Understanding Our Government, And What to Do About It.

Understanding Our Government

And What to Do About

by

Jim Gilliam

Understanding Our Government

And What to Do About It

by

Jim Gilliam

Copyright © 2016 by Jim Gilliam

Published by Jim Gilliam at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Background

Beginning of the Country and Its Growth

The Expansionist Period

Foreign Expansion and Control

Corporate Expansion

Contributing Factors

The Role of Various Institutions

Language and Terminology

Whistleblowers and Other Political Prisoners

Conclusions

Background

Our government is not our government.

Over the past few years it has become apparent that there are severe problems within our government and its relation to the general population. Since the Supreme Court's conservative activists have basically ruled that money is speech , the very wealthy have been speaking loudly buying politicians at every opportunity. We are, in fact, an oligarchy that pretends to be a republic. There is a reason for the low trust the public places in its elected leaders that should represent them. The legalization of the use of propaganda within the National Defense Authorization Act as a necessary form of governing insures that we need to be more alert than ever to the abuses of those in power. For many years, the government, ruled by the leaders of industry and banking, have distorted information and used outright lies as a means to guide the beliefs of the population into channels that are deemed appropriate. The recent limitations placed on the National Security Agency have done nothing to protect our rights, but have made government and business ties even closer than they were. We must never forget that government/industry/banking will do nothing positive for the people unless they are to gain a bigger profit, more power, or limit losses due to citizen unrest. Anytime one hears that the government is going to help some nation or group, it is imperative to look beyond the stated reasons for the seemingly benevolent acts, because they are just a screen for the truth and most often help no one except themselves. By recalling all the hoopla about the North American Free Trade Agreement and how it was to help the United States, no one should forget that the help was for the bottom line of corporate profits and not for the working class that lost jobs to cheaper labor in other countries. Since that time there have been at least 13 more Free Trade agreements with much less public awareness, and the fact that absolutely none of them actually benefit the working people of this country. This same process of lying by our elected representatives about the reasons for government actions is so prevalent that it is a necessity to understand that it is because of their complete and utter disregard for the people they are sworn to serve. This is blatantly obvious with many of those that have sworn to uphold the Constitution stating publicly that the Constitution is outdated and has no place in our modern world. Some even claim it is just a worthless piece of paper. In short, these purchased politicians want to do away with Constitutional protections of the people to please their corporate masters. The idea of ridding themselves of Constitutional safeguards has been a goal of the bankers and industrialists at least since the beginning of the 20th century when workers were beginning to collectively demand rights, more tolerable working conditions, a safer work place, and a living wage. The actions of government, under the guiding hand of the very wealthy, have since chipped away at all of these demands and previous successes of workers. To install a de facto class division between the wealthy and not wealthy and the control of the masses by the privileged has moved into high gear. Even though this creation of an elite class has been in the making since the beginnings of the country, the ability to do so is now within their grasp and is, in fact, doing so.

The most important aspect of any democracy or participatory government is access to information in order to make intelligent choices. We do not have access to information for many reasons. The most obvious is that all sections of government over classify everything in order to prevent the people from knowing what government is doing and imprisoning or attempting to imprison anyone that gives any needed information to the people. An additional and not so well understood aspect is the limiting of information by corporations that should be supplying us with news but instead are filling us with useless garbage to fulfill their twofold agenda of profit and control. A breakdown of what happens during any news hour shows us that the most minutes are consumed by commercials that aid the corporate bottom line. Another few minutes are taken up by some local news story for a particular city but of absolutely no relevance to the rest of the nation other than titillation because of the way the story is presented. These stories are built around murders, cheating spouses, accidents, child abuse, rape or some other emotionally charged issue. When something of national interest does occur that fits into the guidelines of the corporate agenda, the story is run for days on end with all kinds of nonsense thrown in by so called experts whose main purpose is supporting some part of the corporate plan whether it be spending more tax dollars on something called national defense or whether it is taking money away from social security or healthcare to be used for some corporate subsidy. By using the so called experts, the corporate media does not have to waste any money for actual news but can use the views of these talking heads to support their corporate world view. Then, some time is used for selling some product to consumers calling it newsworthy because of some small innovation. There are even times when important news is reported but is altered by business interests with no thought given to the facts that may be totally absent and are not necessary for the message being sold by the media.

The news in the United States is what has been deemed as appropriate by a business entity whose purpose is profit and control. This desire for control of information and of people is also the leading cause of corporations wanting to destroy the open internet. By controlling the internet they can control all the information that we receive instead of being limited to what is in print and over the airwaves. Thus we have the huge fight over internet freedom that AT&T, Comcast, Newscorp, Time Warner, Disney and CBS will continue to wage through propaganda campaigns, lies, misdirection, frivolous lawsuits, and purchase of politicians until the people run out of money and will to fight back. When the corporations get their way with that, they will control every avenue of information that is available. U.S. mainstream news is nothing more than propaganda that is used to guide the behavior of the population through manipulation of emotions resulting in the desired factual ignorance. To ignore that truth is to further the decline of the country and living standards of all outside those referred to as elites.

