Military Dictatorship in the US?

[John Dolva]

Shermans march through the south, razing and leaving an impoverished country behind them could be the 'ghost that came home to roost' in Kennedys assassination. In Dallas, Kennedy was caught between a rock and a hard place.

(Sherman had been recalled after retirement on insanity issues. Walker?)

_____

The breath of emancipation which caused the slaves to rally to Sherman finds a parallel in the peasants rallying to Cromwell in the 1600's. Only to be led to the folly of Ireland where their hopes were destroyed. The winners were the rising capitalist. The losers(landlords) were absorbed. The monarchy restored. The soldiers appropriated.

Lincoln rallied the 'bondsmen' when he referred to the 250 year old struggle (which brings us to the early 1600's) in his second inauguration speech

"Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

March 4, 1865"

He here recognises the efforts of the average working person, both in amassing wealth and in sacrificing life in the struggles between dominant economic forces.

Kennedy (referrring to Stephens topic on unions etc) also did so.

It seems the sacrifice is ultimately made by the ordinary citizen, therefore an ultimate solution lies in the hands of an educated, organised and united common folk, where they stop being a pawn in greater power plays, and ultimately take the control implicit in the constitution.

____________

General Lees surrender was not the end of the war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.G.T._Beauregard

"Beauregard was born at the "Contreras" plantation in St. Bernard Parish, outside of New Orleans, Louisiana, to a white Creole family. His nickname to many of his army friends was The Little Creole (and also Bory, The Little Frenchman, Felix, and The Little Napoleon).

Beauregard's first assignment from the Confederate Government was command of the forces in Charleston, South Carolina, where on April 12, 1861, he opened fire on the Union-held Fort Sumter, regarded as the start of the American Civil War."

http://www.answers.com/topic/american-civil-war

"The “wedges of separation” caused by slavery split large Protestant sects into Northern and Southern branches and dissolved the Whig party. Most Southern Whigs joined the Democratic party, one of the few remaining, if shaky, nationwide institutions. The new Republican party, heir to the Free-Soil party and to the Liberty party, was a strictly Northern phenomenon. The crucial point was reached in the presidential election of 1860, in which the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, defeated three opponents—Stephen A. Douglas (Northern Democrat), John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat), and John Bell of the Constitutional Union party.

Lincoln's victory was the signal for the secession of South Carolina (Dec. 20, 1860), and that state was followed out of the Union by six other states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Immediately the question of federal property in these states became important, especially the forts in the harbor of Charleston, S.C. (see Fort Sumter). The outgoing President, James Buchanan, a Northern Democrat who was either truckling to the Southern, proslavery wing of his party or sincerely attempting to avert war, pursued a vacillating course. At any rate the question of the forts was still unsettled when Lincoln was inaugurated, and meanwhile there had been several futile efforts to reunite the sections, notably the Crittenden Compromise offered by Sen. J. J. Crittenden. Lincoln resolved to hold Sumter. The new Confederate government under President Jefferson Davis and South Carolina were equally determined to oust the Federals.

Sumter to Gettysburg

When, on Apr. 12, 1861, the Confederate commander P. G. T. Beauregard, acting on instructions, ordered the firing on Fort Sumter, hostilities officially began. Lincoln immediately called for troops to be used against the seven seceding states, which were soon joined by Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, completing the 11-state Confederacy. In the first important military campaign of the war untrained Union troops under Irvin McDowell, advancing on Richmond, now the Confederate capital, were routed by equally inexperienced Confederate soldiers led by Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston in the first battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861). This fiasco led Lincoln to bring up George B. McClellan (1826–85), fresh from his successes in W Virginia (admitted as the new state of West Virginia in 1863)."

"Apr-May 1865

Confederate troops surrender; 500,000 American soldiers lost their lives in the Civil War

May 13 1865

Last battle of the Civil War at Palmito Ranch, near Brownsville", Texas. (victory to the confedearates.)

OOOOOOOOOOOOO

some interesting curios:

http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/governors/war/clark-reagan.html

Rail and Post

"In addition to the misery caused by battle, the Civil War disrupted many everyday aspects of life. The Confederacy struggled to take over ordinary government services such as postal delivery. John Henniger Reagan, a former U.S. Congressman from East Texas, was appointed postmaster general of the Confederacy. In this letter, Reagan instructs the governors of the Confederate states to continue to pay their accounts to the U.S. postal service as before until a Confederate postal service could be organized.

U.S. postal service to the Confederacy was cut off on May 31, 1861. Although Reagan was an able administrator, Confederate postal service throughout the war was exceedingly poor**. Very few stamps were issued, and delivery was handicapped by Federal control of the Mississippi River, destruction of railroads, blockade by sea, and invading army by land. Most people came to rely on travelers and soldiers on furlough as an informal alternative to the postal service.

At war's end, Reagan went on the run with other officials of the former Confederacy. Eventually, he was arrested along with Jefferson Davis and former Texas governor Francis R. Lubbock. During his imprisonment, he recognized the reality of the Confederacy's defeat and wrote an open letter to his fellow Texans urging them to recognize the authority of the United States and to renounce secession and slavery. Pardoned and released, he returned to Texas in December 1865, only to find himself the object of scorn for his conciliatory stance.

Events proved Reagan right, and he eventually won the nickname the "Old Roman" as a compliment to his willingness to sacrifice personal popularity for the greater good. He was reelected to Congress in 1874, and became a United States Senator in 1887. In 1891, he became the chairman of the newly formed Railroad Commission, which became a uniquely powerful body in regulating not only railroads, but many other aspects of the Texas economy. He retired in 1903 and died in 1905."

http://members.tripod.com/~ProlificPains/wpns.htm

"The Le Mat Revolver was the most famous foreign pistol in service during the Civil War. It was invented by a French-born New Orleans doctor in 1856. The 'cap and ball' weapon is unique in that it has two barrels. A cylinder which held nine .40 calibre rounds fired through the upper barrel and revolved around the lower .63 calibre barrel which held a charge of buck-shot. By merely flicking his thumb, the shooter could re-align the hammer to fall on the lower barrel which acted as a small shotgun -- deadly at close range. Dr (or sometimes colonel) Jean Alexander Francois Le Mat produced about 300 of his weapon in New Orleans prior to the outbreak of the war. The weapons were noted as reliable and became well liked, so when the war began, Le Mat moved to France to set up mass production for the Confederacy."

EDIT::

**While this may be so, Reagan was an able administrator and the Confederate Postal service was one of the Confederate successes. It worked and lasted. It is described by some as the most successful department of the Confederate government.

the treasury and the PO department had an interesting relationsip:

http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/publications/jo.../article_2.html

“Attorney-General Watts, to whom President Davis referred the papers, in returning them to the President, said in his report that the brief paragraphs at the end of the letter of the Postmaster-General so aptly stated the law that he copied them in his opinion.” 95 The attorney-general plainly said that the postmaster-general had as full power over the funds belonging to the post office department as the secretary of the treasury had over other public moneys; and that his power to make and enforce all necessary regulations for the collection, safe-keeping, and disbursement of the funds of the post office department, embracing within the scope of such regulations the treasurer and auditor for the post office department, was as full and complete as that of the secretary of the treasury in relation to other public moneys."

http://cgi.ebay.com/Scott-CS-14-Unused-186...3QQcmdZViewItem

"From its beginning, the Confederate Post Office was very different from the Confederate Treasury Department. For one thing, the Post Office was a financial success, although it never faced the demands or pressures that were placed on Confederate currency. However, like their federal counterparts, CS stamps were frequently used as fractional currency. John H. Reagan of Texas, the Confederate Postmaster-General, was so competent that after the war, he was offered the same position with the US Post Office!"

to round off:

I think that here we are dealing with the last layers of the smokescreen. A few mirrors left to smash. In the inner sanctum is the domestic. Southern.

While all these apparently separate facts in themselves are true, there was a PRE assassination time. It is within the pre assassination framework that particular clues lie.

Pre Dallas was a world where Kennedy was alive, and the conspirators were hidden, laying their plans, using existing networks.

http://www.vectorsite.net/twcw_85.html

In the meantime, the Confederate forces in the West were laying down their arms. Jefferson Davis still wanted to continue the fight, but he was captured by Union cavalry and dragged off in humiliation. That only left Confederate forces at sea still in action for a time, including an ironclad, the CSS STONEWALL, that the Confederacy had purchased from France and the raider CSS SHENANDOAH, operating in the north Pacific. Both gave up the fight once their captains finally learned the war was over.

