No End In Sight is a well-made feature-length documentary film which reviews the mistakes made by the Bush Administration in Iraq.  I just finished watching it, and it prompted me to write the following observations.

The biggest frustration I have with Bush is that he and his dwindling followers convince themselves that he has been fighting a war on terror, and has made us safer, when in fact his bumbling missteps and criminal neglect to lead his nation’s military has made us much more vulnerable, creating more ill-will and terrorist motivation than if he had just done nothing at all after September 11, 2001.

By initially abdicating his commander-in-chief role to Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, and Dick Cheney, Bush allowed the looting of Iraq’s cities, the destruction of an ancient culture’s treasures, and the disbanding of Iraq’s army, effectively insuring the creation of an insurgency of half a million unemployed, angry military men.

Had Iraq’s politically neutral but highly skilled administrative sector been allowed to stay on in the newly forming nation, the looting and loss of priceless treasures would probably been forgiven, eventually. But then disbanding 500,000 combat veterans, firing them all without any compensation or new employment, and allowing them to arm themselves by looting the hundreds of well-stocked, unguarded armories across the country was Big Mistake.

Bush declared major combat operations to be victoriously over under the Mission Accomplished banner, but not long after that a country full of furious, frustrated, battle-hardened breadwinners was ready to blow holes in the incompetent American management of Iraq, the country we occupied in order to defeat terrorism.

In the film, one Iraqi man on the street says, “It was bad under Saddam, but this is worse.” Indeed. And the United States is more hated now, than ever, by those who mean us harm, and less safe against terrorist attacks, with a military left broken and demoralized, and an electorate politically polarized.

I’m not sure how Bush could have more effectively screwed us all over, other than exactly what he did for the last 7 years. I’m not sure that all the damage he has done can ever be repaired. The next person to sit in his office will have to spend years just getting our international reputation and military effectiveness back to pre-Bush levels. Whatever real progress the next president hoped to make will be overshadowed by the herculean effort they will need to expend just healing over the brokenness and corruption allowed into the executive branch by this most incompetent of all U.S. Presidents, number 43.

Good luck, Obama, or Clinton, or McCain.

netflix.com page for film
imdb.com page
http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/

“Not my will, but Thine,” Jesus said in Gethsemane, submitting His own instinct for self-preservation to the plan of salvation that He and the Father had provided.

To have freedom of choice is to have the ability to choose the wrong or choose the right. To live in a world full of free wills is to have a bewildering array of wrongs and rights to choose. To consistently choose the right requires the assistance of the One who is Right. To assist us, He has provided the Word which gives teachings and examples of both the right way and the wrong way.

The ultimate wrong is to assume power over another’s will. Power corrupts because it finds a pleasure center in us known as greed or selfishness. Institutionally enthroned greed, known as capitalism, is the perfect place within which to nurture corruption.

Christ’s voluntary act of submission shows greed to be sin, and selfishness to be sin, and indicts capitalism of the ultimate wrong: encouraging people to assume power over others and exploit them.

America, why not take back our airwaves for neighborhood radio stations?

PROBLEM:
Radio stations across America are being consolidated quickly into fewer and fewer large multi-national corporations. The local voice of local radio is drowned out by ClearChannel, Sirius and XM satellite radio, and even NPR’s local voice is abdicated more and more to the national feed. Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, you could take your freshly minted single down to the local DJ, and he would play it on the radio. You use to be able to call in to a local radio personality and speak personally to all the local listeners about a topic of local concern. News beyond the inane surreal bites that local TV allows past their filters was readily available in the longer, more in-depth treatment only radio news tends to allow any more.

The problem is that you and me, the local consumer of radio, have no voice in this radio marketplace. The powers that we put in charge of making sure our airwaves remain OUR airwaves have sold out to the highest bidders, the media conglomerates. They aren’t hearing us anymore. The two big parties seem more interested in getting elected and preserving status quo than solving any serious problems. Appealing to them will get us nowhere fast.

SOLUTION:
In every single neighborhood in this country is an institution for the education of the public known as the local public school. We, the people, send our kids there (disclaimer: I don’t; I send mine to the private school where I teach, but please– keep reading!), pay for the school’s upkeep through our local property taxes, and occasionally visit the campus for parent-teacher conferences, to vote, or for other community functions. The local public school is a ubiquitous, known entity which is vital to every community, and control over its activities is fiercely maintained at the most local levels, namely, the parents and teachers and local school boards.

