Anarcho-Historian Lesson #8: Economic Elites and the State

 

August 1490 represented a glorious late summer for Renaissance crime, wealth, power, patronage and statecraft, well throughout the entire peninsula of Italy. From the salt water bays of Sicily to the alpine, fresh water lakes between France and Italy, Twelve Families ruled this famous European land. They lovingly murdered and plundered throughout the Boot.

They had the names of Este, Gonzaga, Orsini, Colonna, Montefeltro, Bentivoglio, Petrucci, Baglioni, Malatesta, and then the three most powerful ‘Famiglie’ – the Medici, (the first bankers to the Popes), the Sforza, (the most ruthless ‘condottiere’), and the Aragonese, (possessing the grand Imperial Navy of Spain – later creating the Spanish Armada). And lest I forget, there was also infamous number thirteen – the Borgia, from Valencia, Spain. The great naval empire, republican-oligarchy of Venice, or ‘The Serenissima,’ watched on the sidelines, confident in its own power.

Eventually, the Venetians would also have to resort to the condottieri in order to support their land empire in Italy, and the French monarchy, under Charles VIII, would soon invade the peninsula within a few years. About thirty years later, the last great German emperor, Charles V, would also invade the peninsula. The Italian farmers suffered the sack of their crops through such foreign invasions; but the Twelve families of crime, power and wealth always maintained their rule and preserved their comfortable positions.

During that late medieval period, most of the Twelve Families begot themselves as hired mercenaries, or contract killers. They fought for the Popes, (called Guelphs), or for the German Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, (called Ghibellines), or for other local, powerful families in Italy. They even fought with other European powers – and a few even fought with the Muslim caliphates across the Great Sea, or the Mediterranean. The money was what mattered. These hired killers had the name of ‘condottieri,’ or men of honor under contract.

The successful condottieri, or those late medieval knights, began to acquire landed properties, lots of money, and most importantly, loyal armed followers, called ‘soldati,’ or soldiers, through their legal crimes: theft-pillaging, sacking cities, and murdering rich rivals.

The loyal soldiers remained devoted until the violence, warfare and thefts dried up. Inside the Twelve Families, the loyalty could break apart due to any infraction of the condottieri honor code. There were also lots of illegitimate sons and daughters too – and they also wanted parts of the action.

In 1500, during a wedding of the Baglioni family, a terrible war started, and half the guests murdered the other half! In 1505, inside the Este family, one illegitimate son, the Cardinal Ipolitio, had paid killers to almost gouge out the eyes of his half-brother, Giulio, over the sexual rights to the beautiful Angela Borgia, sister to the infamous Lucrezia. Eventually, brother Alfonso, the legitimate son, had Giulio imprisoned for 53 years.

The Twelve Families of Renaissance Italy generally married into each other’s blood lines – in order to avoid further bloodshed, and thereby create even stronger alliances for family unity. Marriage also brought wealthy dowries that helped keep the wealth, ‘in the family.’

But one family had a different history, and outshined the others. They were the Medicis of Florence. This family began as a merchant clan possessing great monopolies around the city. Their financial successes transformed them into bankers – and especially for the Popes in Rome. Four of the Medici even became Renaissance Popes.

The Medici intermarried into all the other twelve families, including their rivals and enemies. One of the Medici, an illegitimate son, Cosimo di Medici, became a powerful condottiere, and transformed himself into the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Medici represented the greatest arts patrons of the Renaissance, and even greater than the Venetian Empire.

They patronized the best: Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Cellini, Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Botticelli. Their palaces slowly accumulated marvelous art treasures, all of which still stand in majestic Florence to this day: the Uffizi, the Pitti, the Belvedere, and Boboli Gardens. They even hired the genius of Pisa, by the name of Galileo, as the personal tutor for the Medici children. Machiavelli, the great political scientist-historian, dedicated his book, ‘The Prince,’ or ‘Il Principe,’ to the Medici.

The Medici Family had ultimately controlled the economic, political, military, and most importantly, the ideological reigns of Renaissance Italy. In Italian, this virtue had the name of ‘podestà,’ or simply pure power. The Medici Family transcended into the Godfathers of the Renaissance.

These historic examples from the Renaissance expose the relations between the criminal state and the criminal economic elites. It has been, and still remains, the perfect example of parasitism, or basically, the scheming of parasites.

The economic elites both influence the state and the state influences the elites. Both clans function together in symbiotic processes similar to worm parasites inside the human body. Like parasitic worms, they move in and out of each other’s spheres and feed off each other. As the parasites take control of certain natural body functions, so the elites take political controls, while the politicians can retire as corporate executives. The state cannot survive without economic elites; likewise, the economic elites cannot function without political bosses in order to enforce their monopoly controls.

The parasitic rule of crime is almost impregnable, but counter-hegemonic blocks, or concocted political alliances, with their many historical absurdities, or as they said in the Renaissance, ‘Mala Fortuna,’ (Bad Fortune), have ultimately defeated such power supports and furtive goals. By the middle of the eighteenth-century, the 1700s, the Medici had lost their power completely, and so, the obese, degenerate Medici offspring married themselves into the powerful royalties of Europe. Their family line had finally ended – forever.

Elite Families are different from the families representing the rest of us. Throughout human history, they have betrayed and murdered each other, so one member could hoard greater controls and more power. It is still this same way for old money elites. Nowadays, they just hide their crimes so much better. Elites families, or old money families, offer higher oaths to their own chosen institutions – the rest of humanity for damnation!

For example, the Kennedy Family in the United States tortured their own daughter, Rosemary, through a lobotomy. They hired a psycho-babble quack to do the ‘surgery’ on her.  The Family wanted her eliminated due to her teenage outbursts and her escape from a convent that her parents had forced her into. Rosemary was always an embarrassment because she was ‘slower’ than the other siblings. Rosemary spent the rest of her life locked up inside a closed institution, with special nurses to take of her, condemned to a life in a comatose mental state. The economic elites never tolerate such humiliations.

These putrid elites generally rule through four chosen methods. They first get away with legal crime and state violence. There is one privilege of law for them, and the full fury of the law for the rest of us. Secondly, they always encourage the settlement or immigration of certain ethnic groups, while they hate, imprison, murder and expel others. Thirdly, they tend to champion and fund certain ideologies over others. Fourthly, they patronize particular artists and artistic styles, and the especially fund modern, public art installations.

Some contemporary examples reference the Amerikan Empire – and the elite parasites within it. The Bush Family always had a reputation for partying, but unlike the poor kids in the ghettos and trailer parks, the privileged sons and daughters never did any jail time for their drug and drinking alcohol indiscretions. During the late Vietnam War period, George W. got a nice spot in a Texan Air National Guard unit, which never had a deployment order to ‘Nam.’

In the United States, there always seems to spark up another ‘immigration debate’ in the corporate media. It is not really a debate at all, but the lobbying of certain elite factions in the United States that want more foreign, cheap wage immigrant workers. Meanwhile, the working classes have no real voice. Powerful urban elites mainly want a docile and cowardly wage slave workforce. These elites are urban sophisticates with money, yet they need slave wage labor for basic cleaning and cooking, and other bad jobs. They also see ‘their cities’ as displacement-gentrification zones.

In Captialist-Fascist Amerika, the enemy group in America’s large cities, are the large African-American, or Black populations. According to the elites, those people must go. They are the official criminal class. The elites use every illegal method to get rid of them. They run the mostly, white skinned privilege police forces to harass, or stop and frisk, colored youths. They defend slumlords, or urban property pimps, in extorting rent for rat infested dumps. They fill the prisons with the real dangerous ones, and they allow higher priced supermarkets to open up in the ‘bad sections,’ which the banks redline as areas for destruction. These political thugs desperately want to replace the dangerous classes, representing ‘the Blacks,’ with docile, first generation immigrant, wage slaves.

One great example was the governorship of Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefeller Family decided that it needed to enter politics and secure its ill-gotten, yet legal looting. In the 1970s, a couple of Rockefellers secured governorships, heads of international elite institutions, banking CEO spots, urban property pimping and art foundation dealing. The most powerful state bully was Nelson Rockefeller of New York State. During his governorship, he passed through one of the toughest anti-illegal drug laws in the country, called ‘The Rockefeller Laws.’ Even low quantities for ‘hard drugs’ garnered at least fifteen years in prison.

Like the old ‘gun control’ laws, which Rockefeller also supported, these ‘drug control’ laws targeted New York City’s African-American population. During his putrid reign, the prisoners of Attica Prison revolted and demanded reforms for better treatment. Many of the revolting prisoners were African-Americans. Rockefeller sent in the State Police with full immunity to exterminate the revolting prisoners – which was what they dutifully did.

These urban elites always demand more ‘gun control.’ They don’t want to ban guns for their own bodyguards, for the local police forces, or for ‘their private armies.’ Instead, they prefer that the criminal classes, meaning the African-Americans, do not possess the rights to own firearms and to defend themselves.

America’s economic elites are also very active on their ideological fronts. They fund particular research centers in universities, and contribute to certain ideological ‘think tanks,’ or academic fronts that defend their preferred ideological positions. They push certain nongovernmental organizations, or non-governmental organizations, into ‘international underdevelopment fields,’ and they set up ideological ‘state advising’ organizations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum, etc.

Their ideologies represent a hodgepodge of the different factions of economic elites. Some of them want more population controls and support eugenics. Others demand the continual supremacy of the US dollar as international reserve currency. While various elite groups prefer low inflation and high unemployment; most of them definitely support free trade initiatives for multi-national corporations, and their right to off-shore cheap jobs around the world. There are elite groups who push for more ‘literacy in education,’ or a better qualified workforce, while others want to turn education into a secure profit motive with ‘choice in state schools’ and public monies for private initiatives. America’s economic elites have many other ideological stratagems, but for the sake of this essay, it is too numerous to list all of them.

Finally, these top members of the 1% consider themselves the true patrons of the fine and high arts, good taste, refinement and ‘class.’ They are all active within some type of arts organization. The list has included concert halls, fine art museums, arts fellowships, private collection administration, high-end galleries, and modern, public art placements.

Our top-notch elites also enjoy a variety of high-end restaurants with ethnic diversity-plate presentation twists. Yet, the back kitchens of these fine and wretched dining establishments all have lowly paid immigrants who do not possess legal working papers – the most obedient wage slaves.

Elite economic power and influence seem almost unbreakable. But their sick dreams and perverted desires often twist and turn – and not to their liking usually. What the elites actually receive is quite different from their goals. Hegemony and historical absurdity always confound them – and will continue to do so.

They want white hipster, ‘artiste’ heavens with first generation immigrant communities in ‘their cities,’ but they often manage hard to live-in, expensive cities with few good jobs left, and a violent crime rate that keeps spiraling into dangerous levels. They want gun control and open immigration, yet America’s rural working classes and middle classes know their game, and so they always successfully resist the elites every time they pull one of their influence tricks into pushing their agendas. This is the reason America’s economic elites give total support to the police-surveillance-prison state.

Since the beginning of human civilization, economic elites and the state have existed as parasites between each other. They move and feed in and out of each other, meanwhile, they try to impose their wills on the lesser ones. They have generally won in human history, but their victories are always different from their original plans.

