Domination: Chapter 10

10. CONCLUSIONS

The Questions are Still at Issue
At the beginning of this book I listed six key issues that I wanted to explore in our look at history:
(1) domination;
(2) inequality (stratification);
(3) scripting (fabrication);
(4) mystification;
(5) secrecy;
(6) malfeasance in office.

We have seen that office-holders through the ages have fabricated rules, mystified their offices, maneuvered in secrecy and operated in ways that were beneficial to the few at the expense of the many. Domination and inequality have been rampant in our historical tour.
In this final chapter I want to address these issues in light of the government of the United States. I am sad to report that the cancer that plagued polities through the ages is still with us. The most recent Presidency, that of George W. Bush certainly is one of the worst in years and stands out as the most arrogant and aggressive Imperial Administration in our history, but unhappily the cancer goes deeper than one man or his band of Neocon ideologues. The economics of war and corruption have eaten into the bowels of government.

Which History?

When I was a student at Cambridge I loved to go to the University Library, which houses many of the world’s great books and stroll through the isles of the history section. It has thousands of books on the history of the world and lots on the different regions of the globe. At the time I wondered what history’s function was. What does it mean to have a whole floor of the library holding thousands of musty volumes?
Then, during my experience as a teacher and researcher in the world of academia I came to see a disconnect between what was being written and discussed in seminars and that which was going on in the world outside. Of course, this is summed up in the oft-used phrase: The Ivory Tower. There is some truth to the stereotype. Most academics know what is going on in the world but they feel cut off from power. Not being influential and rarely consulted by those in command, they churn out academic tomes and articles that will get them tenure, promotions and salary increases (I did my share).
The histories so produced are not very threatening to the establishment; nor do they make an effort to connect what went on anciently with what is going on today and that which might be going on in the lifetimes of our grandchildren.
I have tried to write a different history. In so doing I want my reader to see that history can provide insights that are relevant and useful in making changes in our world, views that can help us make the world a better place. At the end of this chapter I will give some examples of things we can do.
Using the tactic of spindoctoring, fabricating the truth, élites throughout history have portrayed the powerless as “beggars running amok” (Enclosure debate in twelfth century England); underachieving and underproducing (Highland clearances); or “collaborators with the Muslim enemy” (Christian Catalonia). Having made such definitions, continue to treat the masses as undeserving of all the information available to government officials and higher ups. Élites in our historical tour, then, have demonstrated a certain arrogance and felt the need to operate without the people’s consent, hiding from them the operations of government.
Below, in our discussion of present-day
America we will see that not much has changed in this regard, except that it is a more complex situation today and, therefore, perhaps more difficult to understand. Note the newsman Walter Lippman’s (1889-1974) characterization of the American public as “the bewildered herd” in need of being shepherded by a “specialized class” of persons, today called Neocons (see “The Arrogance of Office,” below). Such views of the public permit leaders to promote opaque government, withholding information from the public and pursuing war plans that benefit a few at the expense of the majority.
This is not a new problem. James Madison voiced his concerns about the fate of democracy as time wore on. He warned of “a real domination of the few under an apparent liberty of the many…” [my italics]. He deplored “the daring depravity of the times” where private interests had “become the praetorian band of the government – at once its tools and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations” The founding father continues:

A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives (Chomsky 2002:15). .

In our historical tour we have seen some secret dealings: did the commoners in Yokut-Mono society have the information needed to resist the plots and devices of the little chief and shaman? Did Tlingit commoners and slaves have the information needed to fight their impoverishment in the face of lavish ego displays by their chiefs? Did the English peasant have the information needed to stop the enclosures? (the pamphleteers tried but they were being read mainly by other élites, some of whom did try to help the peasants). Did the Amerindians at Etowah have the information to stop the political abuses that undoubtedly contributed to the decline and collapse of their society? Even in today’s Sisalaland, do women and young men have the information they need to understand how divination contributes to their servitude? Did the Highland clansmen and clanswomen have the information needed to stop the clearances? Did the peasants of Catalonia have the information to fight off the Power of the Pen as élites there manufactured serfdom in their land? As the Central African Kings fabricated domination, did the people of Kubalannd have the information that would allow them to see through the fog of spin put up by the King’s priests? Do Americans today understand what is going on in the state-management system in Washington DC?
In most cases, the answer is no. Who was providing information? In a general sense, the priesthood or those attached to and benefiting from nearness to power. It is the same today. C. Wright Mills noted that news people in America are part of the power élite. Those at the top of the profession, who have six-figure salaries and mix and mingle with upper class are unlikely candidates to disseminate analyses and information that would be highly critical of the American way of life. The Kuba priests and the Catalan comital lawyers didn’t want to rock the boat and neither do the information-suppliers of our mass media. The cybernetic result in each case is filtered information for the public.
Filtered information is altered or incomplete information. No doubt some secrecy is necessary in carrying out foreign policy and in combating the very real dangers that exist in a post-9/11 world. Nevertheless, as I write this leaked memos from the State Department and elsewhere within the beltway point again and again to the fact that government lies to its people and in a democracy the level of secrecy should be very low, yet some say the Imperial Presidency is on the rise. Certainly, it is a tendency that a vibrant democracy should resist.

The Camouflage of “Democracy”

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1827) said that our liberty cannot but be guarded by the freedom of the press, but Americans have come to take democracy for granted and because of this apathy it has become a mask of ideality. We falsely believe that democracy exists, is working and we are content to accept the axiom that the press is watching our backs.
Democracy has become our Deity. Like the African kings of Kubaland who claimed to have Deity on their side, a modern day American President can thwart the will of the people because of the opacity of a highly authoritative office and a belief that democracy is working. The President claims to have the Deity-inspired. Constitution on his side and the Supreme Court is supposed to be watching that. Furthermore, in a declared democracy the free press is supposed to preserve awareness in the general public, as a guardian against despotism. These beliefs shield us from knowing what is wrong with our government and from taking action to correct those wrongs. The best shield is the belief in the absence of a shield.
In our modern day world the whole poleconomy, with its attendant institutions and culture of abundance acts as a shield for self-seeking men within government. Sometimes the shield breaks down dramatically, as with Watergate or the Enron collapse. At other times it slowly erodes away, as with the growing awareness on the part of the American people that they were duped into an unnecessary war in Iraq. But these are taken to be temporary faults and the system is assumed to be fundamentally sound and self-correcting.
Unfortunately, the appearance of media power, the idea that reporters are hard at work creating transparency, is part and parcel of the opacity that prevents the general public from knowing the truth about what is going on in government and in the world of business. We can see this in the following quote:

… what journalists should be doing is standing outside the cycle of symbolic and physical violence, corruption and manipulated information that makes up the power relations of society, so they can show audiences the truth of the system and how it works. But, instead, they, themselves, are immersed in this system of untruth. Like other players in this system, they engage in symbolic violence against reputations; they manipulate information to achieve various ends; they make covert alliances, and offer the public forms of untruth that masquerade as truth. And they do so even as they depict themselves as honest brokers who stand outside the system and expose it flaws to public scrutiny (http://www.transparencynow.com/news/preface.htm)

And much of the media is not even concerned with news or looking at important issues, but spews out “entertainment,” the equivalent of Aldus Huxley’s soma in Brave New World. And perhaps the media has a big brother, and it’s not the Big Brother of the novel, but one might say that “Big Brother Mall” is mightier than the Media. Or, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, “The mall is the massage.” Americans are so busy working to consume and working at consuming that they have been blinded to realities of despotism in the White House or the workings of the war machine in the state management system (see below).
Hegemony for the Kuba Divine King was about mind control, about only projecting some information in doctrinal form to keep his followers following. The Divine King had his High Priests and a whole cadre of functionaries in the Temple Complex that supported mind control. Today, the President of the United States has a press secretary and a whole cadre of functionaries in the Democracy Façade that support mind control. There are oligarchs in all facets of our society, men and women who greatly benefit in terms of prestige, power and property from the Democracy Façade. They are in government and commerce, the two frequently interacting with one another, and in pursuing their self interests they prevent democracy from working properly, doing so under cover of the widespread belief that this could not happen in a democracy. The "oligarchy" is deeply imbedded in governmental structure, corporations, political groups and the media. All participate in the business of obfuscation, of camouflaging what is really going on in official circles.
As early as 1945, a few years before Eisenhower made his warning to America, the sociologist C. Wright Mills called these oligarchs “the power élite.” Neither Professor Mills nor President Eisenhower was a conspiracy theorist and neither am I. We all, however, have come to understand that through networking powerful go-getters communicate with one another to create an informal power structure that exists alongside of the formal structures of each sub-world of business, government, political parties, PACs, lobbyists and the media. Through common activities – playing golf, belonging to the same élite clubs, intermarriage, being at the same “inside-the-beltway” cocktail parties – such peers of the realm share information and constitute the diffuse power behind domination. In most instances they do not intend to dominate, but as aggrandizers, they are in pursuit of prestige, power and property. Mind control – the limiting of information – is simply the byproduct of that quest.
No doubt the same was true of the courtiers of France’s Louis XIV or the priests and kingmakers of ancient Egypt. The game has changed little.
We have looked at a small part of the evolution of sociocultural formations – the fabrication of domination. The evolutionary period has been short, some twelve thousand years, which by Paleolithic terms is very short. We have looked at the evolution of sociocultural formations from early storing societies to the modern day. In essence I am saying that the fabrication of illusion began then and continues today.
Why illusion? Because aggrandizers benefit from it. It began at that moment when the Paleolithic was ending and the Neolithic was beginning because for the first time in human existence there was something for go-getters to go get: a storable, stealable surplus. It is no accident of history that war and slavery began at that point and continue today. Furthermore, a surplus to fight over generated other goals for aggressive men: prestige and political power. They were motivators then and remain so today for the office-holders and agents in politics, business, media organizations and other domains that provide opportunists access to prestige, power and property (e.g., organizations promoting evangelism, the movie business and other forms of illusion manufacture).
All are today concerned with spinning illusion, in one form or another. They, like their Neolithic counterparts, are intent on presenting their version of the “truth.” Let's ask these questions about illusion:

 Did illusion exist in the Paleolithic?

