Chapter 22, The God Card, has as much to do with global competition within the afterglow of the Nixon Shock of 1971, as it does with the inevitable results of Crime Control now playing out in Ferguson, MO. There is a direct correlation between Flat Money, street crime, and terrorism. Once the ability to make a reasonable living wage is removed, then social unrest (in many facets) is inevitable.
As noted in previous post of this work, not everyone can, or should, go into nursing (as touted in the 2000s, not everyone can, or should, go into the construction trades (as expressed currently), not everyone can, or should, go into Information Technology (as advised in the 1990s). Such bubbles in the workforce lead to inevitable blowouts (this has been discussed elsewhere in this work).
Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson, are direct results of Nixon's decision in 1971, and no one, even Obama, wants to address the root cause of conflict; they only want to "crack skulls," or cheer on the ones who are "cracking the skulls."
The warning of John F. Kennedy is appropriate:
Cliff Potts
November 14, 2014
Israel
did offer to live at peace with the Arab majority in the newly formed nation in
1948. The offer was rejected. Where Jordan
exists today was, under the Balfour Declaration, where the Palestine State
was to exist. While today’s news feeds are filled with the horrible Jews backed
by the horrible United
States oppressing the honorable Arabs, this
is not quite the facts. The Arabs are quite capable of sophisticated propaganda
in their own right. The Arabs backed Germany and lost. The Arabs backed
the Soviet Union and lost. Now they perpetuate
that story that the United States
was founded by Satanists, exiled from Egypt ,
who infiltrated the Masonic Lodge in England in the 1600s.
Dubai does not have an
extradition treaty with the U.S.
and the current administration is in short time mode as seen with the “Scooter”
Libby presidential intervention. Mr. Bush and his neo-conservative cronies will
be out of office in January of 2009. Barring some kind of catastrophic attack
against the United States
it is doubtful that the GOP will retain the presidency in the November 2008
elections. Once again in this political climate a major corporate citizen and a
primary government contractor are engaged in activities which are not good for
its primary customer, the United
States of America , its owners, or its
employees.
As noted in previous post of this work, not everyone can, or should, go into nursing (as touted in the 2000s, not everyone can, or should, go into the construction trades (as expressed currently), not everyone can, or should, go into Information Technology (as advised in the 1990s). Such bubbles in the workforce lead to inevitable blowouts (this has been discussed elsewhere in this work).
Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson, are direct results of Nixon's decision in 1971, and no one, even Obama, wants to address the root cause of conflict; they only want to "crack skulls," or cheer on the ones who are "cracking the skulls."
The warning of John F. Kennedy is appropriate:
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
Cliff Potts
November 14, 2014
Wealth, Women, and War is released in accordance with the solidarity principals of Occupy Wall Street adopted on February 9, 2012.
The God Card
In the beginning of this report we discussed
utilizing the writings of antiquity as the basis for the social contract. We
examined this in some depth in the last chapter concerning institutional
religion in the United
States .
In the first century Rome ,
at the height of the Roman Empire , we know
that the production of products ensured a good economy for skilled workmen. We
are told by the economist, that production and not jobs is the key to economic
strength today. Some like, Bryan Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, point out that most people in the United States
today do not understand the difference between jobs and production. This was
pointed out in the June 14, 2007 edition of The
Economist.[1]
This conceptually diminishes the argument for the need of economic opportunity.
It may be just another corporate smoke screen.
The United
States , due to the decisions made in the
1970s to kill stagflation (the conjunction of a stagnant economy and a post-war
inflationary spike), shifted away from production, and the by-product of
employment. How one can build a productive economy with less than a fully
utilized working population seems unanswered. There seems to be an outlook
which emphasizes that less employment opportunity is somehow healthy for the
economy. While fewer employees do reduce cost for the corporations, the whole
argument seems a little shortsighted. Where it seems to fail is in the arena of
human dynamic and the individual and group response to diminished economic
rewards.
