IN THE SHADOW

OF EMPIRE

Life & Death under US Domination

Muhammed A. Asadi
1

ALSO BY MUHAMMED A. ASADI

The Unifying Theory of Everything: Koran & Natures
Testimony
Islam & Christianity: Conflict or Conciliation?
The Justice Paradigm: Koran, Social Justice & Scientific
Sociology
Global Apartheid & the World Economic Order. Racism,
the West & the Third World
Living by the Sword: the War Addiction of Americas Elite
The author can be reached through his website at
http://www.asadi.org. Copies of the above titles can be
ordered through http://www.amazon.com, or through any
retail bookstore.
Copies of Living By the Sword: The War Addiction of
Americas Elite, can be ordered through
http://www.lulu.com, or the authors website at
http://www.asadi.org

IN THE SHADOW
OF EMPIRE
Life & Death under US Domination

MUHAMMED A. ASADI

Lulu, Inc
Morrisville, North Carolina.
3

Copyright 2006 by Muhammed A. Asadi

ISBN: 978-1-4116-5981-0
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The Sociological Imagination enables its

possessor to understand the larger historical
scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life
and the external career of a variety of
individuals. It enables him to take into
account how individuals, in the welter of their
daily experience, often become falsely conscious
of their social positions.It is a quality of
mind that seems most dramatically to promise
an understanding of the connection with larger
social realities. It is not merely one quality of
mind among the contemporary range of cultural
sensibilities-it is the quality whose wider and
more adroit use offers the promise that all such
sensibilities-and in fact, human reason itselfwill come to play a greater role in human
affairs.
C. Wright Mills
The Sociological Imagination (1959)

CONTENTS
1.

Demystifying the U.S. Political Economy

2.

Capitalisms Suicide Bombers

3.

Fudging the Numbers: U.S. Media

4.

The Misery-Profit Connection of the U.S. Power

Elite

5.

Public Relations: Manipulation Replaces Authority

6.

Our Era: Compassion or Manipulation?

7.

Peace in the Middle East: Is it possible?

8.

Slavery: Past & Present

9.

Recycling Human Misery: AID & the Pakistan

Earthquake

10. Islam: Image & Reality Post 9/11

11. Quran & Democracy: Are they compatible?
12. The Incoherence of the Incoherent
13. U.S: System Failure
14. Nuclear Proliferation & the U.S. Elite
15. The Jihadists and the US Elite
16. Power & the People
17. Reality versus The Great American Celebration
18. What can be done?
19. Declarations of Independence

In so far as an economy is so arranged that

slumps occur, the problem of unemployment
becomes incapable of personal solution (character
and personal laziness cannot be the cause in such
circumstances). In so far as war is inherent in the
nation-state system and in the uneven
industrialization of the world, the ordinary
individual in his restricted milieu will be powerlesswith or without psychiatric aid- to solve the
troubles this system -or lack of system imposes
upon him. What we experience in various and
specific milieu...is often caused by structural
changes. Accordingly to understand the changes of
many personal milieu we are required to look
beyond them. And the number and variety of such
structural changes increases as the institutions
within which we live become more intricately
connected with one another. To be aware of the idea
of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to
be capable of tracing such linkages among a great
variety of milieu. [To be capable of doing that is
to possess the Sociological Imagination]
C. Wright Mills,
The Sociological Imagination (1959:10-11)

10

Introduction
In his pioneering work, The Power Elite
(1956), C. Wright Mills pointed out that the powerelite (as applied to the U.S. elite) involves the (1)
Uneasy coincidence of economic, military and
political power (Mills 1956:278), where (2) Chosen
elites (chosen through co-optation and socialization)
move within and between these three institutional
structures. Further, this power-elite possesses a (3)
specific and clear class consciousness and unique
image of self as a psychological fact (considering
themselves separate and superior to the rest of
society), regardless of ideological label or party
membership. Factions might exist among the powerelite but their coinciding (4) community of
interests and the resulting inner discipline bind
them together even across differences (Mills
1956:283). Given these forces that are at play among
them, the way they have emerged and the (5)
institutions that have shaped them, it is impossible
for them to break away from the corporate world
and its interests in the decisions they make while in
public office. These interests are driven by their
worldview, (6) the Military Metaphysic, which has,
since the end of the Second World War, come to
describe the economic life of the U.S, in the form of
a permanent war economy.
The Mills model, having its origin in 1956,
still has pragmatic strength of prediction within the
hegemonic power-state itself, as well as the
11

International System (discussed in my previous book,

Living By the Sword: the War Addiction of
Americas Elite (2004)): As part of that mythology
perpetuated by the power-elite, through the media
of mass communication, deeply believed in by the
masses, is the idea that the government works for the
common good of the public, doing everything in its
name, what C. Wright Mills referred to as The
Great American Celebration that this media is busy
with. During times of unstructured disaster, tears
appear in this mythological shroud, and we see a
brief interlude in this celebration. The Hurricane
Katrina disaster revealed (see Pew poll September 8,
2005) that many questioned the delayed, impersonal
response of an administration that had been
reminding them since 9/11, through multi-colored
codes and alert-levels, that their safety was the
governments number one priority. Americans, in
large numbers, were wondering whether their
government actually cares about them or merely
feigns concern for ulterior motives (also shown by
the AP-Ipsos Poll, September 10, 2005). After having
witnessed first hand the destruction of an entire city
due to the misplaced values and neglect of its
decision makers, Americans begin to understand
concerns of people around the world who have
suffered the destruction of countless cities as a direct
result of the American War Machine and its values
of sanctioning the powerless. On the other hand a
review of memos put out by Neo-Conservative think
tanks like the Project for the New American Century and
the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, revealed
that these elites either had no comments on this
12

