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We need to talk more about the Grassy Knoll syndrome.
Re: The Grass Knollsters were right, but it took a long time to establish this, and the criminals were never caught. But one can infer from the "who benefits?" principle of investigation, that those who did it were war profiteers, since the biggest, most profound result of it was to reverse JFK's de-escalation in Vietnam.
Soon afterward: Over one million people slaughtered for no good reason. Vast new military spending and weapons development.
Although it's much easier to see the more obvious criminals of THIS coup--for instance, we have BushCon election machine company executives pledging support for Bush, and donating in $100,000 chunks to his campaign, secret source code and no paper trail--and we have a long history of dirty tricks and stolen elections overseen by Karl Rove.
But I wonder if we are seeing deeply enough.
I keep thinking of David Kelly, the British weapons inspector who was killed in July '03, just as he began whistleblowing on Tony Blair's lies about Iraq WMDs, and his email about "dark actors playing games" the day before he died. (Note: His death was whitewashed as a suicide--a highly questionable conclusion, given the odd facts of his death.) (--yet another mountain of evidence unattended!)
I've often thought that a quite plausible motive for killing him would have been that he had stumbled upon a plot to plant WMDs in Iraq--or was possibly asked to join such a plot and refused.
At the time, there was nothing that Bush and Blair needed more, on the political scene, than a "find" of WMDs in Iraq. It would seem a simple enough covert operation, given the chaos in Iraq. With all we know or suspect now about 9/11, anthrax, Paul Wellstone, Al Zarqawi, the timely "capture" of Saddam Hussein, Homeland Security "alerts," and other dubious events, surely there WAS such a plot, to plant WMDs. So what happened to it? How/why was it derailed?
And if my guess is right--that an honest man was killed because he found out about such a plot and objected to it (and was possibly trying to remedy the situation, or balance things out, by whistleblowing on Blair's WMD lies)--that is, in short, if an honest man was killed because he knew too much, what other dark, dirty deeds are we looking at and can't see, for all the smoke being blown in our eyes?
I've been wondering, too, about the various mercenaries in Iraq (Titan Corp. et al), and their possible role, and that of the FBI, in some of the more mysterious events there, such as the beheading of Nick Berg.
There is a fascinating FBI trail from Zacharias Moussaoui's computer to Nick Berg, that turned up in news reports after his beheading--the truly odd coincidence (?) that Moussaoui was using Berg's email address and pass word. There is a whole FBI cover story about it (in the news stories of Berg's beheading), that Berg innocently let a stranger on a bus use his email--a stranger who just happened to know Zacharias Moussaoui. Summer 2001. (--the very computer that Cathleen Rowley was trying to get inside of, and couldn't get permission to open until AFTER 9/11).
Anyway, is what we are looking at here, in this election, JUST election fraud? I mean, is it the mere theft of an election for the obvious political motive of staying in power? And was it merely accomplished within the NORMAL, VISIBLE corruption of the corporate American political system?
Or is it worse? Is it deeper? Is it wider? Is it in the "Grassy Knoll" category--where people following investigative trails fall off steep cliffs, and somehow manage to slash their wrists on the way down?
WHAT is in operation here? Just a corrupt political machine--that could possibly be ousted and brought low by election reform?
Or is it something more fundamental--the turning of our entire military and intelligence establishment and its corporate masters--into some kind of beastial thing, a greedy, bloodthirsty, torturing monster, that can only be dealt with by strong-willed Hobbits and self-sacrificing old Wizards?
And if it's the latter, what hope do we have of "exposing" Election Fraud? And what hope do we have that "election reform" will remedy the problem?
You can probably tell that I just read Howard Zinn. He takes a dim view of the Founding Fathers and their successors, and their mechanisms for controlling the masses. He does hold out hope for the cleverness and independence of thought of ordinary people, though. He says that a pro forma revolution is just not possible here (the bad guys have too many weapons of mass destruction), but that a different kind of revolution, one of disengagement from "the system," undertaken locally, community by community, is the answer. (He bases this, in part, on stories of underdog rebellions throughout American history.)
Looked at from another perspective, however, what he describes as "the answer" is so like the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent thousand years of feudalism (small communities surviving, by means of their own skills and limited trading) that I shudder to think of it, and I can't help but note that the price of survival was often enslavement by local robber barons, whom Zinn doesn't figure into his scenario, but whom I'm sure will always be with us.
You see, in theory anyway--and in English history at least--the king was the peoples' protection AGAINST the robber barons (he/she protected the forests, for instance, from rapacious use by the rich, while allowing smaller scale, local sustainable use).
The federal government has been our "king"--the overarching authority that protected our rights under the Constitution, against depredations by corporate robber barons, landowners, the rich, the bankers, the railroad kings, the factory owners and corrupt, bigoted local officials (especially in the case of black civil rights).
When the bankers and speculators destroyed the financial system, the federal government (via FDR) came to the rescue of the common people. When local and state officials sanctioned murder, lynchings, segregation and denial of voting rights against black citizens, the federal government was pressed to respond, and was EXPECTED to respond, as the logical agent of protection.
That protection--that sense that someone in DC has the common good in mind--is gone. It vanished almost overnight for both the poor and the middle class (or, rather, it seemed to vanish overnight, with Bush's ascendancy, but it was actually long in the making).
Zinn doesn't give the Founding Fathers due credit for the system of checks and balances by which this protection of the common people came about. (He says we don't even belong to "the nation" that was created--a provocative argument, well worth thinking about, but it ignores the mystical relationship between king and commoners that is a large part of our psychological makeup as a people.)
I write this in a state of bereavement over January 6. Despite the heroes who revealed themselves (or maybe because there were so few of them), it just became so very clear to me that the Democrats will never again be the party of the "New Deal," and that they have no power in the current situation, and don't seem to even want power. They are near to being useless as an opposition to Bush Inc., and they are complicit it too many ways.
So where does that leave us as a democracy and as a people? Hung out to dry is where. And if that is the case--and I challenge anyone to provide convincing evidence to the contrary--what do we do next?
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