army rather than another basketball team."
By 1992, the U.S. had arranged for professionals to play in the Olympics, so Americans were able to delight in NBA all-stars slaughtering a ragged team from Zaire, composed of kids who had to work for a living and barely raised enough money to get to the games, and who had only begun to practice together a few months before the Olympics began. In short, a heavily tilted playing field allowed an orgy of jingoism to masquerade as normal pride in legitimate national achievements. It wasn't the only time.
There are many fine men and women serving in the U.S. armed forces, motivated by a genuine desire to give their lives if necessary to defend their country. Unfortunately, the mission of the U.S. armed forces is not to defend the country, but to protect and expand the far-flung empire. The U.S. presides over an armed planetary force vastly beyond the capacities of any other empire in history. This includes over half a million troops stationed at over 700 military bases around the world, and many more within the 50 states, including enormous recent constructions in Central Asia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Colombia. It boasts an arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads, a small fraction of which could eliminate human civilization, plus a naval strike force possessed of more tonnage and firepower than the rest of the world's navies combined, patrolling every ocean and stopping on every continent. It also has, or will soon develop, space vehicles with capacity to strike both terrestrial and outer space targets, and send reconnaissance and attack drones back into the atmosphere. This is in defense of an international network of client states (satellites is the more blunt term) that generates huge profits for a plutocratic minority at direct social cost to the world majority.
Meanwhile, the U.S. troops that are constantly praised as "heroes" are treated rather poorly. Since 2001, over six thousand of them have died in Afghanistan and Iraq for no legitimate purpose, with tens of thousands more wounded or disabled in fulfillment of an apparently endless mission that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis as well. Suicide rates among U.S. veterans of these two wars dramatically exceed the corresponding rate for the rest of the U.S. population, with mental issues exceeding physical injuries as the cause of veteran hospital admissions. And on any given night in the USA tens of thousands of homeless veterans are found living on the streets.
In short, our nation is bled to feed the imperial vanity of our rulers. "Support our troops" is a cynical veneer designed to disguise a shameless policy of "cut their benefits."
Sources:
Michael Parenti, Superpatriotism, (City Lights, 2004)
Michael Parenti, The Face of Imperialism, (Paradign Publishers, 2011)
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
1882: New York City
You Too Can Succeed In Life
"The happiness road no longer leads only to the prairies of the West. Now, it is also the day of the big cities. The whistle of the train, magic flute, awakens youth from its rustic drowsiness and invites it to join the new paradises of cement and steel. Any ragged orphan, promise the siren voices, can become a prosperous businessman if he works hard and lives virtuously in the offices and factories of the giant buildings.
"A writer, Horatio Alger, sells these illusions by the millions of copies. Alger is more famous than Shakespeare and his novels have a bigger circulation than the Bible. His readers and his characters, tame wage earners, have not stopped running since they got off the trains or transatlantic ships. In reality, the track is reserved for a handful of business athletes, but North American society massively consumes the fantasy of free competition, and even cripples dream of winning races."
-----Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, Vol. 2, Faces and Masks, p. 221
Friday, November 3, 2017
Immigrants, Immigration, Personal Identities and Social Unconsciousness
The latest tragedy of innocent deaths caused by – depending
on level of consciousness control – a maniac, a terrorist, an immigrant
terrorist maniac or a maniacal terrorist immigrant, invites more word game
therapy by avoiding the substance of a political economic problem. The fact
that Trump has supported ending a policy which allows immigrants to enter the
country through a lottery doesn’t turn criticism of that capital enriching social
policy into a bigoted or anti-human rights position. The romanticized legends
and myths about immigrants stand in terrible contrast to the actual history of
immigration in America; the historic reality of people dumped on foreign shores
for their economic use as cheap labor transformed into heroic tales of them
rising from street peddlers to bank owners. In fact, had the latest
maniac-terrorist not been allowed to enter this country under this lottery
program, those he murdered might still be alive. Unless they turned out to be
among the more than 100 slain everyday on our streets and roadways in the
American market for private transit profits at public loss of life. Of course,
most of those 100 die in accidents while the eight in New York were murdered.
But as in every case of maniacal immigrant terrorism or terroristic native born
maniacalism, the political economics and foreign policy that are the underlying
cause are reduced to charges and counter charges of bigotry, hate crimes,
anti-diversity and more psychobabble avoiding confrontation with that primary
cause.
Why do some folks hate us so much they would crash planes
into buildings, blow up or gun down people on holiday, and crash vehicles into innocent
citizens just taking a stroll? Could it have something to do with our foreign
policy which has been destroying nations and slaughtering people in the Middle
East for nearly 17 years - most
recently - because they are terrorists acting in revenge for the policy which
has been slaughtering and destroying them since long before? In fact, the one
thing most Middle East people can agree on whether religious, agnostic,
sectarian, diplomatic or every day folk, is that Palestinians have been abused
and mistreated by the west since long before 1948, though things got much worse
since then and are at the root of all the present problems presented as somehow
arising out of a vacuum labeled “islamic terrorism”.
