Why Politics, From Me?

I'm 58 years old! I am a Veteran of the U.S. Navy who worked in Top Secret communications! I am a Recovering drug Addict with over 13 years of clean time, after having used drugs for nearly 30 years! I have been incarcerated many times and am a convicted felon! I am a Certified Drug and Alcohol Abuse Counselor! Does this mean anything? Not in itself, but if I may, let me try to qualify! My primary presence on the Internet has been as the WebMaster of my Addiction Recovery site! I have had over a dozen articles pertaining to Addiction and Recovery from this disease, published on the Internet. I have had one article published regarding my Political views. I thought to myself, recently, why should anyone care what I think about politics? Well, just what does qualify someone to make public commentary? Surely, some of the commentators regularly on television don't seem to know anything special! So, I'll take a shot at making my case...
My family migrated from Missouri to California in 1958, when I was 9 years old. This move in itself most certainly changed my future and that of my entire family. Missouri is a conservative area. California is liberal and trendy. They are two very different places in our Society. Thus, ingrained midwestern values and beliefs were the root of our family, and over a lifetime, we have melted into the West Coast lifestyle and have become Californians. Thus said, on to my life as it pertains to my political views...
A teenager of the 1960's, I'm sure that I am a typical baby-boomer in many ways. But, in many ways I'm not a typical or average citizen, at all! Only about 1% of the U.S. population succumbs to drug addiction. I am one of them! I am also a Veteran of the Armed Forces, also a small percentage of the population, since the WWII Vets are passing in great numbers. I am also a convicted felon. Would it surprise you to know that 1 out of 99 Americans is incarcerated over the course of a month? I don't know the stats on those who have ever been incarcerated. Currently 2,300,000 Americans are incarcerated. That said, let's move on to my individual case...
When I was 13, John Kennedy was assassinated. That event had a prominent effect on me as a person, as it did many Americans. The mystery of that incident brought politics into the lives of people who had previously basked in the luxury of the robust American lifestyle that followed WWII. Before that most citizens of the U.S. took it for granted that we had the best, most honest government possible. It has never been the same since. The Vietnam War added to the questionability of our undaunted faith in Government and it's many agencies. When President Richard Nixon was branded as an outright liar, a little more confidence slipped away. Average American belief systems were challenged by the Civil Rights movement, the Women's Rights movement, and concerted efforts on the part of our citizenry, as a united front, to force an end to the Vietnam War.
As I approached the age of 18, it was a safe assumption that I would be drafted into the military. Every boy who was not wealthy and able to find an exemption of the privileged, got drafted. That part has not changed. The poor still fight the wars for the rich. The poor still do the dieing for the Capitalists. Having had many friends die in Vietnam, I reached the conclusion that the only way to avoid being drafted into the Army Infantry was to enlist, which I did. On November 17, 1967 I took the Oath to defend my country in the U.S. Navy. I was just a kid. I had no idea how prolific an effect this would have on my life. The worst thing that happened as a result of serving was that my recreational experience with drugs would turn into an Addiction lasting nearly 30 years.
Politics came head on into my life as a Navy Radioman, working in Top Secret communications at the Commander-In-Chief of the Pacific Fleet Headquarters, Naval Communications Station, Message Center Makalapa, across the King Kamehameha Highway from Pearl Harbor, several stories underground. As a result of my security clearance, I became privy to all communications to the Pacific Fleet, including operational information between CINCPACFLT, the Pentagon, and the White House. I will not now and never have discussed any details of this information, as I took an oath not to. The only exception was in protected confidence with my Counselor in drug treatment at the VA Hospital program in Fresno, California. Even then, many details were omitted, and limited to a couple of sessions. The point being, that I found out many things that obliterated my trust in the Government. During this period, President Richard Nixon was forced out of office for basically deceiving the public and abusing his power, for political gain. I couldn't avoid politics even if I had wanted to.
I re-entered civilian life skeptical of government, spiritually bankrupt, and severely addicted to drugs. My dependency started in Navy schools, with Benzedrine, an amphetamine. I eventually used drugs as psychological self-medication, also. Once addicted you use drugs for any and every reason you can think of, avoiding confronting the problems that they actually mask. The first year I was out, I didn't work. I grew my hair out, and lived outside the norm, not desiring to be a part of anything, especially Society. I did get involved in the fight to stop the War in Vietnam, helping people beat the draft, and participating in demonstrations. In my mind, the government was responsible for everything that was wrong with the World and me. Though my thinking was very distorted, I became extremely politically aware, keeping up with the daily news, and being able to factually defend my positions as an anti-social personality developed in me. Marriages failed as a result of my Addiction. I lost and quit jobs as a result of my drug use and abuse. I went back and forth from a functional addict to a dysfunctional addict. I was in and out of jail. I became a pipeline welder with my own tools for the independence and high demand that made changing jobs easy.
This lasted until drug testing became a regular part of the job market. I had chosen selling drugs as my profession, which made using that much easier. But, in the end the law caught up with me. After many incarcerations and many ups and downs, I just could not stay out of jail. My arrest on January 21, 1995, and a radical spiritual experience while facing a prison sentence, allowed me to acknowledge that I had hit my bottom. I had lost the will to live and broke down mentally during my detoxification from Meth, in jail. I resorted to prayer and my prayer was answered. I used drugs for the last time at the beginning of that jail term. I took my last drink on March 24, 1995. As a result of a plea bargain, my prison sentence was suspended on the terms that I serve one year in jail and one year in a drug treatment program. I would actually only serve four months in jail and remained in the program for six months. I entered the VA Hospital, Fresno, California, Chemical Dependency Treatment Program on April 11, 1995. As it turned out the very government that I had blamed for my problems for nearly 30 years, became my saving grace. I had to seriously re-assess my political views after that. At 50 I began my quest for Certification as a drug counselor at a State University.
Little did I realize how politically dependent the profession I had chosen, was. After 7 years of Counseling I had a serious health crisis that took me off of work for 8 months. During this period of time the failing economy under the Republican administration, resulted in a major cancellation of Grants. Drug treatment depends hugely on Grants as treatment is a financial impossibility for most Addicts. Having lost my job and my health insurance, I found myself approaching 60, in a scant job market, competing with people half my age. I am now living on unemployment insurance compensation, with no real prospect for a job. Politics are again very crucial to my life. Republicans fund wars and big business. Democrats fund social programs and middle America. I fear it will take a robust economy and major funding for drug treatment before the market become great enough for the job competition in my field to accommodate my demographic. Meanwhile, I contribute meekly to the Democratic Party and depend on my Spirituality to get through, one day at a time. I sponsor a needy child through Children International, and have several family members, also in financial distress, living with me. I have developed a totally non-profit Addiction Recovery website, and use it to keep me sane and as my way of still being able to help other Addicts. I feel that my experiences with the military, the criminal justice system, and my Recovery from drug Addiction, have shaped a well-informed, highly aware political position and very well developed political opinions. Of course the key word is "opinion"! I feel very qualified to comment...
You be the judge! I will quote this article as a reference in all future political articles that I submit.
Thank you,