Taylor's decision applied to Bedford Forrest, who was by no means certain he felt like abiding by it. He was in a black mood and not merely because of the surrender; Wilson's troopers had not only given him and his men their worst beating of the war during the Union push on Selma, his arm was in a sling from multiple saber wounds, administered by a Union cavalry captain who Forrest shot with a revolver. That left Forrest's final personal score at 30 Yankees killed in close combat, while they had killed 29 of his horses in the course of the struggle. Forrest would say that he was "a horse ahead at the close."

__________

........

"That gave him little satisfaction for the moment. There was much talk in his ranks of going to Mexico, and Forrest himself seriously considered it until he had a long talk with his adjutant, who suggested that Forrest had a responsibility for leadership in the South in peace as he had in war. Forrest took the point to heart and decided to stay. When Forrest and his men formally gave up their arms and their regimental flags on 9 May, he said farewell with an address that stated the terms of their surrender were magnanimous and should be answered in kind, that there should be no blood feuds, that the men should obey the laws and be good citizens of the restored Union. It was a noble sentiment, though not one Forrest would live up to completely himself.

* Jefferson Davis was still at large at the beginning of May. He and his cabinet had remained in Charlotte until 26 April, watching the situation deteriorate. Davis was shocked to learn of Mr. Lincoln's murder, not out of any love for an adversary who had been so determined to crush secession, but because Davis knew that Abraham Lincoln had no vindictiveness towards the South, while Andrew Johnson made no secret of his desire for vengeance.

Mr. Davis was indignant when he heard that Johnston had surrendered without trying to escape with the remnants of his forces as Breckinridge had ordered. It was exactly what Davis expected of Johnston, and worse it left the Confederate government in the position of trying to escape through states where the Confederate States Army had laid down its guns.

Wade Hampton, as big a die-hard as Mr. Davis, didn't feel bound by Johnston's surrender. He wanted to lead the loyalists among his cavalry west to Texas to carry on the struggle, crossing over into Mexico if forced. Davis was encouraged to know there were still soldiers willing to carry on the struggle, and decided to head west.

For the moment, the problem was to evade capture. Davis and his cabinet fled from Charlotte into South Carolina, though his party dwindled as officials dropped out due to ill health, duties to their families, and other reasons. The remaining group reached Abbeville, South Carolina, on 2 May, where Mr. Davis was delighted to find that there were 3,000 loyal troops still in the area. He felt invigorated, and that afternoon he spoke with their brigadiers, who had been assembled by Breckinridge. Davis told the officers they and their loyal men would be the nucleus from which a new campaign of resistance could be formed.

The officers went dead silent and acted a bit fidgety. Finally, they worked up the nerve to tell him that continuation of the struggle would be "a cruel injustice to the people of the South", that they did not want their men to be reduced to homeless brigands. Davis went silent for a moment in his turn, and then asked them why they were still in uniform if they did not want to carry on the struggle further. They replied that they would remain in arms long enough to see him to safety, but once that was done they were through with fighting. He thought this over, and gave them a speech appealing to their patriotism.

They remained silent. "Then all is lost," he said, and got up. He almost fell over; Breckinridge had to come to his side and offer him his arm. Mr. Davis and his party left before midnight that same day, disposing of the money, gold, and silver from the Confederate treasury that had been carted with them from Richmond. Some was hidden locally; some was sent off in the false bottom of a carriage to Charleston, where it would be sent to England in hopes of eventually finding its way to the new capitol of the Confederacy, wherever that might be; and some gold was taken by the fugitives to help them on their journey.

The group continued to dwindle. By 6 May, the Davis party was in Georgia and had been reduced to 20 men, and his only cabinet official left with him was Postmaster General John Reagan.

____________________

Forrest:

A Union officer described them as "the Texas Rangers are as quick as lightning. They ride like Arabs, shoot like archers at a mark, and fight like devils.” They served under MG Nathan Bedford Forrest and Joseph Wheeler and fought at Shiloh, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, Knoxville, and Atlanta. In a raid at Fort Donelson in the winter of 1863 a ranger, Sam Maverick, swam the frigid Cumberland River in a sleet storm and set fire to a number of Union transports.

Forrest went on to become a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan.

So, we have gold, redemption and subversion setting in motion the inevitable events 100 years hence. Kennedy challenged the south and paid the price, the Texas Bush dynasty ascendancy follows.

[Greg Wagner]

From a purely economic standpoint, the military escapades of George W. Bush also serve as a vehicle to transfer wealth ($300 billion so far, maybe $1 trillion by the time its over) from the masses (taxpayers at large) to individuals and groups who are heavily invested in certain companies. That money doesn't just evaporate into thin air- it goes somewhere.

The tax system in the U.S. was designed in part as a method of redistributing (in a small, incremental way) a portion of the massive wealth accumulated by the rich back out amongst society (using the affluents' tax dollars to build roads, schools, parks, etc. that benefit communities and society as a whole). George's tax policy has halted this in its tracks, allowing the wealthy to keep more of their earnings and contribute less in tax payments. This was done by changing the income tax code and eliminating the estate tax. The economics of the "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan are really a simple matter of a means to transfer wealth from one segment of the population to another. I'm not suggesting that this is the sole reason Bush went to war, there is after all the oil we wanted to control and the ideological foothold the perpetrators hoped to gain in the region- errrrrr, I mean there was the WMD Saddam had and the fact that he was behind 9/11. I keep forgetting about those, ummm, reasons.

Edited March 20, 2006 by Greg Wagner

[Ron Ecker]

Greg,

Well said. The opposition party at least claims to have hope of starting to change things with the 2006 elections, ignoring the fact that the electoral machinery is controlled by the party in power, as it proved in 2004.

Virtually everything about federal governance in America has become a sham, and the people just don't get it.

As Walter Cronkite used to say, signing off, "And that's the way it is."

Ron

[Ron Ecker]

Here's a great review of a new book "American Theocracy" that tell it like it is. Truly frightening.

New York Times

March 19, 2006

'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips

Clear and Present Dangers

Review by ALAN BRINKLEY

Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In writing "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked a very big question about American politics: How would the demographic and economic changes of postwar America shape the long-term future of the two major parties? His answer, startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of people and resources from the old Northern industrial states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun Belt") would produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican Party, he believed, would restore stability and order to a society experiencing disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly before publishing his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance the changes he had foreseen.

Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in the decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring Republican Majority.") In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both sides of the political divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years. It is not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly persuasive.

Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.

The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.

And while this argument may be somewhat too simplistic to explain the complicated mix of motives behind the war, it is hard to dismiss Phillips's larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush administration — unusually dominated by oilmen — has taken what the president deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying levels. The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."

Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.

Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.

The third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, perhaps, the best known — the astonishing rise of debt as the precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course, the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes about the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative economists, who point especially to future debt — particularly the enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40 trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will create in the coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the United States government, fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a brief pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the national debt — currently over $8 trillion — is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.

The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of many people over many decades — among them Alan Greenspan, who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a product of the "financialization" of the American economy — the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.

There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to Phillips, as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of other writers and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of the familiarity of many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and political change. By describing a series of major transformations, by demonstrating the relationships among them and by discussing them with passionate restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger that no American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore.

Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost at Columbia University.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19brink.html

Edited March 20, 2006 by Ron Ecker

[John Simkin]

From a purely economic standpoint, the military escapades of George W. Bush also serve as a vehicle to transfer wealth ($300 billion so far, maybe $1 trillion by the time its over) from the masses (taxpayers at large) to individuals and groups who are heavily invested in certain companies. That money doesn't just evaporate into thin air- it goes somewhere.

The tax system in the U.S. was designed in part as a method of redistributing (in a small, incremental way) a portion of the massive wealth accumulated by the rich back out amongst society (using the affluents' tax dollars to build roads, schools, parks, etc. that benefit communities and society as a whole). George's tax policy has halted this in its tracks, allowing the wealthy to keep more of their earnings and contribute less in tax payments. This was done by changing the income tax code and eliminating the estate tax. The economics of the "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan are really a simple matter of a means to transfer wealth from one segment of the population to another. I'm not suggesting that this is the sole reason Bush went to war, there is after all the oil we wanted to control and the ideological foothold the perpetrators hoped to gain in the region- errrrrr, I mean there was the WMD Saddam had and the fact that he was behind 9/11. I keep forgetting about those, ummm, reasons.

