Not Quite the Same Tea in Palin's "Tea Party"

I didn’t write about Sarah Palin’s visit to Boston last month at the end of her “Tea Party” tour, Wednesday, April 14^th. Sometimes, the task of sifting the treasure from the trash in a story is just too overwhelming; whatever observations I have to share with my readers come not so much from the actual who, what, when, where, why and how of it, but from the examination of how our government manipulates our perceptions of those things. A recent conversation with a clerk in my neighborhood health food store got me thinking about these binary components of our political tableau and about how successful our government has been because of them. Tea time today seems an appropriate time to turn my attention to Ms. Palin’s stunt on the common and contribute a fresh, badly needed perspective.

We Americans are used to politicians who act as though they understand the issues of greatest concern to us when they so obviously don’t. This discrepancy in our political discourse is now so familiar it’s a foregone conclusion, and its rich history gives us much material to scrutinize – far more than can be analyzed in this little blog. What is immediately obvious is the fact that where this discrepancy exists, only those already in power – no matter their party affiliations – benefit from it. We, those without power, are left fighting not the true battles to see our problems taken up by our leaders, but rather, whomever those running for office pit against us with this contrivance: weak on crime and terrorism ‘liberals’ v. hawk neocons, anti-empire protesters v. oil and military bourgeoisie. Ms. Palin is certainly a politician. She knows that garnering the kind of support she needs to afford the type of pervasive PR every politician who’s selected by our corporate leaders needs in order to control the public discourse requires her to set forth talking points of no relevance to the average American. That’s how she proves her status as a quisling to her backers. Thus, her “Tea Party” tour. But she's also so much more than that.  With one breath, she’ll tell you America’s problem is big government, and then with another, she’ll assure you she wants a strong defense – in an age when the Pentagon’s budget is (and has been for quite some time) in excess of $75 billion dollars annually and all that money (which we borrow from Saudi Arabia and China at exorbitant interest rates) goes to – what else – big outsourced government, also known as the private security industry. The average American doesn’t see this contradiction reinforced in evening news broadcasts, or morning and afternoon talk shows, or popular non-fiction, so it believes it doesn’t exist, even though all it takes to see it is a willingness to do so.  Palin wants to keep the military industrial complex happy because those are the people who fund her campaign “war chest,” and so we may rightfully ask, "Is Sarah Palin merely a politician, or a soldier, herself, and, if so, what kind of soldier?”

“I trusted Obama to change the direction our country was headed, but so far, I’ve seen no change. We need smaller government,” one Palin supporter commented to a WBZ news reporter the day of her party. That’s the news bite the majority of New Englanders heard, followed by Palin, herself: “I want to tell you – [nah] – we’ll keep clinging to our constitution and our guns and religion, and you can keep the change,” as if this mission statement hasn’t been forcibly undertaken by every administration since Reagan’s. “Smaller government” isn’t our issue, clearly, and it hasn’t been their issue, either, for the last 30 years, as we can see from the Pentagon’s budget, the proceeds of which have been distributed to ‘free’ market privateers who have completely undermined our constitutional republic by replacing public government that represents us all with the permanent police state they control. Less corrupt, more effective government – without the propaganda shrink wrapped around the agenda of items permissible to discuss in the public discourse – is the issue. Palin’s tea ‘parody’ represents far more closely the fête the Mad Hatter threw for Alice than the 1773 demonstration in Boston Harbor for that reason. So one must ask – is it really ‘tea,’ or something else, at the heart of Palin’s ‘protest?’

“Well, that’s why I get to live in the bubble I live in – thanks to people like you,” the clerk said to me that day, without even a hint of shame, when I told her about my blog. She’s about the age of the initial group of youth who cast their first votes when Viacom’s MTV inaugurated its Rock the Vote campaign in 1990, becoming the first global corporation to sponsor mass, direct American civics education – bad mass, direct American civics education, at that. For her, as for most Americans, self-governance begins and ends at the polling booth every four years, when she and her cohorts organize themselves into that type of “mob” which Founding Father James Madison decried as the enemy of the American Constitutional Republic in Federalist Paper No. 10 – that democratic mob made up of the most powerful factions of people in our country (such as the broadcasting industry), whose interests are the only ones our elected officials represent. Madison, like all the other Federalists, despised democracy and preferred to it instead a constitutional republic in which the people elected “virtuous” men to represent everyone, not merely the most powerful of the body politic.