Within the framework of the hard line response to the
inevitable spike in crime as a result to the lack of opportunity there is a
“crime control” mentality. That fails society on a number of levels. One, it
increases the need for a wide range of law enforcement personnel; that is a
cost without adding to production of goods and services. Two, such jobs are low
paying with little to no benefits resulting in the same economic conditions for
the watchers as the watched. The resulting effect is collusion between the
watched and the watchers for economic gain. We use to call this “corruption;”
if we keep it up we will be calling it “standard operating procedure.” This
will also push the population further and further away from any additional
support of the operative status quo. Those who do not end up incarcerated will
be hard pressed to continue to support those who are. However, through taxation,
they will be forced to take on the burden of increasing the support of the
increased prison population.
The “get tough” advocates are working on the assumption
that only a small portion of the population will engage in criminal activity.
That is a bad assumption. We are already seeing an increase in the prison
population which is disproportionate to the demographic which commits crimes.
There are fewer people in the United
States population in the ages of fifteen to
thirty, yet more people in prison. That shows that the assumption is a fallacy,
and reinforces the connection between crime and economic opportunity without
the expert arguments of the economist. It never ceases to be amazing just how
well we can rationalize the base motives of humanity; in this case being
corporate egoism or debauchery.
In the 1980s, the shift away from the economics of
production through opportunity was pushed even further in the application of
“supply side economics.” In the span of six years the U.S. abandoned two thousand years
of economic practices which built the economy from Imperial Rome to the U.S.
Superpower. Within an evolutionary framework it makes a certain amount of
sense. The collectiveness of the functional social order has been abandoned in
favor of a Darwinist approach to economics. We have come to the conclusion that
somehow we do not need each other. This shift in philosophy is how we have come
to the present situation: wealth is controlled by a few talented and gifted
business savvy individuals and the skilled craftsman is left to fend for
himself against the corporate behemoth.
The craftsman is not competing against equally
skilled craftsmen from around the globe. He is competing against the goods sold
locally which are produced in far flung locations in underdeveloped economies.
The local craftsman’s CODB (Cost of Doing Business) is fixed, based on the
pricing of the local economy. The craftsman from an underdeveloped country, often
subsidized by their local government – as seen in Japan , sells his product for less
because his CODB is less and the additional collective resources are provided by his government. This
subsidization is also the case in China
and India .
It is worth noting that our three competitors have cohesive societies, and have
criticized the United States
as being a mongrel nation, then turned around and chided the U.S. for being racist. These
countries are not stupid; they are playing on our worse social fears. What is
worse, is that our corporations sell us out to them. During a time of war,
presuming that we are really at war, would such actions not be considered
treasonous?
This brings up another point of contention between
the corporation and the individual. No matter how strong, or how wealthy, the
corporation cannot continue to function in a way which is considered disloyal
to the local geographical social order. Politics will find a way. History shows
that the corporation’s will shall be pushed aside for the sake of the combined
individual will within the politics of a given region. It may take a generation
of living under the yoke of deprivation, but it does occur. Moreover it occurs
quite often.
Maybe the concept of the nation state is dead. Maybe,
due to technology, we are truly a global community. However, ponder this: did
the telegraph, linking far flung communities prevent the Civil War, or did it
exacerbate it? Rather than use the communication tool to alleviate problems,
the wires sung with stories of challenges and abuse until the nation broke down
in utter chaos. The south seceded from the Union out of fear of what the Union
would do once Abraham Lincoln took office, not because of anything that was
done by James Buchanan prior to the inauguration of Lincoln . The only thing which was aided by
the communication technology was the heightening of the fear and misgiving of
what would happen. Bring this forward. The telephone was invented by Alexander
Graham Bell in 1876. It did not prevent World War One. Nor, for that matter,
did the wireless radio. Transatlantic cables, radio, and the airplane did not
prevent World War Two. Television did not prevent the Cold War, the Korean
Conflict, Vietnam ,
and the wide assortment of bush wars around the world. These technologies did
make the world a much smaller place.