 If so, who were the scriptwriters?

 If there were Paleolithic scriptwriters, how far from truth (reality) did they stray in their spinning of versions of the truth?

 Did this distance between truth and illusion increase or decrease in the Neolithic? (We have seen that it increased)

 Since it increased, has it continued to snowball up to the modern day?

 If it has snowballed, what can we do about it?

Another way of thinking about this is that one’s control over one’s own life was far greater in the Paleolithic than it is now. Put another way, we are very greatly distanced from the forces that affect our lives. Did you get invited to Davos for the last meeting of the World Economic Forum? Were you involved in the secret meetings between Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz when they fabricated reasons to go to war in Iraq? Do you sit on the board of a giant corporation? Have you been involved in the inner workings of the WTO? For the vast majority of us, the answer to all of these questions in “no.”
Let's ask another question: Did they have a hidden agenda that you (1) don’t know anything about; and (2) can't do anything about? Now the answer becomes a bit fuzzier. Certainly the answer to number (1) is yes. The world is full of pockets of restricted information flows. It’s number (2) that becomes problematic.
I will deal with that question later, but let's continue with the comparison between Paleolithic man and a person in the modern world. In the Paleolithic the “blanket of illusion” was quite thin. Nature was very immediate and understandable and wants were minimal, as we are biological beings and, like other organisms, our basics are that we have to eat and avoid being eaten. Men and women of the Paleolithic had the fundamental tools to deal with these contingencies and each individual could do so without interference from illusions generated by others.
In those areas that individuals could not easily control pragmatically, however, is where illusion-generating began. No one in the Paleolithic solved the problem of sickness and death, so we see the emergence of shamans who claimed to have remedies for sickness, claims of an ability to cure. Handling death took a little longer, perhaps, but eventually we got lots of spindoctors there too. Paleoanthropologists have uncovered evidence of religious ideas early in human development. Ancient religious practices and beliefs of prehistoric peoples are inferred from archaeological findings. The oldest burials that attest to a belief in life after death date from 52,000–32,000 BP. Bodies were buried with grave goods e.g., stone tools and parts of animals, suggesting an attempt to placate the dead or equip them for a journey to the next world. Some corpses were adorned with red ochre. The first evidence of animal sacrifice comes from the Middle Paleolithic Period, which may have been offerings to the dead, to a higher power or to the fertility of the animal species.
Furthermore, seven thousand year old red ochre rock paintings from Finland, for example, show images of elk, men, boats, handprints and geometric designs. Archaeologists associate these with shamanism, especially in that some images portray experiences of metamorphosis, of falling into a trance and of summoning zoomorphic spirit helpers.
Paleolithic shamans were the first scriptwriters, the first persons to spin an explanation of sickness and death. In the face of these dangers, early shamans attempted to fabricate means of dealing with them and/or explaining them. Illusionary concepts and practices emerged. We see this in the study of contemporary forgers, e.g., the Zhun/twasi (!Kung) of Southern Africa. From them we have some indication of what prehistoric shamanism must have been like. They believe in a god named Prishiboro, whose wife was an elephant. His elder brother tricked him into killing her and, later, into eating her flesh. Her herd tried to kill Prishiboro in revenge, but his brother defeated them.
The Zhun/twasi also have many taboos concerning the dead as they believe that the ghosts of the dead can cause them injury or death. It is against the rules to say a name of the dead person once an annual ceremony to release the spirits of the dead has been performed for him or her.
Furthermore, the Zhun/twasi practice shamanism in order to communicate with the spirit world and to cure what they call star sickness. Shamans go into a trance state and run through fire to ward off evil spirits, who are thought to cause illness by shooting invisible arrows at a person. They also perform the laying on of hands and dances in a trance state to cure sickness. The shaman experiences n/um in a trance state, the pure energy that runs the cosmos. It is thought that such ritual practices activate n/um and can lead to a cure.
If we assume that there are no evil spirits shooting arrows at the sick in Zhun/twasi society, then we have to assume that their ideas and practices trying to deal with this are illusions.
Why would Paleolithic people have come up with such misapprehensions? What would a shaman get from performing trances and laying on of hands? It wasn’t property and, if the Zhun/twasi are any indication, shamans would not have gained power over people, except to help them. That leaves us with prestige, which is a powerful motivator for aggrandizers.
So humans can chase explanations for the inexplicable and achievers often arise to aid in the search for answers. Today clergy and quacks can acquire power over others and property in this process, as well as prestige, but in the Paleolithic only prestige motivated the men and women who sought to solve life’s mysteries. Once power and property could be accessed in this manner, the race to fabricate illusionary sociocultural formations was on.
The Paleolithic shaman didn’t lead band members very far from reality. The prehistoric illusionary blanket was quite thin by comparison to some of the elaborate fabrications that exist in our modern world. We live in a world where spindoctoring has become a way of life e.g., the advertising executive on Madison Avenue; the press secretary at the White House; the corporate moguls at Disney; we could go on, but the point is that much of modern culture is illusionary and some people benefit from the manufacture of illusion. Conversely, some people are hurt by it.
Freud discovered that we can be enslaved by illusion. His research demonstrated that we often misperceive the events of adult life, interpreting them in terms of childhood fears and desires. Moreover, even those with mild neuroses torture themselves for nonexistent sins and see enemies and dangers where they don't exist. Freud indicated that it was the ability to see truth that can free a person from illusion.
A minor neurotic idea might be that one can repeat an act that had bad consequences in the past and achieve good ones. People try that one over and over. But such a delusion only creates havoc in a small personal world. In the fabrication of domination, we are dealing with large-scale selfism wherein ambitious men have historically created false impressions that have led to social inequality, injustice and widespread mayhem.
Governmental neurosis might be seen as the oft-repeated process of making war to make peace. George Orwell, in his dystopian novel 1984, lampoons an illusionary world:
The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size (Orwell 1949:15)

Unfortunately, there is another modern day instance where governmental office is acting as a shield for deviant behavior and it is gravely affecting governance for the people. This is the fact that many Congressmen are pursing office as a temporary stepping-stone to consultancies in the military industrial complex, employment that brings them fabulous incomes and high-profile jobs within the Beltway. In Washington DC it is known as the revolving door syndrome. It is long been known that retired military officers could find lucrative jobs in industry and now Congressmen are beginning to see the dollar signs.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with either military men or Congressmen going into business upon leaving the government. The problem is that, in the case of those in Congress especially, it is possible to become involved in shady deals while still in office and use one’s congressional contacts after taking a job in industry, both to the detriment of the public good. In other words, post-congressional career goals of members of Congress threaten to undermine the function of the office i.e., serving the public to maintain and improve the public good. The problem is twofold: (1) lawmakers planning to become lobbyists can create laws to benefit their future employers; and, (2) ex-legislators can capitalize on their relationship with former lawmakers, “thus providing the groups that they lobby for added advantage” (Santos 2006:134).
The political structure of Congress has always been attractive to the ambitious and the pursuit of power and prestige there has led to some spectacular careers of honorable public service. It has also led to the downfall of many who have fiddled the rules or broken them to pursue the other motivator in our triad of inducements – property. They committed outright crimes, were caught and punished.
But now there is a more subtle form of deviance in Congress, going on under the camouflage of office. Adolfo Santos says, “one of the most understudied forms of political ambition – discrete ambition – is one of the most damaging to the representative process and the legitimacy of political institutions” (Santos 2006:2). He indicates that the legitimacy of the Congress is at stake because this phenomenon is growing. The rules of government are failing to constrain the raw ambition of many of the less-moral members of our legislature in Washington DC. The representative process is being undermined as legislators act in discrete ways while in office to help their future employers. This is compromising the public good.
In this fast-moving world of illusion and spin coming out of Washington DC it is difficult for the average citizen to understand what is going on. Santos says, “As the public becomes less able to comprehend complex public policy, it becomes easier for representatives to take advantage of this ignorance and sponsor legislation that they may not be held accountable for” (Santos 2006:15). This governmental slight-of-hand is further exacerbated by the fact that much policy is being handled by a few Congressmen in committee, not deliberated in public on the floor.
Members of Congress are granted wide powers of discretion, which allows for an abuse of office and shenanigans behind closed doors, especially when the issues are not being debated in public (Parker 1992). According to the intent of the founding fathers, democracy was supposed to be a system wherein the issues were debated in public and the American people could watch and monitor the process. This is what is supposed to distinguish our governance from what we have seen in our historical analysis with the discrete, shadowy actions of chiefs, kings and emperors. Edmund Burke felt that we could rely on the moral goodness of aristocrats in government to do the will of the people. Tell that to the clansmen in the Highlands of Scotland who trusted their lairds to do right by them and were eventually thrown off their land as the lairds cum landlords demanded more and more income from the land, eventually preferring sheep to the people over which they held guardianship. On the other hand, James Madison felt that the aristocracy needed structure and rules to prevent any deceitful behavior on the part of legislators. He felt that congressional rules should function to temper the ambitions of officer-seekers. Neither has worked, as today the desire for wealth is unbridled in Washington DC.
The Kings of Kubaland hid behind a façade of divinity to pursue great wealth and power at the expense of their constituents, siphoning off enough to ensure the support of a leisure class. Ten percent of the population lived splendidly, while the rest, in various forms of servitude, labored on their behalf. The Castle-Lords and the counts of Barcelona fabricated “legal” structures that enabled them to enserf the peasantry and went on to construct a Pariah State that acted not unlike pirates all throughout Iberia, the Mediterranean and North Africa, extracting tribute, killing people and stealing land.
I am assuming that the reader can see that today: The Kings of government in Washington DC hide behind a façade of democracy to pursue ambitions not dissimilar from those of ancient politicos. They are formulating a society where the rich are getting very rich very fast; while the general population lacks a proper national security infrastructure, adequate health care and forty-eight million of our citizens live in poverty, a figure twice that of Canada and the UK and three times as high as most European countries (Hicks 2005). While Scandinavian countries have a child poverty rate of 2-3%, the wealthy USA has a rate of 21.7%. “Both the U.S. child mortality rate (8.6 per 1,000 births) and infant mortality rate (6.9 per 1,000 births) was higher than those for Europe, Canada, and Israel” (Pal 2005). This is a society where the top one percent earns twenty-one percent of the income (NPR October 13, 2007).
The camouflage of office works for a few, but not for all, as was the case in ancient Africa, Catalonia, the Scottish Highlands and elsewhere. In those distant lands of the ancien régime, élites were rent-seekers. Has this changed? Note the quote from Adolfo Santos:

