Our book is an alarm to America to wake up and change before its too late and we cease to exist. We will show that all human endeavors are run by rackets and this theory explains universal human behavior. People don't want to do what's BEST for themselves and others because it pays more in the short-term to accept a less-than-optimal solution that can be milked perpetually. Problems demand solutions and partial solutions that keep problems around guarantee those providing the partial solutions employment. In a couple words, people like to be screwed-up. It gives them things to do and get paid for. In the first chapter, we define what a racket is and how money--certificates of guaranteed human cooperation the love of which enables them to form quickly. Rackets are like parasites that feed off the host organism and if allowed to grow will kill it off, in the case of American Corporation-Consumer racketeering its the entire planet earth's ability to sustain all life that could be destroyed by out-of-control, unwise consumption.

In Chapter 2, we describe how the U.S. Constitution was not prepared to deal with the exodus of citizens from family farms to corporation factories in cities after the civil war and failed to protect the representative democracy that the America experiment of societal freedom within rules of law was based on. In Chapter 3, we describe how a permanent dependency on THEY THE CORPORATIONS to provide the social fabric of America has ensued, robbing WE THE PEOPLE of much control over our own lives and no control or even steering inputs to the helm of the federal government.

Urbanized Americans had to buy into a set of powerful lies in order to get where we are today--enslaved to a myriad of corrupt rackets. They are:

Foundational American Sociological Lies

1. We need the Corporations, without their rackets, we die

2. If I play fair and conform to society, I will win in life--which is material success

3. Reality is what's presented by the media

4. The Federal Government is the expression of American society

5. America is the greatest nation and doesn't need reform

6. Don't think, only feel through experience

Today's American Sociological Fabric

THEY THE CORPORATIONS

Corporations

Government------------------Media

________________________________

WE THE PEOPLE

THEY THE CORPORATIONS are actually now not just the businesses building widgets or providing services but both the government and the media that they have bought off with their massive pools of I-get, you-get (IGYGET) certificates (money).

These lies and social fabric have been foisted upon urban American citizenry through the Thomas Dewey public school system beginning at the turn of the century and finalized by the 24-hour television system in order to make them docile "sheeple" as each one of these lies enables racketeer elites to perpetuate and build myriad new rackets. Each one disarms the citizen from challenging a vital area of the status quo and basically sets him or her up as a victim-for-life without them even knowing it. When they are miserable and defeated they assume its because they were personally lacking or just didn't get the necessary lucky breaks to "rise to the top"--they never consider that maybe the deck was stacked against them with no chance intended of a non-corrupt person to rise into a position strong enough to threaten the rackets.

In chapter 4, we delve into how the majority of Americans are conned into playing by a BS set of rules and fair play and long hours of work to keep them distracted and unable to interfere while evil men do sub-rosa "white collar" criminal acts just under the radar screen of violent crimes and get the competitive advantage over law-abiding rival firms, we call this using the "Wedge of Evil". The next lie and chapter 5 in our book is that reality is what the media says it is because the press are allegedly honest observers of some sort of "mythological scoreboard" that we are watching from our seats in a stadium of life. On the playing field of life is not you or I--the star players and only true actors are the Federal Government, the lie that Calamity (uncle) Sam is America which is covered in the succeeding chapter 6. Not surprisingly, the corporation racketeers run the local, state and federal governments and they have brain-washed journalism teachers to inculcate into their offspring that ONLY A GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL can give birth to a "STORY". The national narrative of reality itself cannot be described by you or I except as BS pandering "human interest" fluff, TRUTH is what the government says it is or its "not a story". We don't exist. Physical, external reality does not exist. Only what the government says exists, exists. So the "scoreboard" only shows scores the government says are scored regardless of what's really going on in reality on the playing field of life.

Chapter 7 describes the lie that America (AKA the Federal Government) is great and has no serious sins or flaws; to say otherwise is to make you un-patriotically correct, a communist, etc. you fill-in-the-blank for the in-vogue insult. The racketeers invoke all kinds of emotional Abraham Lincoln, George Washington stuff to smokescreen that all that's going on today would be violently disapproved by them but their good name is juxtaposed with all kinds of evil misdeeds to lull everyone into thinking somehow we'll just muddle through.

The last lie in Chapter 8 is the one that is fatal; that you have no right to criticize a damn thing going on unless you are actively involved in it. You must take LSD to know its unhealthy. You must be a racketeer and "feel their pain" in order to "earn" the right to criticize---which means of course you must compromise yourself and become a racketeer at least for a time to do so. The racketeers know if you become one of them the chances are due to sunk costs of life effort you will become one of them and be disarmed. There is no COMMON sense because there's no way everyone can experience every walk of life---aka all the rackets to "earn" the right to have a sensibility about how that area of human life should be and should achieve for the BEST, greatest common denominator arrangement. Its the classic sin of PRIDE, the pride of life and godless French philosophers Sartre/Camus existentialistic narcissism.

For Chapter 9 we ask why do the ruling elites need us, anyway? What is it that they have against us? If they hare us so much why do they keep us around?

America's conduct since the end of WW2 has increasingly been more and more evil as the WE THE PEOPLE vs THEY THE GOVERNMENT divide grows fed by mass mind-control by 24/7/365 TV and mass-produced consumerism creating a docile populace that doesn't fight evil men and women from doing enormous evil in our name for themselves. America is a nation of individual consumer machines addicted to material consumption who to feed its greed habit will go into their neighbor's house to steal resources that is placing its very survival at risk at the hands of those capable of defending themselves who are growing as we alienate ourselves from the rest of the world as a lawless, immoral nation-state.