Why not resurrect local community through the local production of radio and television content using the newly abandoned analog TV signals which the new digital high definition televisions have opened up for us? Why not compete with the impersonal national networks with the infinitely more interesting local music scene, which will then grow and flourish, having a reliable local outlet? It is easier than ever to produce high-quality content with modern consumer computer and digital sound and video recording equipment. It’s time to go live on the air with locally produced content.

In my public high school (Battle Creek Central High, class of 1984), there was a broadcasting class, which loved so much that even though it was an elective I retook it, just to stay in the media learning mode. We produced TV and radio programs as class projects. It wouldn’t have taken much to enable our broadcast journalism studio to become a licensed radio/TV station. All the equipment was in place.

Colleges have local radio stations, reaching out to the students on campus while training prospective broadcast journalism students and providing a local outlet to campus musicians. Why couldn’t any and every American public school be the host site of a small, local FM or AM radio station, reaching out to the surrounding neighborhoods in the voices and opinions of the local citizens who are, like me, willing and able to spend the time and a little money to produce local content?

I believe it’s an idea whose time has come.

UPDATE: Now that the event has finished, the archiving begins. You can still hear all the testimony at the links below. But Democracy Now! is devoting a portion of their hour long show every day this week to rebroadcasting portions of it. Go to democracynow.org for more.

Iraq Veterans Against the War
warcomeshome.org/wintersoldier2008

You owe it to the troops.

If you think you “support the troops,” you do not, until you hear from the troops themselves, telling the real war stories.

Iraq war veterans are giving first-hand eyewitness accounts live on the radio right now.

Support the troops.

Pause and listen for a while to them tell about war.

Corporations have brought great amounts of inventiveness and positive change to Planet Earth. But at what cost? And if it will soon be too late to fix the global damage due to CO2 and other pollutants, why is Exxon attempting to delay the inevitable changes that must happen in order for the human race to survive the next few generations?

One reason: the profit motive. Greed. The piles of billions of dollars just aren’t enough; they feel the need for a few billion more. That’s capitalism, folks! We must roll back the deregulation of industry which has accelerated the accumulation of corporate wealth and global climate change.

Regulate, regulate, regulate, and Planet Earth survives.

It’s that simple.

If the dictator is perfectly benevolent and infinitely wise, then dictatorship is to be preferred over democracy.

If the dictator rules in a laissez-faire fashion regarding his subjects’ free moral agency, no one would rebel against him; there would be no motive for revolutionary regime change.

If the dictator had omnipotent power, but only ever chose to use it to empower his subjects to pursue their own passions, loves, and happiness, guiding and guarding them from all dangers without and within, then democracy would be a ridiculous suggestion.

This type of dictatorship describes the political reality described in the biblical pre-fall and post-millennium universe. Here in the present, inside this brief window of time, within the sin vaccination probationary era, there exist a few God-friendly governments. This writer would identify them as democratic republics with strong socialist sympathies. Examples would include the post WWII, pre-Reagan United States of America, and many of the current members of the European Union, notably Norway, France, and Sweden. These nations are God-friendly because they have made the sincere attempt to maintain for their society the values of religious liberty and social justice.

Sadly, the United States abandoned its attempts at social justice when the Civil Rights era closed with the Republican Reagan revolution, when the dismantling of the nation’s social safety net commenced. And the rise of the religious right to political prominence has been accompanied by a steady erosion of the wall of separation between church and state. It remains to be seen whether there can be a renaissance of American social justice and religious liberty with an election year upon us.

Greed for profit, lust for pleasure, and fear of threats are formidable weapons in the arsenal of those who desire to subvert societies embracing the values of freedom of conscience and social unity. The Common Enemy, Satan and those men who serve his ends as the ruling elite class in earthly civilizations, have perfected and disguised their manipulation of the masses of citizens.

The public relations and advertising industries, joined seamlessly with the mass media, are the main tools used by the ruling classes to manufacture the consent of the governed. In Wizard-of-Oz fashion, the wealthy few behind the curtain of power insulate themselves from public accountability, by retreating from the public consciousness. Taking their modus operandi from the great Deceiver himself, politically entrenched dynasties control the economies and governments of whole nations, of entire regions using the power of the mass media they own, and by enlisting the most lethal military organizations in existence. Whole departmental budgets of these military machines are blacked out from public view, their existence in many ways denied by the governments themselves, operating as they see fit behind the scenes, without the consent of anyone but the most wealthy and powerful players in the world.