But here’s the catch: to whom can a concerned Patriot turn for help in fighting fascist hypocrites such as Palin now that we’re down this rabbit hole – where up is down, down is up, and nothing our politicians say or do makes patent sense? Ron Paul supporter Michael Edward has made good use of the disaffection of those of us who understand these things about our politicians and our lost form of government, but when we scratch the surface of his “Restore the Republic” movement, we find the same type of hypocrisy that calls for less, not more effective, civil government. It’s easy to see that what they want is actually vigilante-style “independence,” the freedom to live as lawless frontiersmen in the mistaken belief that that is what our Founding Fathers wished for us.

I admit it – much of Edward’s research is spot on, and he demonstrates a thorough understanding of the singularly most distressing aspect of our emerging socialist state: the totalitarianism that a group of privileged (less and less honorably elected) people increasingly exert over the majority of us. But that the one, effective antidote to this situation is a government-less, “free market” exploitation of the issues at the heart of our attempts to promote the commonwealth our Founding Fathers intended us to create is a fallacy, one they are prepared to cling to, if necessary, with guns in hand. They couldn’t be more closely aligned with the neocons they claim to abhor.

There is an unmistakable pattern of propaganda at work here: embedded into a manufactured issue that takes a perspective beneficial only to those who created the issue is a grain of truth to which we are drawn, but then the subsequent dialogue is inevitably channeled in a way that benefits only those people who created the ‘issue.’ With its ‘answer’ of no government to its specious ‘problem’ of big government, it’s easy to see that Restore the Republic is clearly a “false flag” organization created to ensnare unsuspecting disaffected Americans by pretending to be something that it is not – representative of the interests of the average American.  I can only deduce his organization is a false flag, one of the many propaganda tools of "historic" importance George W. Bush ordered the quislings of his Global Communications Office to create in 2003 for his never-ending covert war.

Then there’s the hatred of the other that is so assiduously promoted by American culture that's also used to undermine belief in a public government that has given us everything from the interstate highway system to the enforcement of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, of anyone who doesn’t ascribe to the anti-humanistic notion we are all nothing more than animals in a jungle, of anyone who remembers a time when the American government wasn’t directly involved in creating debased culture that encourages us to fight amongst ourselves.  Probably the most detrimental war being waged against the American citizen is in the area of quality public education.

Thomas Jefferson, our 3^rd president and the author of the Declaration of Independence, was a firm believer in universal, government-supported education for all Americans, regardless of their ability to pay for it. He and a group of his colleagues put together what can only be called the first charter school in Washington, D.C., by pledging the sum of $200 in ten installments in 1805 for its creation, when he was barely solvent. Together, they raised more than $35,000 to start this, the forerunner to the public school, just to prove to lawmakers that publicly-supported education was worth financing with public funds – and they succeeded. Less than a decade-and-a-half later, the Commonwealth of Virginia created the first public institution of higher learning, the University of Virginia, and Jefferson became its first head. Jefferson envisioned what recent educators would call constructivist principles as the basis of good, universal education, but since the 1970s, education has been turned into an enterprise where only performance matters, an enterprise in which even basic science and history facts have been relegated to the rubbish heap. In the last 20 years especially, the charter school movement has done everything it can to create an elite class of citizens culled for advancement from those students that demonstrate susceptibility to indoctrination, not the ability to think critically. Charter schools still get public funding, but it’s the private funding mechanism that has ultimate decision-making power in our classrooms, given that it is they, through their access to local political representatives vis-à-vis their respective tax bases, who now dictate whatever government requirements the schools must meet for accreditation. This isn’t the type of influence Jefferson and his colleagues believed was the right of citizens in a constitutional republic. Though they could have predicted it, they would never have tolerated the undue influence of the corporation in American society. In an age when accurate science and history information is under siege, the proliferation of this system of education is troubling indeed.

