Perhaps today someone will speak the truth about this American "democracy"

Deep in the bowels of a Washington DC Think Tank, a recent college graduate—selected for her unquestioning and eager embrace of their cynical ideology—labors under the watchful eye of a well-connected political strategist, creating “talking points” for the evening news. The large corporations that so generously fund the Think Tank will pleased with this latest fiction, the strategist muses as he inserts her virulent words into his email and clicks “send”. He is confident that corporate contributions will flow as long as the propaganda flows.



Squeezed in a featureless cubicle in the middle of a sprawling over-lit newsroom, a young reporter is struggling to ensure his article conforms with the worldview of his boss’s bosses, leaders of a large corporation with billions in government defense contracts. His computer chimes. He retrieves the Think Tank's “talking points” from his inbox and begins to read. If you want to get along, you gotta go along, he whispers to himself. He presses Command-Shift-C on his keyboard and proceeds to infect his own work with the diseased words.



Seated behind a desk on a cheap plastic office chair in a crowded suburban high school, an American history teacher bites her lip as she recites to her class from the authorized textbook. She must restrain herself from commenting on the narrow interpretations and overt omissions. No Child Left Behind dictates that her students must learn these fictions or her school will lose its federal funding. A bell rings and the students escape to the next class, where they will be infected with more fictions.



A 30-something copywriter in a major advertising agency rubs his eyes as he stares at his flickering computer screen. It is late and he wants to go home, but he must find some compelling reason for consumers to buy another drug, another game, another heavily processed food for which there is no true need. The packaging warns it may be harmful to the buyer’s health. He wonders if they mean a physical or psychological health, but dismisses the concern; there is no room for moral misgivings in the world of business. He touches his keyboard and continues to spread fiction.



He sighs deeply. Perhaps today someone will speak the truth about this American "democracy".

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18763.htm

In the article, she coined the term “banality of evil.” Hitler’s henchmen who had behaved monstrously did not look like monsters. Instead, they were bland and benign. According to Arendt, Eichmann’s character flaw was mindless obedience to authority, not a sadistic or psychopathic personality.


Question #5: And what out of us, how would we choose not to be a "little Eichmann, what would we be saying?

Ward Churchill: You're not to make a speech, you were to pose a question. You posed it; I'll answer it, OK? When you knowingly accept the collateral effects of business practice as usual, projected by the United States into the rest of the planet, and even if you don't agree with it, contribute your expertise, your technical ability, your proficiency to furthering the process of extermination of masses of children, for your own personal gain and benefit, to fit into the structure, without challenging it, you are, in the Hannah Arendt metaphysical sense of Eichmann, Eichmann.


http://media.www.kaleo.org/media/storage/paper872/news/2005/03/01/Editorials/No.Solution.To.Churchill.Conundrum-2798476.shtml

Their Power comes from We, The People. If we are too stupid, passive, or lazy to assert our leadership, then we are condemned to the results.

"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."
- George Bernard Shaw

The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush?s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression

The conspirators were operating under the umbrella of a front group called the American Liberty League, which included many families that are still household names today, including Heinz, Colgate, Birds Eye and General Motors.

In 1936, William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he stated,

"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.... A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions."

A carefully kept secret is the strong sympathy and corporate connections that existed between many of the most powerful American capitalists and German capitalists and their fascist system. Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil of New Jersey had close patent and other ties to I.G. Farben, the giant German corporation that used slave labor at Auschwitz. Standard Oil delivered oil to the Nazis through Switzerland and Spain and even refueled German submarines at Teneriffe in the Canary Islands. At the back of a book called Trading With the Enemy by Charles Higham is a photocopy of an intelligence document from an American officer complaining about this refueling operation and the presence of Nazi officers on Standard's oil tankers. Standard Oil also made tetraethyl lead and synthetic rubber available to the Nazis. Tetraethyl lead is an essential ingredient in aviation gasoline. Standard Oil was investigated several times by Congressional committees for trading with the enemy, but they were too powerful for anything substantive to be done. Chase Bank, also owned by Rockefeller, stayed open in Paris all during the war and helped finance the Nazis.