In today’s global economy we are dependant upon the
interconnectivity of people on the individual level via the internet to
facilitate the globalization process. Yet, the same technology which has made
the world smaller may have sped up the friction between cultural differences.
The technology made the world a smaller place, facilitated global trade, but
the cultural differences still do exist.
Philosophical differences still exist. Generational
differences still exist. Demographic differences still exist. All of these
prejudicial differences come into play in the world around us. Our ability to
communicate globally does not negate those differences. Just because these
differences are taboo discussion points in polite society, does not mean they
do not exist; it simply means that that we have decided to ignore the rabid red
dragon in the living room.
Many old philosophies dictate specific tribal and/or
racial superiority. These philosophies are often couched in proverbs which
include the phrases “God’s will,” “God’s law,” “Natural Law,” etc. etc. When
there is plenty to go around and there is relative prosperity for all, such
prejudices are academic and irrelevant. It is during these times that society
is motivated to do away with as many forms of prejudice as it deems detrimental
to society as a whole. However, when resources are lean, primal tribal identity
becomes a primary factor within a geographically specific location. From this
tribal identification is derived the self-assured justification necessary for
one group to have, or acquire, the resources of another group, or individual.
The arguments concerning the existence of Israel
are good examples. According to popular Western religious tradition, Israel
exists because “God” ordained that portion of the land to the Jews. Based on
the standard Jewish text, the land deeded to the Jews by God extends from the
Mediterranean to Iraq
and consumes much of the Arab land today. This would consume Saudi Arabia , Jordan ,
Syria , and Iraq . This is far more than the
beachfront and scrubland which Israel
occupies today.
In spite of Arab assertions, Syria was created by the League of Nations as a
colony of France in 1922,
and Palestine (including at the time Jordan ) was ceded to Great Britain in 1916. Saudi Arabia ’s existence dates back to 1744;
which makes it only slightly older than the United States itself. The argument
against Israel
is somewhat self-serving. The Balfour Declaration establishing, at least
conceptually, a Jewish homeland was made in 1917. The whole region fell into
the hands of the Western powers because the Ottoman Empire
sided with the Austrians and Germans and lost World War One. The Arabs have no
more legal right to control the land or its destiny than the Jews do.
Criminal activity in opposition to a legal mandate is
only as good as the ability to gain control and hold it in a negotiated peace.
This is something which the Arabs have not been able to do since 1948 when the
Balfour Declaration was finally implemented. The deeper discussion concerning
what the Arabs did when to whom, and what Israel did to whom when, is beyond
the scope of this report. For a detailed discussion on the situation see A History of Israel: From the Rise of
Zionism to Our Time by Howard M. Sachar.
When political arguments fail, and survival hangs in
the balance it is from the writings or antiquity that the God of the Jews and
the Christians arises and final authorization and ultimate justification. The
Jews, however, never did occupy the amount of territory ceded to them in their
scriptures. The current location of Israel
is roughly the size of Chicago ,
Illinois and occupies the same
track of land which they held tribally in the days of the Greek and Roman
Empires following the last Babylonian captivity period. In spite of the
overwhelming disinformation concerning Israel , the current conflict does
not date back millennium; it is relatively new on the geopolitical landscape.
According to Western historic record, Israel ceased to exist in 73 A.D. Rome , growing tired of the
chronic Jewish uprisings, murdered, enslaved, and scattered the Jewish people.