Jefferson also had such disdain for the power exerted by religious leaders, and such a mistrust of institutionalized religion, that he wrote his own version of the gospels in which he redacted all the supernaturalism that he felt obscured the collective wisdom of the ancient texts. And he made certain that anyone who so chose could follow his example and freely worship G_d as he or she pleased. That’s why the first organizing principle of our nation’s founding documents, the first amendment to our federal constitution, established a clear-cut separation between church and state. He would be appalled if he were alive today that American church leaders now have the power to perform the duties of civil law enforcement and arrest people, thanks to George W. Bush’s administration.  Perhaps Sarah Palin’s former party leader didn’t expressly call our Constitution “just a piece of paper,” but he certainly acts as though he believes that is all it is.

By all accounts, we can see that the "smaller" government of the former neocons and the even smaller -- or non-existent -- government of the Tea Party -- actually exists, particularly where it concerns services such as quality education, so what the heck is Palin and the crazies that follow her around talking about?  And where did Christine O'Donnell come from?  Here, we can benefit from some more history to help answer our mounting questions.

In 1953, the CIA engineered the coup against Iran's reformist leader, Moussadgh, by paying poor Iranians to pretend, by conducting mass protests, that Moussadgh was unpopular and that there was a legitimate counter party to him.  They did this to install the pro-west business (Great Britain, especially), oil cartel-friendly Shah.  Then the CIA did the same thing 20 years later in Chile, ushering in the brutal, pro-fascist Pinochet dictatorship.  In 1981, Ronald Reagan made it legal for the CIA to do the same type of theatre here, in America, and, as we've already seen, to infiltrate "for the purposes of influencing the activities of" all political action groups in order to polarize factions against each other.  He did so because he realized - as every great dictator does - that conquering a people is easier when they are fighting each other, instead of you.  Probably the most ludicrous thing Tea Party candidates such as newly "elected" Christine O'Donnell tell people about the surge in popularity of Tea Party candidates is that the American people want them, the true conservatives, because neocons such as Rush Limbaugh aren't right-wing enough.   All those Tea Party "protestors" at their rallies?  Government-paid, militants-for-hire.  Remember -- the Joint Forces have been working in America since 1996 with all the CIA's and FBI's tools and technologies, and the ability to hire from your neighborhood minions to do their street theater.


Now, I'm not saying there aren't some seriously stupid, deluded people in the Tea Party "movement," but the Tea Party is clearly another type of propaganda tool the CIA uses -- misdirection. While you sit here deriding them, or laughing at their staged stupidity on The Colbert Report, or The Jon Stewart Show, your civil society is being transformed exactly the way Nazi Germany was in the First and Second Solutions (and you know what that led to; that's right - the Final Solution, which is well under way), and every legitimate activist working to change this already patently fascist government is derided as crazy -- just like Tea Party candidates.  Propaganda tools such as these are the reason why the American public has been deluded into believing it is still a government of, by and for the people, and that it isn't already every horrible thing the Tea Party candidates say they want for America's future government, which is no government at all, according to them.  That's exactly what you have -- no public, shared government, just a police state.  So we've come to the point where we can now answer the question, "Who is Sarah Palin, and is she a member of our military, and if so, what type?"  She's clearly not a mere politician, and if she's not, neither are any other Tea Party "candidates," including Christine O'Donnell.  Since they're using CIA-developed tools, we can justifiably deduce they are members of the CIA and, that being the case, that they are not legitimate political figures, or true freedom-loving American patriots, or any type of entity that can benefit you, the American people.  They're puppets on a string, and the people pulling those strings are the fascists in control of our government.