It is very interesting that the media pays little attention to the link between political donations and government policy. I believe that financial corruption is at the heart of all that has been wrong with the American political system over the last 50 years: McCarthyism, the arms race, the Cold War, foreign policy in the Americas and South-East Asia, assassination of JFK, Vietnam War, Iran-Contra, Iraq War, etc.

The same thing has been taking place in the UK. It is just possible that we might be on the verge of hearing the truth about the link between financial corruption and the Iraq War:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6382

[Greg Wagner]

Just out of curiosity I did a little research and compiled these numbers. While a case can be made that 9/11 and other naturally occurring market forces could be partially responsible for the trends illustrated, its also pretty clear that Bush’s foreign policy is the prime mover here. This is far from a scientific evaluation, but I think its significant that war stocks have posted huge gains over the last 5 years while the U.S. economy overall has floundered.

[John Simkin]

Excellent information Greg. I will try and get the same information on the providers of military services in the UK.

[Douglas Caddy]

Excellent information Greg. I will try and get the same information on the providers of military services in the UK.

Here is an excellent interview with Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback, that provides more information on the U.S. military's power over the national government:

Part I: Cold Warrior in a Strange Land

Interview With Chalmers Johnson

TomDispatch.com

Tuesday 21 March 2006

As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare of mid-day, he suddenly exclaims, "Look at that structure!" I glance over and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft carrier. "It's the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan," he says, "the newest carrier in the fleet. It's a floating Chernobyl and it sits a proverbial six inches off the bottom with two huge atomic reactors. You make a wrong move and there goes the country's seventh largest city."

Soon, we're heading toward their home just up the coast in one of those fabled highway traffic jams that every description of Southern California must include. "We feel we're far enough north," he adds in the kind of amused tone that makes his company both alarming and thoroughly entertaining, "so we could see the glow, get the cat, pack up, and head for Quartzsite, Arizona."

Chalmers Johnson, who served in the U.S. Navy and now is a historian of American militarism, lives cheek by jowl with his former service. San Diego is the headquarters of the 11th Naval District. "It's wall to wall military bases right up the coast," he comments. "By the way, this summer the Pentagon's planning the largest naval concentration in the Pacific in the post-World War II period! Four aircraft-carrier task forces - two from the Atlantic and that's almost unprecedented - doing military exercises off the coast of China."

That afternoon, we seat ourselves at his dining room table. He's seventy-four years old, crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and bad knees. He walks with a cane, but his is one of the spriest minds in town. Out the window I can see a plethora of strange, oversized succulents. ("That's an Agave attenuata," he says. "If you want one, feel free. We have them everywhere. When the blue-gray Tequila plant blooms, its flower climbs 75 feet straight up! Then you get every hummingbird in Southern California.") In the distance, the Pacific Ocean gleams.

Johnson is wearing a black t-shirt that, he tells me, a former military officer and friend brought back from Russia. ("He was amused to see hippies selling these in the Moscow airport.") The shirt sports an illustration of an AK-47 on its front with the inscription, "Mikhail Kalashnikov" in Cyrillic script, and underneath, "The freedom fighter's friend, a product of the Soviet Union." On the back in English, it says, "World Massacre Tour" with the following list: "The Gulf War, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Angola, Laos, Nicaragua, Salvador, Lebanon, Gaza Strip, Karabakh, Chechnya… To be continued."

Johnson, who served as a lieutenant (jg) in the Navy in the early 1950s and from 1967-1973 was a consultant for the CIA, ran the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for years. He defended the Vietnam War ("In that I was distinctly a man of my times…"), but is probably the only person of his generation to have written, in the years since, anything like this passage from the introduction to his book Blowback: "The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense… In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naiveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong."

Retired, after a long, provocative career as a Japan specialist, he is the author of the prophetic Blowback, The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, published in 2000 to little attention. After 9/11, it became a bestseller, putting the word "blowback," a CIA term for retaliation for U.S. covert actions, into common usage. He has since written The Sorrows of Empire, Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. ("As an academic subject, the American Empire is largely taboo," he tells me. "I'm now comfortably retired, but I had a successful academic career. I realize that young academics today will take up the subject and start doing research on aspects of our empire only if they've got some cover. They need somebody to go first. I've had some of my former graduate students say, 'Look, you're invulnerable. If you won't take the lead, why do you expect us to go do a research project on the impact of American military whorehouses on Turkey. I mean, let's face it, it's a good subject!")

He is just now completing the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy. It will be entitled Nemesis.

Sharp as a tack, energetic and high-spirited, by turns genuinely alarmed and thoroughly sardonic, he's a talker by nature. Our encounter is an interview in name only. No one has ever needed an interviewer less. I do begin with a question that had been on my mind, but it's hardly necessary.

Tomdispatch: Let's start with a telltale moment in your life, the moment when the Cold War ended. What did it mean to you?

Chalmers Johnson: I was a cold warrior. There's no doubt about that. I believed the Soviet Union was a genuine menace. I still think so.

There's no doubt that, in some ways, the Soviet Union inspired a degree of idealism. There are grown men I admire who can't but stand up if they hear the Internationale being played, even though they split with the Communists ages ago because of the NKVD and the gulag. I thought we needed to protect ourselves from the Soviets.

As I saw it, the only justification for our monster military apparatus, its size, the amounts spent on it, the growth of the Military-Industrial Complex that [President Dwight] Eisenhower identified for us, was the existence of the Soviet Union and its determination to match us. The fact that the Soviet Union was global, that it was extremely powerful, mattered, but none of us fully anticipated its weaknesses. I had been there in 1978 at the height of [soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev's power. You certainly had a sense then that no consumer economy was present. My colleagues at the Institute for the USA and Canada were full of: Oh my god, I found a bottle of good Georgian white wine, or the Cubans have something good in, let's go over to their bar; but if you went down to the store, all you could buy was vodka.

It was a fairly rough kind of world, but some things they did very, very well. We talk about missile defense for this country. To this day, there's only one nation with a weapon that could penetrate any missile defense we put up - and that's Russia. And we still can't possibly match the one they have, the Topol-M, also known as the SS-27. When [President Ronald] Reagan said he was going to build a Star Wars, these very smart Soviet weapon-makers said: We're going to stop it. And they did.

As [senator] Daniel Moynihan said: Who needs a CIA that couldn't tell the Soviet Union was falling apart in the 1980s, a $32 billion intelligence agency that could not figure out their economy was in such awful shape they were going to come apart as a result of their war in Afghanistan and a few other things.

In 1989, [soviet leader] Mikhail Gorbachev makes a decision. They could have stopped the Germans from tearing down the Berlin Wall, but for the future of Russia he decided he'd rather have friendly relations with Germany and France than with those miserable satellites Stalin had created in East Europe. So he just watches them tear it down and, at once, the whole Soviet empire starts to unravel. It's the same sort of thing that might happen to us if we ever stood by and watched the Okinawans kick us out of Okinawa. I think our empire might unravel in a way you could never stop once it started.

The Soviet Union imploded. I thought: What an incredible vindication for the United States. Now it's over, and the time has come for a real victory dividend, a genuine peace dividend. The question was: Would the U.S. behave as it had in the past when big wars came to an end? We disarmed so rapidly after World War II. Granted, in 1947 we started to rearm very rapidly, but by then our military was farcical. In 1989, what startled me almost more than the Wall coming down was this: As the entire justification for the Military-Industrial Complex, for the Pentagon apparatus, for the fleets around the world, for all our bases came to an end, the United States instantly - pure knee-jerk reaction - began to seek an alternative enemy. Our leaders simply could not contemplate dismantling the apparatus of the Cold War.

That was, I thought, shocking. I was no less shocked that the American public seemed indifferent. And what things they did do were disastrous. George Bush, the father, was President. He instantaneously declared that he was no longer interested in Afghanistan. It's over. What a huge cost we've paid for that, for creating the largest clandestine operation we ever had and then just walking away, so that any Afghan we recruited in the 1980s in the fight against the Soviet Union instantaneously came to see us as the enemy - and started paying us back. The biggest blowback of the lot was, of course, 9/11, but there were plenty of them before then.