The six truths of history always come into play – and will continue as such. Neither the state, nor the economic elites can exist without each other, yet there always farts some competing factions between them. Although they have a lot fewer numbers compared to the rest of us, their powers and privileges of legal crime award them greater unity and strength.

Worlds of Pharmakopeia II: Cannabis Churning in the Mystical Orient

A cold wind was howling through the medieval streets of Rome during middle December. The days were real short. Darkness even shadowed the moon. This particular day was in the middle of the month, and the year was 1485. Christmas had its parties coming up, but the Pope Caesar had other nefarious plans tucked into his fat stomach. The sinister name of intolerance and hypocrisy was none other than Pope Innocent VIII, (the Eighth).

On this nefarious date he issued a strange papal bull against witchcraft and sorcery that seemed to infect the women of Europe, and especially the First Reich of Germany, bizarrely called, the Holy Roman Empire. This Empire was neither holy nor Roman.

Within this peculiar papal condemnation, he also cited the use of a demonic herb, called cannabis, often found, or imagined, in satanic religious rites. His informant-experts for these underground, conspiratorial satanic covens represented two German Dominican monks, Jakob Spengler and Heinrich Kramer. They would soon publish a nasty book, called ‘The Hammer of the Witches,’ which would help in the murder of close to 200,000 ‘witches,’ mostly marginalized women, during the next 250 years in Europe and in America.

Unfortunately for the plant ‘cannabis sativa,’ this strange and mystical herb from deep Asia, received the taint of evil with the papal stamp of approval. Yet, this same Pope Innocent the Eighth enjoyed some other mortal sins during his reign. He was obese and lived a life of extreme luxury inside the papal palace. He fathered two illegitimate children and had them married off into one of the strongest Families in Renaissance Italy, the Medici. He dipped some of the papal finances into the new Portuguese African Slave Trade. Meanwhile, he tried to revive the Papal Crusades of another Pope Innocent, in order to exterminate the Muslim Turks, the Protestant Waldensians in Northern Italy, and the Hussites in the Czech lands. All cannabis haters in history have shared three evil characteristics: intolerance, gross hypocrisy and state murder.

What is it about cannabis sativa that attracts such hatred and venom? The answer lies in its historical origins: the mystical rites for Lord Shiva and the Islamic Assassins in the medieval period. Cannabis still has these mystical, ‘orientalist’ associations to this actual day. Whether the foreign visitor enters the medinas of Morocco or the festivals dedicated to Shiva in India and Nepal, the scent of the cannabis herb inundates the consciousness.

From its evil oriental connections until its later appearances in the United States, cannabis would connect to a more infamous notoriety. African-American artists smoked the herb while they played their demonic, African sensualized beats, called jazz. Attractive white women even took off their shoes in the smoky clubs, and they danced with the demons. Mestizo, mixed race, Mexican fruit pickers and outlaws also smoked the leaf, called ‘mota,’ during their raucous partying. The dangerous, criminal classes, of course, used the oriental poison. The Amerikan Imperial thugs had taken notice. The historical hatred against cannabis has simply been another combined form of intolerance and murder.

Cannabis is actually a marvelous and natural soft drug. It relaxes and calms the mental nerves, and helps with bouts of nausea and gastrointestinal pains. Some doctors state that cannabis has other helpful healing properties. Cannabis can spark interior mental activity or engaging conversation. It stimulates the human appetites, both culinary and sexual. The drug goes perfectly with foods, entertainment, the arts and it especially compliments other natural drugs found on the Earth, such as alcohol, coffee and tea.

The only negatives to the drug are certain habitual users of it. It seems to have the similar effects of antidepressants on them, which produce lethargy, ego self-obsessions, or minor neuroses. But these are some excessive users. I have also personally met aggressive and successful attorneys that were avid smokers of the weed.

I return to cannabis’ ancient history and its orientalist associations. Lord Shiva, the God of both Creation and Destruction, the Cosmic Dance and the Holy Lingam, (phallic power), the revealer of mystical Tantra, patron of cows, yoga and the third sex, married to the goddess, Parvati, father to the god, Ganesh – also partook of the mystical drink, called ‘soma.’ Legend has it that the mystical drink was none other than ‘bhang,’ a milky concoction containing cannabis.

Shiva’s wandering followers called ‘sadhus,’ still partake of the magical perfumed medicine. During my travels around the world, I have seen these holy men, and some thieving-fakers claiming to exist as sadhus, smoking cannabis out of funnel type ceramic pipes called ‘chillum.’ Watching those holy men in action with their long dread locks, scruffy beards, blue and white-painted dyes, bodies smeared with cow dung, rope necklaces and bracelets, and dirty loin cloths, added to the whole Indian-Asian mystical effect.

On a more common level, during the Hindu festival of Holi, which happens around springtime, young Indians and Nepalese drink the marvelous liquid ‘bhang’ shakes, or ‘lassies,’ and later, hit the public streets throwing brightly colored dyes on the surrounding partiers and walkers. They hit me too – which added to the great fun during that day. Shiva’s gift was a truly a wonderful act.

Islam conquered the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent in the middle of the eleventh century. The cannabis magic of Shiva would also influence the Sufi Muslim mystics that lived in those regions. Even the great Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, praised the herb and the wine. Cannabis entered the Islamic world: it stayed and it prospered. Still today in the Islamic world from North Africa to Afghanistan, the traveler can spot old men sitting in cafes, wearing their ‘chalaba’ long outfits with hoods. They smoke the green and brown ‘kif’ in their long pipes, while they sip on herbal mint tea, Turkish coffee and chew on honey snacks. Religious controversies have continued between the Sunni, Shia and Sufi branches of Islam – but smoking the flowering buds united them all.

One of the truths of human history has been its reign of absurdity. Cannabis had attached itself to one of the Shia sects of medieval Islam – ‘the Assassins.’ The Assassins were part of the Ismaili sect or the ‘Seveners.’ They also drank the luscious wine and smoked the enchanting herb.

The medieval Japanese Shogunates had their ‘ninjas’; while Medieval Islamic World Culture had their assassins. The assassins lived outside of society. Those disciplined holy warriors squatted in abandoned, foreboding military castles in northern Syria, Iraq and Iran. Their founder, Hassan i Sabbah, or ‘The Old Man of the Mountain,’ organized this Shia sect military order into a hierarchical brotherhood. Inside the castle, the warriors studied religious and philosophical texts, scientific works, learned various languages, and most importantly, the arts of killing. Their three preferred methods moved towards the silent variety: the dagger, the poison and strangulation.

Their victims were always political leaders within the Islamic world. If the Islamic political hack instituted unjust acts, mandated cruel laws, oppressed the poor, allowed poverty to accumulate, or stole lots of money from the just – then the Assassins went on the attack.

The Assassins first left a note pinned with a small dagger within the confines of the caliph or sultan’s palace. If that didn’t work, then the spiritual leader picked an Assassin to fulfill the last deed – a violent death. The Assassins always reached their victims, and after killing the state bum, they would often let frightened onlookers see the terminating work. Many of the assassins never returned from their ultimate missions.

Only one Islamic political-military ruler survived them – Saladin the Great. He survived three attempts on his life. They aroused fear in both the Islamic potentates and the European royal Crusaders. One of the Crusader kings even used the Assassins as allies against his Islamic rivals. Their enemies called them, ‘hashasheen’ in Arabic, or the Troublemakers.

From this Arabic word, the European Crusaders, and especially the Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, tied some connections between the sinister Oriental herbal paste, ‘hashish,’ with Assassin lore. According to the ignorant Euro-experts, hash was the powerful ingredient that transformed the Assassins into fanatical killers. This corrupted link also transformed European languages on the continent.

Most European languages have a separate word for killing and for murder: ‘matar,’ in Spanish, ‘tuer,’ in French, and ‘uccidire,’ in Italian. But these three languages share the same original word for murder, ‘asesinar, assassiner, assassinare.’ This outrageous relation between cannabis and irrational violence even stayed well into the 1930s USA with crap movies such as ‘Reefer Madness.’

This marvelous soft drug of cannabis has had its absurd orientalist associations. The real issue of cannabis was not its properties, but the European hatred for ‘the other,’ which still fuels the sociopathology of the Amerikan Empire. The murderous and hateful world empire still hunts for its victims through its continuous War against Cannabis, and all other ‘illegal drugs.’ The CIA can deal whatever it wants, yet the same US government prefers smokers to rot inside its hundreds of overpopulated prisons. In spite of all of this hate, Lord Shiva’s precious gift still wafts its distinctive breeze throughout all the lands of the Earth.

The Amerikan Empire VIII: Diseased Culture

In the contemporary USA there is a serious subculture that mixes together gun owners, actors and historians. They call themselves the reenactors. These historical period actors represent the aficionados of old military costumes, weapons, and martial movements. They regularly follow the sacred dates of battle memorials. Other tasks include interpreting for museum exhibitions and extras for historical episodes on cable TV. They do reenactments at historical sites, while replaying personal battle accounts. They truly do live the history and experience the combat flutters – even without the dead and mangled human bodies lying around them.

Across this United States, there are thousands of local historical societies doing their parts for regional memory. There also thousands of mini-museums, which feature glass cases of local artifacts and human stories. There also exist live nostalgia sites, and especially in the West and in the South, featuring dudes and gals dressed up in historical costumes. Along the ‘done up’ stage, tourists can see the period furniture, walk in the local stores, and visit the bars and restaurants. They can also watch the dressed-up people ‘doing their stuff the old way.’ We should not forget the medieval lore of Renaissance Festivals too. No other nation on Earth has so many museums – and museums for every imaginable taste inside of our tiny Earth universe.

Museums were actually a new invention to the human condition. Museums were not part of the large urban dynamic until the late 1700s, eighteenth-century. People hadn’t the need for museums during most of human history. Life, art, conflict, love and death were all around them. They just didn’t need a special space in order to experience their lives. The actuality of living worked fine – filled with surprises, sublime joy and tragedies.

The official founder of museums was none other than the ego-maniac dictator of the French Empire, (1798-1815), Napoleon Bonaparte. Like a good state thug, he just stole the grand art works of Italy, especially some of the more famous paintings, after his army had invaded the country. His army transported them to Paris, and then placed most of them inside an old Royal Palace in Paris, called the Louvre. Now every major and minor city across the world – has its very own, sacred ‘museum’ space. Bad habits are certainly addictive. But the irony of ironies, art mausoleums of the dead, commonly called, ‘museums,’ have become synonymous with modern, high culture.

Returning to the American reenactors, they generally prefer particular reenactments. Their favorites are two wars in US history: the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. How many reenactments does one see representing the War of 1812 or the Mexican War? There is a definite reason for the reenactors’ preferences.

They prefer these two wars because they exemplified the good side to American culture: the right to complete and total personal freedom, and the cultural action of honor to defend such rights. The reenactors don’t just act and play for the sake of historical posterity; they also reenact because contemporary Amerikan culture represents the direct opposite of true freedom – and the fight for one’s honor to defend it. Only small sections of the American South still give obeisance to the cultural value of honor.