CounselorDave!







David R Carroll, CADC is a certified substance abuse counselor, in California. He has served as a treatment program Director (started a new program). He developed the curriculum for that program that required approval from the California Department of Corrections Substance Abuse Services Coordinating Agency, and the California Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs. He has also worked going into California prisons recruiting inmates for Aftercare treatment for addiction and alcoholism. Counselor Carroll is also WebMaster of the site, Addiction: Why Me? The goal of the Site is to become self sufficient enough to support itself and to expand to "Live Chat" for confidential, help for addicts and their victims (family, friends, etc.).

The Politics Behind the Candidates in Iran

As you know, prior to election in Iran, I wrote in our blog that I did not believe that anything good will come as a result of the current election. Looking at the Guardian Council's decision of selecting Ahmadinejad for president, I would have preferred a one candidate election. Why put all these old revolutionaries who have profited from the Islamic regime on the stand to run for president, when at the end of the day the average Iranian has no say in the election?

Unfortunately, absolute power corrupts absolutely under any regime. This is evident in today's Iran more than ever. As the election debates took shape the week before the election, the profiteering of Muslim ex-revolutionaries became obvious. In the debates Mr. Ahmadenijad accused the reformers of systematic theft and looting of nations wealth by reform candidates and its supporters. I was surprised that why a sitting president that had this information for 4 years while being in office did nothing about it until election night. Why Aytolah Khamenai would give these men the right to run for election if they or the immediate family had done some of these looting. For the average Iranian it has been obvious for years that Rafsanjani and Karubi had enriched themselves with public wealth. Still for many this was an awakening to see beyond the mask of religion and billions that these folks have taken from the Iranian nation's wealth. It is clear that ideologies are served for the masses while mass looting of country's wealth has taken place over the past 30 years under these old guards.

For folks that are not familiar with the Iranian factions, let's be clear that all these old men do not represent anything new. The two main characters in this battle are not Mousavi and Ahmadenajad, but Rafsanjani and Khomeini who are old guards of the revolution. Since they are old, they are no longer fighting for power for themselves. They are guarding the nepotistic ideals so that the sons and daughters of these revolutionaries can benefit from continued control over the government and its resources and maintain the nepotistic lines of governance.

Iran's hope for theological democracy under Islam was put to rest under the previous leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khatami, the president of Iran prior to Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately because of the divisions within the reform movement at the time the reform movement was put to rest at the voter level. After the first four-year term of president Khatami, the same revolutionary guards insured that the reform in Iran politics does not happen. How did this happen? They simply banned sitting member of the parliament from running in subsequent terms. They became disenfranchised. These parliamentary elected officials no longer met the needs of the Islamic Republic ruling dictators Rafsanjani and Khomeini. They got forced out of politics.

In his second term, president Khatami used his executive power to open news papers and magazines, and soon hundreds of news papers flourished in Iran. With the selection of Ahmadinejad as president, these magazines and voices again became disenfranchised and were quickly shut down. Many reformers got barred from journalism. As I have stated in my book, the supreme leader and the clergy system in Iran controls who is allowed to run based on a selection of old revolutionaries and mullahs out of Qom. This is effectively a one party system.

As I was watching the election, I thought what must have been shocking to the viewers from the West was the absence of a forum for a challenger to regroup and be able to mobilize its base. Mr. Mousavi and his supporters could only go to the streets to voice their opposition towards the election in illegal rallies. No political party in the parliament was visible to voice a challenge, or unite and plan for the next election. By the design the government has placed an executive judicial and parliamentary system that is full of yes men, and that follows the orders of the regime. No other voice can be heard in Iran, and even if it could, it would be dealt with brute force.

This video shows how the current leaders 20 years ago supported each other and to the opposition of senior clergy at the time sidelined Aytollah Montazeri. Grand Aytollah Montazeri in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war was always expected in the 80's to replace Aytollah Khamanei. Montazeri spent 5 years in jail himself. He was sidelined because he did not believe in Islamic republic that did not represent democratic ideals of the masses. He also protested against the wave of execution that the Islamic republic committed against the voice of opposition views in Iran.