I was flabbergasted and felt the need to understand what had happened. The chief question that came to mind almost at once, as soon as it was clear that our part of the Cold War was going to be perpetuated - the same structure, the same military Keynesianism, an economy based largely on the building of weapons - was: Did this suggest that the Cold War was, in fact, a cover for something else; that something else being an American empire intentionally created during World War II as the successor to the British Empire?.

Now that led me to say: Yes, the Cold War was not the clean-cut conflict between totalitarian and democratic values that we had claimed it to be. You can make something of a claim for that in Western Europe at certain points in the 1950s, but once you bring it into the global context, once you include China and our two East Asian wars, Korea and Vietnam, the whole thing breaks down badly and this caused me to realize that I had some rethinking to do. The wise-ass sophomore has said to me - this has happened a number of times - "Aren't you being inconsistent?" I usually answer with the famous remark of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, who, when once accused of being inconsistent, said to his questioner, "Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?"

A personal experience five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union also set me rethinking international relations in a more basic way. I was invited to Okinawa by its governor in the wake of a very serious incident. On September 4, 1995, two Marines and a sailor raped a 12-year old girl. It produced the biggest outpouring of anti-Americanism in our key ally, Japan, since the Security Treaty was signed [in 1960].

I had never been to Okinawa before, even though I had spent most of my life studying Japan. I was flabbergasted by the 32 American military bases I found on an island smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands and the enormous pressures it put on the population there. My first reaction as a good ?old Warrior was: Okinawa must be exceptional. It's off the beaten track. The American press doesn't cover it. It's a military colony. Our military has been there since the battle of Okinawa in 1945. It had all the smell of the Raj about it. But I assumed that this was just an unfortunate, if revealing, pimple on the side of our huge apparatus. As I began to study it, though, I discovered that Okinawa was not exceptional. It was the norm. It was what you find in all of the American military enclaves around the world.

TD: The way we garrison the planet has been essential to your rethinking of the American position in the world. Your chapters on Pentagon basing policy were the heart of your last book, The Sorrows of Empire. Didn't you find it strange that, whether reviewers liked the book or not, none of them seemed to deal with your take on our actual bases? What do you make of that?

Johnson: I don't know why that is. I don't know why Americans take for granted, for instance, that huge American military reservations in the United States are natural ways to organize things. There's nothing slightly natural about them. They're artificial and expensive. One of the most interesting ceremonies of recent times is the brouhaha over announced base closings. After all, it's perfectly logical for the Department of Defense to shut down redundant facilities, but you wouldn't think so from all the fuss.

I'm always amazed by the way we kid ourselves about the influence of the Military-Industrial Complex in our society. We use euphemisms like supply-side economics or the Laffer Curve. We never say: We're artificially making work. If the WPA [Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression] was often called a dig-holes-and-fill-em-up-again project, now we're making things that blow up and we sell them to people. Our weapons aren't particularly good, not compared to those of the great weapons makers around the world. It's just that we can make a lot of them very rapidly.

TD: As a professional editor, I would say that when we look at the world, we have a remarkable ability to edit it.

Johnson: Absolutely. We edit parts of it out. I mean, people in San Diego don't seem the least bit surprised that between here and Los Angeles is a huge military reservation called Camp Pendleton, the headquarters of the First Marine Division. I was there myself back in the Korean War days. I unfortunately crossed the captain of the LST-883 that I was serving on. We had orders to send an officer to Camp Pendleton and he said, "I know who I'm going to send." It was me. (He laughs) And I'll never forget it. The world of Marine drill sergeants is another universe.

In many ways, as an enthusiast for the natural environment, I am delighted to have Pendleton there. It's a cordon sanitaire. I spent a little time with its commandant maybe a decade ago. We got to talking about protecting birds and he said, "I'm under orders to protect these birds. One of my troops drives across a bird's nest in his tank and I'll court martial him. Now, if that goddamn bird flies over to San Clemente, he takes his chances." Even then I thought: That's one of the few things going for you guys, because nothing else that goes on here particularly contributes to our country. Today, of course, with the military eager to suspend compliance with environmental regulations, even that small benefit is gone.

TD: So, returning to our starting point, you saw an empire and…

Johnson: …it had to be conceptualized. Empires are defined so often as holders of colonies, but analytically, by empire we simply mean the projection of hegemony outward, over other people, using them to serve our interests, regardless of how their interests may be affected.

So what kind of empire is ours? The unit is not the colony, it's the military base. This is not quite as unusual as defenders of the concept of empire often assume. That is to say, we can easily calculate the main military bases of the Roman Empire in the Middle East, and it turns out to be about the same number it takes to garrison the region today. You need about 38 major bases. You can plot them out in Roman times and you can plot them out today.

An empire of bases - that's the concept that best explains the logic of the 700 or more military bases around the world acknowledged by the Department of Defense. Now, we're just kidding ourselves that this is to provide security for Americans. In most cases, it's true that we first occupied these bases with some strategic purpose in mind in one of our wars. Then the war ends and we never give them up. We discovered that it's part of the game; it's the perk for the people who fought the war. The Marines to this day believe they deserve to be in Okinawa because of the losses they had in the bloodiest and last big battle of World War II.

I was astonished, however, at how quickly the concept of empire - though not necessarily an empire of bases - became acceptable to the neoconservatives and others in the era of the younger Bush. After all, to use the term proudly, as many of them did, meant flying directly in the face of the origins of the United States. We used to pride ourselves on being as anti-imperialist as anybody could be, attacking a king who ruled in such a tyrannical manner. That lasted only, I suppose, until the Spanish-American War. We'd already become an empire well before that, of course.

TD: Haven't we now become kind of a one-legged empire in the sense that, as you've written, just about everything has become military?

Johnson: That's what's truly ominous about the American empire. In most empires, the military is there, but militarism is so central to ours - militarism not meaning national defense or even the projection of force for political purposes, but as a way of life, as a way of getting rich or getting comfortable. I guarantee you that the first Marine Division lives better in Okinawa than in Oceanside, California, by considerable orders of magnitude. After the Wall came down, the Soviet troops didn't leave East Germany for five years. They didn't want to go home. They were living so much better in Germany than they knew they would be back in poor Russia.

Most empires try to disguise that military aspect of things. Our problem is: For some reason, we love our military. We regard it as a microcosm of our society and as an institution that works. There's nothing more hypocritical, or constantly invoked by our politicians, than "support our boys." After all, those boys and girls aren't necessarily the most admirable human beings that ever came along, certainly not once they get into another society where they are told they are, by definition, doing good. Then the racism that's such a part of our society emerges very rapidly - once they get into societies where they don't understand what's going on, where they shout at some poor Iraqi in English.

TD: I assume you'd agree that our imperial budget is the defense budget. Do you want to make some sense of it for us?

Johnson: Part of empire is the way it's penetrated our society, the way we've become dependent on it. Empires in the past - the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Japanese Empire - helped to enrich British citizens, Roman citizens, Japanese citizens. In our society, we don't want to admit how deeply the making and selling of weaponry has become our way of life; that we really have no more than four major weapons manufacturers - Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics - but these companies distribute their huge contracts to as many states, as many congressional districts, as possible.

The military budget is starting to bankrupt the country. It's got so much in it that's well beyond any rational military purpose. It equals just less than half of total global military spending. And yet here we are, stymied by two of the smallest, poorest countries on Earth. Iraq before we invaded had a GDP the size of the state of Louisiana and Afghanistan was certainly one of the poorest places on the planet. And yet these two places have stopped us.

Militarily, we've got an incoherent, not very intelligent bu?get. It becomes less incoherent only when you realize the ways it's being used to fund our industries or that one of the few things we still manufacture reasonably effectively is weapons. It's a huge export business, run not by the companies but by foreign military sales within the Pentagon.

This is not, of course, free enterprise. Four huge manufacturers with only one major customer. This is state socialism and it's keeping the economy running not in the way it's taught in any economics course in any American university. It's closer to what John Maynard Keynes advocated for getting out of the Great Depression - counter-cyclical governmental expenditures to keep people employed.