America's population grows by 1, 000, 000 people each year, making our 300, 000, 000 total population increasingly hungry and unmanageable in the event the comfortable consumerism fed by cheap oil should collapse as the Hurricane Katrina societal collapse in Louisiana showed. Evil men beginning at the turn of the century with the advent of the industrial age learned quickly how to brain-wash the masses to consume their mass-produced widgets and maximize their profits on orders of magnitude the family-owned, rural America founding fathers in 1789 simply could not anticipate and place adequate safeguards into our form of government to prevent evil from corrupting the entire nation.

Can we Reason with the American People to Consciously Choose Against Racketeering?

The Milgen experiment showed that 65% of the populace would murder another human being if an authority figure told them to do so. This means only 35% of the populace has a strong moral conscience willing to defy authority to stay true to an internal compass of values. Ponerologists conclude that 25% of any human population have NO CONSCIENCE whatsoever; with their conclusions leading that these people are BORN THAT WAY. These unpleasant truths are staggering and warn us that we Americans are long over-due for a serious wake-up to realities before a minority of evil people---but by no means a small number of evil men and women destroy the nation and perhaps the world with it. What this means is that 1 in every 4 Americans has no conscience at all--and the FIRST thing anyone should ask when meeting any person is if that person is a psychopath/sociopath? Milgen teaches us that another 40% has such a weak conscience that they will do whatever they are told by whoever is ruling over them--if the 25% psycho/sociopaths are in charge as we see in the current Bush neocon administration, you will suddenly see "Tom Brokaw wanting to kill ragheads"--which is exactly what happened after the false flag September 11, 2001 attacks which were actually done by psycho/sociopaths within the U.S. government. These conscience-less murderers have gotten bolder and bolder with each year beginning with the Kennedy assassination in 1963 which did not result in any massive work-place strikes by the people demanding justice be done. This is why its a matter of national survival that we reform our government so psycho/sociopaths cannot be in our executive, legislative or judicial branches at all and this include our military, police, and teaching organizations all of whom need to be PROFESSIONS where individual conscience drives all actions--not bureaucracies where lying to please the boss to get promoted is the norm. If the moral 35% segment of the population comprises our governmental functions its possible that we have the other 40% participate in a morally-sound national life but the 25% will fight against it lusting to "kill ragheads" or "make a great society" of welfare recipients that can be exploited for racketeering ends.

The problem is the 25% psycho/sociopaths would still populate our corporations doing the "business" of creating the fabric of life in the society and these evil men know how to be pied pipers to the 40% so together both create a 65% majority that wants the "bread & circuses" consumerist racket to continue which can be used to put their puppets into the government if no anti-psycho/sociopath barriers are in place--which is exactly what has happened since 1913 when the U.S. Constitution's balance of powers was ruined by the direct election of Senators in state-wide election campaigns fed by corporate dollars.

So the answer to the question is NO---as long as there's a weak conscience 40% that the evil 25% psycho/sociopaths can exploit to create rackets the only people we can reason with against this are the 35% moral minority who probably already agree with us anyway! As a matter of saving ourselves from imminent national destruction, we must immediately weed out and block psycho/sociopaths from our nation's governments. Then, we must increase the numbers of people with strong consciences from 35% to over 50% so we can by choice operate professional, family and community responsibly run businesses that will not feed greed and consumptive excess nor destroy the life-giving capacity of our planet. In a nutshell, we need to come to our collective senses before its too late. To do this, we need to THINK about what the hell we are doing and you cannot do this if you are watching TV programs numbing you into a false reality of somehow being a part of something bigger when really you are on the sidelines doing nothing as the psycho/sociopaths feed you their programs to keep you consuming for their rackets. TV qualitatively in itself is not evil if its content is morally sound--but quantitatively if its on 24/7/365 and you watch it for several hours daily even if it was all moral "Little House on the Prairie" it would be still a great evil as it has taken you out of the fight against evil in reality making you a house-embedded "couch potato". The greatest difference between the WW2 "Greatest Generation" that beat the Great Depression and won WW2 by direct, personal participation in external reality and our sorry, introverted, current generation is that we have TV. The internet is TV by the individual's choice that can be either very good or very evil in the content chosen, but corporate TV is all evil by its intrinsic temptation to occupy all of one's time and its qualitative content that is made to brain-wash you to feed your lusts--which you cannot control if its turned on. Americans need to turn their minds ON by turning their TVs OFF.

An example of how an occasional audio/visual program can inspire us is the recent movie "American Gangster" has this exact theme and could be better titled "American Racketeer". The evil, old, black gangster played by George Stanford Brown in the beginning of the movie expresses the consumerist decay of an 1960s America that has grown too large with no one on duty looking out as symbolized by him dying of a heart attack in an impersonal appliance store with no clerks on duty to call an ambulance. Protege' Denzel Washington takes over his racket and makes it significantly more evil by flooding Harlem with cheap drugs from South East Asia under-cutting the Italian mafia by minimalist layers of handling bureaucracy and a twisted ideal of product excellence. The monies from this lucrative drug trade are so great that the final line of defense of society from self-destruction--the police are easily bought off. Then the pivotal scene in this movie based on real-life events occurs. A man--one man of the 35% with a moral compass so strong happens to somehow join the police force and not get ousted by all the corrupt cops around him. Played by Russell Crowe, he and his under cover partner discover a parked car with $1, 000, 000 of illegal drug money, enough money to live well-off for the rest of their lives if they chose to take it and not report it to anyone as most cops would do. Crowe says no. He grabs the money and turns it into his police department making him and his partner un-trusted outcasts with the rest of the NYC police department leading to his partner eventually getting killed as he's hooked on drugs himself. Crowe himself has to face his own immorality at his son's custody hearing when his wife played by the gorgeous Carla Gugino accuses him of being a moral hypocrite going after crooks when he himself was a womanizer. In a heart-wrenching scene, he says, "You are right" and he gives her custody of their son. The last line stand against drug money bribery by Crowe is just enough leverage that a similar morally sound Federal agent discovers him and places him in charge of an anti-drug task force that "discovers" Denzel's racket and brings him in to justice. Then an amazing thing happens. Crowe reasons with him; explaining to him why its wrong all the people his cheap drugs have destroyed. Denzel asks him, "Is it true you turned in $1 MILLION dollars instead of taking it?". When Crowe says its true, this is the life-changing moment when Denzel's character comes to his senses and realizes that good men do exist and goodness is worth fighting for. We also learn at this point, why he was a racketeer in crime in the first place--in his childhood the police as representatives of society at large--had thrown him and his mom out of their house and brutalized them. Denzel then assists Crowe in ridding the police department of corrupt cops.