Now as the same Guardian Council and mullahs have reclaimed power at the expense of the current generation of youth in Iran, the question is- Where does Iran reform movement go from this point?

The options are clear. First, the nepotistic revolutionary leaders will not give up the wealth that their families have made. They will not surrender the thrown or loose respect for the crimes of looting that their daddies did in the country. They will continue to fight each other as the losing party may end up hung or expelled from the country. The last real leader Iran had after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini was Grand Ayatollah Montazeri. In the 80s when I attended the Friday prayers with my parents and I remember the laud orchestrated chants that Ayatollah Montazeri was the hope of Iran. He had lost three kids as martyrs to establishing the regime and was the Ayatollah Khomeini's exiled partner. He was quickly sidelined by Rafsanjani and Khamenei at the time, and after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, he was no longer a figure in the Iranian government and was put under house arrest and silenced. Even though he was a great revolutionary responsible for carrying the torch since he believed in open government with each Iranian having a voice, he was sidelined for the strict conservatives to rule.

This was fine for the neoconservatives in the White House at the time since they wanted a fundamental religious government in Iran. Remember that it was during the Reagan years that the Iran-Contra scandal broke out and the CIA funded sales of guns to Iran by importing cocaine into the U.S. The Reagan's neoconservatives even negotiated with the Islamic regime to keep the hostages for 444 days so that it would kill President Carter's chance of reelection and they got conveniently released when Reagan took office.

The fact is that the neoconservatives and the religious conservative government in Iran are not after ideologies. They use ideologies for the masses only to mold the public opinion. As the end goal is power, no amount of power is sufficient for these folks. They are happy to change ideologies and viewpoints in order to reach the end goal. For the conservatives in the white house at the time the end goal is dominance over nation wealth.

Before the election the neoconservatives hoped that Iran would select Ahmadenijad. Why? Because it would create the next war for them to be engaged in and control a population rich in culture and resources to create more military bases and to have the next war to fund the military industrial complex that relies on its base of support. The neoconservatives like senator McCain do not have the interests of the people of Iran in mind. They are encouraging actions that would help Ahmadenijad. They are OK with the concept of Iranians killing Iranians indefinitely, just like they have been OK with funding both sides of the Iran-Iraq war. Additionally, it gives a reason to the hawks in Israel to buy more guns with the U.S. tax payer's dollars and use them in Iran. That will draw the U.S. into a fight with Iran and send my fellow Iranians back to the dark ages, very similar to what happened in Iraq. Remember that in Iraq, after the first war, the same neoconservatives told the Shiite majority that they would support the uprising and at the end they sat by the sidelines while Iraq military crushed the Shiite majority in the south in the most brutal way possible. Besides the next war and a permanent military base in Iran they have no other agenda. With that base established, they can run heroin out of the golden triangle all the way to Afghanistan, Iran and Kurdistan to fund the next dictator for another war. Therefore the cycle of violence between nations continues and they all profit from it.

Iranian government has used this to its full advantage to clamp down on its own people. You see for the Iranian revolutionaries it is better if the Israel does attack the nuclear development infrastructure. The conservative government can again consolidate power by reminding of the great evils outside of Iran's borders. By having Israil attack they can continue to use the military to suppress all opposition.

Civil disobedience is the path to Iran's future:

In Iran the concept of civil disobedience to this regime must take hold. You cannot bring a change in government with setting buildings on fire or throwing rocks. At the end, this level of violence only hurts the Iranians. In this regard I refer to the Iranians in the Basij, the revolutionary guard and the student protesters who are all mostly under 30 years of age. These young men and women represent the next generation of great Iranian minds that will be lost in such protests. The sons of the elite that rule with an ironed fist will not be impacted as they have taken the wealth of the nation to offshore bank accounts. We will only lose the poor, the middle class and other valuable Iranians to street protest.

The leaders who can possibly lead the country out of this mess such as Khatami or Mousavi are sidelined and it erodes the base of support for them if this violence continues. Continuation of violence is not what these leaders are asking for. What course of action should the average Iranian take?

The one course is the logical path for the resistance to any oppressor and that is nonviolent civil disobedience and resistance. For this we should only look at how the French are able to shut down the government by taking on peaceful strikes. Recently the union of Iranian bus drivers went on strike. This form of disobedience is the best form of resistance against tyranny. If doctors, city employees, nurses, lawyers called national strikes it would bring the ruling regime to its knees. National strikes combined with the shouts of Allah Akbar on rooftops will force this government to change without the need for another stone being thrown or innocent protester being shot in a violent act. This form of unrest is the course for all Iranians.

The demand for these protests needs to be clear: to establish political parties in Iran, open access to media, and stop filtering of election candidates by the religious theocracy. Non of this can happen without having fair elections held in the country. If the Iranian Majles (parliament) members that are still have some allegiance to the reform movement need to make the above issues and the fair elections its daily priority. See the latest video from the Iranian parliament.

In regards to the U.S. politics towards the region, I hope that President Obama continues with the current stand offish approach, as any sign of threat by the West will only be used to again consolidate power by the Islamic regime, commit mass genocide by purging the anti revolutionaries, and create the next wave of exile of war refugees in Iran. Of course this is the course that Israel would love to see since they would then be able to receive the green light to attack Iran. See the videos attached on the site link bellow.

As I watched the Shell and Chevron clean energy commercials in between broadcasts of CNN and Fox on Iran, I wondered how the media will portray things in Iran over the next few months. I have been going through the latest videos on YouTube each night looking for new materials that I could post on our site. To my amazement hundreds of new videos appear each night on YouTube. When I look at these gruesome images, my heart melts and I am deeply saddened to see them. The fact is that many new posts are not new but recycled from previous days and cut over with music and revolutionary slogans in order to increase the passion of the youth of Iran to continue the street fights and protests. The LA Iranians that left as part of the old regime all want to portray the current government as more violent than the Shah so they can put Mr. Pahlavi to rule once again and repaint him as a less violent king than the religious conservatives.