The country suffers from a collective anxiety neurosis every time we talk about closing bases and it has nothing to do with politics. New England goes just as mad over shutting shut down the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as people here in San Diego would if you suggested shutting the Marine Corps Air Station. It's always seen as our base. How dare you take away our base! Our congressmen must get it back!

This illustrates what I consider the most insidious aspect of our militarism and our military empire. We can't get off it any more. It's not that we're hooked in a narcotic sense. It's just that we'd collapse as an economy if we let it go and we know it. That's the terrifying thing.

And the precedents for this should really terrify us. The greatest single previous example of military Keynesianism - that is, of taking an economy distraught over recession or depression, over people being very close to the edge and turning it around - is Germany. Remember, for the five years after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he was admired as one of the geniuses of modern times. And people were put back to work. This was done entirely through military Keynesianism, an alliance between the Nazi Party and German manufacturers.

Many at the time claimed it was an answer to the problems of real Keynesianism, of using artificial government demand to reopen factories, which was seen as strengthening the trade unions, the working class. Capitalists were afraid of government policies that tended to strengthen the working class. They might prove to be revolutionary. They had been often enough in that century. In this country, we were still shell-shocked over Bolshevism; to a certain extent, we still are.

What we've done with our economy is very similar to what Adolf Hitler did with his. We turn out airplanes and other weapons systems in huge numbers. This leads us right back to 1991 when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. We couldn't let the Cold War come to an end. We realized it very quickly. In fact, there are many people who believe that the thrust of the Cold War even as it began, especially in the National Security Council's grand strategy document, NSC68, rested on the clear understanding of late middle-aged Americans who had lived through the Great Depression that the American economy could not sustain itself on the basis of capitalist free enterprise. And that's how - my god - in 1966, only a couple of decades after we started down this path, we ended up with some 32,000 nuclear warheads. That was the year of the peak stockpile, which made no sense at all. We still have 9,960 at the present moment.

Now, the 2007 Pentagon budget doesn't make sense either. It's $439.3 billion…

TD: … not including war…

Johnson: Not including war! These people have talked us into building a fantastic military apparatus, and then, there was that famous crack [Clinton Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright made to General Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Well, if you want to use it today, they charge you another $120 billion dollars! (He laughs.)

But even the official budget makes no sense. It's filled with weapons like Lockheed Martin's F-22 - the biggest single contract ever written. It's a stealth airplane and it's absolutely useless. They want to build another Virginia class nuclear submarine. These are just toys for the admirals.

TD: When we were younger, there were always lots of articles about Pentagon boondoggles, the million-dollar military monkey wrench and the like. No one bothers to write articles like that any more, do they?

Johnson: That's because they've completely given up on decent, normal accounting at the Pentagon. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, and a colleague at Harvard have put together a real Pentagon budget which, for the wars we're fighting right now, comes out to about $2 trillion. What they've added in are things like interest on the national debt that was used to buy arms in the past. Turns out to be quite a few billion dollars. Above all, they try to get a halfway honest figure for veterans' benefits. For this year, it's officially $68 billion, which is almost surely way too low given, if nothing more, the huge number of veterans who applied for and received benefits after our first Gulf War.

We hear on the nightly news about the medical miracle that people can be in an explosion in which, essentially, three 155 millimeter shells go off underneath a Humvee, and they survive through heroic emergency efforts. Barely. Like Bob Woodruff, the anchor person from ABC News. The guy who saved his life said, I thought he was dead when I picked him up. But many of these military casualties will be wards of the state forever. Do we intend to disavow them? It leads you back to the famous antiwar cracks of the 1930s, when Congressmen used to say: There's nothing we wouldn't do for our troops - and that's what we do, nothing.

We almost surely will have to repudiate some of the promises we've made. For instance, Tricare is the government's medical care for veterans, their families. It's a mere $39 billion for 2007. But those numbers are going to go off the chart. And we can't afford it.

Even that pompous ideologue Donald Rumsfeld seems to have thrown in the towel on the latest budget. Not a thing is cut. Every weapon got through. He stands for "force transformation" and we already have enough nuclear equipment for any imaginable situation, so why on Earth spend anything more? And yet the Department of Energy is spending $18.5 billion on nuclear weapons in fiscal year 2006, according to former Senior Defense Department Budget Analyst Winslow Wheeler, who is today a researcher with the Center for Defense Information.

TD: Not included in the Pentagon budget.

Johnson: Of course not. This is the Department of Energy's budget.

TD: In other words, there's a whole hidden budget…

Johnson: Oh, it's huge! Three-quarters of a trillion dollars is the number I use for the whole shebang: $440 billion for the authorized budget; at least $120 billion for the supplementary war-fighting budget, calculated by Tina Jones, the comptroller of the Department of Defense, at $6.8 billion per month. Then you add in all the other things out there, above all veterans' care, care of the badly wounded who, not so long ago, would have added up to something more like Vietnam-era casualty figures. In Vietnam, they were dead bodies; these are still living people. They're so embarrassing to the administration that they're flown back at night, offloaded without any citizens seeing what's going on. It's amazing to me that [Congressman] John Murtha, as big a friend as the defense industry ever had - you could count on him to buy any crazy missile-defense gimmick, anything in outer space - seems to have slightly woken up only because he spent some time as an old Marine veteran going to the hospitals.

Another person who may be getting this message across to the public is Gary Trudeau in some of his Doonesbury cartoons. Tom, I know your mother was a cartoonist and we both treasure Walt Kelly, who drew the Pogo strip. How applicable is Pogo's most famous line today: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

[Douglas Caddy]

Excellent information Greg. I will try and get the same information on the providers of military services in the UK.

Here is Part 2 of the Tomdispatch interview with Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback, in which Johnson describes the corruptive power of the U.S. military that may bring about the monetary bankruptcy of the U.S. in the near future:

Tomdispatch Interview: Chalmers Johnson on Our Fading Republic

March 22, 2006

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=70576

In Part 1 of his interview, Chalmers Johnson suggested what that fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall, end-of-the-Cold-War moment meant to him; explored how deeply empire and militarism have entered the American bloodstream; and began to consider what it means to live in an unacknowledged state of military Keynesianism, garrisoning the planet, and with an imperial budget -- a real yearly Pentagon budget -- of perhaps three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Tom

What Ever Happened to Congress?

A Tomdispatch Interview with Chalmers Johnson (Part 2)

Tomdispatch: You were discussing the lunacy of the 2007 Pentagon budget…

Chalmers Johnson:What I don't understand is that the current defense budget and the recent Quadrennial Defense Review (which has no strategy in it at all) are just continuations of everything we did before. Make sure that the couple of hundred military golf courses around the world are well groomed, that the Lear jets are ready to fly the admirals and generals to the Armed Forces ski resort in Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or the military's two luxury hotels in downtown Seoul and Tokyo.

What I can't explain is what has happened to Congress. Is it just that they're corrupt? That's certainly part of it. I'm sitting here in California's 50th district. This past December, our congressman Randy Cunningham confessed to the largest single bribery case in the history of the U.S. Congress: $2.4 million in trinkets -- a Rolls Royce, some French antiques -- went to him, thanks to his ability as a member of the military subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee to add things secretly to the budget. He was doing this for pals of his running small companies. He was adding things even the Department of Defense said it didn't want.

This is bribery and, as somebody said the other day, Congress comes extremely cheap. For $2.4 million, these guys got about $175 million in contracts. It was an easy deal.

The military is out of control. As part of the executive branch, it's expanded under cover of the national security state. Back when I was a kid, the Pentagon was called the Department of War. Now, it's the Department of Defense, though it palpably has nothing to do with defense. Hasn't for a long time. We even have another department of the government today that's concerned with "homeland security." You wonder what on Earth do we have that for -- and a Dept of Defense, too!

The government isn't working right. There's no proper supervision. The founders, the authors of the Constitution, regarded the supreme organ to be Congress. The mystery to me -- more than the huge expansion of executive branch powers we've seen since the neoconservatives and George Bush came to power -- is: Why has Congress failed us so completely? Why are they no longer interested in the way the money is spent? Why does a Pentagon budget like this one produce so little interest? Is it that people have a vested interest in it, that it's going to produce more jobs for them?

