I wonder if there is a single person who believes that politicians are cut from a superior piece of cloth than the rest of us?  Politicians are by nature people whose true motivations are concealed and whose power rests on the support of those with money . . . who are, in turn, motivated to protect their privileged life styles by calling in the chits on politicians.  Despite these relatively well known facts, there are still millions of people who live in La La Land.  They defend the actions of their government and maintain that if something were unsafe, they government would protect us from it.

 

The vast majority of those polled in the U.S. now understand that the government lied about Afghanistan and Iraq, well, most do not seem to understand what motivated the assault on Afghanistan yet we still have people risking their lives to control a country very few could find on the map if Jay Leno caught them on camera one day.  As people, Americans are not very political and I now suspect our appalling educational system is absolutely intentional.  Of all the courses I was ever obliged to take in the formative years of my life, I always felt that civics was the most badly taught.  There was nothing interesting about the idiotic material presented and this was generally unrelated to the pop quizzes that were randomly foisted on us.  If we really think this is the best of all possible worlds and our country is the best of the best, we need but compare our educations (or anything else) to virtually any other country in the world.

 

So, let's get a few things really straight.  Once upon a time, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, allegedly in search of a shorter route to India.  It took him many years to convince potential patrons that his ships would not fall off the edge of the world and even more years to raise the funds for the journey.  As the tee shirts at the recent Chief Seattle celebrations read, "We have been fighting terrorism since 1492."  Queen Isabella was under the thumb of the most evil of all Inquisitors, Torquemada.  She is always represented as a pious and devout queen, but the gold was looted long before the Jesuits began their work.

 

These were enormous undertakings.  Imagine that astronauts had found gold on the Moon (if they actually landed there which is no longer an article of faith to be blindly accepted) and imagine also that the Moon were populated by people who had only stones to use in their own defense.  You can be absolutely sure there would have been countless more lunar expeditions and attempts made to subdue the natives so as to relieve them of their gold.  Does anyone at all doubt this?  I am certain there is no one who doubts this.

 

How would such an exploitation be carried out?  Immense taxes would be levied on ordinary people while the corporations producing the booster rockets and satellites and excavation equipment would be protected by politicians and their elite financiers.  The propaganda machine would crank out jingoistic nonsense about how the beings on the Moon are inferior and need our culture in order to progress or their would be blamed for killing our brave astronauts who risked their lives to protect our country and standard of living.  Nothing pertaining to ownership rights or incursion on their turf would be mentioned.  If public support for more expeditions was faltering, an incident would be created to convince the public that the lunar creatures were somehow dangerous to us.  Maybe they are infected with diseases that could poison us so we need to eradicate them before we take the gold.

 

Politicians always have to justify their deeds with something they think the public will swallow.  It's called bait and most of the time, the public takes the bait. 

 

If you doubt any of this, consider who the Pilgrims were and from what they were fleeing.  In Europe, the Inquisition had been increasing its power over people for hundreds of years.  It began in the 1231 and reigned terror on innocent people for 600 years.  We did not learn anything about it in church or school.   The Plague wiped out one third of the population of Europe but we were only taught that the Pilgrims came in search of religious freedom.  These same lofty spirited free thinkers spent the next few centuries taking land and converting indigenous peoples at gunpoint.  I think we can see that the official version in the textbooks was a spin.

 

A point came when these free spirited descendents of Pilgrims wanted autonomy from King George.  They began with a boycott of British goods.  Then disguised as Indians, they dumped the tea into the harbor.  How many of you remember that these patriots were disguised as Indians?    The jingo was "No taxation without representation" but except for the one on tea, all the taxes had already been repealed three years earlier.  I never learned that in school either.  I suspect, however, that Indians took some of the blow back for "their" audacity in pitching the tea overboard.  There were no arrests for the crime that precipitated the Revolutionary War.

 

Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were considered to be some of the most progressive and fair documents in history.  No other country in the world held similar truths to be self-evident, except, of course, the Iroquois whose system of government influenced Thomas Jefferson.  I met an Iroquois once.  He told me that his people considered government or correct governing to be the highest form of spiritual expression.  Obviously, this possibility has existed since the beginning of time but government becomes just as corrupt as the people whose power becomes the rule of the land.

 

Bush Sr. was caught referring to individuals in the military as OFU (one fodder unit) so if the goal of politics is to have a broad base for recruiting, government needs a lot of underprivileged people to whom it can promise education and other perks in exchange for wearing a uniform and pretending to be our best and bravest.  I am not sure that the men serving under Custer were our best and bravest and I am positive that no one in high positions really believes that the recruits in Afghanistan and Iraq are our best and bravest.  They are the fools and dupes of the military-industrial complex, the financial structure that is destroying our heritage, not just our heritage but that of countless other peoples around the world.