The U.S. news coverage has been amazing in regards to this election with no coverage of Haiti or the Moroccan election that took place. They keep recirculation of Iran videos as new footage. Is this because the oil companies are now buying more advertisements on these media outlets since they would be the first to benefit from the next war? Are the advertisement sales department and the editor's desk in cahoots to serve content that they can get large corporate sponsors for? I am sure that is the case. This is similar to the case of the war generals and analysts working for the media who remained on the U.S. government payroll. The media did not only look the other way but acted to pass the war propaganda to the masses on behalf of the government. Are they now getting extra advertisement dollars from the oil companies when they keep running the same footage of carnage again and again on TV? Or is it because of the heavy hand of the AIPAC Zionists and the religious conservatives with the help of the U.S. tax payers' money that is funding these continues reruns of the violence in Iran. So I would expect that over the next few months as the public opinion is shaped by these broadcasters on how evil Iran is they hope to force President Obama to change course and give Israel permission to attack Iran.

In the above scenario, the Ahmadinejads are victorious since they can once again claim power and say -- I told you so, this reform movement is from the expatriates and Israel so let's all rally around the flag, country and god and defend the nation. Finally, millions of Iranian lives will be lost defending the country but to the benefit of the neoconservatives and the nepotistic kings and princes of the region.

While Iranians die to drum beats of another war, the military industrial complex benefits from selling guns, and the oil companies from looting the Iranian wealth. The sons of these current leaders will than take residence in friendly countries with the wealth that they looted from Iran.

A site dedicated to social justice from around the globe. With the single focus of helping to build similarities from different races and cultures. By helping to highlight the plight of humanity by our collective shared experience of dealing with poverty, war, racism and social injustice. Iranian-American author Vahid Razavi and his dedicated team from Belgrade Serbia covering global issues from Iran, Middle East, US and the Balkans.
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Politics - Bread and Circuses

There's an old saying: "If you want to know what's really going on, follow the money trail."

If you do not understand money, banking and finance, you cannot really understand politics. For the motivation of politics and politicians is ultimately the accumulation of money and resources. Money and resources = power.

Many people object to this statement. One of my clients said, "I grew up in the 60's during the civil rights movement. That was a purely political and altruistic agenda that had nothing to do with money."

In the 1960's however, the United States was unquestionably the world's greatest economic power. Our currency was strong. When you are abundant and strong, you feel magnanimous. In 2007, our economy is weak, our debt is high and our currency is declining. The current corrupt and mean-spirited political environment is a reflection of our country's declining economic status.

The OMB predicts that by the year 2012, the national debt of the United States will be 11.466 trillion dollars. This figure does NOT account for unfunded liabilities like Social Security.

The total amount of dollar denominated debt (including unregistered derivatives securities) worldwide has been estimated at 1.2 quadrillion dollars. That's right folks. 1.2 quadrillion. The dollar has been hyper-inflated on a planetary scale.

How has this happened? To understand that, you have to understand how money is created and manipulated. A great place to start is to read the book called "The Creature From Jekyll Island.

The money we use is monetized debt. It has no value whatsoever. Today, money is not backed by anything tangible, other than the "full faith and credit of the United States." What does that mean? It means the future work, sweat and productivity of the American people.

It is a startling fact that if all dollar denominated loans and debts were paid off, all of our money would disappear. Therefore, even if Congress wanted to pay off the national debt, it could not do so without destroying the economy!

Look at the top of any bill of any denomination, and you will find "Federal Reserve Note." Do you know what a note is? It is a promise to pay, a certificate of debt. The money we use are just a fancy IOU's. Unfortunately, the Fed, in cooperation with Congress, has played fast and loose with our currency. When you discover how money is created, you will understand the truth of this statement: "Money DOES grow on trees." Those who control the creation of money control the economy, and the lives of everyone in the nation. Economic cycles of boom and bust are not natural economic occurrences, but artificially created conditions due to the manipulation of the money supply.

Did you know that legal tender laws FORCE Americans to use Federal Reserve Notes? Look on the left hand side of the bill: "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." It is illegal in the United States to use gold or silver as money. If you refuse to accept Federal Reserve Notes in exchange for your valuable goods and services, you can be thrown in jail. The power of the State is used to enforce legal tender laws.

The debasing of our currency (and thus our economy) is the most important crisis facing our country, and the world, because the dollar is the linchpin of international finance. [1] The growth of the unregistered derivatives market has hyper-inflated the dollar to the point where the international financial and banking system is in turmoil. At the present moment, and behind the theater of politics, the world is confronted with an international banking and currency crisis which is being completely ignored by the mass media in the United States (so what else is new?)

Called "Wantagate" by those in the know, it is a story of fraudulent financial manipulation that involves the highest banking and political officials in the United States, and the world.

How can such a gigantic crisis go unreported?

Because the focus is on politics!

Pick up a copy of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the L.A. Times. Listen to the news. Listen to NPR. The news is, almost exclusively, political. What economic news is reported is mostly mundane stuff like the Dow Jones industrial average.

Politics and political intrigue obscures the fundamental economic and financial realities underlying the actions politicians take. In other words, the bread and circuses of politics takes your attention away from the money trail. Following the money trail will ALWAYS explain the actions of politicians.

For example, why did we go to war in Iraq?