Rockefeller is far from alone in this collaboration with the Nazis. Both Henry Ford and Edsel Ford were great admirers of fascism, and Ford built trucks and armored cars for the Nazis in France. General Motors, owned by the DuPont family, manufactured tanks and the aircraft engines for the Junkers bombers at the Adam-Opel plant in Russelsheim,Germany. ITT supplied fuses for artillery shells and all sorts of communications equipment to the Nazis. In addition, they built the Focke-Wulf bombers for the Luftwaffe. Sosthenes Behn of ITT was a major financier of the Swedish ball bearing firm SKF, which preferentially supplied the Nazis with ball bearings and denied them to the US military.

These American capitalists were so important and influential in Nazi Germany that Hitler awarded the Order of Merit of the Golden Eagle to both Henry Ford and James Mooney, the director of operations for General Motors in Europe.

Irenee du Pont organized the Black Legion in the United States. This was a fascist organization that terrorized and murdered union leaders and disrupted union organizing campaigns. The members wore hoods and black robes with skull and crossbones. Another of his organizations was the American Liberty League, which taught hatred of blacks and Jews, love of Hitler and loathing of the Roosevelts. The DuPont and Morgan families even approached Major General Smedley Butler through an intermediary to determine if a military coup could be organized against President Roosevelt because Roosevelt's programs for the poor and working class were so hated by DuPont and other important American capitalists. Major General Butler was deeply offended and reported the plot to Roosevelt.

German and American capitalists were as thick as thieves, often sitting on the boards of directors of the same corporation. They repeatedly tried to get a peace agreement between the United States and Germany that would allow a world fascist government and destroy the common enemy-socialism in the Soviet Union. Hitler obstructed these efforts. It should come as no great surprise to people that after World War 2, the CIA utilized Nazi war criminals in their covert wars against leftists worldwide or that the Republican Party, which represents fascist capitalists like the DuPonts and Fords, should accept a large number of these European fascists into their ranks.

To bring this matter of fascism and the Republican Party up to date, both George W. Bush's grandfather and great-grandfather were on the board of Brown Brothers Harriman, which was so flagrant in its financing of the Nazis that two of its subsidiaries, Union Banking Co. and Hamburg-Amerika Shipping Line, were seized under the Trading With the Enemy Act. Now, the present administration is pushing ahead with its war for empire under the disguise of a "war on terrorism." It is fervently attempting to destroy civil liberties in this country using the same excuse. They can now imprison US citizens as enemy combatants with no charges, no access to lawyers and one's family and friends not knowing where one is imprisoned. One is essentially "disappeared," similar to what the CIA-sponsored death squads did in Latin America, except one is not killed. With the second Patriot Act, they can even take away one's citizenship. What I am saying is this. The present US administration is not just sympathetic to fascism. They are fascists, and their war agenda in an age of nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous to our survival as a species!

Prescott & American corporations did not succeed but many would argue that two generations down the line (BushCo) the mission has all but been accomplished.

"A mother cries as the body of her son is lowered into the grave. He was only nineteen and full of promise when he heard his nation calling and enlisted in the National Guard. He was quickly trained and armed with a rifle, a Vietnam-era flak jacket, and desert boots. His first letter home bore his pride and the conviction that he was bringing democracy and freedom to an oppressed and backward nation. He claimed the battle for hearts and minds would soon be won and he would return to a grateful nation a hero. His next letter confessed the indiscriminate killing, the fear, and the hatred of an entire culture. The conquered, he said, must accept freedom and democracy, even if it is at the point of a gun. There was no third letter. Only a knock on the door and a painfully short visit by two Marines who brought with them the few miserable effects of their son. Nothing of him was found after the car bombing. The father comforted his wife in her misery as he thought back to Vietnam, when a fiction had spread and killed 52,000 other sons."

That might lose votes.