This account is in dispute by the Arabs who held that stretch of real estate
from the fall of Rome (Constantinople )
in 1453 to 1919. In 1948 the Jews were finally granted the sovereign state of Israel
as reparation for the allowed Nazi genocide during World War Two. This secured
a westward leaning political state in the Soviet sphere of influence. The Soviet
Union, needing friendly neighbors as a buffer against Western Europe and the United States gave Islamic nations favorable
status until 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan . The preferential
treatment to Islam remains an oddity in Soviet History. In Richard Pipes’ A Concise History of the Russian Revolution
the blatant discrimination against the Jews and Christians is documented; the
preference towards Islam is also documented. Islam was given preference for
totally pragmatic reasons.[2]
The religions of antiquity had nothing to do with the decision. The U.S
decision to support Israel
equally had little to do with religion. Religion is simply a safe all-encompassing
label to differentiate complex political states of affairs.
These facts are, as stated, opposed by the Arabs who
controlled the land from mid 1400s, under the Ottoman
Empire , to the late 1940s under the French and British empires.
The Arabs rebuff that there never was a Jewish State in the region around Jerusalem . Their view,
sees the power shift from the Greeks, to the Romans, to Mohammad, and through
Mohammad’s obedience to God, the establishment of God’s true kingdom (and one
true religion) through the Ottoman Empire . It
was an Empire which stretched from the Middle East across North Africa, north
to Spain
and the Basque region. The core of the Empire lasted from the fall of
Constantinople until the end of World War One with the capitulation to Great Britain and France
by Germany
and her allies.
The occupation of the Ottoman-Turkish Empire by France and Great
Britain (and subsequent U.S. influence) is seen by the
Arabs as a continuation of the struggle which began with the Crusades. Those
crusades, popularized in the peasant class nobles as the righteous against
Islam, were triggered by the Arab’s excessive tolls penalizing the Christian
pilgrims to Jerusalem and more importantly, interference with the all important
spice trade along the silk road from India. Spices played a major part in the
preservation of meat in Medieval Europe. As Christendom rallied around the
Cross of Christ, Arabs rallied around Muhammad. The economics of the situation
were pushed aside, and the series of wars, at least in popular mythology became
a struggle of religions.
Once again, the ultimate authority and justification
to continue the struggle is God. However, God, and the specifics surrounding
God, are used only as a tribal identifier, and it has very little to do with
the nature of the conflict. The conflict remains socioeconomic and political.
God, or religion, has nothing to do with it. Today it is about the control of
the oil resources in the region.
One can leave the existence of the monotheistic God
of the Near East and Middle East to the
philosophers, theologians and the preachers. The events in the world today have
very little to do with “the true living God.” Current events come about due to
market manipulations, technological factors, human inventiveness, and the lack
thereof.
The reason for the Jewish/Arab conflict is resource
scarcity. The first resource is the land itself. The second resource which
brings the west into the conflict is oil. The God card is played only to bring
in the sympathies of the mass supporters on each side of the conflict.
Admittedly this is a lightly glossed over view of the
complexity of the Arab/Jewish conflict, but it is sufficient for the purposes
of this report. It illustrates how the God card is played to justify a conflict
which is due primarily to resource scarcity.
The Jews traveled from relative deprivation in post
World War Two Europe and the Soviet Union , to
a location where they would not be prosecuted because of their view of God. The
Jews, due to the litigious nature of their own religious tradition, have a
propensity to be articulate, independent, free-thinking, and quite adapted to
the capitalistic system. It is not their system, but one inherited by the Jews
over eons of wanderings around the old.
Money lending in antiquity was considered a dirty
business, as such it was one of the business in which the Jews were allowed to
excel by European and Russian Royalty. They became good at the business and
were persecuted for excelling at the very business to which they had adapted
out of necessity.
Hitler’s destruction of the Jews was due to the amount
of wealth perceived via propaganda to be held by the Jews. The Holocaust had
little to do with religion. It was mass murder to secure the wealth held by a
minority in Europe; a case of competition gone out of control in the capitalist
system due to the deprivation imposed upon Germany after World War One.
A huge debt was imposed on the Germans, and they were
given little economic ability to repay that debt. This economic deprivation
created a criminal nation state. In the aftermath of this massive genocide, the
Jews pressed Great Britain
to live up to the agreement under the Balfour Declaration, and the exodus to
the Promised Land began again.
