Posted by Editors on March 31, 2008 at 17:01:28:

excerpts from the book
The Terrorism Trap
by Michael Parenti
City Lights books, 2002
How we are being manipulated by this political government...
We are pretty much familiar with the economic system’s unsteady performances which make our daily lives distressful… , the latest being the much publicized home mortgage foreclosure epidemic throughout our society, as well as the tremendous gas price burden most people all wage brackets are enduring…, while the responsible corporations are accumulating record breaking billion dollars profits.
We cannot expect corporations to have a social conscience when capitalism’s economics compels them to either PROFIT or BUST. It’s the SYSTEM , not the corporations, per se, that causes our high cost of living while our wages remain unable to keep up without going into debt. No social conscience in the economic system of capitalism. We can do better.
But capitalism’s perennial failures to service our society’s need for domestic peace and prosperity (for all) have also brought upon us the horrors of periodic wars with other nations…, again by the system compelling the corporate controllers to pursue the profit- promising resources found in other nations …, resources like oil, which they have not been able to acquire through peaceful means…, and with the obedient cooperation of OUR(?) political representatives, whose commitment to capitalism is without question, have dispatched our military to take coercive control of the oil reserves of others in the name of “Bringing Democracy” to that land. And where there has grown resistance to U.S. global pursuits for resources, including cheap labor, in some 38 other countries…, many whose names often are unfamiliar to us until there is a military uprising …, those anti corporate movements have been identified “for” us as “Terrorist” enemies…., and for some measure of corporate global security, the U.S. government has stationed troops and military machinery in many other nations..
The government’s use of the term, “Terrorism,” is today’s buzz word which is meant to impress upon us that “The enemy is everywhere, and We, the People, must, for our own survival, get behind whatever this Congress, and this Administration, and the next ONES, decide should be done, and must be supported, without protest, by the American people…, regardless of the costs in human life and social treasure.
The irony in all this that OUR GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA, USED TO JUSTIFY THE ECONOMIC AND MILITARY INVASION, OF OTHER NATIONS whose cultures are not in tune with those in the Western societies…, all the more seemingly plausible, HAS BEEN GIVEN A BOOST BY THE AUTOCRATIC RULERS OF THOSE NATIONS, who, for their own population control needs, align us, the American people, with the U.S. corporate hegemony designs for their lands…, and today
we hear “Death to all Americans.” …. a U.S. corporate legacy to which we are all now subject.
To have a pretty keen perspective on the background for all our present domestic apprehensions about what is happening throughout the world where our kid soldiers are spending their time, and more appalling, giving their lives… , one of the most comprehensive analyses available to us has been recorded by Michael Parenti, an internationally known award-winning author and lecturer, whose works can easily be accessed on Google.
The following is an excerpt from Parenti’s the book, The Terrorist Trap…Published by City Lights…2002. This book is worth a studied read for all of us need a basis for confronting capitalism’s advocates with empirical evidence and practical alternatives to the current autocratic economic and political government institutions which deny us entry into a genuine democratic relationship with ourselves in necessary social institutions.
***** From the TERRORIST TRAP …………
This is one way how capitalism has poisoned our government and has plunged our society into a cauldron of fears and insecurities...
“Washington policymakers ( policies which We, the People never had a chance to vote for...) claim that US interventions are motivated by a desire to fight terrorism, bring democracy to other peoples, maintain peace and stability in various regions, defend our national security, protect weaker nations from aggressors, oppose tyranny, prevent genocide, and the like. This all sounds good, and most of would endorse such motives..., if these were true.
“But if US leaders have only the best intentions when they intervene in other lands, why has the United States become the most hated nation in the terrorist's lists of bad guys?
“People from all walks of life around the world denounce the US government as imperialist. Do they see something that most Americans have not been allowed to see?
“Since WW2, the US government has spent over 240 billion to equip and station military and internal security people in more than 80 other nations, not to "defend" these nations from foreign aggressors, but to protect various ruling dictators and multi national corporate investors from being kicked out by domestic, anti imperialist movements.