So the question arises, what if there are no Russell Crowe types in American society at the critical moment to stop us from collectively going over the edge into destruction?

What if the bureaucracies have so strangled our governmental functions that its simply intolerable for any 35% moral person to stay involved?

America needs to come to its collective senses not just over drugs but over our entire national life. We need to face head-on the unpleasant realities of the true extent of evil which is growing and not being checked in any way. Later in this book we propose exactly how to do this.

Life's Rackets

The following is a great essay excepting on liberal bullshit pet peeves which I struck a line through. Homosexuality is an intolerable civilization-killer like the crime of murder. The Israelis would leave their enemies alone if they'd leave them alone.

www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080531_the_corporate_state_and_the_subversion_of_democracy/

The Corporate State and the Subversion of Democracy

Posted on May 31, 2008

By Chris Hedges

Note: Chris Hedges gave this keynote address on Wednesday, May 28, in Furman University's Younts Conference Center. The address was part of protests by faculty and students over the South Carolina college's decision to invite George W. Bush to give the May 31 commencement address. When it was announced in May that President Bush would deliver the commencement address, 222 students and faculty signed and posted on the school's Web site a statement titled "We Object." The statement cites the war in Iraq and the administration's "obstructing progress on reducing greenhouse gases while favoring billions in tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies that are earning record profits." "We are ashamed of the actions of this administration. The war in Iraq has cost the lives of over 4,000 brave and honorable U.S. military personnel," the statement read. "Because we love this country and the ideals it stands for, we accept our civic responsibility to speak out against these actions that violate American values."

---

I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were African-American or Native American or of Japanese descent in World War II or poor or gay or a woman or an immigrant, but it was a country I loved and honored. This country gave me hope that it could be better. It paid its workers wages that were envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law, and respect for human rights. It had social programs from Head Start to welfare to Social Security to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, was dedicated to protecting the interests of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a media that was diverse and endowed with the integrity to give a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to explain ourselves to ourselves. I am not blind to the imperfections of this America, or the failures to always meet these ideals at home and abroad. I spent 20 years of my life in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent reporting in countries where crimes and injustices were committed in our name, whether during the Contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. But there was much that was good and decent and honorable in our country. And there was hope.

The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father's father, and his father's father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. The "consent of the governed" has become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science are obsolete. Our state, our nation, has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish political elite, a small and privileged group which governs on behalf of moneyed interests. We are undergoing, as John Ralston Saul wrote, "a coup d'etat in slow motion." We are being impoverished-legally, economically, spiritually and politically.

And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs, where the American dream will be no more than that-a dream, where those who work hard for a living can no longer earn a decent wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweat shops in China or the decaying rust belt of Ohio, where democratic dissent is condemned as treason and ruthlessly silenced.

I single out no party. The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the Republicans. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers, he insisted, would vote Democratic anyway.

They had no choice. It was better, he argued, to take corporate money. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton's leadership, had virtual fundraising parity with the Republicans. Today the Democrats get more. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.

The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. NAFTA would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States.

"There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home," President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he was lobbying for the bill.

But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the curious effect of reversing every one of Clinton's rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans for Mexican farmers, they had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States. The Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At least 2 million Mexican farmers have been driven off their land since 1994.

And guess where many of them went? This desperate flight of poor Mexicans into the United States is now being exacerbated by large-scale factory closures along the border as manufacturers pack up and leave Mexico for the cut-rate embrace of China's totalitarian capitalism. But we were assured that goods would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone would be happier. I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA was great if you were a corporation. It was a disaster if you were a worker.

Clinton's welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation's social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But these were the lucky ones.

In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding.

The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill. And today we stand in shame with 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars, most for nonviolent drug offenses. More than one in 100 adults in the United States is incarcerated and one in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. The United States, with less than 5 per cent of the global population, has almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

The growing desperation across the United States is unleashing not simply a recession-we have been in a recession for some time now-but the possibility of a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. This desperation has provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low wages and without unions or benefits. This is good news if you are a corporation. It is very bad news if you work for a living. For the bottom 90 percent of Americans, annual income has been on a slow, steady decline for three decades. The majority's income peaked at $ 33,000 in 1973. By 2005, according to New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston in his book Free Lunch, it had fallen to a bit more than $29,000, this despite three decades of economic expansion.

And where did that money go? Ask ExxonMobil, the biggest U.S. oil and gas company, which made a $10.9-billion profit in the first quarter of this year, leaving us to pay close to $4 a gallon to fill up our cars. Or better yet, ask Exxon Mobil Corp Chief Executive Rex Tillerson, whose compensation rose nearly 18 percent to $21.7 million in 2007, when the oil company pulled in the largest profit ever for a U.S. company. His take-home pay package included $1.75 million in salary, a $3.36-million bonus, and $16.1 million of stock and option awards, according to a company filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He also received nearly $430,000 of other compensation, including $229,331 for personal security and $41,122 for use of the company aircraft. In addition to his pay package, Tillerson, 56, received more than $7.6 million from exercising options and stock awards during the year. Exxon Mobil earned $40.61 billion in 2007, up 3 percent from the previous year. But Tillerson's 2007 pay was not even the highest mark for the U.S. oil and gas industry. Occidental Petroleum Corp. CEO Ray Irani made $33.6 million and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. chief James Hackett took in $26.7 million over the same period.