Congress has been structured to be more attractive to individuals seeking to profit financially from legislative service. [There are] two ways in which the changes have made the nature of Congress more appealing to “rent-seeking” legislators. First, the decentralized nature of Congress enhances the ability of individual legislators to influence the content of regulation and laws. Second, the existing institutional controls on the avarice and discretion of legislators are exceedingly weak. These characteristics make rent seeking an attractive feature of congressional service [my insert, his italics; Santos 2006:75].

Ethics reform acts have done little to stop such avarice on the part of the fortunate few at the top. Aggrandizers can always find ways around rules. What they don’t like is the light of day. Transparency is the only hope. We must have a clear view of what office-holders are doing and the means to correct wrongdoing and ill-advised policies.

Government Camouflage & the Military Industrial Complex

We have seen that office-holders throughout history have disguised their actions behind official camouflage. They have increasingly spent lavishly on things that did not benefit society. This has reached astronomical proportions in modern day America. Furthermore, much of the expenditure is not only on what does not help America, but it is hurting America, others and the environment. President Eisenhower warned us first. Here is part of his prophetic speech:
My fellow Americans:
Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor…
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad…
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense…
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs …Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
…Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose… (Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 (Public Papers of the Presidents, 1960, 1035-1040); see: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
I have included cogent parts of President Eisenhower’s speech because I think it is important for every American to read it. This prescient warning was issued almost a half century ago and the problem of what he called the military industrial complex has grown enormously and we have gone into more than one disastrous war due to its influence. In his farewell speech he expresses the hope that Americans will not allow the military industrial complex to grow and that government officials will improve upon governing over and above what he was able to accomplish in office. Let's see what has happened since.
As I am writing this chapter, President Bush submitted his war budget for 2007 and 2008 to Congress. “He is asking for an additional $93 billion in funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the period that ends on September 30 of this year, as well as another $142 billion for the coming fiscal year which runs from October 1, 2007 through September 30, 2008” (Leys 2007).
"Procurement" covers the cost of buying new equipment, ammunitions, weapons systems, etc., which are supplied by what President Eisenhower called the military industrial complex. The amount budgeted to buy new items grew from FY 2004 to FY 2006, but is now slated to take a gigantic leap in FY 2007:

FY 2004 — $5.5 billion

FY 2005 — $18.8 billion

FY 2006 — $23 billion

FY 2007 — $44.6 billion
Furthermore, because procurement money is not spent in the year for which it is appropriated and carried over, the whole process becomes fuzzy. What actually goes on at the GAO is difficult to know. In the “rolling over” process lies room for “contrivances.” Moreover, a great deal of money is being spent in a cozy relationship between government and big business.
And war spending is on the rise, up “a stunning 94% increase from FY 2006 to FY 2007… ." We might ask: “Do we have a 94% increase in spending on education; cleaning up the environment; eradicating poverty or health care; updating our decaying infrastructure? The answer is no, war spending sucks away dollars that could be spent helping society, not killing people and our soldiers in faraway lands.
What is more, there is chicanery going on in Congress and the Department of Defense. With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military is “over strength,” so the enormously high baseline DOD budget is being upped through supplemental spending bills. In addition, the DOD’s documents do not clearly indicate “much in the way of concrete and detailed information on how these funds will be expended. Nor does it give any indication of why the costs are growing so exponentially yet again” (Leys 2007). This is true military-industrial-congressional camouflage.
The funding process for Operations and Maintenance seems to be a sinkhole. Recent reports by the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office are all critical of the accounting process. They conclude that it is impossible to determine how the money is being spent. This is especially true because in the big sinkhole, there are little black holes e.g., for the FY 2005 nearly 26% of spending went to “other supplies and equipment” and “other services and miscellaneous contracts.” Likewise, of the $98 billion for military operations in Iraq and the war on terrorism nearly 25% ($23 billion) was allocated for purposes described as “other.” We have little idea how those “other” funds get spent.
And what if we knew exactly where every cent went of the over $300 billion we spend every year on war? That’s not as important as the issues raised by President Eisenhower. His main point was that the military industrial complex would corrode our democracy and war is what is fueling the deterioration of our democratic way of life. I doubt that George W. Bush has ever read Eisenhower’s words, but when he decided that 9/11 gave him the right to govern by Presidential decree rather than respect the balance of power in our Constitution, he was fulfilling the prophecy in President Eisenhower’s words.
In deciding that 9/11 allowed despotism in the White House he created what he claimed that he wanted to destroy. He forgot that “those who fight for liberating truth cannot become enmeshed in the cycle of untruth and violence that they are trying to break” (http://www.transparencynow.com/news/preface.htm).
And untruth about feeding the war machine has real life consequences for those we send to fight government-created wars. When the Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee, Senator Ted Stevens (R. Alaska) pushed for more hi-tech military equipment at the beginning of the Iraq conflict, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) raised a warning, telling Stevens that his appropriations would “undermine DoD’s ability to adequately fund training, operations, maintenance, supplies and other essentials.” The letter went on: these unnecessary expenditures “would seriously damage the readiness of our armed forces and undermine their ability to execute current operations, including the war on terrorism” (St. Clair 2005:8-9).
It is now common knowledge that that is exactly what happened. Our sons and daughters went into Iraq without proper equipment and in insufficient numbers to accomplish the task of securing the peace and rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure destroyed by our hi-tech weaponry. On a personal note, my son fought in Iraq out of a Humvee that lacked armor plating to stop high-powered fire or roadside bombs. He indicated to me that the soldiers he fought with in Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq were repeatedly short of the basic equipment needed to fight a war.
This is only part of the picture. Expenditures on unneeded war technology takes funds away from the real war on terrorism, which is about securing our homeland against bombings, germ warfare and natural disasters. In short, because of secret deals in Washington DC between defense contractors, Congressmen and staff of the state management system our tax dollars are being spent on that which makes us less safe.
Our government’s ill-advised foreign wars have created a world that is more hostile to us and less supportive of what we really need to do to secure our homeland. We spend billions of dollars a year to create “blowback” (Johnson 2000). That money could be much better spent on shoring up America’s decaying infrastructure and securing our borders against terrorists (Flynn 2007).
The Steven’s letter and thousands of documents like it:

is the congressional equivalent of the Pentagon Papers for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In order to shell out billions for Star Wars and the F-22 fighter, Congress took money from accounts that would have improved the terrible logistical planning in Iraq and bought essential items for the protection of US combat troops, such as body armor
and armored Humvees (St. Clair 2005:9).

Secret deals in our nation’s capital are sucking up our wealth and undermining America’s future. Military spending is up, but protection has gone down.
That’s because much of the real defense spending on the Hill happens after hours and is planted in the bewildering copse of congressional earmarks, obscure line items conference committee ad-ons and last minute riders that most members of congress don’t even know how to interpret. And these convert ad-ons have spiked since 9/11, rising from $4 billion a year in 2001 to $12 billion a year in 2005 (St. Clair 2005:20).