large-scale disaster or suggested that it should have

been taken care of on the local level. In the
impersonal response by these elite, we can
empirically confirm what C. Wright Mills referred to
as the crackpot realism (1956:356) of this elite and
their success within the American system of
organized irresponsibility (1956: 360-361). These are
the same people who advocate preemptive strikes
against "gathering threats" to "protect the American
people". Yet when an actual massive disaster strikes
that cannot be explained in terms of the military
metaphysic (a military definition of reality), it is
ignored. Their near unanimous response (or lack
thereof) in September, 2005 was predicted by the
Mills model in 1956 and amounts to an empirical
verification of his following statement:
"...In part at least this has resulted from one simple
historical fact, pivotal for the years since 1939: the
focus of elite attention has been shifted from domestic
problems centered in the thirties around slump, to
international problems, centered in the forties and
fifties around war (the permanent war economy and
its link to resource theft and the defense
industries)...
(C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956)
In our era, we need to move beyond the
"feel good" mythology of pluralism that is largely
based on fiction as applied to the current global
scene, further we also need to rework the classical
Marxian model to reflect the realities of todays
world. In bridging the gap between these two, the
Mills model offers the greatest hope and is closest to
13

empirical reality. Let us take this model, expand upon

it and understand our world, and use it to break free
from the cycle of underdevelopment forced upon the
majority world by these power-elite.

14

If you do not specify and confront real

issues, what you say will surely obscure
them. If you do not embody controversy,
what you say will be an acceptance of the
drift to the coming human hell.
(C. Wright Mills, 1916-1962)

15

16

1. Demystifying the U.S. Political Economy

Pluralism, Ruling Class or the Power Elite
Posted: November 2005.

Sociologists commonly define the

intersection of the state and the economy (within a
societys institutional structure) as political economy.
In the political economy of laissez faire capitalism
of the Victorian era, it was commonly assumed by
mainstream political scientists that the state was
largely independent and powerful over the economy,
which comprised of a large number of small
concerns. The state in such a conception was the
driving force of history. According to a modern
refinement of this view, termed pluralism, there is a
balance of power, due to a stalemate of competing
interest groups and elected politicians. In its sanitized
world-view, pluralism considers the state as an
honest broker of free and fair competition for the
common good of society.
Pluralism found its opponent in Marx who
attacked the view that there was an ideational,
common-good based balance of power between the
poor masses and the owners of the means of
production. The misery of the proletariat, working in
inhumane conditions, as a cog in the industrial mode
of production, captured by his historical, empirical
and often very descriptive analysis, put the false
17

gods of capitalism, the symbolism of competition

for public benefit, to rest over 150 years back:
power was unfairly skewed towards the owners of
the means of production as the state decided in their
favor, even as the immesiration of the proletariat
reached levels of absolute deprivation.
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth
he produces ... The worker becomes an ever cheaper
commodity the more commodities he creates. With the
increasing value of the world of things proceeds in
direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of
men. Labor produces not only commodities; it
produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and
does so in the proportion in which it produces
commodities generally.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts (1844)
Thus arose Marxs ruling class, comprising
of the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of
production, the leaders of the economic sphere,
based on whose relationships of production all
other institutional spheres, religion, family, military
and state took shape, bound by an ideology
generated by them. The state according to Marx
became a subordinate committee:
The executive of the modern state is but a committee
for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie.
Karl Marx & Frederick Engels. The
Communist Manifesto (1848)
18

As capitalism evolved into an advanced

form, ownership, control, power and the means of
communication became centralized and
concentrated, but this concentration was not limited
to one institutional sphere, as Marx had suggested.
Direct control of the proletariat broke down and
evolved into mind control by domination of the
media of mass communication. Management shifted
from a management of profits to the management of
levels of deprivation. Further, the manipulation of
mass consciousness became the key to domination,
using modern technological means unknown in
Marxs day. As a result, the control of the state by the
captains of industry became enshrouded in mystery
as contradictory decisions, sometimes benefiting the
working class and sanctioning industry, went against
the Marxist idea of an omnipotent ruling class. The
New Deal in the United States that incorporated
several ideals of socialism, in a diluted form, into the
machinery of the capitalist economy, suggested to
many the inadequacy of Marxs definition of the state
and its relationship with the economic institution.
World War II and the ascent of the new militarism
further altered the world situation. The military
institution, previously considered parasitic upon the
means of production, now became the driver of a
permanent war economy: The military metaphysicthe military definition of reality was embraced avidly
by elites in the economic, political and military
spheres. It was in this atmosphere of academic
confusion and vacuum that C. Wright Mills (19161962) formulated his power-elite model in the
1950s.
19

MILITARIZED
POLITICAL ECONOMY

The U.S. governments

discretionary spending
on Defense is greater
than its spending on
ALL other programs
combined