The government says that we did it to establish democracy, or remove WMD's, or destroy Al Queda, blah, blah, blah. Former secretary of State Jim Baker said facetiously that we invaded Iraq because of "oil, oil, oil." Well that, at least, is partially true. According to Christopher Story, noted U.K. intelligence analyst, one of the fundamental reasons for invading Iraq was the takeover of the Rafidain Bank, Saddam Hussein's private bank. The Rafidain Bank had trillions of dollars worth of assets and billions in gold bullion. That money properly belongs to the people of the United States via the U.S. Treasury, as the spoils of war. According to Story, Saddam's money was stolen by criminal operatives within the U.S. intelligence community -- with full knowledge of officials at the highest levels of government, including the President, the Vice President, the Treasury secretary and the Homeland Insecurity chief -- and parked in offshore bank accounts. This money is "off the books," because the people who stole it cannot identify source of funds. In any legitimate banking transaction, official codes are issued which identify the financial institutions on both ends of the transaction, and where the money came from. This is not possible with stolen money. For the rest of the story, see the link below in the Resource Box.

We are spending 10 billion dollars every day to fund the war in Iraq. The war has so far, as of this writing, cost almost 500 billion dollars and President Bush has just submitted a request to Congress for 200 billion more. Moreover, the war in Iraq is being privatized, which means that private contractors are making billions from this war. Meanwhile, our brave men and women in the military fight and die -- for what? [2]

Governments throughout history have printed money and debased the currency to fund their conflicts. When the currency becomes devalued, it loses its purchasing power, and prices rise. This is the genesis of inflation. Inflation is not rising prices, it is the debasing of the currency.

The only legitimate way for governments to get money is through taxation. But politicians do not like to raise taxes because the voters will throw them out of office. However, the political scientists in Congress and the monetary scientists at the Fed have devised a brilliant scheme to spend more and more money and keep themselves in power: simply print and create more and more of it. The process by which this occurs is complex and obfuscated, but the bottom line is that the population is taxed by inflation when the money supply increases too rapidly. Each dollar buys less and less, you see. Inflation is a hidden tax -- a cowardly trick imposed by politicians (and bankers) who hide behind the power of the state to enforce legal tender laws.[3]

Moreover, when money is created from nothing, the size and power of government grows larger and larger, sapping the economy. Money that would have been used to start businesses and employ people is wasted by government cronyism. Regardless of who is in power -- capitalists, socialists, liberals, conservatives, Democrats or Republicans -- political parties always use the power of the state to enforce their decrees. Thus, government grows and the political structure of a nation becomes more and hierarchical, fertile soil for the growth of tyranny.

Political parties and groups exist first and foremost to advance an economic agenda. Study the bills Congress passes. Almost all of them have language benefiting special interests -- tax breaks, government contracts, etc.

Political parties did not exist in 1789. Many of the founders of the United States were against the establishment of political parties. George Washington, in his farewell address in 1796, said,

"They [political parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests."

Although the motivation of the founders of the United States was rooted in the ideals of freedom, economic issues -- such as taxation -- played a very important role. Moreover, the creation of a central bank was one of the fundamental issues that divided the founders. Whether or not a political party begins it's life with a set of high ideals, once it becomes established, it 's main motivation is to stay in power. Then it always becomes a vehicle to protect the vested interest.

So people, do not become distracted by the bread and circuses of political theater, for that is what politics is.

Look underneath the superficialities of the news and always ask yourself these questions:

1) Who stands to gain financially by a declared government policy?

2) Where is the money trail?

In this way you may uncover the true motivations behind the actions of the actors on our political stage.

You can then begin to identify people who are open and honest, and vote for them. The crooks, of course, stand out like sore thumbs.

_________________________________

Footnotes:

[1] In an interview for the German magazine Stern, Allan Greenspan, former Fed chief, says that the Euro is rapidly replacing the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Greenspan said that the dollar is still slightly ahead in its use as a reserve currency, but added that "it doesn't have all that much of an advantage" anymore. And why is that, do you think?

[2] According to the FRONTLINE documentary "Private Warriors," private military contractors comprise the second largest "force" in Iraq. There are as many as 100,000 civilian contractors and approximately 20,000 private security forces currently in Iraq, and the number is growing.

[3] Here's an historical example (there are many): The Continental Congress, beginning in 1775, simply printed money to fund the colonial rebellion. The Continental, which was worth 1 dollar in gold in 1775, was by 1779 trading for less than a penny. A loaf of bread cost $5,000! In a letter to Samuel Cooper in 1779, Benjamin Franklin wrote, "This Currency, as we manage it, is a wonderful machine. It performs its Office when we issue it, it pays and clothes Troops and provides Victuals and Ammunition, and when we are obliged to issue a Quantity excessive, it pays itself off by Depreciation."

Kenneth James Michael MacLean has written 8 books, dozens of articles, and produced two movies.
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To check out "The Creature from Jekyll Island" Click Here
For a story on Wantagate, Click Here.

What We Once Entrusted to God - We Now Demand From Politics

Politics is a repository where we dump everything ominous and uncomfortable that we don't want to know about, don't want to be responsible for, and don't know what to do with. We elevate certain persons to power far greater than we give to ourselves, expecting in return for them to handle what frightens and confuses us. As such politicians are small derivatives of what God once was worldwide. For most of human history what happened was God's will and doing. Politics thus has a great deal in common with religion in that it presumes to be in charge of everything, when actually it is in charge of far less ... mostly the military and spending our money.