For each dollar earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5 cents. That was the top 10th's greatest share of the income pie, Johnston writes, since 1929, just before the Roaring '20s collapsed in the Great Depression. And within the top 10 percent, those who made more than $100,000, nearly all the gains went to the top 10th of 1 percent, people like Tillerson, or Irani or Hackett, who made at least $1.7 million that year. And until we have real election reform, until we make it possible to run for national office without candidates kissing the rings of Tillersons, Iranis and Hacketts to get hundreds of millions of dollars, this rape of America will continue.

While the Democrats have been very bad, George W. Bush has been even worse. Let's set aside Iraq-the worst foreign policy blunder in American history. George Bush has also done more to dismantle our Constitution, ignore or revoke our statutes and reverse regulations that protected American citizens from corporate abuse than any other president in recent American history. The president, as the Boston Globe reported, has claimed the authority, through "signing statements," to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." George Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional. The Bush administration has gutted environmental, food and product safety, and workplace safety standards along with their enforcement.

And this is why coal mines collapse, the housing bubble has blown up in our face and we are sold lead-contaminated toys imported from China. Bush has done more than any president to hand our government directly over to corporations, which now get 40 percent of federal discretionary spending. Over 800,000 jobs once handled by government employees have been outsourced to corporations, a move that has not only further empowered our shadow corporate government but helped destroy federal workforce unions. Everything from federal prisons, the management of regulatory and scientific reviews, the processing or denial of Freedom of Information requests, interrogating prisoners and running the world's largest mercenary army in Iraq has become corporate. And these corporations, in a perverse arrangement, make their money off of the American citizen.

Halliburton in 2003 was given a no-bid and non-compete $7-billion contract to repair Iraq's oil fields, as well as the power to oversee and control Iraq's entire oil production. This has now become $130 billion in contract awards to Halliburton. And flush with taxpayer dollars, what has Haliburton done? It has made sure only 36 of its 143 subsidiaries are incorporated in the United States and 107 subsidiaries (or 75 percent) are incorporated in 30 different countries. Halliburton is able through this arrangement to lower its tax liability on foreign income by establishing a "controlled foreign corporation" and subsidiaries inside low-tax, or no-tax, countries known as a "tax havens." They take our money. They squander it. And our corporate government not only funds them but protects them. Halliburton-and Halliburton is just one example-is the engine of our new, rogue corporate state, serviced by people like George Bush and Dick Cheney, once the company's CEO.

What the Oil-Rich Nation of Dubai is Doing with U.S. Petro-Dollars: Fantasy Island--For Real

www.combatreform.com/dubaifantasyworldbuiltbyoildollars.pps

www.youtube.com/v/k7JASOno2IQ&hl

The disparity between our oligarchy and the working class has created a new global serfdom. Credit Suisse analysts estimates that the number of subprime foreclosures in the United States over the next two years will total 1,390,000 and that by the end of 2012, 12.7 percent of all residential borrowers in the United States will be forced out of their homes. The corporate state, which as an idea is an abstraction to many Americans, is very real when the pieces are carefully put together and linked to a system of corporate power that has made this poverty, the denial of our constitutional rights and a state of permanent war inevitable. The assault on the American working class-an assault that has devastated members of my own family- is nearly complete. The U.S. economy has 3.2 million fewer jobs today than it did when George Bush took office, including 2.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs. In the past three years, nearly one in five U.S. workers was laid off. Among workers laid off from full-time work, roughly one-fourth were earning less than $40,000 annually.

A total of 15 million U.S. workers are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to job hunt, according to the Labor Department. There are whole sections of the United States which now resemble the developing world. There has been a Weimarization of the American working class. And the assault on the middle class is now under way.

Anything that can be put on software-from finance to architecture to engineering-can and is being outsourced to workers in countries such as India or China who accept a fraction of the pay and work without benefits. And both the Republican and Democratic parties, beholden to corporations for money and power, allow this to happen.

Take a look at our government departments. Who runs the Defense Department? The Department of Interior? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? Who runs the Department of Labor? Corporations. And in an election year where we are numbed by absurdities we hear nothing about this subordinating of the American people to corporate power. The political debates, which have become popularity contests, are ridiculous and empty. They do not confront the real and advanced destruction of our democracy. They do not confront the takeover of our electoral processes.

We have watched over the past few decades the rise of a powerful web of interlocking corporate entities, a network of arrangements within subsectors, industries or other partial jurisdictions to diminish and often abolish outside control and oversight. These corporations have neutralized national, state and judicial authority.

They dominate, for example, a bloated and wasteful defense industry which has become sacrosanct and beyond the reach of politicians, most of whom are left defending military projects in their districts, no matter how redundant, because they provide jobs. This has permitted a military-industrial complex, which contributes lavishly to political campaigns, to spread across the country with virtual impunity. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history.

The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions on the planet. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the Second World War even as we have more than $400 billion in annual deficits. More than half of federal discretionary spending goes to defense.

This will not end when Bush leaves office. And so we build Cold War relics like $ 3.4-billion submarines and stealth fighters to evade radar systems the Soviets never built and spend $ 8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense that will be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb. The defense industry is able to monopolize the best scientific and research talent and squander the nation's resources and investment capital.

These defense industries produce nothing that is useful for society or the national trade account. Melman, like President Eisenhower, saw the defense industry as viral, something that, as it grew, destroyed a healthy economy. And so we produce sophisticated fighter jets while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule, and our automotive industry tanks.

We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and starve technologies to fight against global warming and renewable energy.

Universities are awash in defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies.

This massive military spending, aided by this $3-trillion war, is hollowing us out from the inside. Our bridges and levees collapse, our schools decay and our safety net is taken away.

The corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by every president since, has destroyed the public and private institutions that protected workers and safeguarded citizens. Only 7.8 per cent of workers in the private sector are unionized. This is about the same percentage as in the early 1900s. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called "near poverty."

Our health care system is broken. Eighteen thousand people die in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine, every year because they can't afford health care. That is six times the number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks, and these unnecessary deaths continue year after year.

But we do not hear these stories of pain and dislocation. We are diverted by bread and circus. News reports do little more than report on trivia and celebrity gossip. The FCC, in an example of how far our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox's celebrity gossip program "TMZ" and the Christian Broadcast Network's "700 Club" as "bona fide newscasts." The economist Charlotte Twight calls this vast corporate system of spectacle and democratic collapse "participatory fascism."

How did we get here? How did this happen? In a word, deregulation-the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state. Our political decline came about because of deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to a capital economy.

This understanding led Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 29, 1938, to send a message to Congress titled "Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power." In it, he wrote:

"The first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism-ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living."

The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the 20th century. Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace, they serve as bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are gone, now that we have a state that is run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and perhaps terrifying political consequences.

I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. In depressed former manufacturing towns from Ohio to Kentucky it was the same. There are tens of millions of Americans for whom the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. They have lost hope.

Fear and instability has plunged the working class into personal and economic despair, and not surprisingly into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we re-enfranchise these Americans back into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.

As the pressure mounts, as this despair and desperation reaches into larger and larger segments of the American populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability.

It is not accidental that with the rise of the corporate state comes the rise of the security state. This is why the Bush White House has pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of "extraordinary rendition," the warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. It is part of a package. It comes together. It is not about terrorism or national security. It is about control. It is about their control of us.

Sen. Frank Church, as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975, investigated the government's massive and highly secretive National Security Agency.

He wrote:

"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.

Such is the capability of this technology. ... I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. ..."

When Sen. Church made this statement the NSA was not authorized to spy on American citizens. Today it is.

In a military brig in Charleston an American citizen, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, is being held in a black hole set up on American soil. He was stripped on June 23, 2003, by George Bush of his constitutional rights and declared an "enemy combatant." He is being detained without charge, interrogated without a lawyer and held indefinitely.

Lawyers for the Bush administration claim that the president can send the military into any neighborhood, any town or suburb, capture a citizen and hold him or her in prison without charge. They base this claim on the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress after 9/11, that gives President Bush the power to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against anyone involved in planning, aiding or carrying out the attacks. But Al-Mari was not captured in Afghanistan or Iraq. He was arrested in Peoria, Ill., in December 2001. And if the president can declare American citizens living inside the United States to be enemy combatants and order them stripped of constitutional rights, what does this mean for us? How long can we be held without charge? Without lawyers? Without access to the outside world? Maybe Al-Mari is, as the government claims, a terrorist. I don't know. But I do know that if this becomes a precedent, if it is not overturned by the courts, habeas corpus, the most important bulwark of our democratic state, will be dead.

We are fed lie after lie to mask the destruction the corporate state has wrought in our lives. The consumer price index, for example, used by the government to measure inflation, has become meaningless. To keep the official inflation figures low the government has been substituting basic products they once measured to check for inflation with ones that do not rise very much in price. This trick has kept the cost-of-living increases tied to the CPI artificially low. The disconnect between what we are told and what is actually true is worthy of the old East German state.

The New York Times' consumer reporter, W.P. Dunleavy, wrote that her groceries now cost $587 a month, up from $400 a year earlier. This is a 40 percent increase. California economist John Williams, who runs an organization called Shadow Statistics, contends that if Washington still used the CPI measurements applied back in the 1970s, inflation would be in the 10 percent range. The advantage to the corporations is huge.

A false inflation rate, one far lower than the real rate, keeps equitable interest payments on bank accounts and certificates of deposit down. It masks the deterioration of the American economy. The Potemkin statistics allow corporations and the corporate state to walk away from obligations tied to real adjustments for inflation.

These statistics mean that less is paid out in Social Security and pensions. It has reduced the interest on the multitrillion-dollar debt. Corporations never have to pay real cost-of-living increases to their employees. The term "unemployment" has also been steadily redefined. This has rendered official data on employment worthless. In real terms about 10 percent of the working population is unemployed, a figure that is, over the long run, unsustainable.

The economy, despite the official statistics, is not growing. It is shrinking. And as the nation crumbles we are awash with the terrible simplicity of false statistics. We confuse our emotional responses, carefully manipulated by advertisers, pundits, spin doctors, television hosts, political consultants and focus groups, with knowledge. It is how we elect presidents and those we send to Congress, how we make decisions, even decisions to go to war. It is how we view the world. Four media giants-AOL-Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch's NewsGroup-control nearly everything we read, see and hear. This growing disconnect with reality is the hallmark of a totalitarian state.

"Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines," Hannah Arendt wrote, "totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.

The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda-before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone's disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world-lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world."

So what do we do? Voting is not enough. If voting was that effective, to quote the activist Philip Berrigan, it would be illegal. And voting in an age when elections are stolen by rigged ballot machines and a stacked Supreme Court willing to overturn all legal precedent to make George Bush president, will not work.

I am not saying do not vote. We should all vote. But that has to be the starting point if we want to reclaim America. We must lobby, organize and advocate for the dissolution of the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. The WTO and NAFTA have handcuffed workers, consumers and stymied our efforts to create clean environments.

These agreements are beyond the control of our courts and have crippled our weakened regulatory agencies. The WTO forces our working class to compete with brutalized child and prison labor overseas, to be reduced to this level of slave labor or to go without meaningful work.

We need to repeal the anti-worker Taft-Hartley law of 1947. The act obstructs the organization of unions. We need to transfer control of pension funds from management to workers. If these pension funds, worth trillions of dollars, were in the hands of workers the working class would own a third of the New York Stock Exchange.