The model when it first appeared was

attacked by pluralists as being Marxist and by
Marxists as being a confused representation of
Marxs ruling class, while others ignorantly
discredited it as a conspiracy involving some people
meeting in dark rooms. Pluralists today suggest that
since the power elite is becoming increasingly
diverse (with the inclusion of Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice- who are supposed to symbolize
the empowerment of African Americans), Mills was
20

wrong in attributing near uniformity to the elite and

underestimating the political struggle of a multitude
of groups. Marxists attack the model stating that
Mills assumes that the three institutional orders, the
economic, the political and the military are equally
powerful, thereby obscuring Marxs ruling class.
These common criticisms of the model by university
academics and popular commentators alike reveal a
misunderstanding of the basic components of Mills
power elite (see introduction).
The different levels of power confuse the
pluralists, hence the accusation that Mills downplays
the importance of group struggle. They appear
seemingly oblivious to the role played by un-elected
elites that populate the presidents cabinet, influential
policy boards and think tanks. They downplay the
fact that institutional mechanisms ensure that major
decisions, policy parameters, campaign issues,
campaigns and the people who will compete are
predetermined before any voting takes place.
The ability to mobilize resources for
effective interest group formation as well as access to
power networks for successful lobbying are
dominated by the wealthiest. Pluralists conveniently
ignore the fact that the wealthiest 1% of U.S. society
controls more wealth than the rest of the 99%
combined and how that disrupts the balance for the
common good in a society where checkpoints are
cleared based upon purchasing power. Further, they
cannot explain political apathy and alienation among
the masses given their balance of power parameter
and the fact that the few that diligently vote among
21

the public are given extremely restricted choices,

which are further restricted by being structured
through mass-mediated information by privately
owned media.
Group struggle might be significant on the
local levels of power but on decisions of national and
global significance there has been near uniformity of
decision by the US power elite, regardless of party
label or popular opinion. Thus we see the continuous
military adventures of these elite in the post World
War II world. Further, as Mills pointed out this
alliance of the power elite is an uneasy one. In order
to maintain a critical mass of power, members from
the lower echelons have to be allowed into the elite
group. Membership however is based upon social
type and worldview. In other words, the new
inductees are social clones of the existing elite. As
Mills stated, the power elite are not bound by any
one community (or country). The elite are a near
homogeneous group, and their homogeneity is based
more on social type and interests rather than any
physical characteristics or geography. Those that
interfere with these broad community of interests
are removed, their membership is revoked (the entry
and exit of Colin Powell from the current Bush
administration would be a contemporary example).
The criticism by the Marxists of the power
elite model is based on ideological belief in classical
Marxism and a misunderstanding of
interchangeability, which is an important
component of the Mills model. The power elite is a
status-group that wields power, an ability to get their
22

will even though others might oppose it: ownership

of wealth is just one dimension in the prestige
accorded to this group, hence the interchangeability.
Talking about relative strength of institutions
becomes redundant when we note the
interchangeability that exists among the big three: the
military, political and economic institutions. When
the roles and statuses that exist at the pinnacles of
institutions are interchangeable among a select group
of uniform social types, it becomes redundant to
talk about relative strength: take the example of
Alexander Haig Jr. a four star military general in the
U.S. Army who moved to the economic institution as
president of United Technologies, a major defense
contractor, then moved to the political institution as
secretary of state under Reagan, then moved to the
economic institution again; or take the example of
Dick Cheney, who moved from the political to the
economic, and back to the political (similar to
Donald Rumsfeld). Colin Powell moved from the
military to the economic, and was serving as board
member for America Online in January 2000, when it
announced its merger with Time Warner; a year later
he moved to the political institution and was
secretary of state in the Bush administration. When
the same people are filling leadership positions
among the big three: the military, economic and
political institutions, due to interchangeability, it
becomes meaningless to talk about relative strength
of the big three institutions, neither can they be
described as a committee of any one institutional
sphere. Using the ruling class analysis how would
we explain that the committee member becomes a
23

ruling class member and then gets demoted to

committee member and after a brief interlude
becomes ruling class member again.
A look at the 1991 Gulf war reveals that
there were a community of interests (both short and
long term) that coincided to bring about a massive
military response by the U.S elite against Iraq: Oil
profits increased by 75% during the first weeks of
the war, also the major defense contractors (like
Raytheon and its Patriot missiles) got a live
battlefield trade show and saw increasing sales
thereafter. For the protection of the economic elite,
permanent military bases in a (oil) resource rich
region were ensured, as were huge military budgets.
The military, increasingly under pressure by Congress
to cut budgets after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
didnt have to give them up. Politically, the
administration of Bush senior was in deep trouble
over the Savings & Loan disaster, and approval
ratings were extremely low. With the medias new,
round-the-clock war coverage, social solidarity was
managed and public opinion channeled in tune with
the desires of the power elite. It was not one
institutional sphere that benefited from the
destruction of Iraq but a nexus of three institutional
spheres based upon a common community of
interests.
The power elite model is not the same as
Marxs ruling class, neither is it historically and
empirically confused as the utopian pluralist model.
The use of the military metaphysic by the current
day elite, as suggested by Mills, is an empirical fact
24

seen by the unbroken chain of continuous wars

instigated by the U.S. elite since the end of World
War II. Compare this to the labor metaphysic
utilized by classical Marxism (where revolutions and
the resulting rule by the proletariat result from class
struggles in advanced capitalist societies), which has
to-date never become empirical reality (the Russian
and the Chinese "revolutions" occurred in largely
rural societies and not advanced capitalist as
predicted by the Marxist dialectic, neither did the
state 'wither away'). Ideological adherence to the
Marxist model, regardless of fact, which has become
the norm among many latter-day Marxists, will only
obscure the understanding of the current world
situation. In the broad sense of historical specificity
of particular social structures coupled with empirical
evidence, emphasized by Marx himself, the Mills
model though different than Marxs ruling class is
more faithful to his methodology than current day
Marxists, whose almost religious adherence to his
ideas are based more on ideology than scientific
analysis. The capitalists have evolved and learned
new ways to protect "their world", in an uneasy
alliance with those in command of other institutional
spheres they now form part of the power elite and
not a monolithic 'ruling class'. The Marxists
meanwhile have remained frozen in time, awaiting a
proletarian revolution just like Apocalyptic Christians
await the second coming of Christ. As a result, in this
battle for the very existence of humanity, they are
losing on all fronts.

