You say, “Whoa, Williams, you really have to explain yourself this time!”

I’ll begin by quoting our founders on democracy. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia Gov. Edmund Randolph said, “… that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” John Adams said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Alexander Hamilton said, “We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real Liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship.”

The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the two most fundamental documents of our nation – the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Our Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” If you don’t want to bother reading our founding documents, just ask yourself: Does our pledge of allegiance to the flag say to “the democracy for which it stands,” or to “the Republic for which it stands”? Or, did Julia Ward Howe make a mistake in titling her Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Should she have titled it “The Battle Hymn of the Democracy”?

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The National Security State

The apparatus of the National Security State, largely established in the National Security Act of 1947, laid the foundations for the extension of American hegemony around the globe. In short, the Act laid the foundations for the apparatus of the American Empire. The National Security Act created the National Security Council (NSC) and position of National Security Adviser, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) as the Pentagon high command of military leaders, and of course, the CIA.

The first major foreign operation carried out by the National Security State, or rather, the “secret government,” was the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Iran. In 1952, the British were concerned at the efforts of Iran’s new Prime Minister Mohommad Mossadeq, in nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, taking the monopoly away from British Petroleum. So the British intelligence, the SIS, proposed to the Americans a joint operation, and the CIA obliged.

In early 1953, with the ascendancy of the Eisenhower administration, two brothers, the Dulles brothers, came to dominate foreign policy decisions. John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State while his brother, Allen Dulles, became director of the CIA. Allen Dulles was a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a director of the CFR from 1927 to 1969,[1] while John Foster Dulles had joined the Council in the 1930s, and was a career diplomat and Wall Street lawyer.[2] In 1953, the Dulles brothers both worked and lobbied Eisenhower for the removal of Mossadeq from Iran,[3] and subsequently, the CIA and SIS worked together to enact the plan and overthrew the Iranian government.[4]

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation in which he warned America and indeed the world about the growing influence of the National Security State in what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex”:

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”[5]

Eisenhower was speaking from the point of view of having first-hand knowledge of this ‘influence’ in the corridors of power, himself as President being unable to challenge it, and unable to do so simply in the first decade of the American Empire. He was warning against the influence of the interconnected relationship and organized power of the military, government, and industry, in that the growing influence of this ‘complex’ was so vast that it threatened to take over the government and subvert democracy itself. It was the functions of this complex that saw profit created through war and empire, and thus, there was a constant drive and impetus towards pursuing empire and resorting to war. If you build a massive military structure, you are going to use it; if it is profitable to go to war, you will go to war.

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In June of this year, this spectacular article came and went with barely a mention ’round the Internet. Richard Gale and Gary Null wrote a very important piece, “The CDC Votes in Favor of a Flu Vaccination Assault on Americans’ Health.” Early in the article, the authors make the statement that, “Nevertheless, we should still brace ourselves for another year of old yarn, fear-mongering, media spin and more voodoo science.” Indeed, though the WHO just recently declared the swine flu (non)pandemic to be over, the scaremongering is already ramping up regarding the seasonal flu. Note this laughable paragraph from a recent article in the Swine Flu Journal:

Federal health officials are gearing up to persuade more Americans to get vaccinated against the flu this fall, in the aftermath of last year’s pandemic that killed thousands nationwide, sickened millions, and frustrated many before petering out.

First off, “millions” weren’t sickened, and, what is the definition of “frustrated many?” The pandemic that wasn’t a pandemic ….. “frustrated many?” What does that really mean? Definition, please?

Compare the above statement with the fact that the CDC predicted up to 90,000 swine flu deaths in the U.S., with 2 million getting infected; the WHO was warning that 7+ million people could and might die; and the final tally was 12,000 deaths in the U.S. (rounded up), and 500 in the UK after UK propagandists predicted 65,000 deaths. And add to that the fact that the numbers reported in the U.S. were not verified scientifically – the CDC just made up numbers. The CDC and medical establishment that declared the pandemic a worldwide emergency intentionally avoided monitoring and tracking swine flu cases and the spread of the infection. As Gale and Null point out, the CDC also does not distinguish between deaths from flu and pneumonia, another intentional spin of the death numbers.

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Allowing the “Ground Zero Mosque” to be built, insists Newt Gingrich, would be tantamount to “surrender” in a struggle against those implacably committed to our destruction. New York gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino, a New York crony capitalist who anointed himself a paladin of the Tea Party movement, has made opposition to the “Ground Zero Mosque” the central plank of his campaign. Paladino, who has profited handsomely from government’s redistribution of wealth, promises that if elected he will confiscate the property used for the Muslim Community Center through eminent domain and use the land to erect a war memorial.

Writing in National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy insists that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf — the Kuwait-born U.S. citizen who leads the Cordoba Initiative — is pursuing a “stealth jihad” as a fellow-traveler of the Muslim Brotherhood. “The Ground Zero project is a test of America’s resolve to face down a civilizational jihad that that aims, in the words of its leaders, to destroy us from within,” maintains McCarthy.

 
According to Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (AFA) the problem isn’t the proposal to build a Muslim cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero. Rather, it’s the fact that the government ruling us permits the existence of mosques anywhere in the United States. 
Since “every single mosque is a potential terror training center or recruiting center for jihad,” Muslims “cannot claim First Amendment Protections,” maintains Fischer (who, in addition to supporting case-specific abolition of the First Amendment, has previously called for the abolition of the habeas corpus guarantee as well).