The working class has every right to be, to steal a line from Obama, bitter with liberal elites. I am bitter. I have seen what the loss of manufacturing jobs and the death of the labor movement did to my relatives in the former mill towns in Maine. Their story is the story of tens of millions of Americans who can no longer find a job that supports a family and provides basic benefits. Human beings are not commodities. They are not goods. They grieve, and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities.

The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.

George Bush, who will be here on Saturday, has done more to shred, violate or absent the government from its obligations under domestic and international law. He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons, and defied the Geneva Convention and human rights law.

He has set up offshore penal colonies where we deny detainees basic rights and openly engage in torture. He launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public. And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we allow the Democratic majority in Congress to get away with its refusal to begin the process of impeachment, which appears likely, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences.

For a world without treaties, statutes and laws is a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation-largely put in place by the United States-destroy our own constitutional rights and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. We are one, maybe two, terrorist attacks away from a police state. Time is running out.

We must not allow international laws and treaties-ones that set minimum standards of behavior and provide a framework for competing social, political, economic and religious groups and interests to resolve differences-to be discarded.

The exercise of power without law is tyranny. And the consequences of George Bush's violation of the law, his creation of legal black holes that can swallow American citizens along with those outside our borders, run in a direct line from the White House to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and military brigs in cities such as Charleston.

George Bush-we now know from the leaked Downing Street memo-fabricated a legal pretext for war. He decided to charge Saddam Hussein with the material breach of the resolution passed in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. He had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was in breach of this resolution. And so he and his advisers manufactured reports of weapons of mass destruction and disseminated them to a frightened and manipulated press and public. In short, he lied. He lied to us and to the rest of the world.

There are tens of thousands, perhaps a few hundred thousand people, who have been killed and maimed in a war that has no legal justification, a war waged in violation of international law, a war that under the post-Nuremberg laws is defined as "a criminal war of aggression."

We have blundered into nations we know little about. We are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917. It will be a cesspool for us as well. We can either begin an orderly withdrawal or watch the mission collapse.

A rule-based world matters. The creation of international bodies and laws, the sanctity of our constitutional rights, have allowed us to stand pre-eminent as a nation-one that seeks at its best to respect and defend the rule of law. If we demolish the fragile and delicate domestic and international order, if we permit George Bush to create a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation, democracy and law are worthless, if we allow these international and domestic legal safeguards to unravel, our moral and political authority will plummet. We will erode the possibility of cooperation between nation-states, including our closest allies. We will lose our country. And we will, in the end, see visited upon us the evils we visit on others.

Read Antigone, when the king imposes his will without listening to those he rules or Thucydides' history. Read how Athens' expanding empire saw it become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. How the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. This, Thucydides wrote, is what doomed Athenian democracy; Athens destroyed itself.

For the primary instrument of tyranny and empire is war and war is a poison, a poison which at times we must ingest just as a cancer patient must ingest a poison to survive. But if we do not understand the poison of war-if we do not understand how deadly that poison is-it can kill us just as surely as the disease.

"Hope, St. Augustine wrote, has two beautiful daughters. They are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to see they do not remain the way they are." We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society.

We are waging a war that devours lives and capital, and that cannot ultimately be won. We are told we need to give up our rights to be safe, to be protected. In short, we are made afraid. We are told to hand over all that is best about our nation to those like George Bush and Dick Cheney who seek to destroy our nation.

A state of fear only engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear, insanity, and then paralysis. In the center of Dante's circle the damned remained motionless. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage, indeed the militancy, to challenge those in the Democratic and Republican parties who herd us towards the corporate state, we will have squandered our courage and our integrity when we need it most.

Home

The family should not be a racket, but mostly it is. What is absolutely the BEST should be what drives everything the family does--but this is no longer the case. Essentially, two young people fall in love and have sex. Whether by accident or on purpose, they make new humans. At this point, the racket they gain is NOT HAVING TO FACE WHO THEY ARE OR WHAT LIFE IS ALL ABOUT. The life of their children become the driving force for everything, even though all parents are doing is passing on the unsolved problem of existence on to their children; who will do the same to their children and so on, so the troubling question hopefully doesn't have to be answered. Its a sure-fire escape from reality for at least 80-100 years.

This is why the premature death of parent's children strikes such an emotional response from today's aging, Post-WW2 "baby boomers". Their entire comfort zone of not having to face self has been stripped away and their own mortality is in their face yet again. Children are death's consolation prize that we are somehow going to live on.

Church

The church should be THE place where the TRUTH is researched and examined and propagated to not even allow the racketeers to take control; but as you can see the church has failed. The typical rant against the church is it "got all fat and happy" and the Lord Jesus Christ does say this is a contributing factor in the book of Revelation in the Bible. However, this is not it--its the rejection of the love of TRUTH being our first love in favor of comfortable consumerism rackets that has caused the church to become its own peace-of-mind, God-isn't-mad-at-me racket.

You can say, "hey! waita minute! I always hear social commentary in church condemning this or that" etc. etc.

In America, the church has created a save-machine racket. Basically, even though Christ forgives us of ALL sins when we accept his pardon ONE TIME, the church makes one constantly feel inadequate over myriad sins of the flesh dating back to 19th century revivalism and one has to keep going forward in altar calls each sunday--which of course keeps the full-time ministry staff employed and buildings built and maintained, so there you have it--another racket. Most Americans think church is a BUILDING when actually its supposed to be a GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE. Jim Baumgaertel writes:

The Evangelical Subculture

Two Different Conversions

When I became a follower of Jesus Christ I underwent two different conversions, although I didn't realize it at the time. First, I was converted from my old life into the Body of Christ by reconciliation with God through Jesus. Hallelujah! At about the same time I bought into the Evangelical Subculture under the false impression that it WAS the Body of Christ. It took me years to realize the difference between the two.