25

26

2. Capitalisms Suicide Bombers:

Thomas Friedman & the Flat-Earth Theory
Posted: January, 2006

According to Thomas Friedman, the world

is flat or fast becoming flat as information
technology transforms world capitalism, giving
everyone a chance to share in the enormous global
pie. Together with this hopeful world scene,
Friedmans new book, The World is Flat (2005),
voices the typical alarmism that defines the mindset
of modern capitalists (as they proclaim a war on
terrorism or counter an imagined war on
Christmas) that Our kids will be increasingly
competing head-to-head with Chinese, Indian and
Asian kids (page, 305). Friedman does not specify
what he means by our kids: are these the kids of
the corporate elite that go to exclusive private
schools or the kids of the rapidly vanishing middle
class in America that go to under-funded public
schools, or the kids of the very poor who go to
schools modeled more after prisons than educational
institutions? This is an important observation,
because together with the myth of a world going flat,
another myth that is widely propagated by the
captains of capitalism is the role of education as the
great equalizer. Jonathan Kozol, Im sure, will have
much to say about schooling and the resulting access
27

to equal opportunity in America, if Mr. Friedman

needs a new source for future revisions. Both of
these myths have no basis in reality but serve as
legitimating tools for a social system that is nurtured
upon inequality.
Friedman, as an apologist for monopoly
capitalism, in his book, makes status-quo enhancing
recommendations that are deceptively ignorant of
the state of the world's poor- including the poor
within the developed world. There is no leveling or
flattening going on in America or the world. The
new class structure in the US, with a gini coefficient
of wealth inequality (calculated by economist Edward
Wolff of New York University) of 0.84 (0 signifies
perfect equality, 1 perfect inequality), reveals almost
near total inequality, and intergenerational
permanence (given historical analysis of the gini
income inequality coefficient over the past
generation- if anything, inequality is getting worse;
the intergenerational permanence is also explored in
depth by sociologists Perucci and Wysong in their
book , The New Class Society). Rather than a flat
structure, the class structure within the US itself has
become as rigid and resistant to change as the Hindu
caste system.
Around the world, the situation is markedly
worse with over 50% living on less than $2 a day
(UN statistics), which adjusting for Purchasing
Power Parity translates into extreme poverty, and an
average consumption of much less than $2 given
1985 prices. According to the UNs Least Developed
Countries Report (LDC), 2002 & 2004, from 1965 to
28

1969, 48 percent of the people in the LDCs were

living on less than $1 a day, now it is almost 50
percent. Taking into account the population increase
from the 1960s, that comes to more than twice the
number of people living on less than $1 a day now
than did back then (138 million then, 307 million
now). The average per capita income of the LDCs, in
the late 1990s measured in terms of current prices
and exchange rates comes to $0.72 a day (72 cents).
Contrary to any leveling or flattening, the vast
majority in the world are getting worse-off and fast
approaching levels of absolute deprivation.
Technology (as well as formal education), as
C. Wright Mills correctly suggested in the 1950s,
merely becomes another tool in the arsenal of the
power elite to further their privilege and not much
else. It has not and will not fix inequality (as intracountry analysis of the gini index of the worlds most
technologically advanced country, i.e. the US,
reveals). Further, there isnt any equal technological
transfer taking place within the world: the
manufacturing that is done in developing countries
uses very little local input, and the outsourcing is
merely to take advantage of cheap labor rather than
any sharing of technology; the developing countries
are used as mere assembly points for extraction of
maximum surplus. The problem the globe confronts
is greed-generated distributional deprivation, in an
otherwise world of plenty. The solution to this mess
cannot be found within the same system that
produced this mess in the first place. However,
Friedman suggests further integration into this
system as he boasts about India and China. Contrary
29

to what Friedman suggests, the solution is to

consciously reject the system and then try to get rid
of the control mechanisms generated by it, of which,
the nation-state system is the most obvious. The
nation-state system is merely a bureaucratized
version of the age-old colonial practice of divide
and rule. Its formalized control mechanisms work
only to keep developing countries and their
populations apart, and in wasteful competition and
conflict over what amounts to be mere crumbs
from the masters table. Where it concerns the
multinationals or the US power elite, the
bureaucracy of the nation-state system ceases to
exist; they neither respect national boundaries nor
national sovereignty. The whole world is their playing
field (or more aptly put, their killing field, as
people of Bhopal, India experienced first hand, and
people of Iraq are experiencing today). The best way
to proceed for the developing world is first to get rid
of this bureaucratic nonsense defined as the nation
state, then to form alliances, trade blocks and
defense pacts with the rest of the rejecting states and
move forward from there.
The forces of tyranny will put hurdles and
blocks in the way of all such attempts towards
emancipation (like their knee-jerk reactions to
Venezuelas Chavez). However, once the united
emancipated nations become a large enough block,
such manipulation by the hegemonic power elite, can
be resisted. The first world is much more
dependent for its hegemony on third world default
to the status quo than the third is dependent on the
first. If the "third world" were to break free of this
30