Like heaven, politics promises everything while delivering very little, mostly an assurance of better times to come-the pretend-form of hope. We need to put the things that we can't handle somewhere so we can pretend they're being taken care of, in a lofty-far removed from us-place, managed by special people who are bigger and wiser than the rest of us. To consider that these elevated people know nothing more than we do about what's wrong, or what to do about it, or that most of the protection we're expecting to be in place, isn't really happening-is very frightening. These miserable results aren't anybody's fault, though we're fond of blaming specific politicians. Debates over which candidate is good and who is bad fuels our elections with some reason to be involved with what spends most of our resources, and accomplishes very little of real value to each one of us.

That is, unless we choose to regard the nation's defense-a powerful military-as saving our skin, when it wouldn't be necessary in the first place if politics did what it promises constantly to be doing-bringing peace and safety. Over time politics has been defined in various ways, as living god-ness, kingly rule, priestly powers, and presently as majority-mob- rule. By definition, politics is designed to assert power, not to bring peace. If it ever succeeded-which it can't-it would put itself out of business. And who in power wants, or knows how to do that? And yet we entrust most of our basic needs to this venerable institution. Let's examine where we've deposited the family jewels. The political arm of the public realm is a non-personal place where we hire people-actors-to stand in as representatives of our most vital needs. Politics decides how much personal opportunity and support society encourages and facilitates for each one of us in the course of our lives. There is no question that the quality of democratic opportunity has increased over hundreds of years. It's a question of how far it still must still go-which is very far.

Politicians pretend to solve problems by investing money in them, though the problems remain largely intact, revealing how little of what's dear to us can be obtained by spending money. Politicians are actors simply because no one can "represent" another person except by pretending what they're doing is "for your own good", is the usual way authority-figures put it. When like the rest of us, they only know how to represent themselves. They do this very effectively behind closed doors and between the lines, skimming off the extras that a public life offers/requires, which is what they, and most of us believe is necessary or we wouldn't so vigorously celebrate the fame of political figures. Our adoration, expressed either as love or hate, gives them special privileges.

Though it's almost never mentioned, politics is based upon the notion that people can say anything they want as long as they don't do very much about it. This is mostly what politics is made of-rhetoric-pretending to solve the world's problems by talking about them. The unwritten, unacknowledged purpose of politics is to prevent anything new from happening. This repressive attitude is called "patriotism," "loyalty" and "law and order." This view posits that the past is holier than the present. Something new that changes the way the system works is considered "un-American", and perhaps even treasonable. Politics sets up bureaucracy to administer its pseudo-decisions. These superstructures that govern key parts of our lives are designed to be moderately oppressive so we don't notice how ineffective they are in responding to our needs. The strategy is based on the notion that if someone is being annoyed and threatened, they'll be too busy defending themselves to notice how much we have failed to respond to what they've requested or complained about. We all have had this experience when we've called a bureaucracy.

They blame us for the problem. Most recently, phone systems have been employed in order to turn up the volume of our annoyance, making it Herculean to impossible to reach a live person, amplifying our resentment commensurate with the increase in public un-safety, and giving us something small to notice and complain about-telephone tag-instead of straight talk about terrorism and torture ... and why we're not all directly voting on how to spend our community property. Most of us would describe this awful experience as the perfidy of bad people doing bad things. The simple truth is that politicians are acting like this for our sake. We should feel sorry for them. In spite of how much money and opportunity they have access to-if they possess sufficient self-centered opportunism-they're our whipping boys that we regularly abuse. They're in public life to be complained about, so that we don't notice the lousy structure of our government, even in our wonderful-in-many-ways democracy.

Governments are structured to make sure nothing changes. If we keep pointing our fingers at a few people for being bad guys, we won't notice how much the whole bloody system needs to be overhauled. Thomas Jefferson strongly recommended that the structure of the government be changed every twenty-five years if need be. Though actually doing it would be very frightening to us. This was undoubtedly why we originally voted down his idea of a constitutional convention convening every generation (25 years). Instead, we venerate the Constitution as a holy relic, as if tradition was more important than people. Even if we admit that politics is too powerful, we still believe it's just another king who is now accountable to us. When it's actually much worse than the king was. Power is now centered in not one, but thousands of people who collaborate with each other far better than they do with us. How do you hold so many people accountable? Anybody who believes voting or the news media create accountability is seriously delusional. Not that they don't make excellent contributions. Both voting and the news used to be powerful, but like everything, they became a sham because they haven't changed.

News advertises one point of view. We all know that; which is why so many of us don't read much of it, don't vote, and don't watch the news. This only adds to our sense of helplessness and despair. The news should present to us all points of view in the same news program, so we would no longer pretend there's only one way of looking at anything. This would help us make up our own minds about what's happening in the world. It would most likely also frighten us to see regularly that there are no easy answers. It's safe to conclude that politics is where we pretend the most. Specifically, we pretend that people are inspired and enlightened by their vocation to look after the welfare of us all. But what is this pretence? It's primarily a passionate belief in the personality of the candidate. It's no different than believing a Hollywood actor is someone of note beyond the heroic, villainous or non-descript parts that they play in the movies. They begin to believe what their fans say about them, and act like big shots. Increasingly politics is personality worship. But what does personality have to do with the issues and problems besetting us? Personality is our public identity-persona-while character is everything we are, parts of which others see much easier than we do. Public appearance reduces who we are to caricatures exaggerating whatever aspects of us that particular public scene amplifies. They don't demonstrate who someone is.

