I’m really not some Zapruder watchin’, X-Files lovin’ Roswell tourin’ conspiracy freak. I’m a regular guy with a regular job and regular bills to pay but I gotta tell you it sure looks weird around here. I have better things to do with my life than to tell you that our beloved country has been taken over by an astonishingly small, supremely wealthy (read powerful) group of men in what can only be described as a full military and political coup and then have you look at me that way. The promise of a government of, by and for the people is crumbling all around us and many of us don’t mind. Or, as I’ve had one friend tell me, ‘If that’s true, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. So why dwell on it?’ This is one very practical response. After all, if we play along and work really, really hard and stay far away from trouble and if our skin is white, we stand a reasonable chance of getting all we really need for ourselves and our family in this lifetime. Our TV's will get bigger, our meals will be supersized and every soccer mom will have an SUV. That’s the unspoken deal with the devil that is now on the table. I know we’ve all had the shit scared out of us but does that mean we have to take it?

We saw the strangest sequence of events in the history of our country happen since the last Presidential election. We saw it all start in a state run by the winner’s brother. We know the Bush family and the Bin Laden family have been partners in business ventures for years. We know of the mysterious Carlyle Group, a consortium of the super-rich made up of exiled players from the Reagan-Bush years who took up residence down the block from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue at the dawn of the Clinton era. We know of Bush Sr.’s business junkets to Saudi Arabia on the Carlyle Group’s behalf in the late 90’s. We know of the negotiations with the Taliban to build highly profitable oil pipelines through Afghanistan which fell apart a month before the World Trade Center was destroyed. We know Enron hand picked appointees from an office INSIDE the White House so they could shape the country’s energy policies to be the most profitable, actually conspiring to cause California’s great energy shortage of 2000 and bleed them dry and THEN they take all the money out of the multi-layered corporation, leaving their employees with destitute futures. In the days following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, our government helped the Saudis and bin Laden family charter a jet flying two dozen members of Osama's family out of the US before the FBI could question them. The ties between the Bushes, the Bin Ladens and the Lays are so strong, so intimate, that it is not hard to imagine them all playing softball together at a big Crawford Texas pig roast back in ’98 and planning the days when they would run the world. After all, they all made their fortunes together as oil barons. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, TEXAS SCARES THE LIVING HELL OUT OF ME! As far as I’m concerned, that place is one big grassy knoll, filled with shadow government Larry Hagmans, coexisting with a dangerous blend of hayseeds, coal miners and Klansmen. I’m telling you, I wouldn’t ride through Dealy Plaza on a sunny day in Suge Knight’s armored Escalade.
I’m trying not to get worked up here but Holy Christ! The same people who control America’s supply of oil and energy…in other words, the people who possess the one element that makes all aspects of life as we know it possible…light, heat, transportation, food…now control the Federal Branch of our government. Does anybody really think this is a good idea? The very idea of America rests with the vigilant checking of absolute power. The whole concept of one man (or group) being allowed to hold only so much power for only a limited amount of time was originally sold to us by George Washington. Without that, it is just a matter of time before a free nation evolves into a Feudal State. You remember Feudalism from junior high school don’t you? That’s where the vast majority of the population toils at their daily jobs, they’re allowed to keep just enough wages to feed and clothe their families and the rest of the country’s output goes to serve… the wealthiest… 1%… of the …population…

Feudalism occurs naturally, over time, as wealth and power are continuously consolidated. No society is immune. In Medieval times the currency was land. Now it is energy.
I can still see Al Gore trying desparately to explain the whole 1% concept to America during those tragic debates and failing miserably. Bush dismissed the whole thing as "fuzzy math", deftly painting his rival as the pointy headed kid in class who was good at math. Listen, even if you hate kids who are good in math, and you think that the 1% are entitled to everything they can get because you consider yourself a libertarian and a true-believer in the capitalist dream, just know one thing:
That 1% CAN get anything it wants and it would gut and skin you if it thought you would make a nice coat.

What we are witnessing in America is the culmination of a process that has been evolving since the end of World War II. The process has been to continuously find ways to subvert the systems of our democratic process and our capitalist infrastructure and methodically, subtly, seize control of the world. That’s right boys and girls, world domination. (cue maniacal laughter) The fact is, World War II really was just that: a war for the world. And luckily, The United States and The Soviet Union won. It’s when it came time to divvy up the spoils that it got ugly. With the world neatly divided between two superpowers, the so-called "cold war" began immediately. It was simply Us vs Them. We know what eventually happened to Them but how much do we know about what happened to Us? How much do we want to know?

The simple Spy Vs Spy mentality of the cold war served as umbrella justification for a whole new America. One that’s responsible for the creation of the Korean War, Vietnam War, Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay Of Pigs, the Original Star Wars (starring Ronald Reagan as Obi Wan), NATO, the C.I.A., hundreds of covert shenanigans in every part of the world, the most significant possibly being our 98% secret involvement in the ten year Soviet-Afghanistan War. With chess-master strategy, we anonymously bankrolled the Afghan forces year after year. While the Soviets went bankrupt trying to keep up, we planted the seeds that would eventually give rise to Al Qaeda, Osama, and the new world of invisible police and shadow governments that we now call home. Or as Bush Sr. named it, tipping his hand years ago, "The New World Order."

Now, the good news is that it’s still not too late. The reason we don’t see tanks rolling through Times Square is that it would kill the golden goose. It is in EVERYONE’S interest to keep some semblance of America alive because if we all truly believed that our elections were completely falsified, that the news we read and see is tainted with bias and misinformation because it’s all owned by three corporate superpowers, that the great promise of the New Technology is being twisted into some Orwellian nightmare, spying on us on the street and in our homes… Well, if we really believed that, we might not be so fucking motivated to go to our daily jobs and bang our heads against the glass ceiling of the middle class just so the Gross National Product can stay nice and fat for a ruling elite. As in any Feudal state, the serfs do the important work and we need to believe in at least a part of the American dream in order to get that work done. Part of the original infrastructure must always remain in place so even the most powerful are limited to subverting the system from within. And with every passing day, it is being subverted with a zeal that we have never seen before. The first and most important thing we all must do is to get angry. This is hard because we are very frightened but, every day, you can see the stir of a new awakening. We are being forced to choose the method of our destruction: death by terrorist or blind allegiance to a shadow government who say they will protect us. Ultimately, we will choose neither.

The freedom that so many people have been ready to surrender, the freedom to be as crazy as we want to be...the freedom to dream unbridled...is the rich fertile soil from which all that is American grows. It's from where all of our true invention has come. This non-judgmental, sweetly anonymous freedom is the one and only thing that makes us unique in the world. Realistically, I don’t see us completely defeating the massive body of super-corporations, powerful lobbies and secret societies that make up the right wing of our government. We can contain them though. Push them back down Pennsylvania Avenue into their steel and glass caves before John Ashcroft takes one more razor blade to the Bill Of Rights. Yes, the current President still has a very high approval rating but the facade is beginning to crack. Abandoning Afganistan (again!), forgetting Osama and taking over Iraq for fabricated reasons and even that backfiring photo op on the aircraft carrier are taking it's toll. Bush can no longer say things as ignorant as "weapons of mass destruction" or "evildoers" and get away with it. There is a lot riding on the next election. Let's hope the tide continues to change because the state of our Federal goverment continues to worsen every day.
And the worse it gets, the harder it will be to fix.
Past Rants
It Takes Destroying A Village
The Return Of The Conservative
Bubba She Hardly Blew Ye