The lack of transparency in our government’s procurement practices is undermining democracy and creating the slippery slope of our decline as a secure nation. The state management system’s backrooms are the place to be for America’s weapons manufacturers because, unlike most agencies, the Pentagon is not limited by its budget. If more military expenditure is needed, money is pulled from elsewhere to keep the war machine oiled and running. Americans need to start asking: where is that money coming from? What are we not doing with it because of war?
Institutional Growth & War

Writing the script of power is usually a group effort. In cases like that of little chiefs, they attract individuals who also want prestige, power and property e.g., the shamans of the Yokut-Mono we have read about. The Kuba King had his titleholders of the élite lineages in the Kuba kingdom. The lairds of the Highlands were surrounded by their tacksmen and when they were transformed into landlords, they had their estate managers, some of whom were tacksmen who themselves had found new avenues to prestige, power and property. The Count of Barcelona formed his poleconomic base in the capital, not alone, but with the help of Paladin Lords who became his inner court, clergy and bailiffs, all of whom benefited from the exercise of power; and all of whom contributed to adding rules and roles in the manipulation of the structure.
Thus, several aggrandizers may contribute to the formation of poleconomic institutions. This is especially true as the structure becomes more complex e.g., in the case of regional chiefdoms or kingdoms where the central figure and his courtiers must try to control opportunists at the periphery – the provincial governors, who may try to replicate the core institutions in their distant territories (Mann 1986). Institution building involves internal tension and the management of conflict if the institution is to survive and thrive.
President Eisenhower warned Americans of a rising threat to their sovereignty when he left office in 1961. He called it the military-industrial complex. I am sure he could not have imagined how large and powerful it was to grow, a complex set of practices within the Washington establishment, some formal, others informal. As time passed, this complex has jelled into what Seymour Melman called state-management (Melman 1971). This transformation occurred during the Kennedy Presidency.
The state-management institutional complex was the result of actions taken to augment military power in the Cold War Era and add economic efficiency by placing control of spending for war materials firmly in the hands of civilians in government (Melman 1972:261). Robert McNamara was the principal driver, under the aegis of the President. In place of an agglomeration of practices, relationships and rules (the military-industrial complex) McNamara formed a defined administrative control center that began to regulate tens of thousands of subordinate managers. In fiscal terms, it has become the “most powerful decision-making unit of the United States government.” Melman notes, “Thereby, the federal government does not ‘serve’ business or ‘regulate’ business. For the new management is the largest of them all. Government is business. That is state capitalism” (Melman 1972:262).
Once initiated, the system became a para-state within a state with a budget that exceeded many nation-states in the world. It was the beginning of a new imperialism. It is what has brought us to a point where the United States is spending ten million dollars an hour in Iraq.
Melman says that in the formation of state-management “a lust for power has been at work” but that “it is not explicable in terms of an individual’s power drive” (Melman 1972:263). This is as we have seen in our case studies in this book: once instituted, poleconomies are driven by the combined desire for prestige, power and property by office-holders and their factions within the poleconomic framework. All institutions in the poleconomy become platforms to launch careers of individual aggrandizers. In the state-management system in Washington DC the possibilities for capturing prestige, power and property are great as the military expenditures are mind-bogglingly huge. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that when the US government sends $4 billion dollars in cash on pallets weighing 363 tons to Iraq for reconstruction payouts, that the possibilities of graft are enormous (http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/06/iraq.cash.reut/index.html, February 7, 2007). The justification for such disbursements is war. Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, put it like this: “We are in a war against terrorists, to have a blame meeting isn't, in my opinion, constructive.” And so it goes.
Four billion dollars is pocket change in a war. The real opportunities, on a career basis, are in being in the loop of military-business-government relationships, both formal and informal. The possibilities for aggrandizement are towering (http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/06/iraq.cash.reut/index.html (February 7, 2007). It is very difficult to get exact figures on Department of Defense (DOD) spending, because of the lack of transparency, but OneWorld.net estimates it at $463 billion for 2006, not counting expenditures on the war in Iraq (http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/143510/1/8523), which are running approximately $24 million a day. Winslow T. Wheeler, Director of the Strauss Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information and the author of The Wastrels of Defense estimates that it could be as high as $63 billion more than the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations’ projection (http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/defense_budget_tutorial.htm).
It is not my intention to nail down an exact figure, which no one seems to be able to do anyway, given the nature of the beast. The point is that the state-management system in Washington DC is a black hole of expenditure and a haven for opportunists. It provides opportunities for getting prestige, power and property that dwarf what is going on at General Motors or any of the top Fortune 500 companies (Melman 1972:264).
Even in the 1970s, when Melman was writing Pentagon Capitalism, the newly-created central office of war expenditure, the DOD, was “beyond compare the largest industrial management in the United States, perhaps in the world” (Melman 1972:264). Melman went on:

Never before in the American experience has there been such a combination of economic and political decision-power in the same hands. The senior officers of the new state-management are also senior political officers of the government of the United States. Thus, one consequence of the establishment of the new state-management has been the installation, within American society, of an institutional feature of a totalitarian system (Melman 1972:264).

Melman notes that in the (now former) Soviet Union this was standard operating procedure and that, by contrast, in the United States this vast complex arose “unannounced and, in effect, [in a] covert fashion” (Melman 1972:265). Furthermore, the net effect of the creation of the state-management system is to increase military capability and the likelihood that America will go to war. He says:

This competence is a war-making capability. Hence, the very efficiency and success of the new industrial-management, unavoidably and regardless of intention, enhances the war-making capability of the government of the United States. As the war-making department accumulates diverse resources and planning capability, it is able to offer the President blue-print stage options for responding to all manner of problem situations – while other government agencies look (and are) unready, understaffed, and under-equipped. This increases the likelihood of recourse to “solutions” based upon military power (Melman 1972:265).

This is a bureaucracy and bureaucratic office-holders do everything in their power to expand their activities, the number of employees under their control, the size of capital investments flowing through their office and by gaining control over subsidiary managements. In short, they do everything they can to expand the power of the state-management system and, coincidently and perhaps unintentionally, the likelihood of war.
In the state-management system, the three élites that C. Wright Mills discussed: military, political and economic, come together. Robert L. Heilbroner agreed, saying that “a military-industrial-political interpenetration of interests” benefits all three, though business is the junior partner, the tail that is waged by political and military officers who make the expenditure decisions (1965:51).
Civilians dominate the process, though there is a revolving door in Washington DC where by those who retire from one, the military or government, are attractive to business for their knowledge of how to get contracts approved. The state-management system is a playing field for aggrandizers and lots of kids want into the playground.
War expenditure, based on secret deliberations by insiders and technical experts, has taken on a mystique of invulnerability (Melman 1971). In this case, secrecy actually works to the advantage of the aggrandizers involved in hiding information from Congress and the people. Melman says, “The idea is that only persons with advanced technical training and access to secret information have the capability really to understand what is going on in this sphere” (Melman 1972:275). Those involved have been given “sacred cow” status and high-level security clearances and appear beyond reproach. Thus, more than half the administrative budget of the United States is not open to scrutiny.
It must strike the reader that this is not unlike the myth-making machines we saw in history, e.g., the efforts of the Kuba King to make a strong link between kingship and the Deity. If a domain is thought to be “not of the normal world” the average person considers it to be the province of a select priesthood. The same thing is going on with the war-making machine in Washington.
Money going into war is not going into making America safe (it has the opposite effect, spawning even more terrorism) and it is not being put into homeland infrastructure to make America more resilient to attacks and natural disasters (Flynn 2007). War funding has become parasitic. Parasitic growth refers to an expansion of production of unnecessary products, those not part and parcel of what is needed to sustain life safely in the United States. Furthermore, the products of the effort are destroyed – exploded or used up – in non-productive ways. They do not produce anything lasting for the USA.
Partly because of bad leadership and partly because our fiscal resources are going into war, we remain unprepared for the next terrorist attack or a natural disaster like Katrina (Flynn 2007). Based on the mystique of untouchableness in Pentagon activities we have allowed our government to become negligent. With a crumbling infrastructure at home, our families are less safe today than yesterday. Monies being blown up (or misplaced) in Iraq and Afghanistan could be put to better use here at home.
Most Americans are in denial over this or, like the proverbial ostriches, have their heads in the muck of consumerism. They are too busy shopping to care. Or watching TV sitcoms or “reality” shows. We are not really preparing for future cataclysms, for the real threats we face within our own borders. For example, an attack by terrorists on a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas into any American harbor could kill thousands and leave millions more without power or heat. Such an attack, with simple rocket propelled grenade launchers (RPGs) could bring the economy of a region to its knees and endanger millions. An attack on an urban power plant using noxious chemicals would kill thousands (Flynn 2007).
Our growing exposure to terrorism and natural disasters is largely due to poor leadership and our own indifference. We have an inadequate and decaying infrastructure handed down from previous generations. Old dams, inadequate dikes, an outdated public health system leaves us vulnerable. For instance, the next San Francisco earthquake could destroy antiquated levees that would contaminate the freshwater supply that most of California relies on for survival. Don’t our leaders think the terrorists are studying such possibilities?
We have abdicated our responsibility for a country in which entertainment and consumerism take precedence and wherein the Congress and we have accepted the state-management system. Most reports from the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress declare that (1) military spending is a stimulus to the economy and (2) we can spend on war at current levels and still maintain peace at home. This is wishful “guns and butter” thinking. We have been sold a myth i.e., that all this spending is about defense, when aggressive foreign policy and wars abroad have bolstered the energies of terrorists and made recruitment for them much easier.
War spending is now governed by a self-perpetuating, self-expanding war machine in our nation’s capital. It is parasitic and therefore exploitative, feeding the careers and pocketbooks of those inside the bloated bureaucracy. In our Catalonian example, we talked of the count-kings’ imperialism in Iberia and the Mediterranean as external aggression; while turning on his own people to extract renders was deemed internal aggression. Furthermore, the Crown of Aragón did little to build a social and material infrastructure at home that would benefit its people. I submit that the same processes are at work in America today.
In short, we have what Clyde Prestowitz calls an “armed economy” (Prestowitz 2003:161). Not only do we spend enormous wealth making munitions to kill our “enemies,” but also the USA is heavily involved in exporting arms. This is not surprising, since we invest in about 70 percent of military R&D in the world.