The Jews chose that stretch of beachfront and scrub land
because their writings of antiquity deeded that stretch of land to them in the
days of the Egyptian Pharaohs. The original occupation took place around 1290
B.C.E. (approximately 3297 years ago). Even that exodus has its roots in the proscription
of a minority by a majority due in no small part to politics, and socioeconomic
status of the Jews within Egypt .
At some point in the near future, it is doubtful that
the United States will be so
sympathetic toward the rights of the Arab peoples who live in the United States .
Another terrorist strike during another economic slump may be all it takes to
completely strip any sympathy toward the Arab population.
In an unfortunate twist of events, the West
subsequently became dependent upon the oil resources under Arab lands. Had our
technology not become so dependent upon oil the Near East
would have become more of a back water on the world stage.
Ford’s automobile was originally designed to be
fueled by ethanol or gasoline. The first production engine was a hybrid.
Gasoline derived from oil proved to be more effective at a lower energy cost.
The same holds true for diesel fuel. The original diesel engine was designed to
run off peanut oil. What was a bright technology improvement in the early 1900s
has become a source of intrigue and global conflict in the early 2000s.
Ethanol is still a poor tradeoff for gasoline as the
off-spec grains used to produce Ethanol are usually reserved for feed-lots.
Bio-diesel derived from recycling cooking oil is proving to be a useful
alternative.
Due to the amount of income which could be generated
in the oil business, the corporations, using their influence, maneuvered the
Eisenhower administration into utilizing a resource which was limited and
non-renewable. This in turn trapped the United States into the middle of
the Arab/Israeli conflict beyond the political games of the Cold War.
The ultimate authority to justify the conflict is
God. However, God, if the monotheistic God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims
does exist, seems to have little to nothing to do with the conflict; except as
an endless source of disagreement to add fuel to the fire. All the real issues
surrounding the decisions concerning the development of the region’s resources
are made by men within the corporations based on the capitalist world view on
both sides of the globe.[3]
Having attacked soft targets in Africa, and military
sites around the Saudi peninsula, the Islamic fundamentalists whose culture is
in direct conflict with the Western free market values traveled to the United States
to strike at the heart of their economic enemy. They organized their cells.
They executed their crimes. They did not hit various religious institutions
within the United States .
While we have been given religious objections as their rational for their
actions, none of the targets were Jewish or Christian institutions. Had the
attacks been based on religious bigotry, one would expect the targets to be
religious in nature. They struck at the transportation system (the airlines
themselves were part of the targeting) and the economic and military power hubs
of the United States .
The rhetoric following the events on 9/11 does pose
some questions which remain unanswered in the political debate of the early
21st Century.
Who, in the United States , knew there attacks
were going to occur? Rumor has it that the Saudi royal family in the U.S.
fled the nation days before the attack.
Who supported the Islamic Judaists who perpetuated
the attacks?
Where did the support funding come from?
How involved were the local communities (Islamic or
otherwise) who might have economic reasons to benefit from the attacks?
Since 16 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia ,
what gains have the Saudis made since 2001?
Did the Saudis benefit from the fall of Afghanistan ’s
Taliban or the fall of Saddam?
Why was no one in the United States held accountable for
the events of September 11, 2001? No one in the CIA, NSA, or FBI even resigned
for the biggest Foreign Intelligence blunders since Japan
attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Unfortunately these answers are hard to pinpoint. Internal
factors have been fogged up because the attacks have been used to engage in
global political adventurism. This adventurism is based on cultural, or tribal,
motivations of the current administration. It is no exaggeration to say that
the power structure has had a quasi-secular, religious view that the United States
under the neo-conservatives has the right to rule the world.
Whatever can be said about the current
administration, it has to be said that the last four administrations have done
a poor job in protecting the interests and safety of the population of the United States .
