Op Ed: Myths, Fantasies
Destroying Nation
No Longer 'Sustainable'

Economic Empire-Building AGAIN Threatens World

"Empire Builders", painting by artist Margaret Isabel DOVASTON

(EUGENE, Ore.) - MONEY, via political and policy support for huge and extremely costly militaristics demanded for “America as World Policeman”, drives that neocon fantasy --now proven a farce and futile wherever applied in the past forty years.

“Pork” and pretense --“to protect and preserve the national security”-- have funded and fueled continuing Congressional complicity, allowing burgeoning growth of those very perpetrators against whom Gen. Eisenhower warned us, most recently.

Ike was simply echoing what Gen. Washington clearly stated as our beginning President: The rapacious military-makers were then already at work to profit however possible from chaos, blood and terror, even as Washington began our governance.

The perverting formula has worked ever since, to our great disadvantage --and shame, too!

That was 232 years ago-- just as the Founders finished their world-shaking prescient work on our revered Constitution, and then our rightly-famed Bill of Rights. WHEN will we EVER LEARN??

Ironically, that beloved Constitution AND our Bill of Rights remain under continuing threat from the dollar-driven and “desperate search for still another war-level danger”; to still-further delude, distort and pervert our real understandings of the very policies against which both PRESIDENT Ike and PRESIDENT George felt they must warn us.

Those woeful consequences-told by both famous leaders are MIRRORED in the news today --every day.

It is painful fact that the dollar-draining intentions of the Pentagon militarists drive the many “pure-pork” projects for multiple weapon systems of no conceivable usage in the vaunted “the war on terrorism”.

But unreasoning fear is still manipulated as cause AND strategic cover for plundering our commonweal resources --not only of treasure but of young-blood and family-hopes.

Our many Congressional political perpetrators remain silently and solidly in-line: They find themselves seduced by simple “corporate campaign contributions” arithmetic; with fear of jobs-lost, if missed/political-payoff fails to bring destructive-weapon plants to their home districts, “sealing the deal.”

Those same Treasury-cost transactions could and should provide all the motivation, guidance and --where justified-- solid substantial subsidies to re-create and re-establish our “exported” product-producing plants --the ones once providing salable outputs marketable across the world.

Wisely-done, that could reverse our current trading deficits --and bring even more and stronger job-growth.

It matters little-or-nothing that continuing and increasing the fantastic Treasury-drains has become “absolutely unsustainable”.

That’s the unvarnished plain/fact long-term view of most economists; with a THREE TRILLION expenditure already perpetrated in Iraq, according to Dr. Joseoph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winner.

It matters little-or-nothing that depleting “peace dividends” when any “wasting war” is completed --they are never “won” !-- is deeply damaging not only to our economy but to our democracy, too.

The totally-by-choice attack on Iraq, now revealed as piratical plunder primarily for control of oil reserves, has thus been shown to be “running into the trillions” --with more costs sure to come while it is allowed to continue.

Indeed, it has become a familiar pattern for popular press presentation all around the nation: “What We Could-and-Should Have Done Will All Those Billions-on-Billions”.

Each localized-story inevitably including an amazing account of the schools, teachers, health services, police, fire AND slashed food and social services we could-and-should have HAD, in operation right NOW.

That press coverage definitely includes multiple conflicts-of-interest within the neocon cabal supporting the military/industrial complex itself; primarily seen as “driven by continuing demands for unceasing corporate growth” --precisely as historically demonstrated in previously-failed “world-dominating empires.”

OUR burgeoning “new American Empire” is now collapsing for the very-same reasons: People everywhere are seeking, more than ever before, democratic freedoms and personal empowerment, demanding real democratic destiny for themselves, their families, and their children.

They are ready to revolt when ANY nation tries to seduce and enslave them for private-profit purposes, as has proven to be the unavoidable consequence of globalization.

World Bank, IMF and other once lush-and-easy international-organization funding has been recognized as “only a repeated pattern for failed economic policies, ruined by neocon manipulation.”