The Commerce, State, and Defense departments all maintain large staffs to sell and facilitate the export of American weapons to the world. In 1999, the last year for which statistics are available, the world’s arms trade rose to nearly $52 billion…a little more than half of this was imports by developed countries, the rest to developing countries. U.S. exports, which accounted for 64 percent of these sales, are likely to approach 70 percent in the future based on sales agreements already signed (Prestowitz 2003:164).

State management has become self-perpetuating. Even with less demand for big ticket military weapons after the end of the Cold War, expenditure on war has been on the rise, even before 9/11 and the so-called “War on Terror.”
In other words, there has been a military coup d'êtat in Washington, but not one where the military storms the White House with soldiers. Rather, this coup has been a slow erosion of the checks and balances that were written into the constitution; a rise of an Imperial Presidency; and the growth of the state development system. All have contributed to the rising power or the military as the principle driver in the U.S. economy. At the height of the Cold War, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, “It is no secret that the billions of dollars demanded by the Pentagon for the armaments industry are necessary not for ‘national security’ but for keeping the economy from collapsing” (2003:272-273).
And someone no less that the chief author of the US Constitution, James Madison, warned us long ago:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. . . . [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and . . . degeneracy of manners and of morals. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare…. (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18562.htm).

Lies about the Militarization of Space

In the next two decades, new technologies will allow the field of space-based weapons of devastating effectiveness to be used to deliver energy and mass as force projection in tactical and strategic conflict. These advances will enable lasers with reasonable mass and cost to effect many kills. This can be done rapidly, continuously and with surgical precision, minimizing exposure of friendly forces. The technologies exist or can be developed in this time period.
— U.S. Air Force Advisory Board, 1996

The state management system has fed off of weaponization on land, sea and in the air (inner space i.e., in earth’s atmosphere). Now, in public, the USA has entered into treaties to make outer space a non-military zone, but this is a lie. We are quickly moving toward a day when outer space will be feeding the war machine, although it already does, as I will explain below. Outer space will feed war expenditure in two ways: (1) it will be a launch pad for attacks on earth with a variety of hi-tech weapons housed on rotating stations pointed at earth; and, (2) it could become a battleground itself, with a variety of ships and weapons fighting each other in space.
We are already moving toward these two goals under the guise of “defense.” In 1999, several manufacturers wrote a Long Range Plan for the U.S. Space Command. It was designed to fund “defensive” systems and a “seamlessly integrated force of theater land, sea, air and space capabilities through a worldwide global defense information network” (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: ix).
Of course, what is defined as “defensive” from our viewpoint is understandably seen as “offensive” by the Chinese, Russians and others. In building weapons of any kind for space we are generating another round of the arms race, which will force other countries and ours to spend money, which could be used for better things. The estimate is in the hundreds of billions.
On August 31, 2006 the lives of your grandchildren were made immeasurably poorer by the actions of the Bush Administration. The President authorized a new space policy for America, replacing our commitment to using only peaceful means in space. The new document focuses on the military use of outer space. It also claims that keeping U.S. superiority in war is paramount in importance and resists the idea that treaties or international laws can or should limit our premier position as the world’s superpower (www.ostp.gov/html/us%20National%20space%20policy.pdf).
Thus, the Imperial Presidency decided behind closed doors to push for the weaponization of space without the people’s knowledge or consent. This leaves us with a bleak future and more needless expenditure on weaponry:

As the Bush administration continues its retreat to an outdated and inappropriate Cold War mentality, and moves toward the weaponization of space as a unilateral venture, the entire use of space for peaceful purposes is threatened. War in heaven can only impoverish life on earth (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 39).

The dollar figures for weapons in space are staggering:
Anti-ICBM defense – $150 billion (and it doesn’t work) (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 41).

By the end of the administration of Bush I, around $100 billion had been spent on anti-missile research (the largest weapons-research project in history with no positive results) (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 51).

Missile Defense at $10.4 billion was the Bush Administration’s largest single program expenditure in fiscal year 2007 (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 57).

Missile Defense is expected to balloon to a total expenditure of $247 billion between 2006-2024 (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 57).

Testing of space weapons has been going on while Americans have been busy buying things, working to buy more things and entertaining themselves. For instance, The Livermore Laboratory tried to develop an X-ray Laser to shoot down incoming missiles. When it proved a failure, the program was dropped in 1984, “although the public was not informed for a number of years” (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 49). These R&D programs spend billions and go on without our knowledge or okay of Congress or the public.
What is more, aspects of this failed X-ray Laser are back on the drawing boards as anti-satellite weapons. This is being driven by representatives of the arms industry, the Pentagon, development labs and conservative think tanks, which form a formidable lobbying machine. Weapons manufacturers are funding the effort to provide congressmen with campaign funds and perks to win over their support. It is estimated that they contributed over $4 million to thirty key members of congress in 2006 (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 49-50). They spend millions more in maintaining their Washington lobbying machine dishing our perks to important decision-makers.
It’s working. President George W. Bush ignored the failures of previous test, calling for early deployment of a national defense system, bringing back many of the Reagan Era proponents of the effort – Donald Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy and members of the Heritage Foundation and weapons manufacturers. These Neocons and their business buddies are spending billions on unneeded weaponry while America’s borders remain unprotected against the more looming threat of terrorism and our puny bulwarks against natural disasters are insufficient and crumbling.
Just as the Neocons lied about the need for war in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld fiddled the 1998 report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat. It stated that soon Iraq, North Korea and Iran would have the capability to strike the USA with atomic missiles:

Close analysis of the Rumsfeld report also reveals that Rumsfeld essentially changed the verbs of earlier less threatening CIA estimates from “mights” and “coulds” to “wills,” a shift to a series of worst-case assumptions, despite the lack of evidence of any significant changes in other countries’ real missile capability. Nevertheless, the report cited an imminent threat as the rationale for the United States to begin immediate construction of a ballistic missile defense (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 53).

Under the influence of the Neocons in his administration, President Bush in 2001 pulled America out of the ABM treaty, which had worked to prevent nuclear war for over thirty years. Just as he invoked terrorism as his reason for invading Iraq, he claimed the ABM treaty tied our hands in the effort to fight terrorism, even though a proliferation of weapons actually increases the chances of atomic weapons falling into the wrong hands (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 54). This is another step in the direction of an Imperial Presidency. One man, without congress, without the consent of the people, under the influence of right-wing ideologues, has taken away an international treaty designed to keep us as safe as possible in an unsafe world. In so doing, these conservative idealists have made the world significantly less safe.
As I write this, President Bush’s has moved against Iraq in his tripartite Axis of Evil, Iraq, North Korea and Iran. He his rattling our sabers against Iran and his refusal to negotiate early on forced North Korea to accelerate their nuclear program to get us to the negotiating table. Failing to negotiate with North Korea initially actually increased their weapons’ capacity and has made the world less safe. The Neocon mentality of aggression first has weakened America’s standing in the world and backfired in a burst of Blowback. The irony is that the Neocons bullied Pyongyang at the very time when the North Korean regime was moderating its policies, improving relations with Japan and South Korea and perhaps looking for a negotiated settlement rather than confrontation (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 59).
In our historical analysis of cases from the little chiefs of the Yokut-Mono society in early California to the Divine Kings of Africa we have seen leaders lie to their constituents. The process continues today in Washington DC and some experts feel that the Bush Administration has a “history of deceit in claiming the need for long-range missile defense and of deploying a system that doesn’t work… .” (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 64).
All this is going on with regard to weapons launched here on earth to earth targets, but the government is on its way to weaponize outer space, basing weapons there that can strike enemies in space and on earth:

In August 2004, the U.S. Air Force moved even further toward space weaponization with the release of its Counterspace Operations doctrine. The document explicitly mentions military operations conceived to “deceive, disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy adversary space capabilities.” The belligerent tone of these recent pronouncements is as disturbing as their content. They employ rhetoric of complete dominance and hegemony, not multilateral cooperation or diplomacy (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 69).