"Remember, Saddam Hussain was our "Friend" (Saddam and Rumsfeld got along just fine) In fact the U.S. government supplied the "gas" which Hussain used to kill and keep down the Kurds who wanted to be in control of their own society whose lands contained..., guess what ...? Right! Oil. Saddam kept the Kurdish oil...then he nationalized Iraq's oil fields..., and kept the profits for himself and Iraq rather than for the U.S. corporations. “
***All comments parenthesized are Eds.
(Then, when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein accused Kuwait of overproducing its oil, which lowered prices globally…., and Kuwait , in tern, accused Iraq of siphoning Kuwait’s oil fields with underground pipelines.., Iraq, with the U.S. government’s silent approval, attacked Kuwait …Then suddenly, in a sharp reversal of friendship with Iraq, the U.S. declared Iraq an aggressor, and committed the U.S. military to defend Kuwait…, and the first Persian Gulf war for oil, managed by, of all related people to the current President, George Bush No.1, who was helped by the UN in forming a formidable coalition of surrounding nations who feared Saddam Husseins’s territorial ambitions in that area…, overwhelmed Iraq, and the First Gulf War ended with Iraq soundly defeated, but it remained an integral national entity due to Bush no.1’s reluctance to occupy Iraq and reconstruct its government.
(The policies of the U.S. in the Mid East are not always very clear to the American people. Both U.S. incursions into Iraq have been for control of its oil reserves, yet, WE never hear of that resource being one of the significant reasons for the present there of the U.S. military…., the other being complete U.S. corporate hegemony in the Mid East, a goal of which the Mid East nations are acutely aware.
(Instead, we are TOLD building a DEMOCRACY is the reason why our kids are dying these., while the secretive sessions between US reps and Iraqi hand-picked legislators for future Iraqi oil rights go on uninterruptedly …)
“Since World War II, the US government has given some $240 billion in military aid to build up the military and internal security forces of more than eighty other nations. The purpose of this enormous effort has been not to defend these nations from invasion by foreign aggressors but to protect their various ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anticapitalist insurgency. That is what some of us have been arguing.
“But how can we determine that?
“By observing that (a) with few exceptions there is no evidence suggesting that these various regimes have ever been threatened by attack from neighboring countries; (b) just about all these "friendly" regimes have supported economic systems that are integrated into a global system of corporate domination, open to foreign penetration on terms that are singularly favorable to transnational investors; (c) there is a great deal of evidence that US-supported military and security forces and death squads in these various countries have been repeatedly used to destroy reformist movements, labor unions, peasant organizations, and popular insurgencies that advocate some kind of egalitarian redistributive politics for themselves.
“For decades we were told that a huge US military establishment was necessary to contain an expansionist world Communist movement with its headquarters in Moscow (or sometimes Beijing). But after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist nations in 1989-1991, Washington made no move to dismantle its costly and dangerous global military apparatus. All Cold War weapons programs continued in full force, with new ones being added all the time, including the outer-space National Missile Defense and other projects to militarize outer space. Immediately the White House and Pentagon began issuing jeremiads about a whole host of new enemies-for some unexplained reason previously overlooked-who menace the United States, including "dangerous rogue states" like Libya with its ragtag army of 50,000 and North Korea with its economy on the brink of collapse.
“The real intentions of US national security state leaders can be revealed in part by noting whom they assist and whom they attack. US leaders have consistently supported rightist regimes and organizations and opposed leftist ones.
“The terms "Right" and "Left" are seldom specifically defined by policymakers or media commentators-and with good reason. To explicate the politico-economic content of leftist governments and movements is to reveal their egalitarian and usually democratic goals, making it much harder to demonize them.
“The "Left," as I would define it, encompasses those individuals, organizations, and governments that oppose the privileged interests of wealthy propertied classes, while advocating egalitarian redistributive policies and a common development beneficial to the general populace.“
(Michael Parenti’s understandings of the advocates who work to generate a national discussion on the merits of an autocratic economic and political system, as is capitalism and this Federal Government, compared to a genuine democracy in both our government institutions, and our socially necessary industrial and service work places are in complete accord with the content of …http://www.peopleforanewsociety.org/)