We need to be alone with our politicians and challenge them in similar ways to how we test potential love partners, that is, if we test our lovers instead of perpetually trying to arrange the pretense of romance-our current wished-for relationship with politicians. Maybe then we would have some idea of who they are. In the meantime, "the show must go on" with its dodges and pretense. We all know that politicians and actors are like us, frail, unknowing in many ways, struggling to understand life, and subject to the same temptations of anyone who is confused and frightened. Politicians are vulnerable to the corruption that exists in any false-front society. They pretend to be "in charge" when they don't have any idea of what to do. In desperation, government has turned over the reigns of power to money, making bargains with big business in Machiavellian amoral ways, while spewing moral political rhetoric. Probably 90 percent of income available to politicians has been acquired dishonestly if one defines honesty rigorously. Knowing this we feel despairing. But we don't know what else to do.

Representative government liberated us from the King and his nobles, and partially from the Church and its presumptive holy pontifications, when we finally realized that nobody has a direct line to God. But we still ask ourselves, "Isn't representation what democracy is about? Isn't voting the only way the average citizen can participate in government?" The answer to both questions is no. But where do we go then when we feel that our political system isn't working? We usually blame the bad guys, as if only some of us created the problems. When we all are responsible for them. Any other assumption is patently undemocratic! In the true nature of democracy, we're all responsible for everything. So why have we been blaming politicians when they don't know anymore than we do about how to fix things? The problem isn't bad people. It's bad structure. Once again habit comes back to reveal its power. Social structure is just institutional habit. Every good idea eventually becomes a bad one.

It's called change. That's what happened to representative government. It was a profound and liberating solution. It's now become an oppressive and dehumanizing obstacle to the continued progress of democracy. We're not as naïve as we used to be. In fact, in the social realm the talents of the majority are grossly underused, in effect utterly ignored! We're far more capable of forming opinions than any of us imagine -and expressing them-in effect being in charge of our own lives. We're not so easily duped by misinformation, which is what politics has been giving us for centuries. We just never noticed this evolving truth about ourselves. In fact, we believed what we were told. Look at old movies and see how people relate to authority. Thank somebody that we are no longer so naïve. We can thank the Internet for giving us relatively free access to all information.

So what's wrong with the system? To begin with, money dominates modern life throughout the system with its amoral anti-philosophy-"it's just doing business"-that makes the world one huge criminal state. As evidence on the news, international crime is increasingly being reported. The anti-moral, anti-spiritual perspective of money has come to dominate the world. It's called "capitalism" and "modernization." The business of making money has become the underground world government. What's the crisis? It's a crisis of credibility. There is nothing in the world in which we believe passionately except for money, which has no credibility whatsoever, and openly brags about it. Business regards "profit" as superior to credibility, pretending there's something moral about making money at the expense of other people. One of our biggest pretenses is that profit doesn't hurt or deprive anyone. There's another whopper possessing enormous pretend-credibility hanging about-that certain people need to be very rich in order to keep the economy going. That's not true.

Projects need huge capital, but that does not require individual people having it. Perhaps we ought to consider putting consumers on the board of directors with equal voting power or limiting the wealth that any one person can possess and see how much good we can accomplish with all the extra resources. Call it "communism" if you like. What difference does it make what we call it? Lots of Karl Marx's ideas were bunk. Maybe this one wasn't. Capitalism has won, so why don't we try to assimilate some of our former opposition's best ideas? Nobody, even our enemy, is all-wrong. Though Marx was wrong about redistributing wealth. The real solution is to eliminate the possibility of great individual wealth. The limitation of wealth would actually accomplish something else far more important. It would take gambling-the big kill-out of the mainstream of life, rendering it more of a pastime than the core of our big dream to strike it rich.

On an emotional level, the legitimacy of this craving is the dream of having safe security. Unfortunately it's based on the cynical belief that money can buy anything. It's not that we entirely believed this in our conscious mind. But in experience we function as if we did. Once more, we are of two minds, and the truthful one is most easily discarded. We want to buy comfort, most of all, and as much safety as we can. If we provided everyone in the world the basics of life-food, clothing, a shelter of their own, protected aloneness, and warmth-there would be far less crime than there is and the cost to society would be much less than it is. That affluent Western civilization hasn't already done this, at least for its own people, is an utter disgrace! If we do this, dread will be removed from everyone's life, which derives from never knowing whether we will have enough to survive. The disgraceful term "poverty" defines all of us who aren't upper-middle class, meaning all those who worry about not having enough all their lives. We continue to inflict on ourselves the cruel, demeaning, and frightening belief that comfort and security must be worked for, must be earned monetarily, or we don't deserve it except as charity that insults the recipient. The humiliating bullet of that perfidious moral assertion is what we try to dodge by getting rich.

If we got used to the idea money isn't so terribly important except as a unit of measurement-in fact it's downright boring-we might consider the unthinkable: to relinquish ownership, that primitive relationship we have with parts of nature, and with each other, that spawns so much violence and abuse. We might replace ownership with choosing the right lifetime occupation, which is what we need far more. We would no longer say, "I can do what I want" and begin to say, "I am the steward of this place, and of my life, as long as I need to be." The idea horrifies us because we have invested so much of our comfort and security in the concept of ownership. Our firm conviction in the necessity of it prevails even though we know how much damage this belief has done to the environment and each other, both of which we have owned for thousands of years, most of human history. Perhaps we don't need to give it up entirely. But we should reexamine it. In change, nothing is sacred. We can either join the process of evolution or we can continue to fight it and probably lose in the end.