When Reagan faced the terrorists in Lebanon , he pulled out. He further
supported Saddam with arms during the Iran/Iraq war. George H.W. Bush escalated
the cultural class by placing foreign troops into Saudi Arabia under the guise of
opposing Saddam’s aggression. Clinton
blatantly ignored the threat and sought to appease the Islamic Fundamentalists
by intervening in the Balkans, and doing little to aggressively investigate the
rise the Al-Qaeda. George W. Bush used the events of September 2001 to launch a
war into Iraq
which has no connection whatsoever to the events of September 11, 2001.
Furthermore, in the current scheme of things, what rational government cuts
taxes as it goes to war? What rational government supports crippling the
national economy during a time of war? What rational government supports
shifting economic growth to a foreign power during a time of war? What rational
government supports building the economy of a possibly aggressive enemy during
a time of war?
One of the common jabs of the current conservative
commentators is that the opposition doesn’t “get it.” They are right! Many of
the current administration’s detractors “don’t get it.” The actions of the Bush
administration are utterly irrational, and blatantly criminal. Could it be that
the administration and its supporters have been operating at level two of
Maslow’s pyramid and are failing to find the needed safety at that level?
Much of the world today views the United States as a greater threat
to the world than the Islamic terrorists. While the terrorists are well armed,
trained, motivated street gangs they are running out of funding. The use of
gasoline, and propane tanks indicate that conventional munitions are becoming
scarce for them. This would seem to indicate that they no longer have the
support of a nation state even at a clandestine level. This could indicate that
the Saudi and the Iranian government support, long implied and never proved,
are drying up.
Lacking military munitions, one can conclude some of
the actions taken by the United
States during this administration are paying
off. Al-Qaeda may be hanging out on its own.
Whether one agrees that there is a threat posed by
the Bush administration’s actions or not, the perception following the
invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq can only mean that the United States
and the corporations are viewed as a negative liability in the general
population.
Case in point: Halliburton is moving its world
headquarters to the Middle East . While they
are touting that this is a move to better serve their customers, even
conservatives are viewing the move as a mean of escaping prosecution in light
of the alleged fraud committed during the current operations in Iraq .
One has to question if such a move is in anyone’s
best interest, or if it is only further proof that the corporations are flawed
by their make-up and corrupt in their activities. Moreover, will it create a
view in the current political and socioeconomic environment that the corporations
are a pariah on the social landscape?
Errors in judgment by one corporation can have ripple
effects which will paint all corporations in a dim light. That much, if nothing
else, is proved in the discussion on Critical Criminology.
Enron, an energy company out of Texas , has already created certain
skepticism about the ethics within the energy industry. Will the actions of
Halliburton further diminish the trust and good will towards the remaining Texas corporate
community and the energy industry? Will it force the rest of the nation to
review their affiliations as well? Remember Andersen Consulting was virtually
destroyed when Enron’s house of paper collapsed. They were acquitted later of
any wrong doing, but the damage was already done. Corporations do not trust
each other to do what is right, but they demand that the people put their trust
in the corporations.
Whatever the answer is, one thing is for certain, God
has little or nothing to do with the activities of the corporations. God
created people. People created corporations. We created them. They are our
responsibility.
[1]
Douglas, B. (2007). The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad
Policies. Princeton , NJ :
Princeton University Press. Lexington (2007, June 14). America 's irrational voters.
Economist .
[2]
Pipes, R. (1995). A Concise History of the Russian Revolution. New York : Vintage
Books.pp 312-342
[3]
As human beings, we do find way to disenfranchise others. In doing so, one
group enhances its own status and economic leverage over another. We do this
individually. We do it along tribal lines. While religion is one of those
identifiers, race is another one. It is no error to conclude that a racial
minority within a given region is granted less resources and opportunity than
the majority within the same region. Gender discrimination has also played a
role in deciding who gets what resources.
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