This can be summed up by two quotes from a very unexpected sources: the god of the aristocracy: "Civil government...is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." --Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
And an army General: "I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers and Co. in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel that I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents." --General Smedley Butler, 1935
Governments don't merely help the rich, they literally defend them. Notice how politicians who stand up for the rich are also for more military, police, and prisons, as well as theocratic social controls. Right-ring libertarians want to cut out the middleman and send military and police authority straight to corporations - for cheaper, more efficient oppression!
Serving with a smile
In Pennsylvania $1000 dollars is paid by taxpayers for each job a company "creates" - Mcdonalds gets a whopping $4000 for each job "created" as it plans to build 25 or so new restaurant in the state.(gosh, we can't have too many Mcdonald's, can we?). This of course is not a bribe, it's "business friendly policies" providing "incentive". It also only applies to a few hundred specific companies (ones that have good lobbyists?) and only if they hire over 25 people - just to make sure it's big business only.
So basically, if big business decides to slow down the economy, our taxes will pay big businesses to get bigger. What incentive are they giving for what?
And all I can say is, how about giving that 4000 bucks to the actual worker as incentive to flip those stinking burgers? Why is greed the only incentive for some people and hunger the only incentive for others?
So since government is pro-rich wouldn't conservative anti-government policies help the non-rich?
Firstly, conservative politicians are not against government, they are against certain parts that are not profitable to them. They are all for the military, which protects their overseas investments. As for the libertarian party, they don't have any hope of being elected if they don't sell out to business - many "libertarians" describe themselves as "minarchists" and you can imagine which part of the government will not be "minimized".
But the main point is their objectives, which they publically admit to: they constantly say that the rich deserve their wealth and authority, and they want to protect the rich from "punishment of success" etc. etc. etc. So can you imagine that all of these politicians, think tanks, and foundations are actually shooting themselves in the foot?
Can I see some examples of bad government?
1. Citing an oversupply of physicians, Medicare has begun a Graduate Medical Education Project that will pay participating hospitals up to $100,000 a year for each intern they do not train - Supply and demand at work.
2. People rally around authority when there is a war on. Not surprisingly, leaders are always declaring war on something. Since Vietnam, the US government has tried to keep out of "wars", instead focusing on "crisies" and "conflicts", which don't need approval from anyone other than the president. The only actual "wars" are against things that won't bother fighting back. We have the "war against drugs" and now the "war against international terrorism" (terrorism within nations is apparently not a problem!)
Thus a bomb in a suitcase is bad while a bomb on an intercontinental missile is good - but only when another country is involved. When an American bombed Oklahoma, America did not respond by bombing America.
Afghanistan and Sudan were bombed though, and whether the targets actually did pose more of a threat than cheap immunizations is irrelevant. A bomb is a bomb, and a person who uses a bomb is a terrorist. A nation that bombs other nations as a matter of policy is imperialist.
Despite fighting in no wars since Korea, the US was constantly acted with violence. From 1945 to Kosovo is 1999 they hadn't had a "crisis" with any white nations - Cuba is the closest they came.
One thing about "wars" is that they are aimed at an enemy's military. In a "crisis", you do whatever the hell you want. Thus the aggression against civilian victims, for example Iraq, where the US committed an actual case of their own propaganda "incubator massacre" - by destroying power plants, incubator babies and anyone else needing a powered hospital died - meanwhile smart bombs" destroyed an air raid shelter in Baghdad, with large numbers of women and children inside. It was thought to be a "military installation", because there could be military officers there. By that logic Mcdonald's could be a "military installation" as well.
Every single day, 150 children in Iraq die from the effects of sanctions (malnutrition and disease) Yet somehow this is not "terrorism" which can't kill that many people in a year. Are these acts acceptable because they are done by the richest and most powerful (and therefore having the most options) nation on Earth?
People in Sudan and other Middle Eastern countries do not trust the United States government--and neither should we. The Pentagon and CIA claim they had a "soil sample" proving the Shifa plant was producing a precursor to VX gas. Yet the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus was unaware that the plant was a major producer of medicinal drugs! So how does one get a soil sample from a place without noticing all of the trucks full of pills leaving?