 

What happens in situations such as this is that the corrupt system tries to sustain itself by hook or crook.  It is easy to stay in power if there is consensus but it becomes increasingly more difficult when the prerogatives and premises are challenged.  This is when you have to create a common enemy to unite people behind the Protector.  I don't know who dressed up like Arabs on 9/11 but I am virtually certain it was not the 19 whose mug shots have been burned onto our TV screens.  We want oil and a pretext was needed that could market the boldest and most audacious theft in modern history.

 

Friends.  This will not end on its own.  It will not end because whether or not oil has peaked and whether or not it is running out, the people with privilege who are protecting their perks still have $100 trillion more in sales to complete before allowing the alternatives to replace oil.  Anyone who believes otherwise is deluded.  When I first graduated from Yale, I worked on Wall Street for two and half years.  The question was always why no one would invest in a razor blade that will never go dull.  The answer was because the first company to buy the patent would be Gillette.  A few months ago, a very brave man demonstrated with water-powered car.  This car could use any water at all:  sea water, waste water, tap water.  It separated the hydrogen and oxygen atoms and used the hydrogen for power and sent the oxygen back into the atmosphere.  It would be cheap to operate and put oxygen into the devitalized air that all but a few of us try to use fr our survival.  In short, it would improve the quality of life for practically everyone on the Planet.  The military grabbed the patents.  It's a security thing, I'm sure.  Even after oil runs out, the military will still need to control the disgruntled masses and it will need mobility.

 

Those of us who live on Turtle Island have sordid karma to sort out and and immense shadow to penetrate.  We have been fed an amazing bundle of euphemisms for reality that cloud our clarity and corrupt the foundation of our lives.  To have real self esteem, we have to live in truth, not falsehood, and we have to live in accordance with the truth:  walk our talk.

 

I am advocating boycott as the loudest and most effective way to shift the fulcrum of power.  Don't you think there is a reason that our liberties are being eroded?  It has nothing to do with terrorists; it has to do with dissidence.  That which would make your lives better is being withheld so that the pirates and plunderers can complete this wave of exploitation and prepare for the next.

 

Let's see if I can be really, really clear.  Every time you spend a dollar, your dollar supports the activities of the provider of the goods or service you just bought.  You must therefore spend intelligently.  Yesterday, I launched a Katrina sympathy movement:  boycott State Farm.  I am not for a moment suggesting that other insurance companies are better; however, in the Bayou, it is State Farm whose response has been the most evil.  I have been in torment with a different insurance company for nearly six years.  I can assure you that the corporations are not mistakenly denying legitimate claims.  What they do, they do deliberately and as a matter of policy, sanctioned at the highest levels.  I would actually urge everyone to show solidarity for the people of New Orleans and the broader Gulf region not only by boycotting State Farm but by selling all shares of insurance stock.  Send a message:  we will not tolerate this kind of corporate criminalty. 

 

Selling stock does exactly what you want it to do:  it impacts the stockholders who are served by the reprehensible policies of the insurance companies.  When an agent or anyone else tries to justify behavior, they always say that claims are denied because the primary obligation of the company is to the bottom line.  Let's see:  Madison Avenue writes the jingos that says "like a good neighbor" and so on and so forth, but the company is owned by stockholders who are in an actual conflict of interest state with customers.  They want to minimize "losses" and will incur expenses to cut losses.  What this double talk means is that engineers who are paid to falsify reports and lawyers who defend those findings are "expenses" but compensation to insured customers is a loss and the bookkeeping is so convoluted that stockholders are satisfied with the appearance of profitability.

 

We may not agree about why we are at war with the Moslem world, but we can agree that the response to victims of Katrina has been pitiful.  I am therefore urging you to change insurance carriers if you are insured with State Farm.  Send a message that as caring human beings, we stand with the victims of misfortune.  We are the "good neighbors" State Farm has failed to be.  If you own stock in the insurance industry, sell it.  The first to act will have the main advantage, but what I am sure will happen is that after a few hundred or thousand cancellations of policy, the whole industry will get the message:  customers first.

 

Basically, this means "people first" because our Nation was to be governed by the people and for the people not for corporations.

 

Your dollars matter because you express your priorities and conscience through how you spend them.  There are countless ways to spend more conscientiously, but this boycott is one with the same economic potential as the Boston Tea Party and I urge you to send this email to everyone you know.