Tim Weiner of the New York Times reported that, “With little public debate, the Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars developing space weapons and preparing plans to deploy them” (2005). The ground-based missile defense system has proved a failure, yet our government is moving it into space i.e., spending your taxes on a system that has already proved a fiasco and a money-pit.
But it would seem that the administration does not believe that the ground-based missile defense system has failed but sees the move into space as part of a multi-layered missile defense system based on weapons on land, at sea and both in the atmosphere and outer space. This concept is one that surely makes the arms producers happy as more systems means more production and profits for them and for those in the state management system it means more work and kickbacks. This is also a “honey hole” in that systems can be produced and tested ad infinitum because there are none that have worked so far. The competitors are competing with no baseline of credulity. They are operating in a vacuum where the only criterion of success is getting the government contract to try to produce something that might work and the longer that process continues, the more profit flows from your pocket to theirs. This is a costly way forward:

As the United States moves toward space-based anti-missile systems, it is proceeding toward a major investment in an unproven form of defense, and one which, for many cogent reasons, should not be undertaken at all. The cost of an effective space-based system that could protect the country against an attack by a relatively small number of missiles has been established as anywhere from $220 billion to $1 trillion dollars. Spending this exorbitant amount of money on an unnecessary and unproven system, at a time when the United States is experiencing $400 billion annual deficits, huge trade imbalances, and is radically cutting benefits to students, the elderly, and the poor, brings into question both our values and our judgment (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 75).

Our government is spurring an arms race that will not only impoverish our nation but will force other nations with even less resources to divert money from social programs to keep up with the United States. It could even cut into military budgets so much so that our traditional military will suffer, which seems to be the case already as many soldiers in Iraq have expressed the fact that they lack the equipment needed to fight the fight.
The Bush Administration is not only acting irrationally and immorally with regard to our people, but is debasing the lives of children and the unborn in other countries for decades to come. All this is being done is a policy vacuum in Washington DC and without input from the people. The enormously dangerous implications of a world with space weapons is in itself enough to make a rational person make sure of their utility, but this is not what drives the state management system. It is driven by greed, arrogance and profit. These are the same traits that spurred opportunists from the Yokut-Mono little chiefs, the greedy landlords of the Highlands of Scotland, the Count-Kings of the Crown of Aragón and many other office-holders we have encountered in this book, those who were supposed to help their people but impoverished them instead.

It’s about Illusion

In sociopolitical life, truth is constantly being re-shaped by power. The appearance of modernity distances us from the truth of our domination. You can control your own life less than your father or mother and they less than their father and mother, and so on back to the first appearance of the storable, stealable surplus. All along the historical path aggrandizers have been creating illusions, not very much different from the fanciful Wizard of Oz that Dorothy discovered pulling the chains and pushing the levers behind a screen. Today, “the picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality” (Chomsky 2002: 37).
To paraphrase the Democratic Party strategist James Carville, “It’s about illusion, stupid!” Since you are reading this book, you are obviously not stupid and you are not watching the boob tube, nor are you searching the mall shops for that one item that is going to make you happy (I have done all of these at one point or another in my life). But it’s still about illusion. There are still powerful forces at work in your life and mine that want you to accept the status quo. Certainly, in my Catalan example, the peasants have a very complex consciousness about their exploitation by élites. Their immediate need to maintain good relations with local Lords and their agents superceded their view of their overall exploitation and any possibility of action by them to obtain future relief. It is natural to smile at a man with a sword in his hand.
Dostoevsky wrote of the irrationality of humankind:

When in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. So I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage… [in routine]. Advantage! What is advantage? [my insert] (Dostoevskii 1960: 196-197).

Dostoevsky was talking about deviants, beatniks, poets, progressives, artists, whomever decides not to accept illusion. But his words can be attached to those mesmerized in front of a sports channel or wandering aimlessly through the countless stores and shops that have sprung up in America in the last half-century. They are caught in the routine of consumerism; they are infected with the disease of Affluenza.
When I used to do workshops on cross-cultural business for Fortune 500 companies, I used to tell attendees that, using one example from outside the United States, Brazilians work to live, while Americans live to work. This is poetically summed up in the Jackson Browne song:
I’m going to rent myself a house
In the shade of the freeway
I’m going to pack my lunch in the morning
And go to work each day
And when the evening rolls around
I’ll go home and lay my body down
And when the morning light comes streaming in
I’ll get up and do it again
Amen
Say it again
Amen

I want to know what became of the changes we waited for love to bring

Were they only the fitful dreams?
Of some greater awakening
I’ve been aware of the time going by

They say in the end it’s the wink of an eye

And when the morning comes streaming in

You’ll get up and do it again
Amen

Caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender, where the sirens sing and the church bells ring

And the junk man pounds his fender

Where the veterans dream of the fight

Fast asleep at the traffic light
And children solemnly wait
For the ice cream vender

Out into the cool of the evening
Strolls the pretender

He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there

Ah the laughter of the lovers
As they run through the night
Leaving nothing for the others
But to choose off and fight
And tear at the world with all their might

While the ships bearing their dreams sail out of sight

I’m going to get myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means?

And we’ll fill in the missing colors
In each other’s paint-by-the-number dreams

And then we’ll put our dark glasses on and we’ll make love until our strength is gone

And when the morning comes streaming in we’ll get up and do it again

Get it up again

I’m going to be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim to the heart and soul of the spender

And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Thought true love could have been a contender

Are you there?
Say a prayer for the pretender
Who started out so strong
Only to surrender (Browne 1976).

It is naïve to believe that the flow of information from the centers of media production to the public does not carry a message that instills complacency in people. This effect does not require malicious intent by media controllers, merely their desire to do a good job and make a profit along the way. But it is equally naïve to believe that there is not some intention involved. The creators behind the “dream-producing machine” do want to create needs, desires and motivations in the purchasing public. This is often simply that editors and producers want to sell newspapers or up their ratings to attract advertisement money, but in some cases there seems to be an overt political agenda e.g., in the case of Fox News, which hides behind the misleading slogan “We report. You decide.” It should read: “We decide what to report and how to slant it.”
It’s not that slanting the news is not good business. The American public is not reading the stories put out by independent media e.g., Democracy Now. Here are the stories Fox News says were most read on their website on February 17, 2007:

 Woman, 84, pleads to attempted sex abuse (having sex with an 11-year old).

 Missing Maine auctioneer turns up in Pennsylvania 5 years later. Didn’t want to be found.

 Arizona woman arrested after allegedly stabbing man during sex to drink his blood.

 Ralph Nader says he might run in 2008 if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination.

 Internet buzzing over mystery weapon found in Iraq (which was about an odd-shaped gun found in a weapons cache).

 Ricky Martin sticks up middle finger while singing about Bush.

 Reports: Britney Spears enters rehab, checks out.

 Baghdad calm amid beginning of new security sweep.

 Atlanta couple convicted of murdering son; church investigated for corporal punishment ties.

 Bomb explodes in Iran near site of previous deadly blast.

 Anna Nicole Smith’s will said estate to go to Howard K. Stern to hold in trust.

 Hillary’s malleable war opinion.

 Duane “Dog” Chapman closer to being extradited to face charges in Mexico.

 Explosion rocks Texas oil refinery, injuring 19.

 Colorado middle school teacher convicted of having students undress for sexual poses.

 Dog groomer accused of cutting dog’s ear off and gluing it back on.

Titillating entertainment seems to permeate the list. When not at the shopping mall, America does read (as opposed to malicious reports to the contrary), they just don’t read the right things, those that will help them make important changes to improve the lives of their grandchildren.
Media bosses compete for sales and ratings in a world where sensationalism sells. A side effect of competition by media executives to have their medium read, viewed or heard, is that a certain normalcy is projected, one that produces a complacency in human beings. The world will go on, despite what I think or do, and the New York Times, CNN, NPR and Newsweek will be there to report it all. The familiarity of CNN’s screen, with its well-known announcer and tickertape running underneath is a staple in American homes. Its familiarity comfortingly says: “See – Americans are well-informed.” In fact, Americans want and get a bland, white bread, version of the news. Even listening to NPR is like taking a bath with your clothes on. They play on the edges of serious analysis and critique but always stop short. Nevertheless, thank God for NPR, which presents more of the facts than most allowing a discerning listener to make up her or his mind and search deeper.
The media have a subliminal message: Don’t rock the “America the beautiful” boat. Barbara Ehrenreich put it like this: “the media are more than just an ‘environment’ or a kind of neutral space where ideas, images, and opinions compete for our attention” (2000: 10). Silence can be a message. I have traveled the world in my life and crossed the Atlantic dozens of times, living many years abroad. Every time I came back to the United States I was always appalled at the lack of world news and the superficiality of our news broadcasts. Living abroad I would get in depth and critical news analysis about many parts of the world. The American news was mainly presenting bland, non-threatening stories about American life. This approach is summed up in CNN’s Headline News approach and its one-minute segment “New of the World in a Minute.” Imagine such shallow coverage in the age of globalization where that which affects your grandchildren is being played out right now on a global stage, not in your backyard, but rather in how your backyard is interwoven with many backyards around the world.
In this book I have tried to show that scriptwriting began with the Jural Revolution and is with us today. The priests of early kings spun webs of deception to create a compliant populace. Today the news media provide this function. The kingly spindoctors were trying to distance the public from the truth, any information that would be harmful to the deal they had going with the king. Today the news media provide this function. Behind the pretty faces and gleaming teeth on CNN or Fox News are decision-makers who filter the news not unlike those robbed priests of old. In ancient Egypt, for instance, spinning illusions had a great poleconomic payoff. It still does today. Illusions still allow the power élite to pursue prestige, power and property at the expense of society
Self-delusion is the worst form of delusion. We Americans have been socialized to believe that we are something special in the world. It’s a nice story. I believed it when I was twelve. Now I am more enamored with the words of great men, like William Appleman Williams, a major figure in American historiography who wrote:

Empire is as American as apple pie.
Or as American as the ever westward moving frontier.
Or as American as helping other people, who believe the way Americans do…
Or as American as saving the world from the devil.
Or as man as the veils that Americans have woven to obscure the harsh reality of their imperial record. One of those is the myth of the original happy valley of innocence and isolationism. Another is the fantasy that world power was somehow, by someone, forced upon the United States at the end of the nineteenth century against its will. And the third is the legend that Americans have used their vast power with unique restraint and only on behalf of self-determination, freedom, and prosperity (1972: 58).