Rather than focusing exclusively on the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, the AFA and like-minded organizations have instigated a nation-wide campaign to protest construction of Muslim houses of worship in more than a half-dozen states. Like McCarthy, Fischer treats Imam Rauf as an asset of the Muslim Brotherhood, which (according to Fischer) is “at the heart and center… the soul of Islam in America.”

 A joyous killer, possibly orgasmic. Note mandatory flagly background, pickle suit, and stupid colorful gewgaws so he looks like a goddam stamp collection. Stern gaze is necessary to become a general. From defending the Constitution to the pleasure of watching Afghans die: The military has come a long way.

 I’ll guess he fell just shy of graduating from third grade. He sure ain’t much of a general, no ways, I reckon. Just the fellow I want representing me in the world.

 Does General Dworkin-Mattis speak of manhood? Odd, since his military is being badly outfought by the unmanly Afghans that are fun to kill. By the Pentagon’s figures the US military outnumbers the resistance several to one. The US has complete control of the air, enjoying F16s, helicopter gun-ships, transport choppers, and Predator drones, as well as armor, body armor, night-vision gear, heavy weaponry, medevac, hospitals, good food, and PXs. The Afghans have only AKs, RPGs, C4, and balls. Yet they are winning, or at least holding their own. How glorious.

 Man for man, weapon for weapon, the Taliban are clearly superior. They take far heavier casualties, but keep on fighting. Their politics are not mine, but they are formidable on the ground. If I were General Dworkin, I’d change my name and go into hiding. Maybe he could wear a veil.

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~ Albert Einstein

Governments in America – at both the state and federal level – are in an escalating state of bankruptcy. Politicians, media hacks, and academicians propose the kinds of responses reminiscent of the classic definition of insanity: to keep repeating the same actions expecting a different result. Increase income taxes, cut spending, enact a federal sales tax, tax “junk food” and tanning salons, are just a few of the suggestions being made by those intent on recycling political solutions to politically-generated problems.

At the center of all this is a national debt that has arisen from a basic truth that statists prefer to ignore: human beings are much less thrifty in spending other people’s money than they are with their own. Let me control your checkbook, and I will come up with a much different pattern of expenditures than you would have. We are much more generous with the lives and property of others, a state of mind upon which political systems depend for their existence.

We need to step outside the circle of our conditioned thinking and consider alternatives to our dilemmas. I have a modest proposal to offer to resolve the national debt: repudiate it! The reality is that, even after more extended wars and the formalization of slave-state efforts to avoid it, defaulting on this debt will become the ultimate solution. Leviathan, and its institutional keepers, will not curb its appetites, particularly when all that stands in its way are the always-expendable people.

I find support for my proposal in the thinking of the Keynesians, whose ideas most of us accepted, helping to produce our current state of affairs. My undergraduate introduction to the study of economics was firmly rooted in Keynesianism, whose tenets expressed what I assumed Thomas Carlyle meant in regarding this field of study as the “dismal science.” One of the frequently stated defenses of government debt was “we only owe it to ourselves.” It was only years later that I was to discover who the “ourselves” were to whom we were indebted. Such creditors proved to be the same gang who comprised “we, the people” in the creation of government in our country: the institutional interests who comprise the ruling political establishment.

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Having dragged the GOP down to utter defeat with eight years of “big government conservatism,” i.e. perpetual war and ballooning deficits, and handed the country over to the tender mercies of the Obama cult, it seems Kristol and his fellow neocons are determined to drag the party all the way down to the status of an irrelevant sect, i.e. the neoconservatives writ a bit larger. The Iraq war, of which Kristol was a leading champion, has bankrupted the country, and destabilized the entire region, just as Republican critics of the war such as the Committee for the Republic, and top Pentagon leaders, feared it would.

It is nonsense to pretend that there was no resistance to the neocons’ fanatic warmongering on the right. As the neoconservatives were lying us into war with tall tales of Iraqi WMDs, a group of authentic conservatives, including C. Boyden Grey, a former official in the first Bush administration, William Nitze, son of Ronald Reagan’s top arms negotiator Paul Nitze, and John B. Henry II, a Washington businessman and direct descendant of Patrick Henry, issued a manifesto descrying the rise of an American empire. To cross that Rubicon, they warned, would mean the end of our old republic. It would bankrupt us, and lead us down the path to a form of collectivism impelled by militarism: “America has begun to stray far from its founding tradition of leading the world by example rather than by force.”

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Currently, there are headlines about allegedly anti-Semitic comments made by senior White House correspondent Helen Thomas. Pundits across the land evince outrage at her off-the-cuff 25-second statement made to a man who appears to be holding a camera right in her face.

Thomas issued a public apology for her words, but this was insufficient to assuage the wounded feelings of powerful antagonists, and she has now retired from a long and distinguished career.

Before we examine her comments and evaluate their possible validity, let’s look at other recent events having to do with Israel.

On May 31st Israeli commandos killed at least nine unarmed volunteers attempting to take humanitarian supplies to Gaza.

According to eyewitness reports and forensic evidence, many of these aid volunteers were shot at close range, including a 19-year-old American citizen killed by four bullets to the head and one to the chest fired from 18 inches away.

Israel immediately imprisoned eyewitnesses and hundreds of other aid participants, confiscated their cameras, laptops, and other possessions, and prevented them from speaking to the press for days. Among the incarcerated were decorated U.S. veterans and an 80-year-old former ambassador who had been deputy director of Reagan’s Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism.

When they finally emerged and were able to tell their stories, many described horrific scenes of Israeli commandos shooting people in the head, of those tending the injured being shot in the stomach, of people bleeding to death while flotilla participants waved white flags and pled for help.

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(H/T Lew Rockwell)

(H/T Lew Rockwell)