An interesting this about the "conflicts" that our "enemies" (always seen not a people, but as one bogeyman) have often been brought to power by the US - Saddam Hussien (while the U.S. sought to prolong the horrible war with Iran) and Noriega were US Allies until they became inconvenient. Osama bin Laden, in any case, was assisted by the CIA because he was an anti-Soviet "asset" during the Afghan war of the 1980s.
This character is yet another in the series of fantastic examples of the kinds of "friends" U.S. imperialism has cultivated, from the contras who set up shop to sell crack cocaine in South Central LA, to Ramzi Yusuf (the World Trade Center bomber, also a figure in the CIA's operations inside Pakistan in support of Afghan fundamentalists).
And in the end of all of these "conflicts" the result is simply more anger against the US than when they started - The feeling of masses of people around the world that their fate, and the fate of their countries, is determined in Washington produces frustration and anger that provides a fertile ground for right-wing nationalists and religious fanatics. Even if U.S. air raids could effectively wipe out some particular "terrorist threat" (the evidence says they can't) they simply add to the resentment which assures that these forces and their political influence will grow. (This is the reason that there are actually some conservatives and libertarians are opposed to bomb Arabs etc. - they make it clear that it's got nothing to do with "bleeding hearts" - ie, ethics! Of course, all of them opposed the bombing of Yugoslavia, in which the victims were white.)
The fashionable cliche among U.S. elites was coined by Madeline Albright: "We are the indispensable nation. We see further." Either she's lying or the US knew all along that it's friends would soon be its enemies - but that's not the main point, which is this: The "indispensable nation" (The "white man's burden" updated for the millenium), assumes that everything they're doing is right and the people are just too stupid to realize it. This is how all totalitarians justify themselves - the people don't know what's in their own interests - also known as "she wants to be raped, she just doesn't know it". If the U.S. is the world's cop then there's some pretty serious police brutality to look into.
If the US government, in the process of trying to "police" or control the world, does business with people who are perfectly happy to kill people by the tens of thousands in Nicaragua or Afghanistan for the pursuit of their economic or ideological goals, what right does it have to act morally outraged when these same forces make Americans their target?
This brings me back to original point - that the actual target of these "conflicts" is not the enemy bogeyman that the nation is at "crisis" with, nor even the enemy's population, but the nation's own population. We should take seriously the administration's statement that the U.S. is embarking here on a long-term "war against terrorism." (Remember who the first casualty of war tends to be - after Pearl Harbor it was Japanese Americans, in WW1 it was anyone with a German-sounding name...)
3. Mike Levine on the so called "war on drugs":
"As an ex Federal agent with almost three decades of law enforcement experience in four Federal agencies, local enforcement and military police, I find it easy
to define a "rip-off," as any method of relieving us of our money and giving us absolutely nothing in return.
So when Gnewt Gingrich and President Clinton raised each other's "bipartisan" hands in "victory" over their awarding $2 billion in taxpayer funds to every
mass media communications corporation on the big board for already proven useless and even contra-productive anti-drug ads, the rip-off alert sirens began to
wail.
$2 Billion dollars of our money to be funneled through the Partnership for a Drug Free America to giant media corporations without the taxpayers having an
opportunity to object? And not one of our elected protectors even questions the efficacy of this mountain of our money moving directly into the coffers of giant
corporations like Disney and The New York Times, without one dollar gong into the drug ravaged communities that need it the
most?
Can this be true?
Holy Brinks Robbery!
To give you an idea of how this massive expenditure of money might have been fought, Brand Week, the leading advertising trade magazine, last week, called the whole anti-drug ad campaign "suspect."
In an article with the ironic title "Drug Money," Daniel Hill observed that "Before a company like General Motors or Colgate-Palmolive goes out and spends $100 million on an advertising campaign, they do massive amounts of state-of- the-art quantitative and qualitative research, producing data that determines how best to communicate to the target audience. But with the PDFA/White House effort, that data is simply gossamer."