We will find ourselves in deep trouble geopolitically if we rely on acting on our own incorrect mythology. We need to move into a realm where we respect men like William Appleman Williams and Noam Chomsky and those who are struggling against the power of popular culture and the obscurantist press.
Chomsky and Herman have developed a “propaganda model,” which is an analytical framework that tries to analyze American media in terms of the basic institutional structural frame in which they operate. The authors conclude that, “the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them” (Chomsky 1988:1). They note that the media claim to be the people’s watchdog, but are not. Occasionally they report on a case that catches the public eye, for instance, the Enron scandals and it appears to the uneducated that the media are doing their job. But, in fact, they report these cases as “aberrations.” Enron shenanigans are described as individual deviations from a great system in which businessmen act morally and in the public interest. There is never any structural analysis that says, “the system is corrupt.” That would threaten élite interests too much. Instead:

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires symbolic propaganda (Williams 1972: 58).

Our system only allows newspapers, radio and television that appear to inform the public of the key issues that will impact our grandchildren. The average citizen does not see the information blitz by the media as propaganda because it is more difficult to see how this could be in the absence of state censorship. In a very subtle way, writers and broadcasters censor themselves.
We are caught up in a system wherein “money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public” (Chomsky & Herman 1988:2). And little more. This is because:

(1) the media industry is huge, owned by powerful people who support the system and who have a strong profit motive to filter the news and punish reporters who deviate from the path of presenting filtered news.

(2) since advertising is the principal source of the income of media owners, they have pecuniary reasons to filter the news in ways that do not offend corporate buyers of ads.

(3) agents of power in government, industry and “experts” provide the media with information that is already filtered. Dissidents and intellectuals are marginalized and rarely allowed to speak through the major media outlets. The media is a filter using pre-filtered information.

(4) the media receives flak from those with substantial resources, the power élite. They listen to these “squeaky wheels,” not the average citizen” (Chomsky & Herman 1988:chapter one).

(5) terrorism has replaced anti-communism as the “monster in the closet.” After 9/11, the media could again participate in a war against something. No media person could have come out in favor of communism and, likewise, no one is going to risk saying that (a) terrorists have some good points to make about American ills or that (b) the government is not firmly committed to fighting terrorism.

Our media provide information that is designed to fudge the truth. Image dominates reality. As Chomsky and Herman say, “the ‘societal purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state” (1988:298). Furthermore: “The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeling debate within the bounds of acceptable premises” (Chomsky & Herman 1988:298).
Just as our Yokut-Mono shaman acted to manipulate the truth for the little-chief, and scribes of the Count of Barcelona fabricated mystical ideas surrounding kingly power to support their leisure class lifestyle and war, the media functions in our society to present a “foggy” picture of what is really going on in our world. This is, I believe, not intended by many of the hardworking journalists in the media, who think they are doing what a journalist is supposed to do. And they are, just not by the thoughtful public’s perspective, but they please their bosses and the power élite.
Too, the media can be self-congratulatory, one arm claiming “good job” for the other arm. The myth of media independence is, thus, self-perpetuating. Contrary to the image of an aggressive press, their general lack of interest in really critical stories about the war machine in Washington DC or corporate malfeasance “have regularly permitted and even encouraged ever larger violations of the law…” (emphasis in original; Chomsky & Herman 1988:301). Patting themselves on the back, media operatives “permit – indeed, encourage – spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness” (Chomsky & Herman 1988:302; my emphasis). All the talking-heads on news programs, which have evolved into shouting-heads, appear to be debating the issues, but they are really about entertainment, not education. They talk and shout and the power élite applaud because their entire puffed-up clamor is not about critical analysis and change, just sound with no real fury.
The media analyst Ben Bagdikian indicates that the private mass media “does not merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world” (1980:x). W. Lance Bennett writes:

The public is exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media in response to these messages. … Leaders have usurped enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular control over the political system by using the media to generate support, compliance, and just plain confusion among the public (1988: 178-179).

The important thing to remember is that the top media specialists are part of the power élite or aspire to be so, rubbing shoulders on a daily basis with the powerful and wealthy to get their stories, living a fast-paced life on the expense account. News directors make an average of $73,800 a year and up to $250,000; while anchors average about $70,000 and can make a million dollars a year (http://www.journalismjobs.com/salaries.cfm). These figures are drawn from a wide range of media outlets and, of course, the major newspapers and stations pay much more than this. The salaries of the top news readers for CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox are well above $5 million annually. The CBS anchor Katie Couric is reported to have recently signed a five-year contract for $15 million. These are not “boat rockers.” If, as the founding fathers intended, the free press is to be a watchdog protecting our freedoms, then the dog is asleep, but hopefully not dead. We need to wake it up.

Commitment in the Modern World

Nootka chiefs and Highland landlords were doing some very similar things as modern capitalists in the global economy i.e., they were strategizing how to maximize their prestige, power, control over people and productive output, though the rationalization of the market had not yet really penetrated the region. They created institutions to bolster their quest. Theirs was a small game, now the gaming board is global, but it seems that the moves are more or less the same – how can I get more for less, how can I squeeze a little bit more value out of my position, my land, my people? The office-holders inside the state-management system (the military-industrial complex) don’t voice it as such. They have their own rationalizations, but the net effect of their actions (and inaction) on your grandchildren will be monstrously dreadful.
The motives of chiefs were a little bit different from Highland landlords, who came to dominate toward the end, as the Lowland Crown and English Market completed their penetration, but the processes were similar and resonate with what is today happening in the global economy. Enormous profits can be had by a few at the expense of the many e.g., playing Casino Capitalism (Strange 1986) in which big-time investors gamble with the future of your loved one, while pursuing immediate rewards. History has the lessons, but few are reading.
Chomsky wonders why domination continues. Most people think, if they think about it at all, that it is because government officials manipulate the truth. That certainly exists but Chomsky is perceptive enough to realize that, except in totalitarian societies, government is not the main manipulator. He says:

The problem isn't ‘governments,’ at least in the West. They are not much involved in doctrinal management (though there are exceptions, like Woodrow Wilson and the Reaganites, both of whom ran huge state propaganda systems – illegal in the latter case; there were no relevant laws in the Wilson era). Doctrinal management is overwhelmingly the task of corporate propaganda, which is extraordinary in scale and very significant in impact; and [it is also] the task of the general intellectual community…who perform a very important service by setting the bounds of discussion and thus entrenching the unspoken presuppositions of the doctrinal system…governments are marginal, outside of totalitarian states, though attention is always focused on them, to direct it away from what matters (31 March 1995; quoted in Barsky 1997:211).

