If we start not from the premise that the government is instituted by the general public to serve it, but is rather instituted by the elite to serve and protect it from the 99%, then we have disposed of a major intellectual barrier to understanding the rush to a national security state. What is your best guess as to the fraction of personnel time and resources spent by the security state on preventing terrorism and the fraction used to determine what the progressive people's movements are up to, in the U.S. and globally, and to suppress them in order to protect the transnational corporations?
Where do all these wars come from? Where is the evidence that the people of the USA, 4% of the world's population, are smarter and harder working than everyone else to the extent that we deserve to appropriate 25% of the world's resources? And are 400 families of that 4% so much smarter and harder working that they deserve to control an amount of wealth equal to that of 155 million of us?
Is there no underlying broad economic pressure for companies to steal oil, minerals, water from wherever they can? To get what is not theirs, do these companies not exert political and ideological pressure on governments? How much propaganda from these companies and their government must be swallowed to persuade me to send my sons and daughters into war's meatgrinder to get me cheap gasoline? Are there not 1000-plus U.S. military bases throughout the world to ensure that the corporations get what they want by hook, or crook, or drone? Is it a coincidence that those military bases are concentrated in oil-rich regions? When Jimmy Carter stated, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America," what justification did he have for excluding the U.S. as an outside force?
Is it not the case that the Tea Party mentality is a raw, unexpurgated version of what the U.S. empire, under Republican and Democratic-led governments, has done around the world for over a hundred years? Where do all these wars come from?
If we start not from the premise that the government is instituted by the general public to serve it, but is rather instituted by the elite to serve and protect it from the 99%, then we have disposed of a major intellectual barrier to understanding the rush to a national security state. What is your best guess as to the fraction of personnel time and resources spent by the security state on preventing terrorism and the fraction used to determine what the progressive people's movements are up to, in the U.S. and globally, and to suppress them in order to protect the transnational corporations?
Where do all these wars come from? Where is the evidence that the people of the USA, 4% of the world's population, are smarter and harder working than everyone else to the extent that we deserve to appropriate 25% of the world's resources? And are 400 families of that 4% so much smarter and harder working that they deserve to control an amount of wealth equal to that of 155 million of us?
Is there no underlying broad economic pressure for companies to steal oil, minerals, water from wherever they can? To get what is not theirs, do these companies not exert political and ideological pressure on governments? How much propaganda from these companies and their government must be swallowed to persuade me to send my sons and daughters into war's meatgrinder to get me cheap gasoline? Are there not 1000-plus U.S. military bases throughout the world to ensure that the corporations get what they want by hook, or crook, or drone? Is it a coincidence that those military bases are concentrated in oil-rich regions? When Jimmy Carter stated, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America," what justification did he have for excluding the U.S. as an outside force?
Is it not the case that the Tea Party mentality is a raw, unexpurgated version of what the U.S. empire, under Republican and Democratic-led governments, has done around the world for over a hundred years? Where do all these wars come from?