1) money rules;
2) the Republican Party is the Party of Wealth;
3) the Republican Party tells all kinds of lies in order to fake what they appear to believe so that they can get the votes of certain disaffected groups (the Religious Right, gun owners, over-burdened taxpayers, hawks, and so forth;
4) the real agenda of the Republican Party is to take and hold power for the financial elites which finance and control the Party's whole structure.
5) The foreign policies of this administration, while often phrased in traditional terms (get rid of weapons of mass destruction, get rid of bad guys, bring freedom to the world etc.), in reality has nothing whatsoever to do with such a positive or creative agenda.
6) 9/11 gave an excuse to invade Iraq as part of a long term policy of the wealthy elite to be able to place massive American troop concentrations in the geographic center of the major oil producing nations of the middle-East, which concentrations would work as a threat matrix for further machinations in the region.
7) Collectively there is a long existing English-American financial establishment (going all the way back to and through Cecil Rhodes), which has been trying to run the world (mostly successfully) for over a century, and which manifests in such institutions as the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.
8) the build up of American military might during the Cold War had little to do with the threat from Russia (the serious experts knew the Russians couldn't mount a real modern war machine), but everything to do with positioning America to be the single super power when communism collapsed, which it eventually had to do.
9) the Wealthy elites don't really care about the poor, and consider them to just be in the way of those who have righteously risen to the top through social rules of natural selection. If your are rich and have power, it was meant to be.
10) because of the hired expertise wealth is able to employ, their understanding of the world is far superior to most governments and universities. The best and the brightest are soon noticed and recruited to be part of this elite. Everyone pretends this intellectual elite is not just paid servants, but Henry Kissinger and the like make so much money and live so high on the hog, that it doesn't seem to make a difference to them that they really don't get to make long term policy decisions (they are servants and not masters).
11) the Real War has always been the rich against the poor, and the means has always been the same as it has for millennia - lawlessness, lies, and violence (both threatened and real). We just happen to live in an Age where so-called public education has been carefully influenced by these same tame intellectual servants of the rich, with the result that we are trained from birth to believe we live in a Democracy, when the true facts are that we live in a tyranny of concentrated wealth, and have done so since at least (at least!) the Civil War, when the bankers manipulated Lincoln, and prevented him from fixing the problem with the nature of money.
12) the rich also own the Democratic Party.
13) Clinton's (a Rhodes Scholar) move to the political center destroyed finally what remained of the Democratic Party, which was really dealt its fatal blow during the early days of the Vietnam War, especially over the police riots in Chicago during the Democratic Convention in 1968. Nader is right, the Democrats are no more progressive, or left leaning, than the Republicans. They just have the role of mastering progressive lies more, while the Republicans master conservative lies.
How do we know if these assumptions are true?
14) the Federal Reserve Act of 1919, involved an unconstitutional grant of power from the Federal Government to a private banking group, and was supported by both parties. There are two basic powers of a government over an economy, the monetary power, and the spending and taxing power. The monetary power concerns the managing of the size of the money supply, and the regulation of interest rates, while the taxing and spending powers are just what their names imply. In the Federal Reserve Act, the monetary power was giving over to a private bank (which was named the "Federal" Reserve, to preserve the illusion of its ties to government). In addition, to again further the illusion, the Chairman of the Fed - currently Alan Greenspan - is appointed by the President - who always follows the lead, in making this appointment, of the financial wizards of Wall Street, while less known is the fact that to the rest of the board of the Fed - who actually vote policy, the Chairman is just a figure head, and the members of this board are appointed officials (lap-dogs) of various private banking interests.
15) everyone, who understands this (and favors it), believes it is necessary because it is assumed that the People, through their elected representatives, are just to darned stupid and self interested to be trusted with the management of all that wealth.
16) social security, that great progressive program created in response to the great depression (the bankers sure controlled that one didn't they), was a lie from the beginning, and was again supported by both parties, who managed to exempt Senators, Congressmen and various other appointed and elected officials from having to pay into such a scam, while at the same time granting themselves (and continue to grant themselves) the world's greatest retirement program ever (that is if you get to be elected and sent to Washington). Immediately, in order to hide what actually spending was being done in Washington (again both parties colluded), the social security fund was used as part of the general fund monies (mingled with income tax receipts) that government could spend, and all that was done was that IOU's were placed in the fund. So in effect, our elected representatives of both Parties created a pyramid scheme in which the accounts which showed a positive balance really only contained IOU's for which (guess who) the taxpayer was also responsible. They got us to loan ourselves the money to cover the theft of our own money - so we owe ourselves for our money which they borrowed in an accounting trick that kept us in the dark.
Let's face it. Governments are today about money and power and all the rhetoric about freedom and truth is just a bunch of crap! The rich don't really care who wins in November 2004, because the basic rules will remain the same. Senators and Congressman will still depend upon wealth for their re-elections. They will still keep themselves free of the debacle that is coming to social security. They will continue to gerrymander voting districts to favor the incumbents to the exclusion of any new blood. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and few there are who can step back from this temptation. Dean and Kucinich were abberations, and Kerry is just another bought soul.
The real war is between the rich and the poor, but lets recognize that while they have power and money, there are a hell of a lot more of us. Even if you place in the camp of the rich all their servants (all those who benefit from the present system), the split is about 80-20. Only 20% are trying (with considerable success lets remember) to control the other 80%'s lives.
The trick question is how do we want to play our part in this war? The rich make war on the poor because that is the only method they know, even with its quite questionable moral nature. Do we really want to make war back? What moral path do we want to follow? Suppose we don't want to play? Suppose we say, yea, you want all that stuff, alright you can have it. Then we get about the business of getting together and surviving in spite of their stupidity and greed.
Ask yourself this question: Is it really necessary to pursue the same goals of wealth and power as the rich? If not, then what goals? Maybe we are smarter. Yes, I know, we have to worry about all the evil in the world (that's the great liberal albatross), and make sure that the 9 year old prostitutes in Thailand get freed, and the slaves in equatorial Africa. We have to make sure the Malaysian garment workers are paid a living wage, and the Chinese plastics producers. And in America, we have to have our free music on the Internet, and hamburgers twice a day.
Once we admit that there is a war between the rich and the poor, and that this war dominates all other political decisions, we are left with a number of questions, the very least of which is: Why play the game by their rules? Why seek our own political power in a venue they already control? In Aikido (a very interesting martial Art), the gesture is to embrace the act of violence moving toward one, and respond in such a way that it passes through one without harm and without our losing our center. Is it possible the same goal/method is valid in this war between the rich make upon the poor?
This doesn't mean, by the way, that we can't get political power, but rather that the means by which that is done may well be along lines quite different from those the true Left and real progressives have been pursuing. The question remains, as noted above, do we play the game by their rules, or do we invent our own?