American culture has always had a terrible link to cruelty, but over a hundred years ago, true liberty and the defense of honor made the American a respected world citizen, violently birthed out of a newly created republic. Americans shared these values with most of the nations of the world. Nowadays unfortunately, only the day-to-day cruelty remains.

Global monopoly capitalism, state-public-coerced schooling, corporate media-advertising-Hollywood garbage, the prison-gulag, ‘legal’ institutional powers, the ultimate police-gang state, and the military-spy-industrial-war complex have all done their insidious parts in transforming American society into a low and diseased culture. Due to this terribly diseased state of Amerikan Imperial culture, the Empire is rotting from the inside. The terrible news is that the sociopaths that hold and manage political power in the States – also know this.

Actual American culture features the horrible diseases of immaturity, boredom, indiscretion and ignorance, mostly due to Amerikan public schooling and the corporate media TV-Hollywood junta. Watching the momentous crap on American cable television, from reality TV shows, to making money shows, to TV shopping channels, can convince even the most patriotic observer on the actual cultural rot.

The other current diseases in the culture represent gluttony, fear-distrust, frustration, and explosive anger: all of which come from extreme monopoly capitalism. Mention leads to the obesity epidemic, the fast food nightmare found in every town and city in the States, the overuse of psychotropic medications that lead to mass shootings, and the street hustling and petty crime that plague most of America’s cities.

The most life threatening disease found inside the culture is cowardice. This mortal killer comes from decades of succumbing to the authoritarian police, militarized surveillance state.

The word ‘culture’ originally comes from the word, agriculture. Just like people use the earth to create foods, cooking and the arts of the table, culture owes its first connections to the holy earth. The most durable cultures have always been the societies that have used the earth for their daily benefits, and yet they have also respected the earth and taken care of it. They understood the balance between use and abuse. Their religious practices always referred back to the earth. We can think on the Native nations in the Americas before the arrival of the European invaders.

Yet, culture can also exist outside of any connection to the earth due to the human ability to mentally create, through both imaginative fantasy and the adoption of complex language structures and vocabularies. With the rise of monotheistic religions on the world stage, such as Christianity and Islam, human cultures created new arts, sciences, idioms and civil societies. These cultural changes help explain Modern Europe’s obsessions with its modern fighting words, such as language, class, people, race and nation. As long as there exists the concept of ‘Europe,’ these fighting terms will not go away any time soon.

I remember when I lived in Europe, a few Europeans had stated to me that America had no culture. Compared to their thousands of years of conflict and history, American culture did not come close to the high levels of Europe. However, every subgroup, region, city, society, club and clique has a culture, even if it is a superficial or weak one. The difference in cultures relate to the various cultural levels, whether high or low. There do exist hierarchies of cultures. And cultures, like the earth and people, can get infections diseases – and even epidemics. This is the current, unfortunate state of the Amerikan Imperial culture.

A very good way to measure the general culture level, within a particular place or region, regards local festivals and celebrations.

One summer, I attended an annual festival in a small, western American town. The weather was beautiful and I was looking forward to feeling the magic of the small town west. What I received instead was lots of boredom, fear of controls and ignorance about the actual history of the region. I didn’t learn anything new; although, there were lots of vendors trying to get me to spend a lot of money.

I heard there was a night concert downtown, so I walked around the downtown area, and found out there was no concert at all. Apparently, the town politicians mandated no loud music after sundown in the fear of attracting people drinking alcohol and having fun. The next day, I walked around the downtown area again, and all I saw were stands, either selling local junk trinkets or genetically modified laced greasy, fast food. I also spotted the traveling carnival rides. Almost all the locals walking around were either fat or obese.

The rides were mostly nausea producing machines, meaning they moved round and round and round, while the rest of the carnival structures featured ‘carnival games,’ or really scam productions to steal people’s money, like throwing a heavy ball into a small, tilted basket, all in order to receive cheap and bogus prizes. Even if the person wanted to just walk around the carnival, they still had to pay up front for just entering the festival zone. On one side street off the Main drag, I observed that there were more police walking around than actual locals. I was so scared of the police presence that I left the area.

I returned again, the next day, to experience the town’s premier music concert. I walked to the park off the main drag. As I stepped toward the park’s entrance, a security staff guy then approached me and told me that I had to pay a good amount of money in order to enter. He also said that I could only buy their overpriced alcohol from the inside vendors, and that they had to search both my body and personal bag for pre-entry. If I got too drunk, then the police would have to arrest me.

I was so shocked about ‘the rules’ that I waked away. I also noticed a heavy local police presence around the park entrance. As I looked over from the outside, the band arrived on stage, and when they started playing, the music was absolutely horrible. The band played Country music cover songs, with a background player for other instruments, such as piano, banjo or accordion, and the musicians used music stands, so they could sing the lyrics. I also noticed that the crowd was sparse and almost nobody danced, except for a few older couples. This so-called festival had a theme related to the town’s history, and yet, I learned nothing from this event. The festival was a bust – and so was the town.

This town was dying like so many other towns out in the American west, and it failed to reinvent itself in order to bring in more tourist dollars. That terrible festival represented the same terrible level of general culture found in the town.

No matter what the local politicians cook up in their deceitful minds, if the local town possesses a low culture, then the place is on the path of dying badly. During that particular festival, I experienced more fear, boredom, disgust and ignorance than anything else. I had really experienced some of America’s mortal cultural diseases.

This is the reason culture is so important to people around the world. Culture represents the totality of our body expressions, values, productions, actions, words and contradictions. Culture, like the planets around the suns, and the moons around the planets, revolves around our difficult lives. We all possess, live and create culture. And culture always goes through movement and changes, just like the universe. Finally, culture also has ties to conflict and resistance.

For example, during an annual religious festival, in the year 1580, in the town of Romans, France, the local people moved into revolt mode. The party started off with some hard-drinking and soon transformed into a liberating revolution!

In contemporary Amerika, some urban hipsters, intolerant leftists, rich liberals and other pathetic snobs like to focus their disgust on to the Revolutionary War and Civil War reenactors. Yet, it is truly their hypocritical, cowardly and low cultural lives that make most people gasp. As long as people breathe, they will create culture. The ones that move culture into resistance will create the highest and most powerful one. Meanwhile in the Amerikan Empire, the sociopaths holding power watch in fear.

As we Anarchists lose tolerance for the repetitive boredom, ignorance, and media fear campaigns vomiting out of the crap television programs, corporate radio broadcasts, and Hollywood movies – we can create alternatives spaces using similar visual mediums. As we perceive the endless public signs and billboards that advertise useless crap, threaten us, attack and harass our daily lives, we can avoid their public spaces and take alternative routes, poster or paint over them, or even take the small signs down. If a state or corporate-funded cultural space wants to rob us so they can make a cheap profit, then we can set up an another space open to marginalized forms of artistic expression – whether on a deserted sidewalk, in a basement or in a public park. The culture of resistance always breathes new life into the general revolution – and offers a marvelous and new sense of freedom.

We Anarchists have made the first steps in resistance and freedom just through our rejection of such a corrupt system. We understand the truth on both life and death, and we see through the sociopaths’ methods of social control and their criminality.

Movement and deep activity are what we are after.

Capitalism and Slavery United: one of our most enduring enemies

Exactly one hundred years ago, the state government of Colorado and the Rockefeller owned CFI company, (Colorado Fuel and Iron), committed an atrocity against poor striking workers – even before the Great Slaughter of World War I. This terrible atrocity possessed the infamous name of the Ludlow Massacre.

What was amazing about this particular miners’ struggle was that they represented various nationalities and cultures: Eastern European, German, Greek, Mexican, Anglo-American, Irish, Italian, New Mexican, British, French and even a few African-Americans. This motley ethnic group had finally had enough with the mining system practiced in the state of Colorado at the turn of the century.

America’s business elites had badgered the federal government for a more ‘disciplined and compliant’ workforce, so the US state apparatus willingly allowed millions of immigrants to enter its borders. The mine owners preferred to hire the newly arrived immigrants due to their willingness to accept low wages and that they all spoke different languages. Unions had troubles organizing against the mine bosses. Those mine bosses also built company towns. Sometimes they literally took over a town with a pit mine in it, and later, transformed the village into a mining town.

In the mining towns, the mine workers and their families lived in shacks without the basic hygienic systems. They had to pay high rents, and buy their basic supplies from the company stores, meaning clothes, foodstuffs and the basic articles for survival. The company stores nickel and dimed the workers on shelf items, and the workers had to use worthless company scrip papers. Sometimes, the mine company paid the workers in those worthless papers, instead of the regular notes.

Workers had to inform the mine company guards when leaving or arriving. The mine company guards ran the towns like the prisons. These legal criminals even murdered or tortured the uncooperative and rebellious workers in the dead of the night. There was really nothing the miners could do, since the main mining outfits had monopolistic owners, such as the Rockefeller family. The Rockefeller’s 40 room villa was all the way on the other side of the continent anyway – Tarrytown, New York!

Mining was a very dangerous job. The mining schedule was a seven-day a week back and neck destroyer that went from sun up to sun down. Back then, accidents, explosions and mine disasters were quite common. Miners died through simple overwork, lung emphysema, suffocation-drowning through getting buried alive or due to flash flooding in the tunnels, or just having their bodies blown into various pieces due to sudden explosions. There was no compensation for any mining accident. A dead miner had to pay for his own burial, or the other miners just threw the dead weight into the common garbage ditch.

In Ludlow, the miners and their families created their own alternative town. They armed themselves with guns, set up a functioning mutual aid system at the campsite, squatted on the land, and the men wore ripped pants, overalls, caps on their heads, and red bandanas around their necks. This was the true origin of the term ‘redneck,’ yet in the current Amerikan Empire, racists and reactionaries have taken the class war term ‘redneck,’ as their own.

The state of Colorado and the Rockefeller monopoly counterattacked with allowing the company mine guards to join the Colorado State Militia. They too had guns – and cannons – and bombs. On April 20th, 1914 they fired upon the tent colony and burnt up the Ludlow miners-squatters camp, murdering around 20 people, most of whom were women and children.

This was not the end of the story. The men of the red bandanas moved the offensive into the Colorado hills. They killed mine guards, worker narc-snitches, and mine pit bosses. The actual number of killed company thugs is still unknown to this day. The miner-guerrillas were so successful in exterminating the mine managers and company town goons that Liberal Democrap, President Wilson sent into federal troops to intimidate the fighters.

Soon, the IWW solidarity union, or the Wobblies, joined with the miner-fighters, while the Rockefellers tried their hands at ‘company unions’ in order to squelch the mutual aid and solidarity networks. Eventually, the mine owners had to settle for union organization with the United Mine Workers. Now the miner job pays well, has some worker compensation packages, and there are less mine pit hours.

The miners had moved onto the war of offense because they had nothing else to lose. They had realized that they had become wage slaves.

Capitalism owes its evil birth from the rotting flesh of slavery. Capitalism and Slavery are historically intertwined like moss growing on an old stone building. We understand this history of Capitalism thanks to the nineteenth-century intellectual, Karl Marx.

