The World Can\'t Trust What America Says
John Kaminski
The key to integrity, this old Mayan guy once told me, is admitting our faults. If we don\'t do that, our whole lives are built on a bed of lies. This is the United States of America 2003 - built on a bed of lies which is disintegrating all around us.
The situation makes some of us think that the Ayatollah (if you\'re old enough to remember him - the Iranian religious leader who presided over the taking of American hostages in 1979) was right: America is the Great Satan, he said. But I guess it\'s not important to Americans anymore to tell the truth. I mean... just look at everything.
The greatest military attack on American soil has not even been investigated. Three thousand people killed in downtown New York City and it\'s just swept under the rug as the insane media manipulators rush on to new fabricated crises to cover up the single greatest crime in American history.
Talk about a big lie. Talk about lack of integrity. And the American people, anesthetized as they are with ill-gotten gains, over-the-counter drugs, bad schools and worse, TV, don\'t even raise a collective eyebrow. Telling the truth is just not important to them anymore, if it ever was.
In fact, if there\'s one thing obvious in the world today, it\'s that America does not tell the truth. It says one thing but always means something else. It promises to spread democracy but all it spreads is oil-money-crazed dictatorships all over the world. Is this the America you learned about in school?
Is this the America you hoped to create for your children, where a lie is called the truth and everybody nods like dozing crackheads in front of a slum tenement waiting for their next fix?
It\'s hard to say you\'re proud to be an American when George W. Bush is your president. Embarrassed is more like it.
Whether it was deserved or not, America used to be regarded as a beacon of freedom and justice for the entire world. That\'s why so many people came here. But it\'s radically different now. America is now a Mafia enforcer, which fleeces poverty-stricken countries for protection money. And if those poor banana republics don\'t pony up, well, the U.S. has plenty of depleted uranium bombs to drop on their children, or financial nooses to tighten around the necks of their shattered economies.
It\'s sadly amusing that America claims to be a democracy, yet so many of its principle allies around the world are murderous dictatorships, with plenty of corrupt despots to recruit as clients who are all-too-willing to rip off their own people. Look no farther than Central America.
Yes, let\'s not gild the lily. It\'s protection money, extorted from poor people by the biggest criminal syndicate of them all, the United States of America. That\'s what NAFTA and the WTO and all these IMF bailouts are all about. Countries get in economic trouble by importing too many alluring products at too high a price from the United States.
Then, because corruption is the rule rather than the exception throughout the world, some soulless leader decides to make a bundle by selling off certain of his country\'s valuable natural resources, but the money doesn\'t wind up in the coffers of his own country, it winds up in his own private Swiss bank account, to which he safely flees after he is run out of his own presidential palace by an enraged populace. This has been virtual policy in Mexico throughout the 20th century.
And that\'s if that country is lucky. If that country is unlucky, the corrupt dictator/president doesn\'t go to Switzerland but instead hangs around and presides over the IMF \"bailout,\" in which the country\'s principal assets, especially utilities, are sold at bargain-basement rates to Wall Street plunderers, and the hapless nation is forced to undergo \"austerity\" measures so the New York banks can harvest their exorbitant interest payments.
Austerity measures like hyperinflation and demolition of all social services guarantee any country that bites on the IMF lure an epidemic of poverty, as the middle class is reduced to servitude and thrown out in the streets. This is happening all over South America. Just pick a country (that doesn\'t have oil). Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru. One of the top American plunderers, the Bechtel Corp., came into Bolivia, made a deal with American flunkie dictator Banzer (now dead, thank God), took over the water distribution system, and charged residents (peasant dirt farmers) half their average monthly income for water that they previously got for next to nothing.
For years, the American press has said nothing about this atrocity. Why? Because we essentially do that to every country. That\'s where American \"prosperity\" originates. God help your country if it does have oil. Then the treatment by America will be much worse.
How much more can we say about Iraq? There is absolutely no scintilla of proof that Saddam was about to make any sudden aggressive moves against anyone. We\'ve been bombing and imposing sanctions illegally for a dozen years to make sure he didn\'t use all those nasty chemical and biological weapons we sold him.