domination by the "first world", then indeed the

first world would reveal just how "dependent" it
has been on the third, both for profits and for
resources. We see this indirectly in their reactions to
every country that tries to show independence and
use its resources for its own benefit. Under the
current system, regardless of how countries try to fit
it, they will suffer; some more than others, some
sooner than later but eventually all will suffer, that is
the great flattening of the world: total immiseration
for all except the tiny elite that dominates the vantage
points of this system. The world does not work in
vacuum-like conditions where each can operate and
succeed on their own, based upon goodwill and a fair
playing field. That is not possible in a globalized
world, a world globalized not by equal players but by
an elite that have monopolized it to their advantage,
even as they play one nation-state against another. In
this monopolized globalization, we have a world
that is controlled implicitly by a tiny elite, 1) through
domination of finance (the IMF and World Bank)
and trade (the WTO), and 2) explicitly through
imperial wars (as in the case of Iraq).
Fitting into the current world system, as
history reveals, produces predictable winners, those
winners are the US elite and their partners (the
previous colonial masters), the European elite.
Success is allowed only to those that fit into the
grand strategy of the American elite. There are no
exceptions to this, except for countries that are being
used as an extension base of the US (e.g. Japan, in
order to keep China in check, or Israel to guard the
Middle East region etc) or those that rejected such
31

neo-liberal integration: the only countries that

escaped declining growth rates in the 1980s were the
ones that rejected the so called free market
reforms, countries like China and India (Neoliberalism is based in large part on total hypocrisy of
the developed nations, that place four times the
number of trade barriers for the developing world
compared to what they themselves confront; see
Oxfams trade report,
http://www.maketradefair.org),
Like it or not, there is apartheid in the US
dominated world system, and no amount of fitting in
will improve the condition of the majority world- the
experience of the African Americans as a microcosm
of this world-system scene is well documented- not
only are life chances unequal, but the very access to
life, to be alive, measured by life-expectancy is
unequal. Both China and India, by trying to fit into
the same system- that has predictable winners and
losers- are merely hastening their long-term
destruction even as they achieve some short-term
gains. Friedman is unimpressed with Pakistan and
the Islamic world even as he conveniently forgets
that their present state is the result of decades of
neo-liberalization (and US inspired proxy-wars), a
major reason why their infant industries were
prematurely aborted, and their status reduced to debt
dependency or primary product provider. Therefore,
the end result that will eventually emerge as India
and China complete their journey in the same
direction, would not be much different to what
Pakistans condition is today. The world, in its
32

current state of exploitation, is headed fast towards

destruction, both environmentally and economically.
Take Iraq as another microcosm of this
world: it was well developed (in the 1970s), it was
resource rich but then we had a corporate sponsored
liberation war, which has produced misery for the
Iraqis and destruction, almost near total destruction
of a well-developed country. It has produced a few
winners as well: the corporations that have profited
by huge contracts and the Iraqi politicians that are
helping the American elite extract this profit (one of
the famous ones, Chalaby, is a seasoned bank
robber, wanted by the Jordanian government). This
in short is what the power-elite are doing around the
globe; when they are done, the world will resemble
Iraq or Afghanistan- flattened parking lots, a global
ghetto, even as these few, the tiny elite live in their
gated communities of what is left of this earth (toxic
dumping in developing nations and poor
neighborhoods within the developed world reveals a
similar trend).
Eventually, since these elite are short sighted,
as their destruction of the environment reveals, they
will end up destroying themselves as well; it is for
this reason that C. Wright Mills termed their
perception of reality as crackpot realism. In fact,
even though in totally different social context, these
elite possesses a similar mentality as suicide bombers.
Capitalisms suicide bombers worship profits and are
willing to kill and be killed for them; they are the
higher terrorists that operate on much larger scales
than the bogeymen, the petty terrorists they claim to
33

fight. In trying to kill the world for short-term

profits, they eventually end up killing themselves and
the earth. For the sake of humanity, they must be
stopped and their policies challenged on every forum
and upon every occasions. Fitting in, like India and
China are doing, into a system generated by their
crackpot versions of reality, helps no one but harms
all. We must reject their system and reject it in
totality.
Published in Political Affairs Magazine, January 2006
(http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/2563/1
/144)

34

3. Fudging the Numbers:

Fox News' O'Reilly claims too much is
spent on the poor
Posted: September, 2005.

OReilly states on his program (Sept 14,

2005) that entitlement spending for the poor have
actually increased during the Bush administration's
2006 budget compared to the Clinton
administration's 1996 budget. Stating that poverty
figures in the US under Clinton in 1996 were at 13.7
% of the population while now they are at 12.7%, he
concludes that America is looking after its poor by
spending a "massive amount" ($368 billion was the
number he quoted) even in the midst of a "war on
terror". Stating that "dollars don't lie", OReilly
concludes that the "no spin zone" has rescued
Americans from misinformation spread by liberals.
This common tactic is often used by the
main stream media: numbers are automatically
supposed to impart authority on what are otherwise
nonsensical claims. What is implied by the
conclusions in these arguments is that blame lies not
on the rich or their government, but on the poor, not
only for their own ills, but for the ills of society at
large. It is claimed that in their own irresponsibility,
the poor squander all this money and help that the
generous government gives them. Rather than
35

