The System Can't be Fixed
by John Kaminski

Our future is a dark age of vicious guards and powerless prisoners, unless ...

Our president is a criminal, if not surely guilty, at least indictable for the following offenses:

If we had a real attorney general who represented all Americans rather than only the wealthy, he would investigate these charges, and convene a legitimate investigation into the suspicious atrocities of 9/11/2001. But as he was appointed by the same man who is charged with committing all these crimes, no investigation is likely. In fact, the attorney general himself is probably guilty of many of the same charges as the president, as he is conspicuously involved in so many of the instances of obstruction of justice.

So there is no chance that the sitting government is going to act on these obvious crimes, since the entire government is polluted by conspirators of the same political party who are beholden to the criminals who gave them their jobs. This deadlock also applies to virtually all of the judges in America, since most of them have been appointed by the same manipulators and their like-minded predecessors, who must promise to condone this corruption before they are ever appointed to the bench in the first place.

And even the legislative branch is subject to the same polluting influences, since it costs millions to achieve these posts and once elected, collusion in the secret and criminal activities of the power elite is essential to advancing one's career.

As preposterous as it sounds, the entire Congress (excepting a dozen or so idealists) needs to be dismissed and indicted for its corrupt actions. That says something about the direction our future must take if we are to actually be free.

We are supposed to have a two-party system in America, but it has been apparent for some time that the differences between the two parties are wholly cosmetic. An analysis of the recent vote on making war against Iraq is instructive, as only eight senators opposed it, despite the complete absence of hard evidence that Iraq should be invaded at all (something the rest of the world knows well, but that the American people choose not to know). The opposition included seven Democrats and one Independent, but the vast majority of Democrats supported the Republican president's position, even though it was clearly a lie. The situation is identical when it comes to the Israelis' continuing theft of the Palestinians' homeland.

Similar outcomes were recorded in the votes for the Patriot Act and Homeland Security bill, two legislative monstrosities which effectively curtailed most of the privileges recorded in our Constitutional Bill of Rights, which had remained essentially unmolested for two centuries. These votes clearly indicate there is no genuine opposition party in the United States, only a false opposition whose differences with the party in permanent power are pretty much meaningless.

This is evident in the opposition party candidates who speak not of changing the current criminal system but only of modifying procedures in trivial ways that would give no relief to the beleaguered citizenry but only enrich their corrupt friends instead of the other guy's. Look hard at the principal candidates for the 2004 opposition presidential nomination: a member of the same college fraternity as the current president, and two partisan advocates of immoral support for a foreign power that is a principal abettor of tyranny in the world. This is no opposition, only another flavor of the same oppression. Thus, there is no reason to expect any kind of change after the next election. To put it more clearly, there is no reason to vote at all.

In short, there is no place for the average American citizen to turn for relief. This terminal disease of political corruption extends downward through the states, counties and muncipalities, where all elective offices are occupied by people able to pay their way into the ruling system, through alliances with corrupt judges and party bosses, with all machinations based on bribery and deception. Perhaps this is what America has always been — that's a long argument — but there is no argument that this is what America is now: a perverted cesspool of political payola.

Members of both parties were involved in the pivotal decisions of the past half-century that allowed the destruction of America's manufacturing base and the widespread practice of financial deception to cheat legitimate investors out of their hard-earned money. The coming impoverishment of the United States is a bipartisan achievement, but only insofar as the policies of both parties have been consistently to take the short-term profit and feed it quickly to elite investors and their political minions rather than to invest it prudently in the continuing well-being of the American economy. The flight of industry beyond our borders is chief testament to this policy, and the reason why, when this country goes broke beyond any solution the fast-talkers can fabricate, there will be no fixing the problem, and no ready solution to a chaotic poverty that will sweep the land.

This is the real reason why Ashcroft is talking internment camps, why people are fearful of boxcars with seats in them, and new, barbed-wire enclosures that are supposedly springing up all across the land. The current president is trying to blackmail us into war by insisting the economy needs the boost of a military extravaganza to replenish its treasury with the varied industrial activity that wars always bring. Since World War I, this is a tried-and-true method of reinvigorating the economy. But once we realize the principle means trading millions of foreign lives simply to resuscitate our bank accounts, the true cost of this political principle will surely be our souls.

And, judging by America's stances in the world today, this is a price that we — willingly or unconsciously — have already paid. America has lost its soul. Once a beacon of freedom, justice and equality, it is now a blinking neon sign on Skid Row advertising high-interest loans to Third World countries that can never finish repaying them.