Rather than focus on that, we are manipulated into accepting
“refugees” from places we have destroyed or are still in process of destroying,
and calling one another names for being in favor or opposed to such sanctuaries
provided, instead of ending our vicious, thoughtless, anti-human policies of
treating an entire portion of humanity as lower life forms until our master
race of self chosen people rulers convince us to take pity on some of their
pain, inflicted by us.
This is not a problem to be solved by taking meds or seeing
a therapist, but by radical transformation of a political economic system that
is the root cause of the problem. Which is why we are made to focus on
individual identity groups and minorities other than the one most important,
which is global capitalist billionaires and their professional lackeys who are not
just a “deep state” in america but operate as such for the entire world.
The empty words,
platitudes and sincere if useless pronouncements from gas-bags after each of
these horrors is to be expected, but serious actions are what is needed to end
the horror inflicted on innocent americans by a relatively tiny population –the
terrorists - in response to the awesome murders and destruction visited upon a
great mass of humanity by a relatively small population from here – the
military - under the control of the smallest population of all – our ruling
class rich. Blaming the ongoing slaughters in the Middle East on the military
is as dumb as blaming billions of Muslims for the retaliatory blood letting of
a minority force of relative amateurs at mass murder. Still, we call them “terrorists”,
while our destruction of nations, their leaders and hundreds of thousands of
innocent Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Yemenis and Palestinians are
rationalized to be supporting democracy, peace, fried chicken, abortion on
demand, free circumcision, or whatever other lie that can be safely forced into
the minds of innocent people who believe too much of what authority tells them.
When that belief changes to anger at having been lied to for
so long, and people are presented with no more alternative than voting for the
sub-moron brand instead of the brain dead brand – the lesser evil marketing
some still call our democracy – we wind up with a presidential race with the
major difference between the candidates of the rich is that one is in their employ
while the other is one of her employers. The fact that Trump helped finance
campaigns for his alleged arch-fiend enemy and she gladly accepted funds from
her arch-fiend enemy, should be enough to cause serious citizens to stop
consuming for a moment and think. But legions of decent, sincere and
desperately manipulated people voted for one or the other while the policies
both support helped induce the new york murderer, as it did all the previous
terrorist-maniac- immigrant fiends created by the main terrorist fiends here at
Hypocrisy Central.
We need to ask what kind of immigration system makes it
possible for a foreigner to get into the country via a lottery that offers as much
personal background information as is available about someone who buys a
lottery ticket, while other foreigners with education, job and language skills are
walled out and sometimes put through a bureaucratic green card hell that lasts
for years? Our kind. That system also allowed someone deported five times to re-enter
the country five times, and eventually, whether accidentally or not, take an innocent
life. These things have almost nothing to do with immigrants, the overwhelming
majority being decent, benign, honest, sincere, hard working and only in rare
cases criminally inclined, but a corrupt debased system profiting from cheap
immigrant labor which is even cheaper when it is illegal.
Past hordes of immigrants from Europe and Asia had greater
distances to travel and couldn’t use illegal routes as easily as current generation
immigrants from south of our borders who need merely cross a line that is on
maps but non-existent in the material world. The idea of a border wall is
neither brilliant nor totally idiotic though it will certainly make illegal
entry more difficult. But as long as the economy profits from such immigrant
labor there will be doors, windows and underground entrances found in such a
wall, many of them attended by capital’s government agents who will provide
safeguards greater than those that currently exist.
How is it possible for people to enter the country illegally
and then get a legal driver’s license? That is so they can drive to work and
shop like other americans, even if they do not speak the language or earn
anything near what some call a living wage, which is becoming more scarce for
English language speakers while foreigners, frequently without similar
education or skills, gain employment instead of americans who, it is said, want
too much money. How much is too much? Maybe a decent legal minimum wage? But an
illegally employed person earns less, which means more private profits, more
public loss, happy capitalists and unhappy citizens easily driven to actions a
more affluent privileged class can, in usually gross over-simplification,
identify as bigotry.
If we truly wish to stop the abuse of human beings and not
merely members of one or another special group of human beings, we need to stop
the oppressive practices inherent in dependence on something called market
forces to govern the creation and use of all that it takes for said humans to
survive. As long as some of us are allowed to be reduced to less than human, a
few of us will amount to more than human and that is the core of a problem
faced by humanity through all manner of civilized (?) societies, from slave to
feudal to capitalist. But the problem has become much worse under the last form
of social organization which evidence shows is destroying more of our race and
the very nature in which we have been created and sustained for much longer than
the latest purchase at the mall or the pentagon, or program to sustain
capitalism via free market fundamentalism or its lesser evil partner, social
democracy. The fact that eight people have combined wealth equal to or greater
than that of half the world’s population – 3.6 billion members of our race –
should be enough factual, material information to give us all pause to think,
then act to end a system that would allow, tolerate, sustain and even laud such
a dreadful reality. At that point we will see the beginning of the end of
terrorism, profitable poverty and war itself. But not before.