Karl Marx was however wrong about his general theories of history. Marx stated in his 1848 writings that all culture and history, called the ‘superstructure of society,’ came out of the ‘productive base of labor and work.’ This theory is incorrect. He was mistaken because he was a philosopher trying to become a historian. History is not a social science but an art of interpreting human struggles and violence. Like artists, humans simply create their own history, and make up their own culture.

Karl Marx was actually quite brilliant in describing the brutality of the capitalist system. Capitalism spreads like gangrene, and grows into monstrous monopolies, while it becomes ever more contradictory as it expands out into the farthest reaches of the planet. This tendency to overproduce, to over-control, and to over-extend leads into the contradictory world of class conflict over wage slavery.

Class conflict or class struggle is simply the continual and incessant changes coming from the owners-bosses in demanding more brutal work output from the workers. The owners want the workers to produce more and more until the poor laborers drop dead because the owners run the businesses for the sake of profit. ‘Profit’ comes from the French verb, ‘profiter,’ which implies, ‘to take advantage of someone.’

Yet the workers only want to work the least amount as possible, since they have to give up their lives, their time and their energy for a survival wage. This is the contradictory condition within all ‘businesses,’ both large and small, imprisoned inside the capitalist beast.

The worker or laborer transforms into the wage slave because he or she must have some income, or wage salary, in order to pay government taxes and rent-utility bills for shelter, and then pay for foodstuffs and clothes. Marx correctly surmised that all working people laboring for a wage have to then ‘sell themselves’ to the owners on the capitalist market. The owners hire managers or company commanders to hire out for them. The plantation boss used overseers to manage labor discipline. The wage slaves, like the slaves of ancient times, must willingly give up large portions of their personal time and strength in order to receive this survival wage or slave wage.

This particular labor-slave cycle continues until they are too old, badly injured, or simply worthless, within the general labor pool. Once they go, then the owner can easily find a younger and more compliant worker to replace the labor loss. When the slave never woke up from sleep or died while working, the plantation owner then visited the slave market for a replacement.

The company owner reviews the labor market through hiring managers that do the employment screening. It is the not the tyranny of useless money that eventually kills the spirit of the average worker-laborer-employee, rather it is the tyranny of the cruel labor market represented through a fetid pool of applicants.

The first capitalist systems in the late medieval period, such as Islamic culture and the Venetian Empire needed an easy and compliant labor source too. They used what all empires have used throughout history: the capture, kidnapping and slow murder of slaves. The Muslim caliphates raided the pagan coasts of East Africa and the Christian Balcans, while the Catholic Venetians raided Muslim and Orthodox Christian territories in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and parts of North Africa. During the fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries, (1400s and 1500s), the newer Atlantic world empires of Spain and Portugal would also raid North Africa for a ready supply of slaves. Eventually they would both go deeper into the African continent.

The other Atlantic world empires followed them, such as the Dutch, (Netherlands), with France and Britain in the seventeenth-century, (1600s). Following the Brazilian Portuguese use of captured slaves from the Tupamori Nation, the Spanish soon became the leaders in the use of captured native slaves from the Mapuche Nation of central Chile, the Guarani Nation of Paraguay, and the Apache Nation in the Red Rocks, or ‘Colorado’ frontier of Nuevo Mejico, (New Mexico). In the 18th century, (1700s), the British Empire would even overtake both the French Empire and the Portuguese Empire in becoming world history’s greatest kidnapping-mass murder-slave trade potentate from Africa to Asia to the Americas.

This imperial political-economic system transformed into Mercantile capitalism. The royal state with favored investors, usually aristocrat-noble relations or court favorites, controlled joint stock companies and the profits of final sale. Meanwhile, the slave planters had to bear numerous credit-debts through purchasing slaves and dealing with cash crop fluctuations in the market, such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, tea, opium and cotton.

Due to this capitalistic ‘mercantile’ monopoly, a new group of outlaws emerged in order to take fast money and loot for themselves, commonly called back then, ‘pirates.’ But for the West Indian ‘white’ planters, slaves were an excellent resource because they could also resale such movable capital. In the case of the Africans, they were the victims of kidnapping slave traders in Africa, and they had no legal resources. They were socially dead human waste.

Britain was also notorious for using just as many ‘white slaves,’ as their ‘black or African ones.’ The white slaves were often the victims of kidnapping rings found all over England and occupied Ireland. When the white slaves began to fraternize with the African ones, then African slavery began to have more ominous, permanent tones.

Britain’s world-wide kidnapping-slave-mass murder system was so successful that it freed up a special commandeering class of scientists, inventors and investors to fund and experiment in technological advancement. It is no coincidence that during this same eighteenth-century, Industrial Capitalism came into fruition.

But the old system of plantation agriculture slavery in the American colonial-settler states, with its numerous inefficiencies and ugly brutality – had to go. Industrial capitalism valued the factory system, which produced a lot more, and hid its brutalities under smoke stacks and within inferno like worker dungeons. A new slave economy was necessary.

Instead of the owners paying for the worker-slaves’ crap food and flea infested huts, they could pay the losers a ‘wage.’ Now, the lowlifes had to pay their own way through life – and literally beg for a ‘job.’ They were technically free – but like any slave, they permanently lost their honor and dignity.

We have returned full circle to the slave trade of Ludlow. These terrible relations between capitalism and slavery still breathe their noxious fumes as I write.

Now capitalism functions under even greater duress, and its contradictions are so much more intense due to the actual extremes of global monopoly capitalism. Even the technically skilled or PhDs, such as myself, have to suffer under the indignity of permanent unemployment or underemployment. Billions of us currently experience life as capitalism’s victims. Even if we don’t work for ‘The Man,’ we still slave under the mental guilt of not having any good employment prospects. Unless we have family money to support us, we must continually resell ourselves on the slave labor market for survival.

If we really own property, which means no mortgage debts or property taxes whatsoever, then we are all technically homeless. We give dirty stares to the pathetic ‘home bums,’ or permanently homeless, on the street corners; yet, their numbers will only continue to grow. Some of us reading this essay, will also end our lives down there – dying slowly in the hopeless gutter.

For the rest of us that are ‘lucky to have work,’ our ‘freedom’ comes at a terrible price. A good chunk of our time and our lives goes to the owner’s personal profit margin, while our general quality of life suffers. We also live impaired under the political-cultural ideology of global monopoly capitalism, called Neo-Liberalism. Most of us live in overcrowded and unhealthy cities, where most of our ‘wage money’ goes into a toilet drain of rent housing.

In order to live economically, many of us have to consume crappy genetically modified food. Meanwhile, both our minds and stomachs have to tolerate regular scam artistry, ubiquitous, large public signs that warn and threaten with the smoldering potential of violent street crime. All of us must endure the institutional violence of petty felony laws, common deceitfulness between neighbors, continual advertising overload, and pathological lying from politicians. Like the old saying goes, ‘slavery has never ended.’

The Amerikan Empire VII: Bad Education through Dirty Social Control

After twelve years of living overseas in Europe, vagabonding and traveling around the world, I decided to return to the Amerikan school system. I wanted to get the top degree as a historian, a PhD. Yet, I always hated the Amerikan system of ‘education.’ Like most people in the country, most of my Amerikan schooling experiences were quite negative.

I had thought that studying for a PhD, or a useless doctorate degree, would signify a totally different experience. I would be able to read what I wanted, and study various themes and topics that interested me. I could write passionately about what truly fascinated me related to historical stuff. I could then become a professor too.

I finally did receive my longed for PhD six years later – but I was terribly wrong. I was good at history, but common sense kicked me in the butt. The rot of the education system had even infected the deadbeat world of Amerikan university graduate school.

From daycare-head start, nursery ‘schools’ to the doctoral program schools in Amerikan universities, bad education reigns through dirty social control. The main culprit represents the mandatory and compulsory state ‘public’ school. The Amerikan forced and coerced schooling system exists solely for training obedient, institutionalized slaves. The elites wanted, and have continued to want, mental cowards that follow orders throughout their bad employment careers. The Amerikan school system currently runs like a minimum security jail system confined within the bureaucratic iron cage.

I’ll never forget my first few weeks on the Amerikan university campus after being out of the ‘school system’ for over ten years. The university charged and extorted students for almost everything that they needed on campus. There were counseling fees, student bookstore fees, student union fess, building fees, computer resource fees, etcetera, and even teaching grad students had to pay for tuition.

In the Amerikan Empire, the state, inclusive of federal, state and city governments, normally tax the citizens incessantly. However, the Amerikan university had perfected this art of taxation, charges and fines, which possessed even greater reach than the state – since tuition costs rose by the rate of inflation times twenty each year.

The university also had a long list of fees and sanctions that required continual outlays of payments, such as parking fees, for both cars and bicycles, late registration fines, drinking alcohol on campus fines, skateboarding fines, and the poor undergrads that lived in the dorms had it worse. Their lives were exactly like prisoners in minimum security jails. They had to inform the security staff when both leaving and arriving in the buildings. Any minor room infraction could land them serious fines, ending up homeless – or even arrested by the campus donut brigade.

I was really shocked when I saw one peculiar ‘innovation.’ The university had a full-fledged and legal, autonomous police force, with its very own detective and jail, cops openly carried semi-automatic guns, high-powered shotguns, and the unit had an armored vehicle with drug sniffing dogs. These cops were often young and hard-core. They regularly rode and walked around the campus looking to harass and bust both unwary students and strangers that ventured on the campus spaces.

While the cops kept the campus on lockdown, surveillance cameras were prevalent everywhere. It wasn’t as bad as a casino or a prison, but it came close. The vigilance cameras were in the hallways, library bookcase areas, and they even faced the front doors of restrooms.

A terrible ambience of fear and distrust pervaded the entire university campus community. The university bosses or administrators managed the whole operation from the top down. The Regents or Trustees possessed the legal management of the university, so they appointed the president. The president next appointed his or her own assistants, and in turn, they appointed the provosts, vice provosts and the other campus directorships. Meanwhile, the provosts appointed the deans and the assistant deans, and the deans appointed their assistants. Almost none of these six figure salaried administrators, and in the case of the president, millionaires, taught classes. They generally attended meetings and passed e-mails to each other.

The administrative chiefs often delegated the heavy university workload, innocuously called service requirements, onto the tenured professor managers. These administrators could dismiss any worker or terminate any job position at will – even if the victim had tenure.

This American university system resembled the old Communist Central Committees of Eastern Europe, or the old Corporations run by the family juntas of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts at the turn of the century. The top directors also referred to ‘their university’ as a not-for-profit corporations. The irony apparently escaped them.

The tenured professor managers were quite disappointing as both workers and people. They often acted in a cowardly manner. They never argued with the administrators, and never fought back against most university injustices. The few who did fight back, ended up fired. Most tenured university professors transformed themselves into institutional drones.

Most of them had already transformed themselves into servile workers through faithfully attending the Amerikan Empire school system.