We could all use a bubble tea break from the sophistry of Palin and the neocons, I understand, but buckling under the pressure to rid the public discourse of pernicious voices such theirs, as our Founding Fathers instructed us to do, would ensure our enslavement to this fascist status quo, and slavery is not what this country was created to perpetuate. This is the issue facing all Americans today:  American fascism, and it is the responsibility of us all to fight and defeat it. So I turn to you today with my plea – save yourselves. The Sarah Palins of the world aren’t interested in doing that. They’re off somewhere, training in the uses of their favorite T, the next mind-control weapon.

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And Speaking of Shills . . .

Recently it came to my attention that another career imposter, whose employment history has included stints as an athletainer and a fake representative of the people, has now begun to impersonate a defender of the American people through his position as a minion of the private security industry and the host of his own “reality” TV series.

Former Minnesota governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura – sans mustache and Navy seal buzz cut, and sporting a rattail as stylish as a mullet – now fronts Conspiracy Theory on the “TruTV” network. Insomnia enabled me to catch a recent rebroadcast of a 2009 episode, “Big Brother,” in which Ventura, with his company of so-called investigators, purports to expose the “heart” of the surveillance industry that currently justifies its existence by creating of us all terror suspects which require omnipresent and increasingly stealthier monitoring. Many of Ventura’s half-dozen or so investigators are duly skeptical of Ventura’s reasons for his seemingly puritanical and dogged determination to uncover what he paranoiacally suspects are industry abuses, one even outrightly declaring that giving up some of our freedoms is necessary to maintaining the freedom of us all. The alleged range of political opinion of middle America has been dutifully mimicked and provides the backdrop against which Ventura will wage his individualistic, American heroic, mostly one-man war for the truth about the threats to our freedom from within.

In the Big Brother episode Ventura clowns for the camera, feigning indignation in all the right places as he would have feigned suffering an opponent’s nelson in 1976, when he interviews industry insiders, including David Williams, a former military police officer turned sheriff turned police reserve and current director of our nation’s first country-wide SS organization, Oklahoma’s Infra-Gard. Ventura is unrelenting in his “hard-hitting” interview of Williams, at whom he growls, “Just so long as you don’t forget who that document protects,” once he’s managed to squeeze out of Williams his concession that Williams may sometimes have to break the law to uphold it but that he nevertheless carries a copy of the U.S. Constitution with him at all times, suggesting he’s never without the talisman in case he’s overcome with a desire to pay obeisance to it. Williams’s organization now has chapters of unnamed business leaders whose job it is to monitor the communities – including the communities of their employees – within their purview in every state. Their job is to put into action a response to threats against the infrastructure, including threats to their supremacy as society’s power brokers. “And you would never, for example, exert any pressure on your employees whose political views don’t exactly align with . . . “ Ventura begins to ask before another Infra-Gard chapter president in Tennessee assures him, “Oh, no, no, no. No. Certainly not. That’s not the purpose of the organization. We’re strictly concerned with protecting the infrastructure . . . of banking . . . telecommunications . . .” Our chapter president now looks more like a member of the current or immediate past White House administrations who stole our tax money to prop up allegedly failing industries, including the automakers that have, together with the oil industry, destroyed beyond repair our environment.

What Ventura doesn’t do, though, at this point, is to talk about the prevalence of gangstalking in the workplace, or even tell his viewing audience how far the law allows employers to conduct character assassination campaigns against their employees for the purposes of removing them not merely from their present positions but from the entire workforce, even though the practice was so prevalent in multi-nationals doing business in Europe in the late 20^th century that several European countries – including Germany – outlawed it. All of Ventura’s half-dozen or so investigators are blithely unaware of these phenomena, inarguably the most germane to their exposé, and provide foils for Ventura’s posturing as the great defender of the freedoms of the hard-working, patriotic and tolerant American people.