I wrote an article well before Cunningham confessed called The Military-Industrial Man in which I identified a lot of what he was doing, but said unfortunately I didn't know how to get rid of him in such a safe district. After it appeared on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, the paper got a couple of letters to the editor from the 34th district in downtown LA saying, I wish he was my congressman. If he'd bring good jobs here, I wouldn't mind making something that just gets blown up or sunk in the ground like missile defense in Alaska. I mean, we've already spent $100 billion on what amounts to a massive high-tech scarecrow. It couldn't hit a thing. The aiming devices aren't there. The tests fail. It doesn't work. It's certainly a cover for something much more ominous -- the expansion of the Air Force into outer space or "full spectrum dominance," as they like to put it.

We need to concentrate on this, and not from a partisan point of view either. There's no reason to believe the Democrats would do a better job. They never have. They've expanded the armed forces just as fast as the Republicans.

This is the beast we're trying to analyze, to understand, and it seems to me today unstoppable. Put it this way: James Madison, the author of our Constitution, said the right that controls all other rights is the right to get information. If you don't have this, the others don't matter. The Bill of Rights doesn't work if you can't find out what's going on. Secrecy has been going crazy in this country for a long time, but it's become worse by orders of magnitude under the present administration. When John Ashcroft became attorney general, he issued orders that access to the Freedom of Information Act should be made as difficult as possible.

The size of the black budget in the Pentagon has been growing ever larger during this administration. These are projects no one gets to see. To me, one of the most interesting spectacles in our society is watching uniformed military officers like General Michael Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, sitting in front of Congress, testifying. It happened the other day. Hillary Clinton asked him: Tell us at least approximately how many [NSA warrantless spying] interventions have you made? "I'm not going to tell you" was his answer. Admiral Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was asked directly about a year ago, are we still paying Ahmed Chalabi $340,000 a month? And his reply was, "I'm not going to say."

At this point, should the senator stand up and say: "I want the U.S. Marshall to arrest that man." I mean, this is contempt of Congress.

TD: You're also saying, of course, that there's a reason to have contempt for Congress.

Johnson: There is indeed. You can understand why these guys do it. Richard Helms, the Director of the CIA back in 1977, was convicted of a felony for lying to Congress. He said, no, we had nothing to do with the overthrow of [Chilean President] Salvador Allende when we had everything to do with it. He gets a suspended sentence, pays a small fine, walks into the CIA building at Langley, Virginia and is met by a cheering crowd. Our hero! He's proudly maintained the principles of the secret intelligence service, which is the private army of the president and we have no idea what he's doing with it. Everything they do is secret. Every item in their budget is secret.

TD: And the military, too, has become something of a private army…

Johnson: Exactly. I dislike conscription because it's so easily manipulated, but I do believe in the principle of the obligation of citizens to defend the country in times of crisis. Now, how we do that is still an open question, but at least the citizens' army was a check on militarism. People in the armed forces knew they were there involuntarily. They were extremely interested in whether their officers were competent, whether the strategy made sense, whether the war they might have to fight was justified, and if they began to believe that they were being deeply lied to, as in Vietnam, the American military would start to come apart. The troops then were fragging their officers so seriously that General Creighton Abrams said, we've got to get them out of there. And call it Vietnamization or anything else, that's what they did.

I fear that we're heading that way in Iraq. You open the morning paper and discover that they're now going to start recruiting down to level four, people with serious mental handicaps. The terrible thing is that they'll just be cannon fodder.

It's not rocket science to say that we're talking about a tragedy in the works here. Americans aren't that rich. We had a trade deficit in 2005 of $725.8 billion. That's a record. It went up almost 25% in just over a year. You can't go on not making things, fighting these kinds of wars, and building weapons that are useless. Herb Stein, when he was chairman of the council of economic advisers in a Republican administration very famously said, "Things that can't go on forever don't."

TD:: So put our problems in a nutshell.

Johnson: From George Bush's point of view, his administration has achieved everything ideologically that he wanted to achieve. Militarism has been advanced powerfully. In the minds of a great many people, the military is now the only American institution that appears to work. He's enriched the ruling classes. He's destroyed the separation of powers as thoroughly as was possible. These are the problems that face us right now. The only way you could begin to rebuild the separation of powers would be to reinvigorate the Congress and I don't know what could shock the American public into doing that. They're the only ones who could do it. The courts can't. The President obviously won't.

The only thing I can think of that might do it would be bankruptcy. Like what happened to Argentina in 2001. The richest country in Latin America became one of the poorest. It collapsed. It lost the ability to borrow money and lost control of its affairs, but a great many Argentines did think about what corrupt presidents had listened to what corrupt advice and done what stupid things during the 1990s. And right now, the country is on its way back.

TD: But superpower bankruptcy? It's a concept nobody's really explored. When the British empire finally went, we were behind them. Is there somebody behind us?

Johnson: No.

TD: So what would it mean for us to go bankrupt?. After all, we're not Argentina.

Johnson: It would mean losing control over things. All of a sudden, we would be dependent on the kindness of strangers. looking for handouts. We already have a $725 billion trade deficit; the largest fiscal deficit in our history, now well over 6% of GDP. The defense budgets are off the charts and don't make any sense, and don't forget that $500 billion we've already spent on the Iraq war -- every nickel of it borrowed from people in China and Japan who saved and invested because they would like to have access to this market. Any time they decide they don't want to lend to us, interest rates will go crazy and the stock exchange will collapse.

We pour about $2 billion a day just into servicing the amounts we borrow. The moment people quit lending us that money, we have to get it out of domestic savings and right now we have a negative savings rate in this country. To get Americans to save 20% of their income, you'd have to pay them at least a 20% interest rate and that would produce a truly howling recession. We'd be back to the state of things in the 1930s that my mother used to describe to me -- we lived in the Arizona countryside then -- when someone would tap on the rear door and say, "Have you got any work? I don't want to be paid, I just want to eat." And she'd say, "Sure, we'll find something for you to do and give you eggs and potatoes."

A depression like that would go on in this country for quite a while. The rest of the world would also have a severe recession, but would probably get over it a lot faster.

TD: So you can imagine the Chinese, Japanese, and European economies going on without us, not going down with us.

Johnson: Absolutely. I think they could.

TD: Don't you imagine, for example, that the Chinese bubble economy, the part that's based on export to the United States might collapse, setting off chaos there too?

Johnson: It might, but the Chinese would not blame their government for it. And there is no reason the Chinese economy shouldn't, in the end, run off domestic consumption. When you've got that many people interested in having better lives, they needn't depend forever on selling sweaters and pajamas in North America. The American economy is big, but there's no reason to believe it's so big the rest of the world couldn't do without us. Moreover, we're kidding ourselves because we already manufacture so little today -- except for weapons.

We could pay a terrible price for not having been more prudent. To have been stupid enough to give up on infrastructure, health care, and education in order to put 8 missiles in the ground at Fort Greeley, Alaska that can't hit anything. In fact, when tested, sometimes they don't even get out of their silos.

TD: How long do you see the dollar remaining the international currency? I noticed recently that Iran was threatening to switch to Euros.

Johnson: Yes, they're trying to create an oil bourse based on the Euro. Any number of countries might do that. Econ 1A as taught in any American university is going to tell you that a country that runs the biggest trade deficits in economic history must pay a penalty if the global system is to be brought back into equilibrium. What this would mean is a currency so depreciated no American could afford a Lexus automobile. A vacation in Italy would cost Americans a wheelbarrow full of dollars.

TD: At least it might stop the CIA from kidnapping people off the streets of Italy in the style to which they've grown accustomed.

Johnson: [Laughs.] Their kidnappers would no longer be staying in the Principe di Savoia [a five-star hotel] in Milano, that's for sure.

The high-growth economies of East Asia now hold huge amounts in American treasury certificates. If the dollar loses its value, the last person to get out of dollars loses everything, so you naturally want to be first. But the person first making the move causes everyone else to panic. So it's a very cautious, yet edgy situation.

A year ago, the head of the Korean Central Bank, which has a couple of hundred billion of our dollars, came out and said: I think we're a little heavily invested in dollars, suggesting that maybe Dubai's currency would be better right now, not to mention the Euro. Instantaneous panic. People started to sell; presidents got on the telephone asking: What in the world are you people up to? And the Koreans backed down -- and so it continues.

