JimBlog.net

It’s Kevorkian logic. Dr. Jack Kevorkian made a name for himself by assisting the desperate elderly of Michigan in ending their own pain-wracked lives. He was eventually stopped by the courts on the grounds that even though Kevorkian was not pushing the “kill” button with his own finger, nevertheless his actions in creating, delivering, and handing over the kill button to the hapless patients was enough participation to attach culpability to his actions. Indirectly, said the U.S. justice system, one who provides the means to kill themselves to those who are attempting suicide are, in fact, accomplices in that act of killing.

As I write, Israel is punishing Lebanon for acts of terrorism by committing further acts of terrorism, namely the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians. I believe the sick euphemism “collateral damage” only applies when you are not directly targeting civilians. Hospitals, water treatment plants, power plants, a milk plant, a tissue paper factory, grain silos - these are not militarily strategic targets, unless your objective is to completely destroy a society. Maybe that is in fact the goal of the Israelis.

Although the Israeli military is one of the deadliest, most effective in the world, they didn’t get that way without billions of dollars (99 Billion, 1946 - 2006) worth of American military hardware and technical training. The blood of Lebanese children, women, hundreds of innocents, is smeared on taxpayer-funded American bullets. We are participating, as Kevorkian helped elderly Americans end their own lives, as accomplices in the state terror of Israel against Lebanon.

This is not a new trend in our military-industrial-congressional complex, unfortunately. Almost as far back as the mass production of military armaments can be traced, Americans have been unwitting accomplices in other nations’ atrocities. The one we hear the most howling about these days is Saddam’s alleged gassing of his own countrymen, the Kurds. Does it change our evaluation of the situation to know that we effectively handed him the gas, and looked the other way? Does it not reek of hypocrisy to turn on the man to whom we supplied guns and bullets throughout his war with Iran?

The other nations of the world, the ones we have used and abused, have not cleansed their history books of these bullying and obnoxious acts committed by our government in the name of We the People. And yet we are the ones increasingly victimized by what the CIA calls “blowback” from those old covert actions.

We need to end the ability of our military and arms industry to be used covertly against innocent civilians. We need to break up the unholy trinity of what Eisenhower dubbed the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex. (He originally included “congressional” in his farewell notes, but in a moment of political weakness struck the word so as not to wound the good relationship he had established between the presidency and congress). The Military exists to fight wars, and has created a massive subculture of violence among our youngest, brightest (but most economically disadvantaged) kids. The arms industry generates enormous wealth profiting from the business of making war, and it is in the best interest of their corporations that the U.S. military remain in a permanent state of war. The U.S. Congress, increasingly composed of the former or future captains of industry and captains of the military, more often represents the interests of the military and arms industry, which speak very loudly to them through their well-funded lobbyists.

The individual U.S. voter has no lobbyists speaking for her, or him. The voice of the voter at election time is moot when the only choices for election or re-election are the same gallery of puppets of Big Business. We need a third party, one which stands for a choice few key goals, and will never back down from them:

1. The end of corporate lobbying.
2. The free and equal use of the public airwaves by all candidates, including primetime cable TV broadcasts.
3. Fraud-free election procedures: ban electronic voting; take the process out of the hands of the secretary of state of individual States, and put elections in the hands of a non-partisan federal commission.
4. Abolish the legal personhood of corporations, ending their perversion of the 14th amendment and their stranglehold on the free market.
5. A legally binding committment to bring all industrial and governmental entities into compliance with environmentally sustainable practices, including a redirection of the efforts of military research and development agencies such as NASA into programs such as that of apolloalliance.org