outrage at why over 37 million Americans are poor

and chronically hungry in one of the wealthiest
countries of the world, there is gloating over a
fictitious one percentage improvement compared to
a previous administration. In their petty squabbling
among themselves, the elite in America often forget
that the deprivation of the poor have life and death
consequences for millions, and represents much
more than sound bytes on a news program. Why
neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have
fixed this "public issue" and made it a priority is
never discussed. The argument used by OReilly who
is in a command position in the corporate news
media in the US, is deceptively simplistic and brings
to mind what C. Wright Mills wrote about this media
half a century back. He said:
The second-rate mind is in command (through the
mass media) of the ponderously spoken platitude. In
the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative
mood, irrationality, are raised to principle.
(The Power Elite, 1956)
It is true, as OReilly mentions that "dollars"
don't lie, but numbers thrown out by themselves are
mere bits of information. It is in the interpretation of
the numbers that the lie is found. Poverty, a
meticulously well-hidden phenomena in the US, both
in social consciousness and actual visibility (due to
segregation), signifies, even in the official figures of
12.7%, a failure of a social system that spends $2.2
trillion dollars a year, transferring wealth from the
masses to the very rich, but cannot even feed a large
percentage of its citizens. (Conveniently ignored by
36

O'Reilly was the fact that wealth-fare, the subsidies

and tax breaks to the rich are several times what is
spent on the poor: $448 billion a year in 1996, when
O'Reilly says $191 billion was spent by Clinton on
entitlements to the poor. By 1999, that wealth-fare
number had grown to $603 billion. The 2003
estimate of $815 billion shows an 82 percent increase
in just seven years,
http://www.southendpress.org/2004/items/TROW
/Introduction). If we use "real" measures of poverty,
based upon average incomes in the US and a current
basket of goods, including health and childcare, this
percentage is actually double that of the official
figures (many private studies and models based on
them have documented this). No mention was made
by OReilly of the fact that the four years that Bush
has been in office, poverty has consistently risen
from 11.3% in 2000 to 12.7% today, a greater
increase than the 1% improvement over 1996 that he
was gloating over. Also not mentioned by OReilly
was the fact that even though the population from
2000 to 2006 increased by around 5%, the number of
the poor (during the same period) increased by 19 %
(31 million then, over 37 million now). The real
increase of course is much greater and masked by
official measures as stated above.
The increase in spending that OReilly is
talking about is the part of the budget that is non
discretionary (i.e. mandatory) spending. That means
that unless the law is changed by Congress, the
current administration cannot increase or decrease it,
it is based on predetermined formulas. As the
number of the poor goes up, according to the
37

formulas used, non-discretionary spending goes up

as well. What those numbers show is not an
improvement in the help given to the poor but
merely the fact that their numbers have gone up, as
has the cost of living. According to the Office of
Management and Budget, not only did this
administration propose cuts in discretionary
spending to help the poor, they made
recommendations for reductions in nondiscretionary spending as well (something that the
executive branch has no authority over). Excluding
Medicaid, spending on entitlements has remained at
1.3% of GDP since 1975, according to the budget
report and non discretionary spending has not even
kept pace with the rate of inflation (according to the
Office of Management & Budget).
These miserly "private solutions that keep
the percentage of the poor more or less constant
regardless of the regime in charge, reveals as C.
Wright Mills suggested, that these programs, rather
than help the poor, actually help the rich in rescuing
capitalism from itself. In the same context, we can
understand the global situation and the
preponderance of international relief agencies. They
are part of the same system that keeps the world
capitalist system intact. Global poverty has actually
become worse and not improved, even as these relief
agencies have increased in numbers. According to
the United Nations Least Developed Countries
Report (2004), 81% of the population in the LDCs
was living on less than $2 a day, adjusted for
Purchasing Power Parity (1985 dollars); it comes to
an average consumption of $1.03 a day- this can buy
38

what $1.03 would have bought in 1985 in the US. As

a result, many of the captains of the World System,
the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and the Fords etc.
have set up shops as relief providers. Structural
change in the world system would fix all the
deprivation needs faced by humanity (at the current
time) but since such structural change is distasteful to
the elite, they encourage private solutions and relief
agencies that might help with people's suffering on a
smaller scale but prevent upheavals that might
change the structure of the system and the ideology
that keeps it intact.
Perhaps this one quote from C. Wright Mills
sums up the Friedman book and its position within
the US intellectual scene:
In the United States today, intellectuals, artists,
ministers, scholars, and scientistsecho and
elaborate the confusions of officialdoms. They neither
raise demands on the powerful for alternative policies,
nor set forth such alternatives before publics. They do
not try to put responsible content into the politics of
the United States; they help to empty politics and
keep it emptyThe journalistic lie, become routine,
is part of this (as well).
(The Sociological Imagination 1959:183-184)

39

40

4. The Misery-Profit Connection

Of the U.S. Power Elite
Posted: September, 2005.