By welding religion to political power and material profit, the ruling elite can maintain their parasitic stranglehold on the vast majority of the working and voting populations of the world, remaining trusted and yet anonymous in the patriotic admiring gaze of the public, filtered through the Magical Mainstream Media machine, television. Religion is not the opiate of the masses, as Marx taught; it is, however, used as a manipulative device by the ruling classes to keep the governed divided and easily conquered, passive and submissive, distracted by the tensions between the multitude of man-made boundaries, including denominations, race, creed, color, gender, ethnicity, and social class.

Religious followers consent voluntarily to give their leaders enormous control and influence over their lives and values, often without consulting the primary sources for their belief systems. Some of the most gullible followers are those who mindlessly follow the whims of their adopted religious mentors, whether pastors or gurus or rabbis or imams or monks or priests. This provides those who sit atop the power structures of states with official state religions with an obscene ability to manipulate entire nations in the name of “god.” The true God cannot be please with such a situation, and indeed in the Biblical Old Testament speaks out through his prophets against such injustice and unrighteousness with deafening consistency, and reserves the most profound warnings of judgment for those who wreak such havoc upon societies.

In the United States, while Judaism currently enjoys a relatively high degree of social acceptance by the whole, Christianity is withering in the face of an all-out assault upon its foundations by the popular media and the academic establishment. Any and all religions are apparently acceptable, except for the one described in the New Testament. Biblical creationists are openly ridiculed while others putting equal amounts of faith in much less reliable gods, such as wealth, competition, or military supremacy, are passed by without comment. The rise of extremist leaders within Christianity, such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, have been convenient targets for popular fallacies like generalization and stereotype. Much as everyday, ordinary Christians might try to disassociate themselves from their all-too-often misguided and power-drunk leaders, whole segments of American society are actively attempting to simply make Christianity go away. It remains a very difficult task to be an American citizen and a Christian who endeavors to reconcile the biblical call to social justice and religious liberty with an ever-dwindling base of support, and the unenviable plight of presidents, pastors, priests, and popes whose deplorable decisions are exhibit A in the case being made against the legitimacy of your own faith.

Above it all, remains God, undistracted from his singular purpose: reveal the truth about himself and his government to every human being, as thoroughly as possible. Through those who have chosen to align themselves with him and his government he works to show the world a better way.

Having 66,000 pages of tax code is a powerful smoke-screen for the Federal Reserve/IRS’s sleight-of-Invisible-Hand, enabling the power-knowledge of “what does the law mean?” to be reserved to a shadowy priesthood of tax lawyers and high-level economics gurus. Who knows these people? When do they get questioned by journalists on our national news media? When does their work ever get scrutinized? Why doesn’t their all-important job description ever become common knowledge? When does their job performance ever make it into the popular news media, academic curricula, or congressional oversight?

If and when a President or U.S. Senator ever gets to hold them accountable or evaluate their performance, how does he or she know the right questions to ask, without one of these same economic gurus or priests advising them?

How might an interested tax-payer ever gain access to the knowledge base needed to formulate a critical line of inquiry, nevermind legally gain physical access to them in order to even ask the questions?

Our U.S. Government has taken these most powerful elements of its governing structure and elevated them high up into a realm of sophistry and obscurity, and this is by design. This way, all those uncomfortable questions disappear, never getting asked.

When you have the power to disappear from the radar screen of public accountability, you have too much power. The Federal Reserve Board, the Internal Revenue Service, and the 66,000 pages of tax code enables the competition element of our free market system to be overcome, the advantage permanently given to the biggest corporations and banks.

Evidently Adam Smith’s so-called Invisible Hand of supply and demand is another concept that operates as sleight of hand, being taught nationwide as economic dogma, while routinely cast aside by the most powerful citizens in order to preserve their position of wealth and power.

“What this suggests about the people running America is far worse than if they were simply malevolent super-geniuses: They don’t know the backstory and couldn’t care less. It’s as though we’re riding in the back seat of a car driven by people who demanded the wheel but aren’t sure what the gas pedal does or what a stop sign actually looks like.”

- from Jonathan Schwartz’s reflections on Bill Kristol’s March 28, 2003 debate with Daniel Ellsberg on CNN

No, I think maybe they actually are malevolent. I can’t seem to distract myself from the perspective of God in the Final Judgment. We gave them napalm! That’s pretty much malevolent’s very definition, yup.