We traded our soul when we bribed all those other countries to let us obliterate Afghanistan. There was no real reason to do it, other than to add another layer of deception to the 9/11 caper, to improve political conditions for an oil pipeline, and to put us in better position for when we decide to invade Iran, or Russia, or Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, or all of the above. There was no real reason to kill all those people except to facilitate additional revenues for military support companies owned by Bush's friends. That's how he's improving our economy, by improving HIS economy and letting a few pennies trickle down here and there.

By allowing this criminal president to get away with his antisocial behavior, the American people don't realize that they are only bringing on for themselves what they are now approving for inhabitants of less fortunate countries like Iraq. Sooner or later, the petronazis are going to run out of foreign patsies to bomb, and are going to turn their guns inward. It's inevitable, and to some extent, it has already happened, in terms of the abolition of the most of the civil rights we have been accustomed to all our lives.

By acquiescing in the criminal bullying of the rest of the world by the mega-might of the American military machine, we are sending a clear signal to the tyrants in Washington and Tel Aviv that we will tolerate any atrocity as long as our gas prices stay low and our TV schedules are not interrupted. Any day now, you'll begin to notice that the criminal atrocities of the power elite are creeping closer and closer to home.

But don't worry. There'll be TV in the camps, I'm told. But only one channel. And guess who'll be on.

The current system absolutely cannot be fixed. No amount of petitioning, protesting, having meaningful conversations with the few remaining compassionate members of Congress (an endangered species if there ever was one), or writing letters to newspapers that don't care will have any effect. They have no effect now, other than to massage the egos of the deluded activists making the effort.

No amount of maverick candidacies, third party movements or political-issue crusades is going going to stop this military juggernaut from turning the world into an armed camp (it is already, in case you haven't noticed) where citizens will be herded into "debtors" camps. Many will be eliminated by vaccination programs, although as the insurance industry collapses, medical care will no longer be available to anyone but the super rich. Already, our schools are assuming the appearance of military indoctrination centers that preach that the poor are evil. Drugs and electronic conditioning will make it easier to turn these elite students against their fellow human beings.

The world is devolving into a universal system of guards and prisoners, and you get to choose which one you will be on the basis of how steadfastly you adhere to the party line. Already, there is nowhere to escape to as satellites can access every square inch of the planet, and gun-toting politicians in every single country are ready and willing to turn you in to the thought police because the bounties for such apprehensions are already very lucrative.

This is what will happen if the current system is allowed to remain in place. The alternatives are almost as scary. Whatever happens is going to involve massive dislocation and death, because people in all the industrialized countries are simply not equipped to survive when their support systems break down. People who live in underdeveloped countries are actually better equipped to survive, because they live closer to nature and are less likely to lose their livelihoods in the event of worldwide economic collapse, which, by the way, is imminent.

Yet, breaking down the support systems is exactly what must happen if legitimate freedom is ever to be regained. It is the support systems that enslave us and keep us dependent on our corporate keepers. We need to eat food we grow in our backyards, not buy from supermarket chains. We need to be able to complain to our government face-to-face, not have to write a letter to Washington, or some other capital that doesn't care. We need to be able to teach our children what we think is important, not what some overpaid consultant in a big city deems is necessary to turn our kids into the next generation of corporate slaves.

We have, over the last century, traded our freedom for that illusory curtain of security that we thought would allow us to live our lives in peace and freedom. Little did we know that this curtain was wholly predicated on the ability and willingness to make war. And now we are beginning to learn that our freedom, all this time, was really a kind of slavery.

Now we find ourselves in a situation that is little better politically than landless serfs were in the Middle Ages at the mercy of their whimsical lords. We have our own lords, and they don't mind killing us and anybody else if we interfere with their moneymaking operations.

If we keep the system, we keep our chains, we keep our right, if we're lucky, to have a lucrative job as long as we say the right thing, and ignore it when our government decides it must slaughter a large bloc of hapless peasants because they are interfering with access to a valuable natural resource. We can't keep the system and remain free.

The price of either path will be painful.

Assuming you ever get the chance, which will you choose?

In regard to the charges against George W. Bush listed at the top of this article:

John Kaminski (skylax@comcast.net) is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida whose Internet essays are seen on hundreds of websites around the world.

More articles by John Kaminski:

Bush Flubs it Again
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