Swans Commentary » swans.com June 30, 2008  

 


 

Theft: Our National Pastime
 

 

by Carol Warner Christen

 

 

 

 

(Swans - June 30, 2008)   Has anyone given much thought to the idea that it is apparently quite easy for the United States of America with its gigantic budget for the Pentagon to steal an entire country? We have done just that in Iraq. This theft is for oil and for a base in Eurasia to dare anyone to stop us.

The decree we gave Iraq to build innumerable -- more than one hundred -- city-size bases on its territory, a gigantic walled and armed embassy, a forced agreement to give us their huge stores of oil, the right to be free of arrest as we arrest Iraqis who violate our lawlessness in their homeland, and the utter devastation of their homes and infrastructure without recompense, was so we could steal their oil to fuel our war machine. The ultimate goal is to control the resources of Eurasia.

This is the big plan from what I read. There are so many important and special people behind this heist it boggles the mind. We gave up habeas corpus so we could imprison ourselves when we realize what our government is actually up to in our names. Then, we let the same government give contracts to the military-industrial-congressional complex we had been warned against by a president who was a military general and knew whereof he spoke. "Is anybody out there?" (Billy Gilman - Is Anybody Out There lyrics.)

The cost of this war to steal a country and its oil has cost us way over a trillion dollars of monies we have given to the military to travel back and forth across an ocean and half a continent. That is money we paid for with young men's lives. We stole their lives, too, in this theft. We left more than four thousand of them dead and more than a hundred thousand with stress-related illnesses the government won't help cure. Why should it? There is no honor amongst thieves and never has been.

We backed off education for our children. We became consumers and shoppers and electronic whizzes to hide our need to know what we did do in our name. We, too, are culpable and irresponsible under the hands of official torturers and murderers. We did not stop at theft. The ponerologists in government (6%) have been helped by the 12% "wanna be kings." The rest of us normal people just want to be left alone to live our lives. We do not know how to stop that wanton, thieving, murderous 18%, do we?

We thought we had a Congress. We thought we elected a president. We watched him pack the Supreme Court and the executive branch with his kind. The corporate capitalists are so numerous in the capitol (Washington, D.C.) of our country that the People have become meaningless monetarily and actually to those we elected to serve us. Instead, they serve other masters unnamed, unaccountable, and unknown. Sure, we can look them up. The Internet lists them. There are so many of them while we still have to care for our families, our disappearing jobs, and our shrinking incomes as nothing changes, except for the worst.

The theft gets bigger; but, no one is to blame. The churches cry for Armageddon and retribution, instead of loving one's neighbor as oneself. Meanwhile, the food supply is smaller as it shrinks from floods and tornados. The weather unleashes more against us than ever before and pulverizes the middle of our country as we pulverized Iraq. Yet, our eyes do not see. Our fourth estate does not report or compare or discuss anything not officially sanctioned. They, too, are often beholden to the people who have stolen a country. What would be the repercussions if we discussed this rationally? No one wants to hear, to know, or to care. Some of us search for information and we find it but it takes much time. Then along comes new outrages from the same set of ideologues.

Somewhere in time, we turned our country's belief systems upside down. Someone decided we should compel other peoples around the planet to conform to our ideas, regardless of whether they want to or not. We rose to empirical fascism to dictate. Dictating is to be the boss. Freedom does not dictate to others. Our forefathers warned us; we forgot why. Our forefathers never meant for us to war preventively or preemptively. We have never been attacked; 9/11 has never been investigated. If it were a crime, why would we simply choose some peoples halfway around the world to blame without proof? This is outside the rules of any law.

I mentioned in the first paragraph that we stole an entire country. I should have said two countries. Our own country, the United States of America, is the second theft. The president became a warmonger by designating himself commander in chief. Then he convinced the Congress that we, the People, didn't need our rights because we, as well as the rest of the world, are all suspects, even our grandmothers and aunts. We are, or might be, the terrorists.

I believe that the president has some form of delusion that all of humanity may be terroristic and hiding amongst us. He has created and perpetrated a chimera that, as we all know, is a fanciful conception; ergo, the government must search, seek, and spy on all of us so as not to miss the terrorists. The delusion metastasizes into an empirical cancer, a blight upon us in the world that once admired our constitutional republic.