Globalization has brought negative results to every nation wherever it has taken over.

WE had our chance to use it --courageously, well and wisely -- to help shape the 21st Century --and we blew it.

WE allowed the neocons to plunder true wealth-production everywhere, and capture for corporate control the failing natural resources worldwide.

WE “sacrificed common-sense to consumerism-greed”, seeking many products at lower costs, only possible via corporate exploitation of manipulated-and-abused labor in still-developing nations.

WE supported a now-suppurating “new economy” built on unstable and non-sustainable financial manipulations --triggered by neocon “deregulation”; while surrendering our own production of primary salable products once famed in every world-market.

WE have undoubtedly allowed ourselves “to be overwhelmed by “corporate pressures and neocon manipulations”; losing what had served us well for the past 150 years, until we allowed this process to begin.

“...of the people, by the people, FOR the people” became “inoperative”’ by their design; because we allowed ourselves to be distracted, diminished, disabled and, finally, defeated as responsible citizens --while our “free press” failed in its Constitutionally-protected responsibilities to fully inform us.

WE failed “to make sure we understood what our leaders were doing”.

WE found ourselves “fooled, finally lied-to and further abused by the very ones we had trusted”, including those most sensitized to us --our elected Congress.

Finally, we allowed that futile foundation political fantasy of “The World-Policeman Role for America” to be further extended and preemptively applied; clearly demonstrating for the world the American neocon-driven determination to dominate all, control everywhere, and --always!--manipulate and enforce “our” empire.

But that seductive fantasy has now become so calamitous that its “dire, self-collapsing consequences” are forcing even leading conservatives to “abandon their favorite most-enduring myth”.

Forced-and-overdue withdrawal from Iraq --the surest sign of very serious policy-syncope malignly manufactured to support that myth-- now signal that “mass-marketed political event” obtained by direct-lie to the public as the pivotal point for this “transitional election” of ‘08, beginning our Century 21.

But the brute fact is that the “Policeman For The World” role --to succor and secure massive corporate profit-potentials-- has proven “totally unsustainable”, simply for its totally overwhelming, unavoidably relentless, direct AND indirect consequential costs.

In addition, the Russian Bear-return “to a new Cold War-conflict” is ominously unmistakable evidence of “unavoidable further dire consequence” for all to see --and understand.

Our “bluster-and-bluff non-threat” reveals far too openly “just how far we’ve fallen from once-claimed world leadership” --sustained since the Seventies by our huge expenditures for military muscle.

Yet “the brute fact of that myth is that we can never dare to set it loose”, since the very foreseeable, almost-sure/thing consequence is the world-feered “Big Bang.”

This is “a different Age, dominated not by military might, but by information and energy-control”, as one world-famed once-neocon chieftain has plainly declared.

John Kenneth Galbraith, famed American economist known for his fundamental work on the concept of countervailing power, wrote: “We now know that we may have less to fear from corporate power than from corporate incompetence”.

He ALSO wrote: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

“Unsustainable” meant something very dire to Galbraith, for excellent reasons made all too clear by his penetrating understandings of the world and its economy.

We will do well to pay better attention to his attained-and-proven wisdom than we have to the deadly blandishments of the neocon cabal.

************************************ Reader’s Note: Quotes are shortened, condensed, summarized for space reasons; verbatim record available on request to Editor with ID.

More than forty documenting references, including writer’s files since the ‘50s, were consulted for this Op Ed. A complete list is also available via same request.

In addition, more than 150 pp. of Internet-sourced materials were also compiled and consulted.

Henry Clay Ruark is the one of, if not the most experienced, working reporter in the state of Oregon, and possibly the entire Northwest. Hank has been at it since the 1930's, working as a newspaper staff writer, reporter and photographer for organizations on the east coast like the Bangor Maine Daily News.
Today he writes Op-Ed's for Salem-News.com with words that deliver his message with much consideration for the youngest, underprivileged and otherwise unrepresented people.