"Gossamer?"
As a court-qualified expert witness in drug trafficking and many other related matters, I would not use "gossamer" to describe the "research" of the PDFA/White House before expending our money. It is more like fraudulent and/or massive ineptitude.
In my own book Fight Back, (recommended reading by the Clinton Administration for Communities with Drug Problems ((1993))), which may be downloaded free of charge from [This] web site, you can find the proof that the federal government already knows that these ad campaigns are useless and even counter productive.
The Bainbridge Washington school district (P. 160) was the example I chose to use, although there were many others to chose from. The reason I chose Bainbridge was that it was written about in a Wall Street Journal article by Joseph Pereira, "Even a School That Is a Leader in The Drug War, Grades Itself a Failure," (11/10/90) and that it was considered by our federal government "one of the most intensive and innovative anti drug programs in the country." It was in fact a model for the Bush-Bennett anti-drug campaign of that same year.
The Bainbridge School district found the intensive anti-drug ad campaign, (identical in content to the current $2 billion campaign) not only unproductive, but counter-productive, that is the blatant hypocrisy of the TV and print anti-drug ads seemed to cause kids to rebel and take the very drugs they were being brow beaten about.
As I pointed out in Fight Back this sentiment was echoed by educators all over the land. For example, Robert Ryan, then, an administrator in the California Department of Education stated that "We've thrown $45 million over the last three years into drug education in our schools. But as of yet I don't think we can say what helps and what doesn't."
$45 million in ad money that could not be proven effective, and now $2 billion?
Is this yet another sign that our political leaders' handling of taxpayer funds is out of control?
Judge for yourself. [I say it's a regular case of corporations using the government to get corporate welfare, a champaign donation here, a martini there, and you've got a business transaction with a representative of the people.]
In a recent AP release (October 17) entitled "Ad Spending Continues To Climb" it was pointed out that advertising spending was up 9.7% from last year. The largest advertiser listed was General Motors, spending an approximate $1.1 billion on print, TV and radio ads. It seems that AP left out one even bigger spender--the Gingrich/Clinton, $2 billion, anti-drug campaign.
It is difficult for me, a career law enforcement officer, to imagine that our leaders have allowed this fraud to come this far. [Of course, I'm not so surprised] Especially in light of the fact that those $2 billion could have bought just about every coca leaf grown in South America this year [This of course would also be a cheaper way to fight wars - simply pay the enemy to defect. Of course, this idea has never been considered by governments, who use their methods of war to rip off their own citizens as well!] and saved us the $14 billion we are about to spend on federal enforcement."
Michael Levine (mail address: WBAI Studios 120 Wall Street New York, NY, 10005 212-209-2800 (voice mail 2970) )
Meanwhile:
By THAO HUA, L.A. Times - Saturday, August 16, 1997
"SANTA ANA--An undercover operation in which Santa Ana police manufactured and sold rock cocaine in order to snare prospective drug buyers was upheld Friday by an appellate court panel."
That's right, courts say it's alright for police to make drugs! Why they can't just use fakes or confiscated drugs never gets explained...All this while conservatives want to puritanize public figures (Well, liberal public figures anyway) because they "lead by example"! (But then, if cops are also allowed to use clubs...)
Can governments be democratic?
The "people's democracy of China" isn't democratic - but does this mean that every other nation IS?
In essence, a government or nation is anyone who can hit you with a club or put pepper-spray in your eyes. They might do this because they don't like what you say, what religion you believe, because they think it will stop you from hurting people, or (most often) to stop you from accessing an object.
The main job of governments is to protect property - "crimes against property" (theft, trespassing etc.) are 90% of all crime. This idea that it's good to use violence to keep people away from land or things is a very old one and extremely harmful. Fuedal systems had it, communism had it, our society has it, and the "libertarian party" wants to keep it.
In my opinion governments can not be democratic, because they are based in violence. The best way to govern is through convincing argument (philosopher-kings would not wield weapons, but would offer ideas). The best way to get fair ideas is to have the people make them.
Of course, this is just my own, pacifist, viewpoint.