Back up. This is a quote from Jonathan Schwarz’s wonderful article in TomDispatch.com, “The Lost Kristol Tapes,” first seen by me on commondreams. This article is wonderful because it slaps back into his seat that petulant man-baby, Bill Kristol, who wants so bad to get his hands on the launch codes, but somehow (God, maybe?!) keeps getting held back into position as “journalist,” or “advisor,” or, once, Dan Quayle’s chief of staff. Maybe the neocons are smart enough to know that certain people, if given absolute power, would destroy the whole sand box.

This quote hit me for the power of its imagery, but as I went to insert it into the rotation on my random-quotes generator, I realized that I don’t necessarily agree with it. (And a basic criterion for inclusion into my random quotes list is that I whole-heartedly agree and couldn’t have said it better myself.) The reason I don’t agree with it completely is because of the compelling case Naomi Klein has built in her book, Shock Doctrine, which I’ve written about already here. Klein’s case is that the bad guys in charge of things are doing bad things because they’re bad. And that they have their media megaphones blaring that they are not bad guys, they’re just incompetent; nice covering fire in their war on our freedoms.

In the course of the debate, Ellsberg makes the by-now-common-knowledge point that the CIA put Saddam Hussein in power as the dictator of Iraq, presumably because the guys in charge back in the 1960’s felt that Saddam was the lesser evil. Brilliant reasoning, but it works for these guys. And according to those Ba’athists then who are writing books about it now, the U.S. gave the new CIA-friendly regime napalm in order to put down an uprising by Kurdish rebels. Yes, the same people who died later by Saddam’s use of chemical weapons technology supplied to him by…. guess who. Yeah, that’s right: the bad guys.

“They hate our freedoms;” that’s been a popular meme injected into public consciousness this war ’round. They should take more care of their choice of words; we’ve all read Orwell, after all. As Shock Doctrine makes clear, the only ones who hate our freedoms are the wealthy disaster capitalists who have lied their way to the top and intend to quietly take away all those freedoms we have to knock them down from there, and kick them back into their smoke-filled back rooms. THEY, the bad guys in charge of American political and financial power at the moment, THEY are the ones who hate OUR freedoms. They are, according to their own bad attempt at manufacturing consent, the real terrorists. They rule by fear, they hate our freedoms; let’s start a war on terror that takes down the true Terrorists. We, The People, simply own too much power for the comfort level of those who insure their future luxuries through the practice of such crass, greedy, meanness that Machiavelli would take it all back.

The beauty of our War on Their Terror is that it’s waged in our courtrooms, in our ballot boxes, and in our House, the Congress. Act, America, before all your freedoms are permanently sacrificed on the altar of the pleasures of powerful elites.

Read the links, and you decide.

There are prophecies in the Bible which indicate that a time is coming in which powerful religio-political forces will persecute a non-conformist minority, attempting to intimidate them into submission, and eventually using deadly force against them. I agree with my Seventh-day Adventist Church in its application of one such prophecy to the United States government. The prophecy has been studied in this respect for over 100 years, comparing the machinations of the Federal Government with the words of the Bible. The Book of Revelation contains one such prophecy:

Revelation 13:15-17, “He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark.

This prophecy connects the power of commerce “buy or sell” with the power to exert deadly force. The introduction of digital banking, check-cards, and identification numbers was a first step toward the ability to bar access to commerce to hand-picked members of the population. To my mind, however, the deadly force aspect was vague; I couldn’t see yet how a large number of American citizens could be militarized and authorized to use lethal force against their fellow Americans. Then the following story was told on my local Pacifica radio station, and I sat there stunned as I listened to it, the implications of it creating a sick feeling in my stomach.

The FBI is partnering with businesses ostensibly to help guard our nation’s economic infrastructure from terrorist threats, but in so doing is granting business leaders the right to the prosecution-free use of deadly force when martial law is declared.

If any small group of people or individual deserves the title of Shadow President or Puppet Master, it’s the Office of Legal Counsel.

Please take a few minutes to read the following interviews from the script of a PBS Frontline episode entitled “Cheney’s Law.”

I’m ashamed that the last place I bought gasoline was a Chevron station. If the city of Berkeley can pull off a boycott of Chevron, I too can go down to the next station (by the way, Chevron owns Texaco). I already had good reason to do this, but Monday’s Flashpoints settled it for me. Listen to it, see if this ten minutes of radio interview doesn’t change your mind, too.

 

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