There are smart young American PhDs in economics today inventing theories about why this will go on forever. One is that there's a global savings glut. People have too much money and nothing to do with it, so they loan it to us. Even so, as the very considerable economics correspondent for the Nation magazine, William Greider, has written several times, it's extremely unwise for the world's largest debtor to go around insulting his bankers. We're going to send four aircraft-carrier task forces to the Pacific this summer to intimidate the Chinese, sail around, fly our airplanes, shoot off a few cruise missiles. Why shouldn't the Chinese say, let's get out of dollars. Okay, they don't want a domestic panic of their own, so the truth is they would do it as subtly as they could, causing as little fuss as possible.

What does this administration think it's doing, reducing taxes when it needs to be reducing huge deficits? As far as I can see, its policies have nothing to do with Republican or Democratic ideology, except that its opposite would be traditional, old Republican conservatism, in the sense of being fiscally responsible, not wasting our money on aircraft carriers or other nonproductive things.

But the officials of this administration are radicals. They're crazies. We all speculate on why they do it. Why has the President broken the Constitution, let the military spin virtually out of control, making it the only institution he would turn to for anything -- another Katrina disaster, a bird flu epidemic? The whole thing seems farcical, but what it does remind you of is ancient Rome.

If a bankruptcy situation doesn't shake us up, then I fear we will, as an author I admire wrote the other day, be "crying for the coup." We could end the way the Roman Republic ended. When the chaos, the instability become too great, you turn it over to a single man. After about the same length of time our republic has been in existence, the Roman Republic got itself in that hole by inadvertently, thoughtlessly acquiring an empire they didn't need and weren't able to administer, that kept them at war all the time. Ultimately, it caught up with them. I can't see how we would be immune to a Julius Caesar, to a militarist who acts the populist.

TD: Do you think that our all-volunteer military will turn out to be the janissaries of our failed empire?

Johnson: They might very well be. I'm already amazed at the degree to which they tolerate this incompetent government. I mean the officers know that their precious army, which they worked so hard to rebuild after the Vietnam War, is coming apart again, that it's going to be ever harder to get people to enlist, that even the military academies are in trouble. I don't know how long they'll take it. Tommy Franks, the general in charge of the attack on Baghdad, did say that if there were another terrorist attack in the United States comparable to 9/11, the military might have no choice but to take over. In other words: If we're going to do the work, why listen to incompetents like George Bush? Why take orders from an outdated character like Donald Rumsfeld? Why listen to a Congress in which, other than John McCain, virtually no Republican has served in the armed forces?

I don't see the obvious way out of our problems. The political system has failed. You could elect the opposition party, but it can't bring the CIA under control; it can't bring the military-industrial complex under control; it can't reinvigorate the Congress. It would be just another holding operation as conditions got worse.

Now, I'll grant you, I could be wrong. If I am, you're going to be so glad, you'll forgive me. [He laughs.] In the past, we've had clear excesses of executive power. There was Lincoln and the suspension of habeas corpus. Theodore Roosevelt virtually invented the executive order. Until then, most presidents didn't issue executive orders. Roosevelt issued well over a thousand. It was the equivalent of today's presidential signing statement. Then you go on to the mad Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson, whom the neocons are now so in love with, and Franklin Roosevelt and his pogrom against Americans of Japanese ancestry. But there was always a tendency afterwards for the pendulum to swing back, for the American public to become concerned about what had been done in its name and correct it. What's worrying me is: Can we expect a pendulum swing back this time?

TD: Maybe there is no pendulum.

Johnson: Today, Cheney tells us that presidential powers have been curtailed by the War Powers Act [of 1973], congressional oversight of the intelligence agencies, and so on. This strikes me as absurd, since these modest reforms were made to deal with the grossest violations of the Constitution in the Nixon administration. Moreover, most of them were stillborn. There's not a president yet who has acknowledged the War Powers Act as legitimate. They regard themselves as not bound by it, even though it was an act of Congress and, by our theory of government, unless openly unconstitutional, that's the bottom line. A nation of laws? No, we are not. Not anymore.

TD: Usually we believe that the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union's collapse and, in essence, our victory. A friend of mine put it another way. The United States, he suggested, was so much more powerful than the USSR that we had a greater capacity to shift our debts elsewhere. The Soviets didn't and so imploded. My question is this: Are we now seeing the delayed end of the Cold War? Perhaps both superpowers were headed for the proverbial trash bin of history, simply at different rates of speed?

Johnson: I've always believed that they went first because they were poorer and that the terrible, hubristic conclusion we drew -- that we were victorious, that we won -- was off the mark. I always felt that we both lost the Cold War for the same reasons -- imperial overstretch, excessive militarism, things that have been identified by students of empires since Babylonia. We've never given Mikhail Gorbachev credit. Most historians would say that no empire ever gave up voluntarily. The only one I can think of that tried was the Soviet Union under him.

TD: Any last words?

Johnson: I'm still working on them. My first effort was Blowback. That was well before I anticipated anything like massive terrorist attacks in the United States. It was a statement that the foreign-policy problems -- I still just saw them as that -- of the first part of the 21st century were going to be left over from the previous century, from our rapacious activities in Latin America, from our failure to truly learn the lessons of Vietnam. The Sorrows of Empire was an attempt to come to grips with our militarism. Now, I'm considering how we've managed to alienate so many rich, smart allies -- every one of them, in fact. How we've come to be so truly hated. This, in a Talleyrand sense, is the sort of mistake from which you can't recover. That's why I'm planning on calling the third volume of what I now think of as "The Blowback Trilogy," Nemesis. Nemesis was the Greek goddess of vengeance. She also went after people who became too arrogant, who were so taken with themselves that they lost all prudence. She was always portrayed as a fierce figure with a scale in one hand -- think, Judgment Day – and a whip in the other…

TD: And you believe she's coming after us?

Johnson: Oh, I believe she's arrived. I think she's sitting around waiting for her moment, the one we're coming up on right now.

[Dawn Meredith]

Everyone in our government needs to read the above information. Truly terrifying. Where are the real "fiscal conservatives"? Or is that term largely a myth?

The book "American Theocracy" is also very on point, thanks for the review. Need to get this one.

Dawn

[John Simkin]

How does this thread relate to the JFK assassination? That's easily answered.

Who was behind the JFK assassination in general? The military industrial complex, to whom Lyndon Johnson, with his lifelong lust for power, legal problems, and need to get rid of JFK, was one of the best things that ever happened. They were partners in crime.

Who runs the U.S. today? The military industrial complex, to whom the neocon PNAC with its 2000 coup and imperialistic foreign policy is one of the best things that ever happened. They are partners in crime.

The same powers that be who got rid of JFK in 1963 are presently bankrupting America, to fill their own pockets, and with the PNAC have taken us to the point that dictatorship looks inevitable. The American people have seemed to be all but asking for it, and it is only more one terrorist attack away.

Sadly, [very sadly] what Ron Ecker said here is true. We are dealing with those who carry the legacy of the JFK assassination - and a few who were involved before or after the fact - when we 'deal' with the current 'administration' and the insanity and horrors they are generating inside the country and most everwhere they put their fingers around the world. The one more terrorist attack you can bet will happen [or appear to happen] just about election time. The Democrats, however, are NOT the antidote to this corporate fascism, neo-mideavalism [oligarchs/church/military], or the oxymoron of 'radical conservatism'. They are only Bush-light. If the American Demos don't wake up to the monsters they have given their imprimatur to VERY soon, I think that it IS possible for the USA to go the way of military dictatorship or defacto dictatorship and police state - as hard as that might be for most to fathom. Only third and fourth and other parties can possibly be the answer to the rapidly deterioration of democracy, free-speech, information freedom, etc. [what is left of all them, at this point]. When one can be imprisoned without due process - we all can be. When there are some political prisoners, any of us can be. When one can be spied on without a warrent, we all can be [and are already]. When we can invade a country that meant us no harm to replace the dictator we put in prior - and all based on lies anyway - no country is safe. When acts of agent-provacatur-types are commonplace, they can become the norm. When we have not learned the lessons of the JFK Assassination it can happen again and again and again...not just to Presidents, but to anyone, any group, any movement, any country, any opposition to the Oligarchy.