Half a million Iraqi children have died because we bombed his water systems and then prevented him from acquiring the materials to fix it. Most Americans donÕt even know the toll that sanctions have taken on the innocent children of that country. They donÕt want to know. That\'s something for Americans to be proud of. This is a classic example of Americans refusing to contemplate the ugly truth.
And as long as we\'re on the subject, there was no legitimate reason for the first Gulf War, either. Iraq had a valid beef against Kuwait, because American oil companies (yes, Neil Bush was involved) were slant drilling into Iraqi oilfields, which is surely an act of economic warfare. Of course, this was never mentioned by the whorish American press.
Look at the other oil countries. Colombia is under permanent siege (both for drugs and oil). Venezuela is currently being wracked by a would-be coup that was blatantly fomented by U.S. business interests. Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are totally repressive military dictatorships, as are all the Stans near the new Caspian Sea oil fields. Mexico\'s in our back pocket, though we\'ve recently loaned them some money so we can fleece them again.
Last weekend, virtually all democratic countries (notable exception: Japan) in the world witnessed massive demonstrations to urge the United States not to throw its poisoned bombs around the Persian Gulf. These demonstrations were not aimed at the great threat Bush and Powell and Rumsfeld are focused on.
The rest of the world (except the neo-Nazi government of Israel) is not concerned about Saddam Hussein. He is no threat to anyone. Most of the bad weapons he had were provided to him by the United States. No, the rest of the world - as recent polls show so clearly - believes the United States is the greatest threat to peace in the world. And how do you figure to defend America\'s reputation with all these blatant lies being told in Washington to justify the mass murder of dark-skinned people who have no army with which to defend themselves?
In point of fact, the disgusting little man who brokered the original Iraq deal was none other than our belligerent defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who sold chemical weapons to Saddam back in the \'80s, shortly after he bestowed another lethal gift on his own citizens in the form of aspartame, the active ingredient used to sweeten Diet Coke and a zillion other things. Aspartame was never formally approved by the FDA except long after the fact, and has been connected to many different health problems. See
http://www.rense.com/general/aspar.htm.
And that\'s to say nothing of Dick Cheney, our surly vice president, who ignored a court order to turn over documents that would have revealed how he and his energy buddies ripped off the state of California for billions of dollars. At the same time, he\'s reaping billions in profits as his old company gets the support contracts from every single military deployment.
Why have the American people said nothing about this? Why have no U.S. newspapers blown the lid off this thing?
Look at the false characters Bush has surrounded himself with to assure the destruction of the environment and the impoverishment of the American people: corporate shills Whitman and Venemen to \"protect\" the environment, an ex-general of the army to conduct \"diplomacy\" with other countries, that general\'s son to assure that everything on TV eventually comes only from one station, a glossolalia-speaking psychopath to enforce the laws of the country.
Why aren\'t millions of Americans besieging their elected representatives, demanding an end to all this criminal behavior? Because it wouldn\'t do any good. All their elected representatives should be indicted themselves. Anyone who ever received a contribution from Enron or Arthur Andersen is obviously an accessory to the robbery of American consumers. All these people belong in the jail at Guantanamo Bay, indefinitely incarcerated without access to lawyers or family under the very terms of the new Orwellian laws they have created.
But there\'s another reason why this won\'t happen. It\'s because the American people have no integrity... as individuals, or as a nation. And in that sense, we have only received what we have deserved.
Congratulations America! Now, the entire world can\'t believe a single thing we say. This is the world we have created for our children.
Continue to scream as we teeter on the edge of the abyss. Right up until that awful moment we fall in, and become as the rest of the world - cringing in terror from the American war machine.
Just remember one thing: in this new century of scripted news alerts and false terror alarms, whatever America says will not be the truth. Americans have made a conscious choice - to lie about everything.
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the coast of Florida and is waiting for the troops to arrive. In the meantime, he may be reached at skylax@comcast.net.
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/worldtrust.html