Meanwhile, our private lives are an open book to any, and all, government agents violating the Fourth Amendment, which is our right to privacy. Apparently, the hope is to imprison clients for the prison complex corporations and rid "troublemakers," by government lights, from the body politic of the People themselves. The worst is that this is without due process of law. It is a violation of a human being, which is the federal equivalent of gang rape. It was done in full view by the agents of the newest "One World Order," another gigantic elitist scam. We all have seen and noted their penchant for torture on television in our gulags overseas. The latest news says that we killed many we tortured. Isn't that worth a murder charge at the very least?

You and I would not get a pass on violence, would we, against another? What makes this the new law of the land? Congress has folded up itself into a corner, pretending as the set of monkeys I owned as a child years ago to "hear no evil, to see no evil, and to speak no evil." At least five members of the Supreme Court gave us back habeas corpus, at least for terrorist prisoners. However, the Fourth Estate insisted that the minority opinion of the court was so important to one of the political parties that only its one-sided view was published. That was the side against the decision. Who are these people?

The Founders expected the Fourth Estate to publish truth. They never realized the extent of corporate ownership with interlocking directorates. Those groups own the news; good reporters who tell the truths of our lives are fired and mouthpieces are put in their place. It is so bad now that not one of the four major news sources on television is trustworthy. The locals, however, are still telling local truths. The newspapers are shrinking, even the comics, as costs become prohibitive, and major news is shunted to lesser pages than the front page. How do we know what is true and what is trivial now? We search if we have time. If not, we pretend everything is still the same and will be forever.

We have stolen our children's futures. We have stolen our own wealth to buy a country for the wealthy to mine for oil. They will be able to live nicely in Dubai's opulence until the peoples of the Mideast toss them into the sea, or worse. Here in North America, we have cut our services to the bone to pay for this. Why? This is a pipe dream.

I wonder when I find vole after vole dead on my property in the country and we use no sprays. What kills them? They are not eaten, just dead. The truck traffic has died down after a huge spurt two months ago. Since then, the bees came and my fruit trees are loaded with small fruits. The bees can smell the flowers. Maybe the simple, the natural, the necessary will blossom again. Our labor will increase; we will have food and nuts, too.

I have mentioned the seven deadly sins in different articles. It seems as if there is no restraint to practice anything: the good, the bad, the indifferent, the useless, war, death, theft, greed. Is it possible when we give away our way of life that the North American Union will fill the void and cut our country into parts separated by huge highways? Will we be cut off from each other? Why? Does anyone notice or care?

That is how the presidents of three adjacent countries see the United States ending up as part and parcel of two other countries. This is a treaty arrangement, not a vote of the People or the Congress. They who signed the international treaty have given us away; they just haven't mentioned it to us in the stark terms of how such a reality would shock us into the now. Will we undo what they have done or shrug it off?

People, we need to talk to each other again. We need to give up this thievery and give those peoples back their homes and get out of the Middle East. We know nothing of their lives, their mores, and their love for their country because we ceased loving ours some thirty or forty years ago in a binge of conservatism in the service of the elites.

We, the People are the whole, not the part at the top. That is also when we began focusing on stuff to consume, even though little of what the ads had us consume was edible. We built up a huge set of debts for this. The country itself built up a huge debt to kill, maim, and make esoteric weaponry for profit. Why are trillions of dollars going everywhere except here? Theft is by corporations that do not honor their contracts but take the money anyway to take over the world. The egos at the top seem to think they are the kings of the planet, the ultimate rulers of our local universe. Bah, humbug! Let's take our country back and remake it without them. Let's pray we have time enough for honor and a future.

 

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About the Author

Carol Warner Christen on Swans (with bio)... Woman born 1939, twice married, five children, 7 grandchildren; own a goat farm, rural Oregon after years in Chicago area and Ohio; Associate of Arts, Chicago Art Institute (1 year); artist, editor, mechanical design drafting supervisor; owned two computer companies before anyone had a computer; activist; antiwar; human.

 

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Please, feel free to insert a link to this work on your Web site or to disseminate its URL on your favorite lists, quoting the first paragraph or providing a summary. However, please DO NOT steal, scavenge, or repost this work on the Web or any electronic media. Inlining, mirroring, and framing are expressly prohibited. Pulp re-publishing is welcome -- please contact the publisher. This material is copyrighted, © Carol Warner Christen 2008. All rights reserved.

 

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Swans -- ISSN: 1554-4915
URL for this work: http://www.swans.com/library/art14/carenc39.html
Published June 30, 2008



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