I had been aware of "Christendom": that worldly religious structure consisting of political and economic empires and bureaucracies, both Protestant and Catholic, that had fought religious wars and undertaken crusades to retake the "Holy Land", that had burned people at the stake, that continued to preach false Christs and false gospels of works, and that continues to talk about the counterfeit unity called Ecumenicalism.

But I had not understood the nature of the Evangelical Subculture, that is a part of the worldly structure of "Christendom". This subculture has its own organizations and institutions, denominations, parachurch organizations; its own magazines and radio stations and TV networks; its own schools and colleges and universities; its own celebrities; its own music industry and book stores; its own marketing and advertising worlds.

Like Joining a Club

The tragedy of the Evangelical Subculture is that people who have a sincere desire to follow Jesus get side tracked into a zeal for being a part of this worldly system. It is like joining a club. The club member begins to wear the clothes and trinkets bought at the "Christian" book stores; watch "Christian" TV and listen to "Christian" radio; buy the latest fad books that sweep the "Christian media"; subscribe to the "Christian" magazines; worship the "Christian" celebrities; use all the latest jargon promoted in the latest books by the celebrity authors.

A cult-like mentality develops among people who see this Evangelical system as identical to the Body of Christ. Their zeal is for the trappings of the subculture. It is its own religion. If someone tries to point out the unbiblical nature of some aspect of this subculture people will take offense because you are criticizing their religion. The subculture becomes the message. The "gospel" that people preach is for conversion to the system, not really to Jesus Christ.

The Subculture, Institutionalism, and Deception

The pop culture of Evangelicalism feeds on institutionalism, denominationalism, "non-denominational" institutional church organizations, and the professional clergy system. The professional clergy and their church organizations, in turn, find an indoctrinated constituency to fill their pews and programs. Both the subculture and the institutional churches turn a relationship with Jesus and his people into a participation in a religion and a lifestyle.

This Evangelical Subculture has played a major role in setting professing Christians up for deception. It seduces people to think and act like the subculture instead of reading the Bible for themselves and deriving their understanding from the Bible. It has been this subculture that has infected the Evangelicals with psychology, self-esteem, political action and social activism, unity at the expense of sound doctrine, mysticism, and cult attachments to gurus, movements, and organizations. Ultimately, the end of this deception is a merging of the Evangelical Subculture with the global counterfeit religious vision.

We ought to be content with the simplicity of following Jesus and being the Body of Christ together with those the Lord provides for fellowship, according to the teachings of the Apostles in the New Testament.

Jim Baumgaertel

Proclamation, Invitation, and Warning

http://procinwarn.com

jimbaum@procinwarn.com

Jim has done a brilliant job of describing the CHURCH RACKET.

A racket is a less-than-optimal, never-ending "solutional" good/service that can be milked indefinitely for gain of the racketeers.

In the Church Racket you never fully get "saved" you are always dirty and in need of an altar call which keeps the Church Racket going and the racketeers fed.

His analysis was great until the end. His conclusion that all we need to do is be pious on our own and be oblivious to all that's going on around us so as not to be in the Church Racket is wrong. Read Francis Schaeffer's works.

"Jesus was a carpenter".

He built things, he offered TANGIBLE things to the world and he also assembled together a Special Forces "A" Team of 12 disciples to DO THINGS.

What we need are small units of REAL CHRISTIANS taking on REAL world problems to be the salt preservative of society as well as preaching the gospel to get their loyalty established to God's team via the pardon of Christ. If you or anyone does nothing tangible in regards to the world we live in and only take part in a save machine you are an accomplice to the evil world order that sustains you. If all Christianity is a bunch of people waiting to die, we are violating Jesus Christ's example to be a carpenter and do tangible things. Here is my take on what Christians should do:

www.combatreform.com/braveamerican.htm

Media

The rise of the mass media at the turn of the century has been paid for by corporations to make the people hunger for their products with increasingly evil psychological manipulations.

Corporations

Work

Government

School

Police/Courts

Military

General Butler's book is remarkable in many ways. Essentially he's calling on WE THE PEOPLE through our federal government to do 3 things; one take-over all war industry corporations and put them on a private E1's salary, two to have ALL the military service eligible men to VOTE on whether to go to war or not, and three, restrict the U.S. military to operations no farther than 200 miles to shore.

The tragedy is that Butler is right about steps 1 and 2. We should amend the U.S. Constitution to enable these measures. We have to be clever so DoD doesn't work around the military age male vote by going to push-button, robotic wars. The problem is Butler is wrong about step 3 the 200 mile limit and this is used by his nay-sayers to overthrow the first two sound measures. Its too bad Butler died before WW2 began to comment on it, even better if he could have hung on past 1945 to comment like H.G. Wells did. I would not be surprised if Butler was murdered. The 200 mile offensive/defensive limit sadly is not adequate in an age of long-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads aptly explained by LTG Gavin in his 1958 book, War and Peace in the space Age. www.combatreform.com/warandpeaceinthespaceage.htm

We need to advocate a "Butler Modified" Plan. This would be his first two points and the third point replaced by a military that can launch punitive raids and regime change wars if the threat of a geniune Hitler appears who is capable or is already attacking us indirectly with sub-national conflict means. Iran for example, would have to be shown as being such a threat to first the Congress and then the military age males for a vote before we went to war. IMHO, we should do away with the all volunteer/victim force/farce so the corporations do not have a group of weak egolings eager to self-validate and/or cash-in financially from corporate wars of convenience. America should have a mandatory 2-year active duty and perpetual reserve service thereafter national service of ALL its citizens and those in the military service would get to vote on wars.