I would say that almost everything Chomsky has written or said I came to on my own and I am almost always in agreement with his poleconomic views. Nevertheless, sometimes he goes over the edge, as with the last statement "to direct away what matters.” This implies a conspiracy – that some guys in a backroom are conspiring to direct our attention away from the fact that “it’s the economy stupid!” This is Chomsky’s frustration coming out, I believe. I feel it too, but the sickness of the West, what I call affluenza, is an infectious result of very successful capitalist production, a gigantic enterprise to produce anything and everything anyone might want, even if they don’t know they want it.
The projection of doctrine and the manufacture of consent is the end result of millions (trillions?) of decisions by office-holders in government, the business world, the media, the world of international organizations e.g., the World Bank, IMF, WTO, GATT, G-7 get-togethers, World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland (or wherever) for example. What is important is not who is running the show, but that the show is being run so far away from the average person that they: (1) do not know what is going on and, (2) could not do anything about it if they knew. Globalization has taken care of that.
It’s no longer about decision-making in Washington DC or Detroit. It’s about resolutions and assessments being made in Beijing, Bombay or Bonn. It is in the mix or a myriad of daily decisions about the deployment of prestige, power and property that our world today seems overwhelming. Yes, aggrandizers all over the planet are conspiring to manufacture consent, to get us to see the world as they want us to see the world. But they are engaged in a cottage industry. Any one effort is insignificant – peanuts. What is noteworthy is that which is so hard to comprehend – the end result of all those individual aggrandizing moments. It’s the global system stupid!
The nice thing about James Bond movies is that there is one, really weird, bad guy ensconced on some island and that when Bond finally kills the tyrant, the world becomes safe. We could substitute any comic book hero – Superman, Spiderman or whomever. It is a fantasy. The real world is much more complex. It is damn hard to kill aggrandizement. Lenin tried and it sprang up like a noxious weed right in his backyard – Stalin!
As long as there is a surplus to be had, history shows us that aggrandizers will scheme to corner the market. As long as there is power to be accumulated, aggrandizers will strategize to be sure that, when all is said and done, they are the powerful.
This is not rocket science. Rather it is common sense. You already knew this. I didn’t open your eyes to anything that you didn’t already know. The real question is: What do we do about it?
The answer is “struggle.” I could have written “nothing,” and the end result might not have been significantly different (but don’t tell anybody). Joe Six Pack and Noam Chomsky are going to get the same poleconomic world (though Noam is not going to be as happy about it as Joe). But if you believe that a better world is possible, then work to make it happen. Ask: where can I make an impact?
So let's talk about impact. Your impact is going to be like a ladyfinger, which in my youth was an effete firecracker, unlike the explosive cherry bombs. You are never going to set off an atomic explosion in the vast world system at work. But it is important to understand social evolution.
It was a big shock to me in my intellectual journey to realize that we are not civilized. We are still Neanderthals. We are cave dwellers, intellectually speaking. Some of us can imagine a much fairer society, but there are powerful forces that will work, on a daily and nightly basis, to prevent that world from taking shape. Why? Because élites greatly benefit from an uncivilized world. They like it like that. Civilization is not in their interests. Yet, it is in the interest of the vast majority of humanity.
You need to choose. Are you going to pander to the few or help improve the lives of the many? Struggle! Find somebody who thinks like you and get to work. Struggle! We have a long, long row to hoe. We are really infantile hominids with selfish social systems that have evolved to the benefit of the few at the expense of the majority of Humankind on earth. Take a stand or watch TV.
If you choose to take a stand and fight oppression then realize that it is not the political establishment or the economic establishment that you need to address, but the poleconomics of reality. By that I mean that, in actuality, neither politicians nor CEOs have power that is independent of each other’s powers. It’s poleconomics stupid! That is, it is the intermixing of decisions by businessmen and those by politicians that result in Affluenza, the sickness of over-consumption in our society.
You won’t change the world overnight. You might die thinking you have failed. But it is important that thinking individuals, those of you taking time out from slot machines and daytime TV to read this book make an effort. There is a cumulative effect. Certainly there are other cumulative effects going on. Perhaps we will devolve into the Dark Ages again, as opposed to the Gray Ages in which we are mired. But personal commitment is needed to lighten our world, to bring rays of hope into what clearly, to this point, has been a social world fabricated by élites for élites.

Press Your Government

The emperor has no clothes!
— Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875)

If you commit to putting pressure on the American government to move in a more humane direction it is imperative that it alter the idiotic foreign policy based on the false premise that we can spread democracy around the world.
It should be clear by now that local cultures and ways of life have not “melted” in America, which was supposed to be the great melting pot experiment. People cling to their religions, languages, customs and don’t easily “melt,” even in a single country. It is infinitely harder to spread democracy around the world. When we try, we fail, as in the former Soviet Union.
If President Bush knew a little history, he might not have blundered into Iraq spouting inane reasons. The historian Will Durant wrote of Greek democracy. After Alexander the Great’s conquests of Asia, the Greeks engaged in a centuries’ long effort to democratize the peoples who fell under Greek hegemony. Durant wrote:

The masses … continued to speak their native tongues, to pursue their long-accustomed ways, and to worship their … gods … . There was no such fusion of races and cultures as Alexander dreamed of; there were Greeks and Greek civilization on the top, and a medley of Asiatic peoples and cultures underneath … . Oriental monarchy proved more powerful than Greek democracy, and finally impressed its form upon the West … the Asiatic theory of divine right of kings passed down through Rome and Constantinople into modern Europe … . The Greeks offered the East philosophy, the East offered Greece religion; religion won … (1997:577-578).

It didn’t work for Alexander, it didn’t work for the Catalan Count-Kings, it didn’t work for the British Empire and it didn’t work for the Soviet Union. Trying to establish hegemony over culturally diverse peoples doesn’t work, even if the goal is laudable. People everywhere feel that local is better than distant; small is better than big; ours is better than theirs. We have been watching the Former Soviet Union break into its constituent cultural parts for a couple of decades now. How is it that American politicians think that they can do what history shows is not possible?
George W. Bush claimed after 9/11 that he had capital and that he was going to use it. He did and he has used it up and now the American people have finally awakened to the fact that his policy in Iraq was ill-conceived and ill-advised. The only way to police the world is to do it with guns and America does not have the military personnel to even effectively beat insurgents in one small country, Iraq. How much more difficult would it be to have to try that on a much larger scale. We cannot and should not be the world’s police force. We should concentrate on our own national interests, not on wasting tax dollars on cultural imperialism.
Press your government to spend war monies on a universal health care system, education, fighting environmental pollution and detrimental emissions. There is so much that could be done at home with what goes into war. On an NPR talk show the other day I heard a truck driver call in and make a very valid point. He noted that because of a lack of a good rail system in America guys like him were making a living hauling around goods that could be more cheaply and efficiently moved by rail and the atmosphere would not be receiving enormous amounts of petroleum emissions from trucks. How many tanks and fighter jets does it take to build a railroad?

What We Need To Do

This book has been about the lack of transparency in poleconomic matters. I have also noted that democracy provides its own special brand of obfuscation. Our democracy exists, as well, in a whirlwind of affluence, in a bubble of exuberant consumerism, the likes of which the world has never seen. In such a maelstrom of options, it is hard to know which path to trod if you are interested in doing something significant.
If I had to pick one issue that I consider to be critical to the future of the human species it would be transparency. We are not yet civilized. We are in the infancy of the quest to find an equitable society where human needs are met, where trillions are not spent on war and where people are encouraged to find positive ways to express themselves.
Why is transparency the most important issue? Because improved transparency allows us to see and gives us an opportunity to know what politicos are doing with respect to all the other vital issues facing us: war, pollution, poverty and health care, to name a few.
In order to have a world where government works on the proper issues, which will take time to achieve, we must have transparency in government, corporations and the media. If we allow chicanery to continue behind the closed doors of government, corporate and media offices we will get more of the same – a Hobbesian world of all against all and Humankind against the environment.
Work to increase transparency in these three domains and you will be contributing to creating a better world. How can you do this? First, read diverse views. For instance, I read The Economist and listen to Fox News to get perspectives that expand my knowledge of what mainstream pundits are saying. I also read The Nation and Harper’s Magazine and pursue websites like Democracy Now! (http:www.democracynow.org/) and Common Dreams (http:www.commondreams.org/). I have also read a great deal by Noam Chomsky, although anymore I don’t dwell on what the progressives are saying because I could write most of what I read and I don’t grow in the process. Find your balance point and read.
Secondly, get involved. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman end their wonderfully revealing book, Manufacturing Consent, with this paragraph:

The organization and self-education of groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and activism, continue to be the fundamental elements in steps toward the democratization of our social life and any meaningful social change. Only to the extent that such developments succeed can we hope to see media that are free and independent (1988:307).

Will this take time? Yes, by all means, but remember that we have just taken the first step in a thousand-mile journey toward becoming civilized.
Find an avenue whereby you can act to reduce the opacity of office and increase transparency. It is vitally important that we know what is happening in the halls of power and that we devise strategies to curb very natural abuses that will occur if we don’t.
Here is a partial checklist of things to do beyond working ardently for greater transparency:

1) Push for more checks, preferably constitutional, on the power of the Presidency. If Congress has more power, it is closer to the people.

2) Work to make government leaders understand that it is our imperialist foreign policy that is generating hatred and terrorism toward the United States. End State Terrorism. Stop trying to remake the world in our own image.

3) Lobby for more diplomacy and less threats and aggression in our foreign policy.

4) Try to get our government to untie foreign aid (much of our “help” to poor nations has a rider that aid must be spent on American goods and services).

5) Work to get across the perspective that we are sinking environmentally, while we play the world’s bully (it doesn’t help to pick a bar fight when the Titanic is sinking).

6.) Make poverty-reduction an important national agenda.

7) Demand universal national health care.

8) Push for the creation of a viable national railroad system, while banning long distance hauling by trucks (unless zero emissions fuel for trucks is developed).

9) Demand that the money now going to war goes to education and that we create a national campaign to value teachers and intellectuals (some propaganda is good, after all).

10) See to it that the media presents a full range of viewpoints on crucial issues – from progressive to conservative.

11) Fight racism.

12) Insist on a better national defense system against nuclear attack and terrorism – your grandchildren are going to need it after the way our government has behaved.

Demagoguery and poleconomic oppression transpire when good people do nothing. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

SOURCES – CHAPTER 10: CONCLUSIONS

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