In the end, we’re left with Ventura’s paranoia being simply reasonable, but ultimately not justified – at least, not today – which is exactly what the fascist American government for whom Ventura has worked most of his life wants you to believe. But we're nevertheless also left with a wee bit more than that: the very fascism which Ventura’s buffoonery tries to obscure.

I imagine this is how most of Ventura's “theories” turn out.

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Howard Zinn has Died

It’s been about a week since Howard Zinn died, and I’ve wrestled with whether I would comment on the man’s legacy, as so many have been doing, or not. Because the issues of extra-judicial, state-sponsored terrorism of Americans and bioslavery are unquestionably the most dire ones facing our nation today, and because these issues are largely ignored by most activists, I offer my thoughts on Zinn in regards to them. First, though, I’ll let Zinn speak for himself.

This is not the type of letter Zinn sent to Barbara Lubin of Middle East Children’s Alliance when she asked for his endorsement. Obviously, when the producers of the 2003 documentary, The Corporation, contacted Zinn to request his participation in their project, they didn’t receive a brush-off from him, either. Yes -- I know he was well over 80 when I approached him. Yes – I know his wife was ill and then died. But within a year of my meeting him, Zinn had a new website, and then a play based on his encounters with the legatees of the voices of the historically oppressed, and then an even newer website, a book, then a documentary based on the play, and then a national tour for the documentary – all aimed at building a high-profile, national dialogue among the well-established, thriving communities of formerly voiceless people, none of whom were – or were like – me. Nowhere in Zinn’s work are activists represented who are today working to raise awareness of extra-judicial, state-sponsored terrorism and torture of American citizens, or of our government’s many bioslaves, though he admits to knowledge of them both. Today’s Palestinian victims of Israel’s genocide in the West Bank? They do merit his acknowledgement and support, as well they should. But one must ask of a man to whom so many have looked for endorsement and support in their activism why he turned his back on what are certainly the most critical issues in our now closed American society that face its citizens – the fastest moving trains in history on which no freedom-defending individual could possibly be neutral. Here is one possible avenue to understanding his evident hypocrisy.

“’What is common to all of these voices,’ Zinn and co-editor Anthony Arnove write in the book’s [Voices of the People’s History of the United States] introduction, ‘is that they have mostly been shut out of the orthodox histories, the major media, the standard textbooks, the controlled culture . . . to create a passive citizenry.’ With Voices, Zinn and Arnove seek to address that malaise, showing that the impossible – slaves rising up against their slave masters, for example – is not only possible but has occurred repeatedly throughout the country’s history.’”

(http://therealnews.com/store/index.php/trnn-books/voices-of-a-people-s-history-of-the-united-states-by-howard-zinn.html

accessed 2/3/10)

Zinn obviously knew that protest in the U.S. was continuous – even protest against government-sanctioned slavery, which is as ubiquitous today as it was in 18, or 19, 61. Notwithstanding the fact that it’s less possible today than it ever has been before for oppressed people to come together in opposition to government-sanctioned oppression, and notwithstanding the fact that what was once government-sanctioned oppression has turned into actual government-sponsored oppression, Zinn’s (what we infer as) contempt for “controlled culture” and its discriminatory mechanisms begs us to ask why he would bother at all to create his own ‘legitimization machine’ and then exclude the members of silenced, rapidly growing communities of oppressed persons, communities which historically have included even a substantial number of his own peers. The issues of extra-judicial, state-sponsored terrorism of Americans and bioslavery haven’t merited his legitimization, for some reason, and because they haven’t, you who have looked to him for direction in your human and civil rights activism believe it doesn’t merit yours, either. That’s the key. Our secret prisons are the wall-less ones erected to socially exterminate us, and Zinn’s exclusion of us from his high-profile community of social activists aids in that social extermination. No matter what the color of our skin, or the type of liberal activism we do, we have no voice, and Zinn’s legitimization machine is another of the reasons we do not. For how long this has been so is impossible to tell; I met an elderly woman at a weekly peace protest in 2006 who maintained that she had been a target of gangstalkers since she first began protesting unsafe nuclear energy plants in the 1970s. She even described to me the failed attempts to hire a lawyer of a substantial group of people who are similarly oppressed and with whom she was associated, after being turned away by the ACLU, to sue the federal government, á la Brian Glick. Though this woman and her constituents live and work within the same alleged peace-and-justice community in Boston as Zinn, the larger world has never heard from him about these issues. I’ve never seen him associated with even the most visible and oldest of such communities, www.multistalkingvictims.org, or any other similar Targeted Individual support and advocacy group. Zinn’s job of late, in fact, seems to have been to provide another way to limit the scope of issues in which the broader activist community can become engaged in opposing today’s fascist American government. Clearly, his last work was to help “create a passive citizenry.” That brings to mind yet more questions, such as, why?