An EXCELLENT new film on war is "Shooter" starring Mark Wahlberg. Aside from being technotactically accurate on current weaponry and fieldcraft, it presents a compelling case for Butler's racket theory of wars being started by corporations and Wahlberg's character as a retired marine gunnery sergeant missing the action being drawn into the role of Lee Harvey Oswald patsy/fall guy. The movie then poses the situation of what if? LHO was COMPETENT and escaped the ring of security during the assassination event? The film also at the end of the journey arrives at an U.S. Senator played with Academy Award-worthy skill by Ned Beatty bought off by the corporations telling Wahlberg that the ends justify the means because the corporations provide jobs for the people ie, the social fabric otherwise they'd be still living in grass huts. Another scoundrel Wahlberg encounters explains its not the actual shooters that matter since like him, they are expendible to the corporate interests, its BASIC HUMAN NATURE to racketeer that is to blame and its a cancer impossible to pinpoint just on one group or individuals and get rid of them as it will pop up again. Since metaphysically its basic human ego and greed we are fighting, our SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT must be first restored to its original founding father's intented checks and balances but then IMPROVED ON to account for the industrial age creating massive pools of money from making widgets/gallons of goop used to RACKETEER.

Another remarkable thing about Butler is that HE REFERS TO HIMSELF AS A SOLDIER not a "marine". He is clearly not like today's narcissistic egomaniac gyrenes full of their own circular illogic and incompetences. The technical advisor for "Shooter" former sniper Pat Garrity appears to be of the same humble professional mindset as Butler judging from the behind-the-scenes segment on how the movie was made. Its too bad the majority of today's marines are not like Butler and Garrity and are caught up in their own ego racket.

War is a Racket was published in 1935 by Round Table Press, Inc., New York. It was condensed in Reader's Digest as a book supplement, with an introduction by Lowell Thomas, who praised Butler's "...moral as well as physical courage... "

Hans Schmidt, in his 1987 biography of Butler, Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History, offers the following assessment: "Much of War is a Racket was stock antiwar, anti-imperialist idiom, part of an American tradition dating back to the eighteenth century. Butler's particular contribution was his recantation, denouncing war on moral grounds after having been a warrior hero and spending most of his life as a military insider. The theme remained vigorously patriotic and nationalistic, decrying imperialism as a disgrace rooted in the greed of a privileged few."

Chapter One

WAR IS A RACKET WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a Soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep's eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce [one unique occasion], their dispute over the Polish Corridor.

The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia [Yugoslavia] complicated matters. Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other's throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people - not those who fight and pay and die - only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.

Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?

Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce in "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:

"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace... War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it."

Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war - anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter's dispute with Jugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.

Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.

Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war - a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit - fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.

It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people - who do not profit.

Chapter Two

WHO MAKES THE PROFITS?

The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven't paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children's children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits - ah! that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent - the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.

Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket - and are safely pocketed. Let's just take a few examples:

Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people - didn't one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn't much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let's look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump - or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

Or, let's take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.

There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let's look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.

Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.

Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.

Let's group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.

A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.

Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren't the only ones. There are still others. Let's take leather.

For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That's all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.

International Nickel Company - and you can't have a war without nickel - showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.

American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.

Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.

And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public - even before a Senate investigatory body.

But here's how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.

Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 Soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a Soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a Soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought - and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.

There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn't any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it - so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.

Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the Soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches - one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!

Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no Soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.

There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.

Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 - count them if you live long enough - was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.

Undershirts for Soldiers cost 14¢ [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30¢ to 40¢ each for them - a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers - all got theirs.

Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment - knapsacks and the things that go to fill them - crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them - and they will do it all over again the next time.

There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.

One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.

Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn't ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.

The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn't float! The seams opened up - and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.

It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.

The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.

Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee - with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator - to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn't suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.

Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses - that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a Soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.

There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.

Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.

Chapter Three

WHO PAYS THE BILLS?

Who provides the profits - these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them - in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us - the people - got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par - and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.

But the Soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men - men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.

In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement - the young boys couldn't stand it.

That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead - they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded - they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too - they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam - on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain - with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.

But don't forget - the Soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.

Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and Soldiers and Sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the Soldiers all got their share - at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the Soldier anyway. Then Soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the Soldier couldn't.

Napoleon once said,

"All men are enamored of decorations...they positively hunger for them."

So by developing the Napoleonic system - the medal business - the government learned it could get Soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.

In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.

So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side...it is His will that the Germans be killed.

And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies...to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American Soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."

Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.

All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed.

But wait!

Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance - something the employer pays for in an enlightened state - and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.

Then, the most crowning insolence of all - he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most Soldiers got no money at all on pay days.

We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back - when they came back from the war and couldn't find work - at $84 and $86. And the Soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!

Yes, the Soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly - his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.

When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too - as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.

And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.

Chapter Four

HOW TO SMASH THIS RACKET!

WELL, it's a racket, all right.

A few profit - and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation - it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted - to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages - all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -

yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders - everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the Soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.

Why shouldn't they?

They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The Soldiers are!

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket - that and nothing else.

Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won't permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people - those who do the suffering and still pay the price - make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.

Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying. There wouldn't be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant - all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war - voting on whether the nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms - to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.

There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide - and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.

A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.

At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don't shout that "We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation." Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.

Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.

The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.

The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.

The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can't go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.

To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.

We must take the profit out of war.

We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.

We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.

Chapter Five

TO HELL WITH WAR!

I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.

Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war." Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.

Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?

Money.

An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:

"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.

If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money...and Germany won't.

So..."

Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy" and a "war to end all wars."

Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.

And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.

Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don't mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional Soldiers and our Sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?

The professional Soldiers and Sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.

The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.

There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough.

The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.

Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the Soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.

But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war - even the munitions makers.

So...I say,

TO HELL WITH WAR!

Medical

That many of us are going to get injured in our fast-moving society and ALL of us are going to get old and die is apparently not enough "business" for the medical "profession".

Loving This Creates All Human Evil: What is money, anyway?

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