Look at history.....hmmm let me see here...
I want to use the example of Mesopotamia from about 3000 to 1500 BCE.
The fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates river was divided amongst competing, yet conciously interconnected and mutually-supporting city-states.
In each their was a ruling dynasty, and that elite also held control of the temple.
The temple was the first bank. Harvests were brought in to the temple first and then redistributed back out based off the social hierarchy in place.
The deities were major sources of identity and pride for their corresponding peoples, and, much in the way football and basketball teams wage legal battle across the nation seasonally, they had roles that were beyond religious.
Elites fight for control, religion is one of the means to do so.
Roman elites, and Germannic's to follow, would use the Catholic Church in a similar manner, though without the sport element.
To keep their wealth centralized (and to therefore stay wealthy) unmarried potential heirs to an estate would join the clergy, and to avoid taxation, or to preserve family wealth and properties, donations of lands and money would be made to the Church.
When Pope Urban II gave out the call for Crusades, religion may have been the justification, but who was this man, and who and what interestes did he represent? This act did not take place all by its lonesome.
Further examples can be made....abundantly...
But, in terms of the totality of this thread, from United Fruit to Gulf Oil there is one purpose behind American foreign policy.
There is one and only one reason why the Marine Corps ensignia, specifically the globe, shows the Western Hemisphere, and I and any other Marine can tell what that is...if they remember..
Nicaragua, back into the 19th century, Panama, Honduras, Guatamala, Haiti, Iran......
Who was Mossadegh, and what happened to him? Why?
Who is Manuel Noriega, and how did he gain power? How did he lose it?
We can go from here, but I can say this.....what we do over there has nothing to do with my "freedoms" here.
Anyone who knows U.S. history realizes that "freedom" is more something to be hoped for by most, a reality that is only experienced by those with enough money to manage the system.
I was with someone close to me when a law enforcement task force banged on his door.....
He had been locked up before, much for what he had actually done, but his last time in had been for something hd hadn't done.
With this said, without his own parole officer's knowledge, another agent, acting on his own, signalled that this man had to be taken in because he "was about to commit more crimes."
I have a copy of the police report, and I attended all his hearings, both on the criminal and parole sides.
I, of course, was at the scene when the report was being compiled....
The report is a lie...
My freedom of speach, this man's right to fair representation, and the promise of correct due process were cast aside.....
He spent 6 months in jail because, when they searched his room, they found a bb gun.
He was set to lost 12 months of his life, but we were able to get it to 6...and call it a victory... that is what it is like to play against a stacked deck....and then we call it "freedom" and "justice."
Now, he told them, prior to them ever entering the room, where this "simulation firearm" was. The officers thanked him for doing so.
I was there....as were many other witnesses.
They would have never found the thing otherwise, because it was buried underneath a mountain of clothes.
In their report, they stated that, upon making entry into the room, that they found what they immediately believed to be an actual firearm laying in plain view, on top of this man's television.
They never made any mention of him telling them where to find it.
No report of the "thank you"s.
This was the only reason he served time.....on a parole violation.
At his hearing, the minute I tried to mention this issue this man's own defense lawyer told me to not say anything.
I, of course, trusted him....but now I see his game...
One Sunday I visited this man in jail....that is a waiting line that I hope few have to deal with..
When I was in the visiting room I could overhear guards speaking to prisoners within the inner jail area.
One guard said to a prisoner, whom I couldn't see from my vantage point, "I love it when you guys come back here. You're paying for my house, and my boat..."
It all comes down to control of the flow of wealth, whether its keeping prisons attended, getting developing nations to take on more international loans, or passing "free trade" laws to undermine economies that are going to be exploited, kind've like what NAFTA did to the Mexican agriculture sector....flooding their markets with cheap corn...
Through crises new technologies are developed, new tensions form that can be used for profit....
I look at the recent terrorist plot (supposedly) involving a Nigerian young man.
Then I look at the struggles of the Ogoni and other peoples within Nigeria who suffer under the paid for/supplied guns of the Nigerian military (paid for by the likes of Shell Oil).
By shaking up Nigeria one can silence a lot of resistance to further development....
Poor Nigeria, if only more people understood this nation's history and current plight....
Then again, I live in Los Angeles.... I look to the mountains that ring the north-eastern valley I call home and I think often about the Chumash and other native peoples who were decimated by Americans.
True, the Spanish caused problems for them....but they never took it to the degree that the Americans did...
I live on blood stained soil....and not from a justified war....
But, then again, I come from peoples who have suffered the same fate on more than one continent, yet both involving the destructive actions of the same pool of nations...maybe it's something that I carry with me...