The worst of the bunch were the other graduate students. I had thought that my fellow students would emerge as intellectual colleagues where deep discussions on history, culture and politics were commonplace. The opposite was true. With so little money at the bottom of the pyramid and with most of us gaining horrible salaries at the poverty level, every other graduate student was a competitor for the meager amounts of available money. Hatred ruled inside of those tiny and claustrophobic grad student offices.

The hatred and anger seethed at all levels on the campus. Administrators often blew their tops against recalcitrant professors. Some professors went ballistic against grad students. The grad students showed their rage through harshly grading the papers of the undergraduates – who represented the ‘lazy’ students. Yet it was the laziest of the bunch, the administrators, who received the greatest payouts. And from there, the pyramid of tension, hate and control regularly flushed down into the university cesspool.

I began to hear other horrible stories and legends. A tenured, professor-pervert got away with his sexual indiscretions due to his ability to garner outside grant money for the university, i.e., the administration. The uni donut cops managed a corrupt practice of busting drivers around the campus at night for Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol, (DUI) money; meanwhile, some of those same cops would get drunk and then receive free rides home. University administrators would physically threaten attorneys, coaches and professors that refused to bend to their wills.

I also heard about some departments where cowardly professor bullies formed mob actions against their non-conformist colleagues. The university environment functioned under some of the worst institutionalized behavior in the education industry. Only the Amerikan prison gulag or the US Post Office seemed worse off – and yet, I had voluntarily entered this sick world.

I stayed on for six years longer until I received my PhD. I had no where else to go. I was good at history, reading and writing. But I paid a serious price for my desperate and stubborn will to continue and finish graduate school. I too fell victim to the pettiness, the competitive meanness, the nasty envy, and worst of all, the frustrated anger. Yet, I prided myself in resisting such institutional vices. It took me four years after receiving my PhD to fully heal my mind from such a harsh ‘educational’ experience.

After reaching the long sought doctoral degree, I then realized something even more sinister – the Amerikan university had become a rotten extension of the Amerikan high school, which in turn, birthed itself out of the infernal concoction of Amerikan forced schooling, or ‘the public school system.’

The mandatory public school system was actually a recent historical phenomenon. About a hundred years ago in the USA, few people attended the local public schools. Kids might attend a local school-house, but the school was completely autonomous, under a schoolmaster or even a local teacher. Most children attended for a few years, but it often ended when they had to work at their parent’s businesses, farms or small ranches. Children mainly learned their life and work skills from their parents.

At about the same time, Amerika’s elite business capos, such as the Rockefellers, began to lobby the state governments for forced, mandatory schooling. They wanted a more ‘disciplined’ workforce, and so they united with German Empire trained, public intellectuals, such as John Dewey, to set up ‘school boards,’ ‘child labor laws,’ and ‘teacher colleges.’ The Amerikan federal and state apparatuses supported this school system because they watched the spectacular military power of the German Empire, or the Second Reich, which had compulsory state schooling. Other world empires, had also utilized this successful school model, such as the French Empire and the British Empire.

By the 1920s, most US states had some form of mandatory public school law, which gave states the legal right to take away parents’ kids, and hold them against their wills for a good party of the day. The elites however, such as the Rockefellers, never sent their kids to those obligatory public schools; instead, their sons, and eventually, daughters too, attended elite college preparatory private schools, and afterwards, attended the ivy league, elite universities.

The requisite state, Amerikan public schools had more administrators than teachers. They often sat in offices, never taught, and received great salaries, benefits and severance pay packages. Under them were the ‘education leaders,’ or principals, who also made very good money.

In order to earn a little money, I did some substitute teaching at some local public schools. During my period breaks, I overheard teachers recounting some outrageous stories of corrupt Board of Education bosses, often coming into the main office for a few hours and then leaving for the rest of the day. And these bosses made six figure salaries! At the same time, most of the teachers that I saw in the teacher’s lounge seemed tired, worn out, weird and their pay was average. The teachers did most of the work, since the principals never really taught any classes.

Working as a substitute also pained me to view the poor children harassed, categorized and ordered around by the school authorities. Bullying was rampant and the violence between students often exploded into nasty fights. The corporate media liars always blamed school violence on bad kids, bad parents and bad teachers. But I saw first hand that it was the institutional violence of enforced schooling, which had started this nefarious cycle.

The school system of the Amerikan Empire did teach a few reading and math skills. Most importantly however, those schools also taught more deceitful lessons.

The compulsory schooling scam has taught children about their low place in the social hierarchy, and how in order to ‘stay afloat in the world,’ the good student must lie, tolerate boredom, elicit favors, and maintain a false, hypocritical public persona.

The Amerikan state school has represented the most impressive institution for maintaining social control. As long as the Amerikan Empire continually murders and vomits out its casualties across this planet, this disguised jail system for children, adolescents and young adults, will rip apart and destroy its own sad victims.

History shall condemn such a monstruous institution clothed in the black robes of ideological deceit, or ‘educational policy.’ Compulsory State Education has forced millions of parents, under the terrible threats of the State, to hand over their own children for mind and personality mutilation.

Gun Culture Exhibit A: Safety, More Safety and Even More Safety

The terrible news stories never end. First, I read about a top state spy honcho, while representing a pro-citizen disarmament government, who shot his weapon’s laser sights at foreign visitors. Next, I glanced at some story about an irresponsible gun owner that allowed his gun to blast off as he was testing it in front of people. If he was lucky, then nobody ended up wounded or murdered. Sadly, this has not been the case from previous collected accounts of negligent discharges.

I have also perused news items about guys showing off their guns to their friends, forgetting that they had recently gone out shooting, and then messing around with their weapons while a live round was in the chamber. The stupid guy then murders his friend that was sitting right across from him. So many lives destroyed over some fool showing off his new weapon!

There are other stories about cops, and cop leaders, demonstrating the proper use of weapons, and then having them shoot off live bullets in front of a shocked audience. Sometimes, the round destroyed some inanimate object, while other times the cop gangers shot themselves with permanent consequences. For all of us that handle weapons, we all must repractice basic gun safety.

Guns are tools. But they are very specific tools. Guns are tools specific for extermination, whether at an old TV that only plays static, or against a rabid, four-legged animal ready for a meaty bite, or even against a human, a two-legged ‘animal’ ready to do some serious violence. We must all safely handle these tools of extermination, so that we do not destroy ourselves, our families, or our friends.

The first step for using any gun or any weapon is not shooting it live, or even disassembling it and then the reassembly. The first step before holding any weapon, is learning, memorizing, checking, and then constantly reviewing the basic gun safety rules. The alternative is just one negligent discharge within a few seconds that can horribly alter our human existence. In one fleeing moment we could destroy our lives and the lives of others.

The first safety rule is to treat all guns and weapons as if they had live rounds inside, meaning ‘loaded.’ This basic rule is not paranoia, but a safe way of always pointing the weapon in a direction where it will not hurt any living being or dangerous object, such as a closed gas canister, and at the same time, always checking the gun safety, releasing the magazine, (if there is one), and examining the chamber. Even if the gun has not been used for a long time, the owner has to do the same procedures. He or she has to make sure that the weapon points at an area that will cause the least amount damage, if the gun happens to discharge a round. Next, he or she has to perform the gun safety check: magazine check, (if there is a magazine inserted), and a chamber check to see if it is free of bullets.

Finding a safe area to point a weapon is hard. If you live above or below someone, then you cannot point the weapon at most surfaces, because almost all bullet rounds go through walls, doors, windows, floors and ceilings. Even pointing the gun at a regular old wall is dangerous because you just don’t know who there is on the outside, on the other side of the wall, or just standing around your place. The point of this lesson is that you never want a negligent discharge.

If you live in an urban environment, the sudden, loud ‘bang’ of a weapon firing is enough for a snitch, cowardly neighbor to call on the donut brigade. When the cops show up later at your door, good luck in not allowing the police gang to push you out of the doorway and then search your personal space. Cops always find some evidence for some crime. The police can then say that the gunshot gave them the probable cause. In some anti-gun Amerikan big cities, a civilian negligent discharge is an actual crime. This is one of the reasons some gun people live in out in the rural parts where guns are prevalent. Gunshots tend move in and out with the wild animal noises.

The second rule about pointing the weapon in a safe direction, also implies that we need to see the target and what is behind it. Since we consider all weapons loaded, we also need to handle and store our weapons in such a way that if a negligent discharge of a bullet does go off, the bullet will do the least amount of damage to the target right in front of it. After we check the gun’s chambers, with no magazine, (or an empty magazine), and the safety on, then we should lock the weapon and store it inside some container. We should place the container in such a way as to have the barrel facing a hard surface, and where there is usually no human contact or pressurized structures behind the surface.

We should never point the weapon at our faces or bodies in order to check for obstructions in the barrel. The gun owner has to do the safety check first, and then disassemble the weapon second. After cleaning and reassembly, the gun owner can then inspect for the barrel for obstructions. After reassembly, the gun owner can also check both the safety and trigger functions – not pulling the trigger itself.

This is the third rule. Never put the finger on the trigger unless you are ready to destroy something. The trigger mechanism is the final act for extermination. Once the owner pulls the trigger even slightly, it can never return back. The round will fire and then come the consequences. This is the reason that all guns come with trigger guards. Even the slightest pressure on the trigger can set it off. We should keep the trigger finger on the frame, and only put that finger on the trigger when all other options are not available in a combat situation. We are now ready to commit devastation. This mentality also implies that we are in the right mind.

The fourth rule is extremely important. Never handle a gun or any weapon while partying with friends, while anxious or mentally preoccupied, after imbibing some alcohol, and don’t even make the gun a common conversation piece for bragging rights, or just to talk about your day shooting with someone. It is better to keep quiet about your weapons, then letting your neighbors or acquaintances find out what you possess. When things get nasty in the Empire, that same neighbor or acquaintance may become the snitch narc that will turn you into the police. Talking about your gun to other people often moves into showing off your gun to other people. When drinking alcohol or mentally preoccupied, you will probably not do any safety checks. A fun get together between friends could turn into the most terrible act we could ever do.

In all my many years of handling weapons, hunting trips, military experience and plinking with friends, I have had one negligent discharge. Luckily, I was not hurt, and nor did I really blast anything important. But as they say, one mistake is one too many, and this is especially true with firearms. I learned my lesson because I startled myself and I felt an acute shock that I could commit such a mistake. I swore that I would never do such a negligent act ever again and I returned to the gun safety protocols. I am still a fanatic for firearm safety. That one embarrassing experience solidified the first and only rule with handling any weapons: safety, more safety, and even more safety.

The Amerikan Empire VI: Third World Juntas of Big City Corruption

 

There was something evil about the walk, and the eyes. The man seemed like a borderline obese monster dressed in a fine suit and polished boots. His gait both wobbled and strutted into public buildings. The protruding, balding head had tufts of oiled hair pasted on the side, and the beard possessed a stench mix of tobacco reek, whiskey, rancid beef and pungent perfume. A grotesque and large cretin at first glance, this fetid human specimen was also one of the most powerful politicians in the United States, from the 1850s to the 70s. Boss Tweed was the name of infamy.