The rise in gas prices following hurricane

Katrina, reveals once again the tendency of corporate
America (in this case the oil companies) and the
American elite, to convert every human disaster into
a profit making opportunity- (just like they are doing
in Iraq).
This new human disaster also reveals the
hypocrisy of the US mainstream media, which is
condemning the looting by those who are stranded in
the city of New Orleans (most of whom didn't have
enough resources to move out before the storm,
disasters often don't affect the rich) even as they
ignore the larger scale looting that is going on all
over the country by these oil companies. Quarterly
profits for some of the top oil companies were up by
over 50% or more this year, yet they still use the
excuse of "supply and demand" in justifying the high
price, as if every one, including people struggling to
pay their rent, are equal players in the oil market!
Exxon Mobil Corp. announced that its
revenue totaled more than $82 billion in the first
three months of the year, which amounts to profits
being up by 44%. Quarterly profits for Conoco
Phillips Inc, were up about 80 percent compared
41

with the corresponding quarter last year; Royal

Dutch Shell Group 28 percent, and BP PLC 35
percent. These profit figures were reported by these
companies after their numbers went through the
manipulation of accounting craftsmen, the actual
numbers might well be higher. Bush's recent energy
bill gave these oil companies the biggest chunk of
subsidies, amounting in the billions, to top off their
profit figures, as icing on a cake.
A product (oil) that is monopolistically
supplied by a few dominant corporations and which
has inelastic demand (because it has no substitutes in
popular usage), and the sale of which results in
record profits for its sellers, can never have simple
"supply and demand" determine its rightful price.
Another fact that this storm revealed about
the American elite and its "misery-profit" connection
is that their grip on power is uneasy and tenuous and
is lost easily. A day after the storm they lost control
of the city, this tells us in a subtle though succinct
way that when misery brings people together, tyranny
loses.
M. Asadi
Published by Egypt's Al- Ahram (September 9, 2005)
(http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/759/letters.htm)

42

5. Public Relations:
Manipulation Replaces Authority
Posted: September 2005

Karen Hughes, the public face of the Bush

Presidential Campaign (in 2000), was sworn in as
undersecretary of state for public diplomacy on
September 8, 2005. The president explained during
the swearing in ceremony that Hughes is being
appointed to explain "our policies and fundamental
values" to people around the world, specifically to
the Arab and Muslim world. Before embarking on
this huge task, Ms. Hughes would do well to begin at
home. Recent polls suggest that not only are people
around the world weary of the policies pursued by
this American administration, its own citizens are
beginning to show discontent and are questioning its
"values and policies".
The American people have legitimate
concerns; maybe Karen Hughes can address them:
* Why are 47 to 82 million Americans (per
year or parts of it) without Health Insurance
(National Coalition of Healthcare), when our military
budgets run around half a trillion dollars?

43

Percentage of Those Without Health Insurance

By Age, Income & Employment
Age Percentage
Under 18 ..... 12%
18-24 ..... 30%
25-34 ..... 25%
35-44 ..... 18%
45-64 ..... 14%
65+ ..... 1%
Household Income
Under $25,000 ..... 24%
$25,000-49,999 ..... 19%
$50,000-74,999 ..... 12%
$75,000+ ..... 8%
Employment
Worked Full-Time ..... 17%
Worked Part-Time ..... 24%
Did Not Work ..... 26%
Source: US Census Bureau & Washington Post
* Why are 36.2 million in the US, chronically
malnourished? This number by the way is larger than
the entire population of Iraq. (According to a
Norwegian study, malnutrition among Iraqi children
44

increased from 4% before the US occupation to

7.7% after).
* Why does the wealthiest 1% of our society
own around 50 % of our wealth, while the bottom
40% owns 0.2 % (less than a third of a percent) of
wealth? The richest 1% of the population now owns
more wealth than the bottom 99% of all Americans
combined.
A federal government study of mortality
rates (1993) showed that for people aged 25 to 64,
death rates for those with incomes of less than $9000
a year were triple the rates for people with incomes
of $25,000 a year or more. The prevalence of disease
(particularly diabetes and heart disease) is almost
similarly related to income. Can access to the
American Dream and the "liberty and freedom"
that supposedly comes with it be equal under such
circumstances, when access to "life", the most basic
human right, is unequal? The condition of the poor
has worsened and many more have entered their
rank during the reign of George Bush.
*Of what value is our "freedom of speech",
when a handful of corporations (the big media)
dominate information and reach millions while the
rest of us reach practically no one and can play no
meaningful part in the production of information?
*In one of the wealthiest countries of the
world, why are over 35 million (U.S. Department of
Education) American adults functionally illiterate and
50 million barely literate and severely limited in their
ability to read and write?
45

*How come two parties dominate politics

and political rule? How come successfully running in
elections requires millions of dollars and heavy
corporate funding, and access to the corporate media
(monopoly)? There is little difference between a twoparty state and the one-party state (which is often
termed a dictatorship).
*Why do the top large corporations
dominate over 90% of all non-farm business
revenue, while small business amount to almost
nothing, and out of the corporations, the top 500
accounting for almost 70% of US GDP ? How does
that mesh with the free market values that you
want to educate the world about? How come 6 out
of 10 corporations pay zero taxes (numbers provided
by the government General Accounting Office) and
sometimes negative-taxes, getting huge subsidies
from the government, even though their revenues
are in the trillions of dollars? Why do the working
poor and the struggling middle-class have to pay
huge chunks of their income as taxes, while
corporations, as a percentage of their revenues pay
little or nothing?
* While you talk about freedom abroad,
please explain to us why the American system is busy
incarcerating people at home. The land of the free
has the biggest prison population in the world and
the highest rate of prisoners per capita of all
countries. One of every 32 adults in the U.S. is either
in jail, on parole or on probation (BBC news report,
26 August, 2002). Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S.
population grew by 21% but federal inmates soared
46