One reason Zinn does not give us the public platform that he assiduously provides to the historically recognizable oppressed is because his doing so would expose as false the one tenet he has spent his life proclaiming as true to the world – that though it may be difficult at times for us to make use of it, the people of the United States have the same democratically-ensured right to be heard that they’ve always had, and justice triumphs in the end, once the oppressed enforce this right. ‘Look at our racially and politically diverse society,’ he seems to be saying, as if racial diversity couldn’t exist in a fascist state; as if a country such as France – so racially diverse many of our own oppressed African-Americans moved there at the beginning of the 20^th century to escape the de facto slavery that existed for them here, via Jim Crow – sat out the Second World War! But War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It wasn’t written by Zinn. It was written by a one-time public defender who had represented protesters falsely arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights. There are many people such as the woman to whom I referred above who are still suffering government persecution, but their stories, the stories of the individuals whom the FBI has systematically and continuously persecuted since the 1960s, have not figured in Zinn’s activism. Employed for his lifetime by government contractors who’ve participated in the creation of both bioslavery and the so-called security technology industries which have replaced our public law enforcement infrastructure, and preferring only to tell others how activists in the past utilized now outmoded tactics to fight their government oppressors, Zinn has offered nothing to the targets of his employers’ sponsors.

As Zinn himself tells us, he was well aware of the problems of extra-judicial, state-sponsored terrorism and bioslavery – not because of his work with the victims of them, but because he was in a position to know the extent of the power now wielded in American society by the private sector aligned with the largely defense-contracting public sector, an alliance which, in the 20^th century, was called fascism, and not, patronizingly, a “point of view.” He also knows this fascism has succeeded in removing any possibility for the government-and-private-sector oppressed in America today to be recognized, listened to, enfranchised, or granted justice since our laws protect only our right to redress by our government, and not private industry, to which our government’s entire security has been outsourced.

Will Arnove, or any other high-profile activists’ flak, grant me, and those like me, the dignity Zinn didn’t? That remains to be seen. One thing is clear: if you’re furtively looking at America’s past for its government’s misdeeds, you’re not looking where you should be: around, about you, today. As an historian, Zinn knew better than anyone that his point of view was dated. As “the activist’s activist,” he has much to answer for, since the perception management campaign in which he was engaged to persuade the liberal left in America to believe all their problems here are behind them, continues. This misperception is exponentially more dangerous to us today than it was even when George H.W. Bush declared in 1991 that the “new world order” of “law-and-order” government – instead of government of, by and for the people – had arrived.

In the final analysis, it is not the Howard Zinn’s of the world that have ever waged the war for freedom on its frontlines, no matter the number of nascent groups of activists, or sporadic protests, he or she participated in, or even organized. It has been you and me – the people – facing the amorphous, pervasive, unmitigated terror that defines our particular epoch each and every day of our lives, terror which prevents us from truly living freely. It is up to you to face the truth about those terrors, including the fact that your leading activists may very well be just another component of them, before, you, too, find yourself excluded from society and terrorized into a secret, wall-less prison.

“First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Former Moabit prison inmate and (Lutheran) Pastor Martin Niemöller

Post-war Lectures on the Work of Germany’s Pastors’ Emergency League during WWII, 1945

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