He started his nefarious political career as a gang leader in New York City within the rough neighborhood of the Lower East Side, or L.E.S. for short. He grew into one of the top gang leaders through swinging a large axe on rival fire fighter guys during street fights. Houses were of wood in those days, and so for those poor unfortunates that lived inside of those hovels, fires were quite common. Poor tenants had to pay protection money to the fire gangs – if they wanted to save their personal stuff and lives from the flame inundations. And if business was ever slow, the fire and cop gangs could do a little arson action on tenement buildings too.

The obese, axe wielding brute soon caught the greedy eyes of some corrupt NYC officials needing some muscle in extorting votes from the lower class lowlifes, the white ones living in the L.E.S. The politicians were members of a notorious Democratic machine and gang called ‘Tammany Hall.’ Boss Tweed gleefully took on the role as the ward boss, and then slithered into becoming the greatest boss of the city, where even national Democratic and Republican party politicians sought out the chubby thug of destiny.

Starting his illustrious career in public service, He purchased for himself a phony attorney credential, which the state government of New York duly certified as legitimate. Next, he continually got himself ‘elected’ to various political positions, such as city alderman, chairman of the NYC Democratic Club, city commissioner, NY state assemblyman – and even a stint as a NYC congressman in the House of Representatives. Every time he placed his name on the ballot, he miraculously won the election and served out his time in office. Yet with all of his important and innovative political work, nothing ever changed in NYC.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, he constructed a stronger pre-mafia gang at Tammany Hall where all the parasites received their cushy jobs. They did not have to work at all really, yet they regularly collected nice salaries and pensions. He also handpicked local, rich bums with distinguished faces to run as mayors of New York. Most of them were from the Lower East Side wards of Irish Catholic immigrants. All of his mayoral candidates fantastically won. Everybody understood: the real power behind city hall government mob was Fat Bastard Tweed.

Tweed monopolized most government posts, and he also monopolized all NYC government construction contracts. Any building that needed repairs or a new facelift had to go through ‘his companies.’ Tweed further capitalized on his loot and became the biggest property pimp landlord in the City through buying up expensive buildings on Fifth Avenue, and then purchasing farm landholdings in the Harlem section of Manhattan.

Some years later, the railroad capitalists Jay Gould and Jim Fisk put up some flim flam municipal bonds in order to raise the stock in their ‘new company’. They needed the master con man Tweed to certify the deeds. Tweed made sure the stock hoax was legit – and demanded that his horde rob a few inflated dividends.

Tweed was such a corrupt master, that the rival Republican machine gang in the City, finagled a deal with the all-powerful boss to completely rewrite New York City’s Charter. Most importantly, Tweed successfully used the different NYC cop gangs as his personal foot soldiers, whether the Municipal Police Force or the Metropolitan Police Force.

Crap historians often look at the Tweed and Tammany Hall Era of New York history as a type of aberration in American urban government. Those historians are not just bad historians, they are also liars. This corrupt urban system in Amerika still functions marvelously, and not just in megalopolis cities, such as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, but also in supposedly progressive cities, like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon – and this Amerikan urban gangrene exists in even medium to small cities across the country.

Amerika’s urban juntas have represented the most foul epitomes of criminal neglect against the poor and lower classes, while those same city bosses have continually colluded with urban elites in order to shortchange the local political economy. Amerika’s city father hoodlums have consistently brutalized the poor lives of those unfortunates that must survive inside those infernos of cruelty.. They legally steal, cook the books, monopolize, extort, graft, bribe, and they rewrite the tax codes, public education system, criminal laws, and urban boundary lines to their sick whims.

They have even used the police as paramilitary murderers and jailers against those honorable people who have resisted such tyranny. While the official US propaganda system has brazenly extolled the lies of freedom and democracy, Amerika’s urban states of sinister corruption and criminality have crafted the inner city horrors of abject slums and ghettos.

We are not dealing with Boss Hogg buffoons. These are shrewd card sharp players that know how to filch and swindle through legal fiat and institutional switch and bait. They are merciless to the working class and lumpen populations that lack money, while they offer innumerable monetary benefits to corporations, real estate conglomerations, large business owners and white yuppie transients with money. These municipal crooks have coated their own pockets for their very own individual perks, like free travel and multiple bodyguards, permanent post-retirement mega-salaries and hoarding public tax monies for their own private initiatives.

A short list of some of their more contemporary frauds and rackets will suffice. These gangs of respectable criminals have often used the improper use of TIF monies and economic gerrymandering of ‘enterprise business zones.’

In order to receive more property and city taxes, which also increase their personal salaries, the city hall bosses continually extend the city limits. Once they illegally rob the outlying lands, they hand over the cheap disused fields or farmlands within those ‘limits’ to a low-cost private developer who then receives a monopoly on all work contracts. This nefarious practice also limits other companies from competing for scarce work opportunities and jobs.

Ultimately, a sprawling area of real estate either sits vacant or fills-up, whether for residential or commercial use. Even if it is a bust for the local economy, the privileged property owner continues to pay the low tax rates, while the city government stooges collect their tax bribes.

University administrator hacks have also worked in tandem with these legal gangsters. Local city judges in on the fix will then allow a ’eminent domain’ section to enter the urban map plan. A new satellite university campus is now under construction. The university administrators pay nothing, while the students pay another tuition increase.

The city bosses have used another popular money laundering-bribery scheme through increasing municipal taxes in order to pay for professional sports stadiums. The multi-billionaire sports team owner pays very little and receives his very own team stadium.

City Hall has even more legal and legit frauds under its sleeves, such as Community Development Block Grants, Corporate Income Tax Credits, Industrial Revenue Bonds, Property Tax Abatements, Sales Tax Exemptions and Tax Formula Changes. Meanwhile, the average citizen living in the cockroach and rat infested tenement building receives the icy stare of the donut cop.

Most of Amerika’s City Hall overseers are also the most rabid supporters of gun confiscations among the local citizens. They are not anti-gun for their own bodyguards or for the local donut brigades, but they will imprison the average citizen for even possessing a shotgun in the home. Crime in these urban Amerikan cauldrons is often rampant and brutal. The urban citizen that defends himself from a criminal act often has to endure a long legal battle or a hard prison term.

These urban bullies only want more control, and more money flowing in to their bank accounts. They also want some extra desserts for their rich friends. The only other group that they tend to stomach are transient yuppies with white skin privilege – as long as they have money to spend. They say they like ‘artists’ too, but the ‘artistes’ only work as the first wave of rent paying transients for their gentrification projects. They have to displace the African-American and Latino poor first. And then the privileged landlords will come for them too.

The cycle of deceit and legal crime continues within Amerika’s cities. Politicians, Financial Banks, Real Estate Conglomerates and Insurance Fraudsters are always the big winners in urban sprawl Amerika. Now we understand why so many big cities in the United States have had all-powerful Mafia families. The regular people have always known that City Hall was on the take, so they went to the wise guys instead for some meager justice. And for the rest of us in the city, we just have to sell ourselves on the rigged market for the bare basics of life: a wage slave job that robs our time and our energies, while paying the rent debt for some privacy and some sleep.

Anarchists of Action: Violence and Silence, the Death of the Ego-Self

I read some interesting articles on the international Anarcho-blogosphere about the need for more insurrectionary Anarchism versus the more middle class oriented, Civic Anarchism.

The Insurrectional Anarchist practices the original Class War methods of classical Anarchism, meaning Propaganda of both the Word and the Deed. These actions imply that the Anarchist reads and writes prolifically, and then proceeds into the insurrectionist mode. The insurrectionist mode involves industrial or commercial sabotage, firebombing work places and factories, destruction of targeted private property, attacking cops at protests, fighting back against Fascists at their demos, and killing selected targets from the elites and the powerful.

Some defenders of these methods call themselves Anarcho-Nihilists or Anarcho-Individualists. A few have even stated that their actions value more than their lives, and that imprisonment from the state becomes the beautiful moment of peace, and for a few, a true clarity of vision. They also state that the insurrectionist locked inside the prison inferno is truly free because he or she has no more fear of the State.

Civic Anarchism tends to exist in many urban centers of the ‘Western’ European and Colonial-Settler European regions, such as the Americas and Australia. The Civic Anarchist, and mostly associated with the Anarcho-Syndicalist, radical unionist bunch, reads and writes a lot, and then works within the system through ‘radical’ organizing. They eschew violence and often condemn the violence of certain Anarchists. The ‘civies’ might organize a workplace, or help out in a strike, but there is a lot more organizational tactics at work, such as endless meetings, writing articles for Indymedia, or setting up a benefit punk show for collecting more organizing funds.

According to the Insurrectional Anarchists, the Civic Anarchists play it safe like their Activist-Leftist, Middle Class counterparts. According to the hard cores, the Civic Anarchists are really Anarcho-activists, and they are not much different from the mortal enemies of Anarchists: the Marxist sect-ideologically crazy activists, with their ideological platforms and assemblies lasting over two hours.

The insurrectionists might have very good reasons to criticize the civic-minded Anarchists. Anarchy is not just talking at meetings and writing polemics. Anarchy also represents the actions of taking what is ours and attacking targets; however, the insurrectionists, like their civic rivals, are also guilty of too much talk.

Too many Anarcho-revolutionaries scream their violent works on their own websites and hard copy pages – and they have even given interviews related to ‘illegal’ activities to corporate news organs! A good example were some Eugene Anarchists that publicly proclaimed their resistance to the State and Capitalism after the WTO protests in 1999.

After their foolish interviews to the corporate press, the full violence of the State came upon them, and then a few Anarchists ended up doing some hard time in prison. While these same insurrectionists are often fanatics for ‘security culture,’ they have often broken their very same rules. Nothing is more damaging to any revolutionary group than having boasters and blowhards scream about their ‘actions’ against the enemy.

I have also read uncountable declarations on the Internet blogosphere, mostly coming from particular Anarcho-gun owners, stating that they were ready to violently throw down against the US government if they try to take away their guns. Oh really? Are those armchair tough guys going to risk it all when the SWAT team thugs show up at their front doors? It is one thing to write the tough words on the Internet, and it is quite another thing to actually engage in a heated gun fight with the authorities.

All of those hard cores know full well that the state spies and police forces are also listening and reading their pronouncements. In the dangerous world that we live in now, one simple slip of the tongue, and often a person goes down. Sometimes, the civic-minded Anarchist that printed the insurrectionist diatribe in his or her written format, whether electronic or paper, represents the one that pays dearly. Other times, the insurrectionist falls into his or her own imprudent post-action actions. The state authorities don’t care much either way, because at least they have found another enemy to destroy who is against the legitimate authority of the state.

Anarchists ought to remember the first rule of any organization antagonistic to the state: silence. For example, the Italian Mafia has always had its code of ‘Omertà,’ and the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Eastern Europe had the code of “Mesirah.’ The Gypsies have also used their code of silence against harassing state bureaucrats.

The Anarchist community has to abide in the code of silence. Silence has generally related to the first law of both prudence and maturity. We also have the old saying, ‘silence is golden.’ If an Anarchist has committed a propaganda of the deed, then the Anarchist must never talk about or refer to the past event – ever again. After an action, it is even best to stay away from friends and alcohol for a few months, so that the boasting, imaginative mind never tempts the loose, undisciplined tongue.