I find myself in totally agreement with Ron and Peter. I am of the opinion that the JFK assassination is just part of the long-term conspiracy against democracy. This is the point of this particular thread:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5799

That is why "Assassination, Terrorism and the Arms Trade: The Contracting Out of U.S. Foreign Policy: 1940-2006" goes right up to the present. Where I probably disagree with Peter and Ron is over the ultimate outcome of these events. I am the eternal optimist who believes that while freedom of expression still exists, it is still possible to create a truly democratic society. I believe the internet is another important factor in this (before the ruling elite also controlled the mass media).

However, as we saw in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany in the 1930s, in a crisis, the ruling elite will resort to fascism. Would this happen in the US in the future? For example, what would happen if the full story of “Assassination, Terrorism and the Arms Trade” was fully exposed in the US in the next couple of years? How would American people react if they really believed that Bush invaded Iraq in order to make money for his financial backers (in the same way that LBJ did in Vietnam)? This is a difficult concept for people to grasp. I am sure that even most conspiracy theorists think I have gone too far to suggest that a politician would act in such a way. Yet I belive this is the key to understanding these events.

At the moment a large percentage of the American people believe that Bush made a silly mistake by invading Iraq. However, if the majority of American developed the opinion that Bush took this decision as a result of pressure applied by Halliburton, Bechtel, etc., I would like to think the American public would demand reform of the system and to break the link between politicians and the arms manufacturers. At a time like this the ruling elite would no doubt consider the possibility of a military dictatorship. After all, China is now showing how a military dictatorship can successfully run a capitalistic system.

The main test will be the way the rest of the advanced world would react. Bush might be able to rely on Tony Blair to defend this military coup (maybe one would take place in the UK at the same time). However, other European countries have a more sophisticated understanding of the political process. I think the power of the European Union is important here. We also still have the internet (something that China is still finding impossible to control). I therefore thing a military coup in the US would end in failure.

I would be interested in how others see this developing situation.

[John Dolva]

How does this thread relate to the JFK assassination? That's easily answered.

Who was behind the JFK assassination in general? The military industrial complex, to whom Lyndon Johnson, with his lifelong lust for power, legal problems, and need to get rid of JFK, was one of the best things that ever happened. They were partners in crime.

Who runs the U.S. today? The military industrial complex, to whom the neocon PNAC with its 2000 coup and imperialistic foreign policy is one of the best things that ever happened. They are partners in crime.

The same powers that be who got rid of JFK in 1963 are presently bankrupting America, to fill their own pockets, and with the PNAC have taken us to the point that dictatorship looks inevitable. The American people have seemed to be all but asking for it, and it is only more one terrorist attack away.

Sadly, [very sadly] what Ron Ecker said here is true. We are dealing with those who carry the legacy of the JFK assassination - and a few who were involved before or after the fact - when we 'deal' with the current 'administration' and the insanity and horrors they are generating inside the country and most everwhere they put their fingers around the world. The one more terrorist attack you can bet will happen [or appear to happen] just about election time. The Democrats, however, are NOT the antidote to this corporate fascism, neo-mideavalism [oligarchs/church/military], or the oxymoron of 'radical conservatism'. They are only Bush-light. If the American Demos don't wake up to the monsters they have given their imprimatur to VERY soon, I think that it IS possible for the USA to go the way of military dictatorship or defacto dictatorship and police state - as hard as that might be for most to fathom. Only third and fourth and other parties can possibly be the answer to the rapidly deterioration of democracy, free-speech, information freedom, etc. [what is left of all them, at this point]. When one can be imprisoned without due process - we all can be. When there are some political prisoners, any of us can be. When one can be spied on without a warrent, we all can be [and are already]. When we can invade a country that meant us no harm to replace the dictator we put in prior - and all based on lies anyway - no country is safe. When acts of agent-provacatur-types are commonplace, they can become the norm. When we have not learned the lessons of the JFK Assassination it can happen again and again and again...not just to Presidents, but to anyone, any group, any movement, any country, any opposition to the Oligarchy.

I find myself in totally agreement with Ron and Peter. I am of the opinion that the JFK assassination is just part of the long-term conspiracy against democracy. This is the point of this particular thread:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5799

That is why "Assassination, Terrorism and the Arms Trade: The Contracting Out of U.S. Foreign Policy: 1940-2006" goes right up to the present. Where I probably disagree with Peter and Ron is over the ultimate outcome of these events. I am the eternal optimist who believes that while freedom of expression still exists, it is still possible to create a truly democratic society. I believe the internet is another important factor in this (before the ruling elite also controlled the mass media).

However, as we saw in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany in the 1930s, in a crisis, the ruling elite will resort to fascism. Would this happen in the US in the future? For example, what would happen if the full story of “Assassination, Terrorism and the Arms Trade” was fully exposed in the US in the next couple of years? How would American people react if they really believed that Bush invaded Iraq in order to make money for his financial backers (in the same way that LBJ did in Vietnam)? This is a difficult concept for people to grasp. I am sure that even most conspiracy theorists think I have gone too far to suggest that a politician would act in such a way. Yet I belive this is the key to understanding these events.

At the moment a large percentage of the American people believe that Bush made a silly mistake by invading Iraq. However, if the majority of American developed the opinion that Bush took this decision as a result of pressure applied by Halliburton, Bechtel, etc., I would like to think the American public would demand reform of the system and to break the link between politicians and the arms manufacturers. At a time like this the ruling elite would no doubt consider the possibility of a military dictatorship. After all, China is now showing how a military dictatorship can successfully run a capitalistic system.

The main test will be the way the rest of the advanced world would react. Bush might be able to rely on Tony Blair to defend this military coup (maybe one would take place in the UK at the same time). However, other European countries have a more sophisticated understanding of the political process. I think the power of the European Union is important here. We also still have the internet (something that China is still finding impossible to control). I therefore thing a military coup in the US would end in failure.

I would be interested in how others see this developing situation.

A number of posts recently are as far as I am concerned highly significant, John's above being one of them.

I also am an optimist, pure optimism sans realism is foolish. A glass may be half empty or half...or both. Both of course.

The US is a source of some of the very best that humanity is capable of. And the worst.

The best rises to the fore in such times of developing crisis, almost as a response to the worst. A response of a concious, educated, connected, united force ready for sacrifices for what is good can hasten the time when the military dictators will be ready to sit down and talk.

So, as John states, the ingredients of a success are here.

In a sense the scene today is a funneled out projection of 40 years ago which in turn is traced further back. The focus on this pre assassination period must not be lost.

[Dawn Meredith]

Great, perceptive posts. And perhaps there is some cause for optimism. The last couple of days the local media has been abuzz with Charlie Sheen (and Alex Jones) on Showbiz Tonight, speaking about a conspiracy in 9-11. Last night they followed up with commentary on this. Feminist author Erica Jong (sp) called W a dictator and mentioned the Kennedy assassination. Viewer mail is running 80 % in favor of Sheen and Jones.

Now if only we could get MORE of the media to cover the truth.

Everyone should also write in to CNN with positive comments about this

coverage, keep this story out there. Keep talk of conspiracy as truth in the media.

How unusual. Normally "all we hear is radio ga ga, radio goo goo"

Dawn

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Dawn: I have posted the Sheen story on a variety of web bulletin boards that get a lot of traffic ( I think the forums of major U.S. dailys are a good spot)

This Sheen interview is potentially an important break in the corporate media coverup of 9/11

Here is the link.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0603/23/sbt.01.html

please post it in visible areas. As pathetic as it seems, some people will only trust a big name media source. We should make the most of this opportunity.

[Douglas Caddy]

Everyone in our government needs to read the above information. Truly terrifying. Where are the real "fiscal conservatives"? Or is that term largely a myth?

The book "American Theocracy" is also very on point, thanks for the review. Need to get this one.

Dawn

The April 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine has as its cover article, “American Coup D’Etat: Military Thinkers Discuss the Unthinkable.”

The introduction to the article states that, “Given that the linchpin of any coup d’etat is the participation, or at least the support, of a nation’s military officers, Harper’s Magazine assembled a panel of experts to discuss the state of our own military – its culture, its relationship with the wider society, and the steadfastness of its loyalty to the ideals of democracy and to the United States Constitution.”

Unfortunately, no internet link exists to the article at this time, so, if not already a subscriber, one must obtain the magazine by other means in order to read this timely and worthwhile discussion by experts.