But what is most paramount to the well-being of humanity is the elimination of violence, which will only happen if we are far more resolute than we are now. It requires preventing any one human from ever being violent more than once. We'd like to entirely eliminate violence. But we can't restrain someone just because we think they might hurt someone, only after they've actually done it. Like everything else repetitive in human nature, violence is habituated. It is not a matter of personal choice. If someone is violent once, they'll be violent again. We must make sure that doesn't happen. Though most likely it will take fifty or a hundred years for us to move toward this solution, giving us time to figure out how best to do it, and people plenty of time to adapt to it before it becomes law. Instead of such visionary reaching, what are we doing? In this technological age we are highly over-identified with our machines because they seem so much more powerful than we are. We want to be a machine! We call these "bionic" wonders "superheroes." We give them magical superpowers-what most movies are about now.

A recent remake of the movie Manchurian Candidate appears to be a story about the evil uses of genetic engineering, when it's most fundamentally a story about bad mothers and fathers. Many parents still perceive their children as instruments of their own power instead of someone entrusted to them in order to assist them in releasing their (the children's) natural powers as independent agents. The movie also expresses what it's like to be dominated by others who pretend to be serving us. This exposes the ways in which family, society, and culture control our lives by keeping the vast majority of us anxious, insecure, about not having enough resources and by insisting we fill standardized identities and jobs. In other words, we've always been dominated by the machine we call "royalty," "the church," "society," the "majority," "the economy," or "the marketplace." Only recently have a great many of us begun to venture into "entrepreneurship," creating the shape and form of our own work. And yet, what still dominates this effort, what we must do in conformance to society's cultural capitalistic command, is to make money simply to survive. This gross necessity distorts the process of being what and who we are because of money's cynical amorality. The result is that we make money at the expense of others.

The care of service has become an advertiser's joke. Some would insist that we have to cooperate with each other, to which I would agree. But that cooperation is democratic only when individuals arrange to collaborate with others individuals because they want to. It's happening more and more all the time. But that mode of governance has barely begun to take over the human experience. Of course we don't know how to collaborate well because we've never seriously tried. These provocative ideas violate many sacred cows of democratic rights in their present form and are thus very unlikely. They're presented herein as illustrations of what we should consider and how much determination will be required for us to reach our goals. It will require the willing cooperation of the vast majority of people in the world, which will probably take fifty or a hundred years to achieve. But nothing will ever happen unless we get started in earnest. We believe politics requires politicians. It doesn't, only administrators of our common will.

It terrifies us to imagine ourselves as individuals taking over the world and being responsible for what happens in it ... perhaps by voting on the Internet. Undoubtedly the ideas presented herein are crazy and unworkable. Most certainly that will be the response of many. But they're not meant to be workable solutions. They are challenges that are meant to help us imagine that individuated forms of governance are possible, that is if we have the will and courage to make ourselves ready and available to such drastic change. By keeping ourselves safe in the status quo, we vote for the belief that everything's fine and force our children to solve the problems we have chosen to ignore. We needed the Internet in order to imagine such political heresy. We needed a way of communicating directly with each other that isn't controlled or policed by anyone. Let's look honestly at our nature, the good and bad of it. It's all displayed on the Internet. But please let's stop turning our security over to someone else. That's how tyranny was, and still is, built.

In its best form, politics is how we set things up in the large picture of human society in order to do only one thing: facilitate the education and the opportunity of individual people. Nothing should be more important than that. This includes money, economy, and defense. If we make anything else more important than the safe passage of individual effort, we will eventually produce a tyranny. In order to achieve these ends we must define human nature psychologically. We must come to see ourselves as we really are, with as little pretense as possible. We must learn to be unafraid of fear, so that we can learn how to keep it in bounds without killing or attacking each other.

Only individual humans can agree, and then instantaneously be committed to actualizing their agreement with the ruthlessness with which violence deserves to be treated. It isn't people toward whom we have to become determined in a vigorous way. It's violence that we must oppress-suppress, by preventing violent people from ever being violent again toward those who have successfully committed to nonviolence...whatever that comes to mean. However, in spite of the oppression that emanates from political decisions and from public bureaucratic practice, the primary obstacle to change in our times exists inside each one of us where personal habits and their institutional practices obstruct our capacity to think, feel, and imagine big!

Like the poor farmers of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, who cringe in terror at the prospect of raising up to face their tormentors, we too have been cowed by our childhood experiences to believe that to be supremely individual, rebellious in thought, word, and deed is a consummately selfish act of treason and a betrayal of the social group, most particularly our family. We were raised to believe such acts deserve the worst kind of punishment-banishment and death.

The family, as its presently structured, is as much an instrument of culture and society as it's an instrument of individual growth and development. It will always condemn rebellion-particularly from itself-before it will encourage individual creativity that might threaten the solidarity of family connections and traditions. This is the hardest lesson, perhaps, that we will ever learn. The prohibitive fears and inhibitions that family, in its present form traumatizes our habit structure will continue to prevent us from imagining ourselves capable of managing the world. For instance, all institutions, including the family do not allow for the arrangement of leadership always to be functional and project driven, which is the only social arrangement that will ever be fully democratic.

Project-leadership emerges spontaneously-the best person for the job-or by vote, but only after the project has been chosen and designed by all of us. Such leadership lasts only as long as the project does, and exists only to focus the efforts of the group of people who implement it. This will not happen unless we vigorously fathom the depths of our own potentially very powerful psyche-spirit, learn to cope with an ethereal, intangible identity, and free the extraordinary talents that lie almost completely unfulfilled.

Without such open transformation such change will never happen today...or tomorrow. For centuries the human spirit has been in bondage. That's where we put it for safekeeping. Unable to occupy it ourselves, we gave it first to every tiny aspect of nature, and then to the gods, and finally to God. We must learn to repossess it. It's who we are. What we do with it is our destiny. It's time to bring it out of cold storage from the next world, so that it can fully occupy, and educate this one.

My additional works can be seen at this website: http://donfenn.com