Most importantly, we Anarchists ought to realize that the mental concepts of our selves are illusions. We have our likes, dislikes, cares and preferences, but just like human culture throughout the various ages of history, all cultures change. So do we. We are not the same people that we were ten years ago, and definitely not twenty years ago. Yes, we do have similarities to those ancient selves of ours, yet we are now a different breed.

Even with these changes, our egos often get in the way of clear thinking. We often surmise that both our personal views and words are truth, while our perceptions are the absolute truth. We often dwell too much on the personal mind garbage. Instead of letting go, we get bogged down inside our recurring thoughts.

Unlike the Marxist sectarians, Anarchism contains some marvelous diversity within its methods. Squatters who take over an abandoned building and open it up for the homeless and vagabonds are doing a great work too. They have fixed up an abandoned property left to rot by some property pimp, and now they can live freely without the common anxieties of having ‘to make rent payments,’ or relying on the landlord to fix the problems. Other residents that have had to pay rents, have seen such successes, and they would also want to enter such living arrangements.

There are other methods that have worked splendidly, such as living in trees to save a forest area, video exposures on the cruel methods of factory mass murder of animals for cheap meat, corporate billboard sabotage, cop watching on a Friday night, setting up a spontaneous street party in a busy intersection, such as Reclaim the Streets, or camping out in a park right in the heart of a large, corrupt mega city, which led to the Occupy movement. All of these tactics have worked and they will continue to work because they have used the greatest powers of the Anarchist, direct action and mutual aid.

As long as we Anarchists keep up the diversity of our work, we will continue to be old nails on the floor for the creeps of the State. We Anarchists are not criminals however, nor should we glamorize muggers, petty thieves, robbers, looters, wise guys and con artists. Unlike them, we fight to build a better world for ourselves. The criminal elements only want their inflated egos caressed. Their worlds are only for themselves – and themselves alone. There is an old saying, ‘there is no honor among thieves.’ This is also the truth.

We can kill the obsessions with ourselves, keep up the revolutionary work, and finally, keep our mouths shut – bearing our secrets forever, while simply holding on to our reserve and dignity. The state authorities and the elites will definitely persecute us, but the invisible barbed wire of silence, coolness, and a noticeable lack of ego trips will weaken all of their insidious methods – security culture or no security culture.

The Amerikan Empire IV: The Evil Cult of Monopoly Capitalism

1. The year was 1876. The USA’s elites had organized the celebration of the Amerikan Empire’s Centennial Birthday through staging a gaudy World’s Fair in Philadelphia. They had a lot to celebrate due to recently subduing some recalcitrant competing elites in the southern region, officially called the Civil War 1860-65. Yet, their ‘hero’ Lincoln died with a bullet to the head.

American elites also decided to appease the old, southern plantation owners through restoring their properties and allowing a permanent racially divided system, which made ‘Dixiecrat’ rule a lot easier. The US government declared that Reconstruction was officially over, referred to as the Compromise of 1876.

During the putrid election of 1876, a Republican party hack, by the name of Hayes, won the presidency. Not only did the Empire survive a civil war and have to weather a hotly divided society through regional conflict, the corrupt American electoral system allowed a legal coup d’état government. That was definitely something to celebrate.

During that same epoch, the US government initiated its final extermination campaigns against the free native nations that hunted and traveled in the west. Recent outbreaks of bovine diseases and droughts had liquidated the vast populations of both herded cattle and wild cattle in the west. For the cattle barons, the massive die outs of cows were simple profit losses. The great western landholders, or Anglo property pimps, forced their workers to stake out barbed wire fences across the great western valleys and lowlands. If they couldn’t sell potential meat, then they could at least sell their ‘private properties.’ Meanwhile, a terrible economic depression had hit the country a few years earlier. The elites at that time referred to it as another ‘economic downturn.’

Like rat infestations found in urban slums, government corruption, stock market manipulations, and growing monopolies in certain business sectors began to multiply. Last names such as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Gould, and Morgan entered the American lexicon as curse words with ties to nefarious business practices. Poverty abounded and starvation was certain for some unfortunates in the working class. Most African-Americans either died in their youths as working class heroes, or they sold their dignity for some scrap food.

In 1877, the railroad owners, and other captains of industry with ties to the railroad monopolies, then implemented severe wage cuts against their workers. But the workers counterattacked across the United States. Workers’ syndicates, or ‘unions,’ called for a nationwide strike to shut down all the industries related to the labor force of the railroads.

The infamous strike of 1877, or the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, was the only successful General Strike in American history. Workers picketed, stopped scabs from entering the workplace, closed down factories and railroad yards, and refused to leave the owners’ properties.

The General Strike was so successful, that the Republican, ex-Union General turned president, Hayes, called out federal troops to help state militias in exterminating the workers. This executive fiat was the first use of federal troops to put down strikes – which contemporary US elites have continued to utilize against strikers in major US industries. The US government successfully liquidated the striking, radical workers, referring to them as ‘Commune radicals,’ and ‘Socialist-Internationalist, Trade Union conspiracists.’ The strikers had become our contemporary ‘radicalized terrorists.’

Many major urban industrial centers in the US had their massacres of workers: Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago and St. Louis. US government troops and state militias, (later called the National Guard), murdered thousands of workers, including women and children workers. Still to this very day, the US government has hidden the number of murders during the Great Railroad Strike. Some labor historians have stated that about 10,000 workers lost their lives during that strike. This was not just a strike: this state sponsored mass murder represented a joint US government-economic elite war against the working classes.

The US government was not finished with its reaction and tyranny. The Amerikan state apparatus soon devised some incremental changes to the state militia system. Gradually, the state militias would come under the control of the federal government and they would slowly integrate into the Amerikan war machine, under the US Army, later referred to as the National Guard. The political elites also established the Armory system. National Guard units now had their new headquarters in castle like structures, which housed their weapons and military equipment. These armories were conveniently located in America’s industrial centers and towns across the continent. The Liberal Democrat president, Wilson, ultimately transformed the diverse bands of state militias into US Army affiliated State National Guard units.

America’s industrial capitalist elites, ‘captains of industry, or ‘robber barons,’ such as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Gould and Morgan hoped to obtain both vertical and horizontal consolidations of their particular industries, meaning the management of both the production of primary materials, and the distribution centers for manufactured materials. After controlling both production and distribution, their dastardly deeds could move into squashing the small business competitors that still fought against their sacred monopolies. These industrial capitalists consolidated their outrageous holdings through the setting up of ‘trusts’ among the biggest players, which fixed high prices, low wages, and information sharing, all leaving out the smaller contenders.

They also created ‘holding companies,’ or fake companies that the family or the major stockholders also legally controlled. They could both hide their monies and resist the nasty label as ‘monopolists.’ Next, these mega-rich madmen bought the senators, congressmen, governors, and state assembly politicians – and even federal, state and local judges. These top bosses also secured disgraceful legal precedents, which gave them greater rights for their corporations than for average American citizens. Corporations comprised the legal privileges of private corporate entities, while controlling the same legal rights as US citizens! Large corporations have since maintained these superior rights and privileges within American legal precedent.

First, the United States of America had transformed itself into the world haven and military defender of the massive mega corporation, the multi-national business conglomerate, and the super companies with tentacles across the globe. From its Industrial capitalist beginnings, the United States government has always supported and upheld the evil cult of Monopoly Capitalism.

Second, this incredibly violent and unjust political-economic system has only helped a few favored corporate and federally subsidized businesses. In the 1880s, it was mainly railroads, oil, metal fabrication, (iron and steel), and massive cattle slaughter.

These days, the favored industries are large finance firms, the Stock Market, mostly headquartered in Wall St., NYC, and the Federal Reserve banks, such as JP Morgan-Chase, Citibank, US Bank and the Bank of America. Then, the insurance fraudsters come in second, such as Blue Cross, Aetna, Kaiser, MetLife, etc., with the GMO-Biotech food monopolies next on the list, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Pfizer, McDonald’s, Dean Foods, ConAgra, DuPont, Smithfield, Tyson, etc.

There are also those large real estate conglomerations, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and corporate media trusts, such as Viacom, Disney, GE-NBC, FOX, CNN, etc. And ultimately, and most importantly, there exist the energy and transportation monopolies, such as EXXON-Mobil, Chevron, Koch and Conoco, Delta, GM, Ford, American Airlines, Chrysler and US Airways-United. The military-police-surveillance transportation conglomerations also receive their super pie portions, such the US military and the spy agencies: NSA, FDA, CIA, FBI, ATF, DHS, IRS, DEA with lots of other government initialed bureaucracies.

Third, this brutal capitalist system is unique in the world in that America’s elites, unlike Europe’s elites, interlock with each other between top government positions, private industry boards of directorships, and intellectual foundations, representing both university research centers and think tank organizations. This interlocking and adjustable power elite, with its well-guarded monopoly capitalist system, explains one of the main reasons for the staying power of the Great Sociopathic Empire.

Fourth, the US government has no unemployment social safety net for the majority of Americans that do not work in its favored monopolies. Meanwhile, it ingeniously uses massive amounts of corporate media propaganda to cover up its cruel and criminal political economic system. The economic corporate news always focuses on the Stock Market, phony new jobs numbers, and bogus inflation stats, while common prices rise for the rest of us. This clever flim flam system offers particular free money benefits to a few people, yet gives nothing in return to most other citizens – and refuses to compensate those that have regularly paid their taxes.

For example, I, like millions of others around the country, have been unable to find a job in my field, and have been underemployed for years now. Yet, I am a doctor holding a PhD after six hard years of work. I have no rights to any unemployment money, even though I had paid taxes for five years previously as a working graduate assistant. Americans get almost nothing in return from their high tax rates. However, the favored monopolies tied to the US government receive the full rounds of benefits, welfare dole and privileges.

A few years after the General Strike of 1877, in the 1880s and 90s, the corporate monoliths called for greater open foreign immigration from eastern and southern Europe to lower the wages. The federal government obliged to their wishes completely, where thereby, millions of desperate European immigrants poured into America’s urban centers. Thousands of poor wage slaves worked themselves to death for pittances, a few others starved or died terribly as vagabonds on the city streets, while many others moved from one industry job to another industry job for survival sake. The ones that moved around represented the winners.

Once again in the 1970s and 80s, through the influence of institutions, such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, Amerika’s interlocking powerful elites demanded more ‘flexibility’ and ‘greater international investment opportunities’ for their corporations, which implied greater profits for shareholders. The translated business code meant that US-based companies should have easy rights to move their production and manufacturing operations overseas, so that they could tap into a worldwide cheap labor source. Now, many of these US manufacturing giants have their production capacities across the urban slums of Asia. The US government allowed US multinationals to inflict this killer of domestic employment – and D.C. will continue to allow these corrupt practices as long as they hold power.

When in the 1880s and 90s, the top business honchos called for a more ‘educated,’ meaning docile, workforce. Both the US government and state governments bowed to their desires. The Amerikan state public school farce, or the national coercive schooling system, consolidated around Boards of Educations and politician appointees, called ‘administrators.’