We recently have come to understand that what is presented to us as news does not necessarily even have a small grain of truth in the stories. Media personalities and politicians routinely lie to us and we, like gullible children, continue to listen to and vote for them. Our lack of thought and intense desire to be entertained allows us to be consistently made fools of with skewed information and sometimes blatant lies passing as information that is used to guide us to correct thinking through our emotions. One recent example of the blatant lies perpetrated by CNN involved a video of masses of people in the streets of Athens, Greece. The CNN report was that this huge demonstration was because people did not want to leave the European Union. Al Jazeera, RT, China News and Euronews all reported two very large mass demonstrations in Athens, Greece with one group wanting to accept the bailout program offered to them by the IMF and the other group wanting to vote NO for accepting any bailout with more austerity in it. Stories also appeared on YouTube that showed amazing support for the anti-bailout stance. With an amazing number of news organizations reporting a completely different story than reported by CNN, a normal person would wonder how they think they could get away with their report. The fact is they are not interested in truth, but only providing the information deemed necessary to keep the U.S. population drugged. Most citizens never consider anything other than corporate media as a place to receive their news. because we have learned to trust only U.S. media. As a result, U.S. citizens are the most ignorant people in the industrialized world. This also is by design, compliments of our government and the oligarchs that are behind the democratic facade.

The six corporations that control the news are responsible for the content of their programs, but the people of the country are responsible in that we have allowed them to get away with their main interest of profit over substance and their secondary interest of controlling the minds of citizens in order for them to continue increasing the pay of the senior executives to astronomical levels while forcing impoverishment on the rest of us. We are involved in class warfare that we are not even aware of, yet be assured, the one percent, elites, or whatever the preferred reference, are fully aware of and are controlling it to their advantage. Years ago during the cold war, in an interview with an ex-CIA agent he was asked what we can do to improve our knowledge of the most important news of the day. His response, Turn off your television set something basically telling us that the information is controlled and not correct. That should have given us a warning at the time, but it was ignored as are all other signals. Right now we still have an open internet that can help us find truth and facts. The same six corporations that will continue their battle until they have complete control of the internet to allow us only the facts they want us to know is necessary to insure that we will no longer have access to the truth.

We also have a problem with the word propaganda. Propaganda is well known to be something confined to whatever is the evil empire or empires at any moment in time. Americans knew it as something used by the Nazis in Germany just before and during World War II. After the war and with United States domination, it was no longer a part of the designated German inventory but reassigned to the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was no longer a popular term until the recent problems with Russia. Now it pertains almost exclusively to Russia. Several aspects of propaganda have been ignored by U.S. media and by the government. The persuasive, ignoble, and even false aspects of propaganda became very popular in the United States with the advent of advertising agencies whose only function is to sell ideas or products regardless of facts or usefulness. These agencies have taken on a new life selling corporate-government ideas to the public. If we look at the simple definition of propaganda as spreading information to support a cause we can see that it is not confined to any state regardless of what is claimed. The corporate media, hand in glove with the government of the United States, has taken propaganda to a new height referring to it as public relations, public education or public diplomacy. By using these terms, the public can sleep well believing that something is actually being done for their benefit instead of lining the pockets of the one percent.

In another area, the lack of concern over the deaths of non-US citizens is evident from the deaths of thousands of Vietnamese in our war there and by not even bothering to count the dead in Iraq or Afghanistan. We know there were exactly 58,220 US deaths in Viet Nam while we only know that there were somewhere between 800,000 and 3 million Vietnamese killed not including the unknown number of casualties in Cambodia and Laos due to our wars. The exact count of U.S. deaths is for political expediency to express a concern that does not exist in reality. Now, with the all volunteer military, some of that political necessity has dropped since the deaths are confined to a small percentage of the population, even though there is an officially acknowledged count of 12,657 from 2003 up until Operation New Dawn. The military has decided to not allow citizens to see the number of caskets returning in flag covered coffins in order to prevent a serious anti-war movement similar to that of Viet Nam. They are also negligent in treating the U.S. victims of our on-going wars when they either return to civilian status or are no longer useful as cannon fodder.

Our history is replete with evidence that the elites were not only trading with the enemy in our wars, but complicit with the ability of those nations to make war in the first place The corporate ability to do this was and is aided by and protected by the United States Department of State. It did this before and doing World War II by granting exceptions for the trading with the enemy laws and ignoring some corporate deals that were overtly damaging to the United States war effort.

During World War II corporations and their government protectors were not concerned about the deaths of our soldiers, the proof of that being in the number of corporations aiding the Nazis throughout the war that continued providing profit. Some of the more obvious were Chase Bank that was handling the finances and transferring stolen and looted money and gold of the Nazis through the Paris branch while Ford Motor Company built military vehicles in Germany well into 1945. International Telephone and Telegraph was helping the Nazis build a better means of communication while several oil companies, like Standard Oil of New Jersey, were providing fuel through South American outlets to the Luftwaffe and Nazi submarines at a time when Americans couldn't get fuel for cars. All this and more was exposed by Charles Higham in his book Trading With the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1939-1949 ©1983. There were written agreements made in the late 1930's stating that trade will continue uninterrupted even in the event of war between the United States and Germany with a further agreement that business would continue as usual regardless of which side won the war. If these kinds of things were happening before and during a world war there is no reason to think there is any positive change now in current world events, especially since corporations are more blatantly running this country through their shills in all levels and departments of government. It also helps explain how Germany recovered so quickly after the war while the propaganda claimed the rapid recovery was because of the difference between communism and capitalism. They conveniently forgot to mention that US tax dollars flowed into German businesses, while German government and corporate positions were filled with ex-Nazis in fulfilling the agreements made before the war, and that much of the German incurred debt was later forgiven. War shall not interfere with profits was the basis of the agreements. With corporate policy getting worse it is no wonder our government wants to hide so much from us.

None of this is ever mentioned in the official histories of the U.S. or the war. We are only told how brave our soldiers and sailors were and that it was our great nation that made