Published Thursday, September 1, 2016 at 9:30 am

Dear Editor,

Ben Franklin: “Those who beat their rifles into plowshares will plow for those who do not.”

When the inmates take over the asylum, it’s a clear sign that things are pretty far gone. Corruption has destroyed ‘our’ system, sending the greediest psychopaths into power. The constitution and the founding principles of ‘our’ government have all been tossed aside by ideologues that have been steadily undermining the rule of law. ‘Our’ politicians are a reflection of who we are: Americans are to blame for blindly supporting corrupt politicians, and will have earned whatever consequences follow with our next president.

In ‘our’ banana republic they can steal from you, beat you, lie to you, and send you to jail where ‘our’ authorities can literally get away with murder, theft, and deceit; they’re hellholes in which you will likely be beaten, raped, and forced to perform slave labor.

Guided by that corruption the SWAT/paramilitary focus in many police departments has updated the idea of being a ‘peace officer’. Whether you’re talking about the police shooting dogs or citizens, the attitude is the same: a rush to violence, abuse of power, fear for officer safety, poor training in how to de-escalate a situation and general carelessness. That paramilitary focus has resulted in a government mindset that allows government agents to invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, shoot you, damage your stuff and terrorize your family. This is the same outlook that sees nothing wrong with Americans being subjected to roadside strip searches, forcible blood draws, and other immoral tactics. This is a mindset that is flourishing within the corrupt corporate-controlled, military-driven American police state.

The majority of the world’s people have their opinions molded and manipulated by the West’s owners, elites and their army of enablers, who make up the top one percent of the economic and political pyramid. The Western system is depicted as a shining beacon on the hill, towering over the world’s people, nobly imposing its superior civilization, culture, goodness, capitalism, justice, rule of law and civil society on the human race. The subtle message is that those who aren’t empire’s obedient servants are uncivilized, uncultured, lawless savages. The West is an empire where colonialism and fascism are alive and thriving. The Empire has over 1,000 military installations around the world, from which it invades or bombs any country it wants, secretly or openly. They call themselves “freedom loving capitalists”.

America’s foreign policy is essentially a marketing strategy for control, selling weapons and stealing other people’s natural resources. Why do we have a thousand bases in a hundred countries around the world? This isn’t something that other countries do.

The American war machine needs to have an enemy: Americans should decide whether they want to keep fighting ‘new Hitler’s’ and enrich generals, bankers and mass-media owners. The vast majority of coups, regime change attempts and destabilization worldwide since WW2 have been committed by ‘our government’; the CIA, various military agencies and privatized contractors specialized in such things.

Some “patriotic” Americans link good citizenship with blind obedience to government authority and worship of the military but don’t take responsibility by holding government officials accountable to the constitution. Remember, “We the people” were entrusted with the power to make and unmake the government whenever it ran afoul of its main purpose, which is to protect our lives, freedoms and property.

Is America the beacon of hope to the millions of peoples who have been killed, maimed, and displaced by America’s wars? Is American policy hopeful for Palestinians trapped in Israeli imposed Ghettos: Is America inspiring for Latin Americans whose elected governments America routinely remove? Russians/Chinese/Iranians who are being encircled with military bases, demonized and misrepresented with lies don’t admire America. What hope is there for America’s middle class whose jobs and future were exported?

What grieving family members want to hear that their loved one died for the sake of regime change: the reason America invaded Iraq? They want to hear that soldier died for his country, to keep us safe, to defend our rights and freedoms: Ensuring ‘consumers’ feel helpless and in need of government protection is priority number one for the ruling class. Are we really free, or have you been conditioned to believe you are? Corporations and mainstream media have us glued to our TVs, searching for answers, for promises that are never kept. We’ve become distracted from the truth, our attention diverted to what we want to hear instead of what we need to hear. Elections have become a distraction from real solutions. They’re not honest debate but a circus of delusion and prefabricated talking points. They offer the illusion of choice in order to pacify you.

It takes ‘consumers’ some time to realize that they’ve been had, and by then they’ve swallowed a new set of lies and are concerned about the latest ‘threat’. ‘Consumers’ seem incapable of understanding that just as all the previous ‘threats’ were a hoax, so will successive ones. Perhaps if Americans were taught their true history in place of idealistic fairy tales, they would be less gullible and less vulnerable to government propaganda.

Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banks, and the multi-faceted ‘defense’ industry have experienced exponential profits since perpetual war became the basis of American foreign policy. All this war requires that ‘our government’ maintain support from the public and what better way to win them over than with fear?

Belief that other nations will steal our vanished Democracy if we don’t invade them first infects ‘consumers’. When the Empire violates international law, people still believe the lie in great part, thanks to corporate media’s incessant confirmation of American exceptionalism. Saying ‘my government would never do that’ is refusing to investigate the possibilities, is admitting government takes priority over truth.

America spent 759 million on Afghanistan schools but can’t tell you where it went. Why do we spend borrowed money on foreign wars and Israel instead of ourselves? Nowhere outside of our borders does anyone truly believe that America represents freedom and democracy. The five sided fun house on the Potomac says it can’t account for six to eight trillion dollars.

Racism and wars of conquest during our first two centuries were ‘officially’ accepted ‘principles’. We have modern ‘accepted’ as reasonable ideologies reinforced by media and government therefore unquestioned by you. Once the Irish were hated until the eastern Europeans began arriving. Then it was Italians and always Indians and Africans: Now its Mexicans and Muslims. During WW1 Germans, almost a quarter of our population at the time became the target. Always this is without question. As in Orwell’s 1984 we line up to profess our collective hate for the newest target, at our ultimate expense, and for the profit of a few.

We’re asked to honor the dead and wounded who served for freedom. Call me skeptical. ‘Consumers’ have never been in greater danger of being fined, kidnapped, caged, maimed and killed by ‘our government’ for ordinary infractions in the land of the ‘free’. Exporting violence doesn’t make a country free. It puts everyone in danger as the entire planet finds any opposition to the Empire is given special military attention. We’re exposed to a constant drumbeat of protecting ‘our’ freedom yet no external threat to the USSA has existed since 1812. The “Trail of Tears” has brought us to new American atrocities including military adventures like Vietnam to our current mid-east adventures.

I think we owe a great debt to our current ‘electoral’ circus for fully revealing to all but the most unaware, how fully devoid of any reality ‘our’ elections are. Disagree? Watch the documentary: hacking democracy.

“The state, or, to make matters more concrete, the government, consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting ‘A’ to satisfy ‘B’. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods.” H.L. Mencken

Craig Dudley