Major universities, and even the Ivy Leagues, started to change their school categories from the strict Liberal Arts paradigm towards special programs in Engineering, Applied Sciences, Business and Agricultural Sciences. America’s urban police forces and prison systems expanded their social engineering scope. Since then, this sinister political economy has mixed with insidious social control mechanisms.

By the 1970s and 80s, representatives of the interlocking elites within D.C. based ‘think tanks,’ demanded more ‘values based education’ and they cited a ‘lack of civic responsibilities and basic skill sets,’ among students. The elites were really concerned with the negative aspects of the ‘Sixties attitudes,’ meaning an absence of respect and awe for government authorities and institutions. Within a few years, public schools and universities instituted more skill based testing of students – even starting from the first primary grades! The US government, under the ‘Dept. of Education,’ pushed public schools and universities in the United States to make all of the necessary changes – if they wanted more federal dollars in their coffers.

US govt. officials and university administrators colluded together in allowing a new test monopoly. This ‘not for profit’ corporation took over the testing mania, called the Educational Testing Service or EST. They were the sole company that controlled the moneymaking windfall of SAT and GRE university level exams. Universities and Colleges then forced their students to take useless core curriculum courses on western history and culture, meaning the US and Europe, which added to their already mandatory course lists. American higher education transformed into a secondary high school curriculum. University administrators annually raised tuition by the real inflation rate. The US government then forced states to raise their drinking age from 18 to 21. Finally, American colleges and universities organized campus cop gangs on their territories in order to watch, harass and arrest those same paying students.

The most violent aspect of this system is the lack of any social safety net for average citizens. The United States government however, and throughout its entire history, has continually subsidized its favored corporate monopolies through tax breaks, legal amnesties, money infusions, free of charge police-military enforcements. Even outright nationalisations in order to save the corporate structures have commenced, yet regular Americans receive almost nothing from this same federal government.

US federal, state and municipal government taxes, (including sales, communication and property taxes), rob over 35% in annual savings from most working Americans’ paychecks. I lived in Europe for some years, and this was about the same rate of European socialist-democracy annual taxation. Most Europeans, however, did receive their secure economic backups in case of injury, unemployment and sudden illness.

The sociopathic elites that run this Empire have managed other ingenious methods of social control. In the US, there are various underhanded schemes in obtaining ‘benefits,’ for some form of economic survival. In other words, certain sectors of the American populace have ‘rights’ to particular government handouts or welfare systems, while others are completely excluded.

Cops have legal immunities from arbitrary firing, and even when murdering American civilians in cold blood. If they are under investigation, then they can receive a paid vacation, nefariously called ‘paid administrative suspension.’ State bureaucrats, such as mediocre teachers, district librarians, burnout officials, firemen and general state workers, receive almost complete coverage in pension, medical and dental benefits, and they can easily cash out on their ‘public retirement’ when they have finished their terms. Their retirements are secure because they dip straight from the state and municipal tax trough.

There are other notorious methods in obtaining public monies. For example, people with tattoos on their faces can begin receiving Social Security disability checks even if they are still in their twenties, while families accepted into the Cash-Stamp program can now use the EBT debit card system to cash out inside any business that serves food, inclusive of convenience stores and casinos! Before the debit card graft, the Food Stamp program was quite strict in that the person could only use the vouchers to buy groceries in supermarkets.

The last question is why the US government, which only concerns itself with protecting multinational, corporate monopolies, would allow a few lower class citizens to engage in such underhanded methods in order to secure free money. The answer is that the top criminals and sociopaths use this system as their main divide and conquer social control.

The corporate media loves harping on the lowlife indigents who receive US government checks, while they just sit around watching TV. These scenes especially infuriate the small business owner class that has to front most of the tax burden inside the US. The small business owner class also fears the steep fall into the working class, and the problems associated with such a class.

At the same time, the generals and top officers in the US military-industrial-spy complex, with the boards of director-executives, inside the top banks of the Federal Reserve, receive thousands of dollars in welfare money. Murderous politicians in various fascist governments, such as Colombia and Israel, also receive millions of dollars in annual foreign aid, or international welfare money. As for now, this strategy has worked. The different social classes in Amerika hate each other and blame each other for the coming economic collapse.

The study of history is necessary for us to understand the injustice and structural violence glued within this crooked and infernal system. Since 1790, the US government and their shill corporate elites have successfully weathered various ‘collapses.’ Economic Collapse is just doing business, and it is often good business. As long as there exists the Amerikan Empire of Sociopaths in Washington D.C., they will continue to push and defend global monopoly capitalism. Those citizens fortunate to work in those ‘currently favored industries’ can survive for now. The rest of us have the choices of enlisting in the military, (if we are still young), family money, homelessness or the prison gulag.  Our last remaining Monopoly game pieces now wait nervously on the cardboard.

Check out this link for more info:

http://www.activistteacher.blogspot.com/2013/09/global-economic-model-of-war.html

The Amerikan Empire III: Ultimate Police Gang State

Every single day within the nightmare of the Amerikan Empire, some police outrage arrives to the public via the corporate news. What is so amazing about these terrible incidents is that the corporate news media actually reports on them. Normally, the local corporate news media in Amerika posts police blotter stories in order to encourage ‘law abiding citizens’ to snitch on criminals through the local police hotline. In effect, the local news does the police’s dirty work for no cost at all; meanwhile the TV media often portrays the local cops as the community’s public servants. Yet with all of this pro-police state media monopoly, citizens still record numerous police brutality acts on videotape, and local citizens continue to tell their horror stories of encountering cops. The reports of cop terror still seep through the daily, deadly doses of TV propaganda.

Police forces in the United States have the greatest privileges against the authority of the law, the widest discretions and leeway in the use of state violence against citizens, and they are immune from any checks and balances versus their powers. The Amerikan police hold even greater powers than what other foreign police forces currently enjoy around the world.

The United States’ cops have the total and undeniable support from all politician of all stripes, and from both of our political spectrums. Donut cops receive praise from both Leftist anti-gun, urban tyrants and from Hardcore right-wing extremists that quote more from the Bible than the Constitution. In most countries around the world, the military holds such sacred positions. In contemporary Amerika, the police possess the chalice of pure silver.

Amerika’s cops are literally a gang unto themselves and unto the corrupt politicians that support them. Amerika has become the ultimate police gang state. The Donut Patrols have been corrupt from their very sinister beginnings, and the United States has the most violent state gangs in the world, both in the number of murder victims from police violence and in police legal immunities in committing legal crime.

How did it get this way? Our modern cop gangs were essentially keystone cop gangs when they first formed in the United States around the 1830s and 40s. In the large urban centers of the Northeast, such as New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia, there were actually rival police gangs vying for the support of local corrupt political bosses, such as Tammany Hall in New York City. These rival gangs also aligned themselves with rival firemen gangs in those urban cauldrons of injustice and brutality. The ‘authorities’ also constructed the first notorious prisons just outside of these wretched cities.

With the massive immigration of Catholic Irish, and both Catholic and Protestant Germans, in the northeastern US during the decades of the 1840s and 50s, the cop gangs literally offered their municipal positions to the dastardliest of local political bosses, or ward bosses. The ward bosses often controlled local Democratic political voting blocks, which meant enlisting recent immigrants into the ‘democratic’ voting scam. This old method explains the reason why there are still so many urban cops in the Northeast from Irish and German descent. As long as these immigrants acted on the wills of the Democratic party ward bosses, and post Civil War, Republican party ward bosses, many police, fireman and city hall jobs were open to them. This infamous and corrupt spoils system strangled city hall government across the nation. Mayors became local tyrants, the cops in turn, became their private gangs.

The urban cop gangs of Irish and German immigrants had also transformed into ‘white Americans.’ When they first arrived on the North American continent, many Americans with white skin privilege referred to them as ‘white niggers.’ But with the opening of corrupt city hall positions and cop-fireman gang services, Americans accepted them as the newer additions to the white European family. Their white skin privilege saved them, they eventually spoke English like Americans, and they also began to hate the real internal enemy of Amerika: the colored person, negro, black person. The evil stench of Amerikan racism built the foundation of Amerikan policing. It is still there today, and even many Black officers utterly hate their ‘own people.’ White supremacy racism will always remain a part of Amerika’s police practices as long as there are cops. And yet, there is more to this sordid story.

Besides Amerika’s megalopolis dictatorships now found on both the east and west coasts, on the Gulf Coast, and in the middle of the continent, there is the region of the South. The southern white authorities during the Jim Crow apartheid period, which lasted for about a hundred years, did not develop most of their police forces until after Reconstruction, meaning after 1876. Most rural counties possessed no police forces whatsoever. There were local sheriffs however. The reason for this lack of policing was due to the pre Civil War practice of slave patrols.

Planter elites in southern state legislatures used the slave patrol system as a divide and conquer method in their rule. They recruited non-slave holding whites into local paramilitary units. These non-slaveholding whites could easily purchase guns without any legal restrictions, and they could use any form of savage violence on both slave and free negroes that they encountered without identification.

During post Reconstruction, local counties in the South recruited from this pool of slave patrollers to form the first cop gangs, or posses of local sheriffs. This system worked so well that southern authorities used these gangs to round-up both African-American men and women for the brutal slave labor and chain gang system in the south, called ‘Convict Leasing.’ Unlike the gang-herd mentality of Amerika’s urban cops, the southern variety became the ultimate law unto themselves. They allowed paramilitary fascist gangs like the Klan a free reign of terror, yet they conducted their own reigns of terror on African-American communities, – and against unwary Yankees entering their ‘territories.’

Even in today’s Amerika, there are horror stories of ‘outsiders’ experiencing car breakdowns in southern towns, then getting arrested for some minor infraction, and soon ending up on prison work details! If they had ‘white skin privilege,’ then they would get an easier load – but if they were black and brown-skinned, then they would experience the full fury of ‘the law.’ A few have never come out alive from such slave prison injustice. The southern cop reputation for brutality, hating blacks and lack of mercy even attracted the eye of authorities in many western cities in the United States. Cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas recruited a heavy portion of their police forces from this slave patrol region.

Amerika’s cop gangs were putrid from the beginning. Amerikan Liberal-Leftist journalists, lawyers and writers regularly whine and lament about the American cop transformation from the friendly donut on patrol to the paramilitary SWAT gang. As usual, they do not know their own history, so they blame the War of Drugs or the attack on the World Trade Towers for the transformations.

The Amerikan Empire has been in continual war, both foreign and domestic conflicts, from its beginning in 1790. In the 1830s, the Amerikan Empire decided to copy the British cop model of night patrols, which ‘policed’ working class areas of urban cities, such as London. But the cop system took on its own peculiar characteristics due to both Amerika’s hatred of the African and the city hall-gang system that emerged in its northern urban maelstroms. As long as the Amerikan Empire exists, it will continue to murder millions of innocents across the world – and it will continue to murder millions of innocents at home. Like the upper officer class in the US Military, Amerikan cops possess a vital service for this empire of sociopaths.