by 312%; not taking into account military prisons

and INS detentions, which makes this increase even
greater. Since ours is a highly bureaucratized society,
with rules and regulations governing every aspect of
life, and the resulting uniformity that comes with it,
there is little substantive freedom (which is a separate
discussion but true nonetheless).
*As you talk about women's rights abroad
and earn gratitude from women in Afghanistan,
please explain to us why around 4 million women are
severely battered every year in the U.S (these
reported numbers are much lower than actual
numbers since many dont report the abuse,
according to independent surveys); 5000 to 7000 of
them die. Nearly 31 percent of all American women
are abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point
in their lives, according to a 1998 Commonwealth
Fund survey. Since these numbers are huge, this
public issue is the responsibility of the government
and solutions needs to be society-wide. What
policies out of the ones that you are going to talk
about abroad are being offered to liberate women
here at home from brutal assault?
Data studies in the United States also show
that 25 percent to 35 percent of girls are sexually
abused (Jean Kilbourne, Deadly Persuasion:
1999:253). Twenty five percent to thirty-five percent
of U.S. women come to a total number greater than
the combined female populations of Afghanistan and
Saudi Arabia. A high percentage of women so
assaulted in the U.S. suffer from Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder (the same disorder that a large
47

number of war veterans suffer from). Thus this

condition of women in the U.S. simulates a
psychological reaction similar to that in a combat
zone. This brings to mind the images of women
from the Taliban era that the corporate media played
over and over as they informed us about how
political enemies abroad abused women.
*As you propagate the benefits of the
"American Dream" abroad, please explain to us why
the tens of millions who live in the inner cities in the
US, minorities whose communities suffer from the
effects of chronic crime, drugs, disease,
homelessness, and unemployment, at levels (in many
cases) worse than the levels in the third world, do
not get access to any part of that dream? We have
a whole series of social indicators: birth rates, death
rates, infant mortality rates, life expectancy, human
development indices, education and income
differentials etc, that prove that many minority
communities in the US live lives of extreme
deprivation. However the administration cut their
benefits even as it converted a huge surplus into a
record deficit because of military spending (going to
a handful of corporations), tax breaks and huge
subsidies to the rich. Please explain to the world how
this translates into "protecting" the American people
when you are assigning millions to a life of misery
and disease through deprivation?

48

6. Our Era: Compassion or Manipulation?

Posted: September, 2005
In our era, bureaucratized corporate control
and the projected corporate culture and its total
domination over "reality" has resulted in mass
atrocity on scales never before seen in human
history, and a blas attitude (wide scale indifference)
regarding it. Social Darwinists have claimed that the
West is more evolved because of "modernity", such
ideas have led to a justification of genocide and have
not enhanced compassion at all.
It is much beyond the realm of biology to
explain human society. Whereas biology is uniform
among humanity, social structure and societies
projected by them are not. Durkheim's mechanical
vs. organic solidarity, Tonnies Gemeinschaft vs. the
Gesellschaft, Simmel's objective versus subjective
culture, Reisman's "inner directed" vs. "other
directed", Mills' "mass society", all suggest that as
societies become more bureaucratized humanity gets
less interested in each other as "being" and less
compassionate, seeing each other as merely fulfilling
functions. Manipulation and not compassion defines
our era. People become less aware of their natural
environment and their place within it, as artificial
creations like watches dictate their lives (as against
the natural day/night cycle) etc. The mass media has
not helped with compassion either. In its quest to
49

turn society into cheerful robots, by bombarding

them with facts that outrun sensibility coupled with
distraction, it has created a highly propagandized
society.
Individual human freedom flourishes under
minimal rules and regulations not maximal ones as in
a bureaucratic society like the US. Bureaucracy
produces standardization like the standardization you
see in the blank face strip malls in the US city scene
with its all too familiar shopping malls, golden
arches, taco bells etc;-the vibrant main street has
been totally destroyed, replaced by corporate culture
and its totally boring city scene; Life under
standardization is narrow, everything is "in the box"
so to speak, it prevents you from looking outsidetherefore it stifles true freedom.
When everything is "in the box" which
prevents most from transcending it due to
adaptation, then memories and experiences are
narrow, everyday is almost the same, when memories
are insignificant time passes fast, because how you
subjectively feel time is based upon past memories.
This speedy passage of time, compared to life in
more traditional societies is almost universally felt by
individuals. Bureaucratic societies like the US, rob a
person of a human life experience. Life in a
bureaucracy is narrow, even though life-expectancy
might be long, so people live vicariously through the
world of fiction- movies are big business- or they try
to escape this existence by drinking themselves to a
frenzy- the alcohol industry capitalizes on this. Glued
together by a massive advertising industry and the
50

"new mythology" that the mass society avidly

embraces, they weave dreams that most will never
attain, always projected towards the future, but
presented as vicariously attainable today through
unrelated consumption.
The uniform message that the mass society
receives through the corporate media is one that
legitimizes capitalism as the only way, that presents
people's problems as being caused by personal and
not social reasons, a "censorship" that avoids giving
equal legitimacy to alternative systems and a system
that presents the US as a paragon of freedom when
none exists and one that presents all challengers as
"demons" that are evil. The media puts out content,
which is a product; we just have to analyze and
classify it and as a result can see the uniformity of its
underlying message. How come the US public,
before the Iraq war came to believe that Saddam had
a hand in 9/11? Or how come only those countries
and their leaders become famous in the US that are
marked as enemies? We discover through this
analysis that the massive advertising industry, like the
news media, effectively contours people's lifestyle
and aspirations driving vague tendencies into specific
directions (as sociologist Robert Merton concluded).
The world according to the media is a submicroscopic part of the real world. Out of the
millions of events happening every day they pick a
few here and there, as if that were the sum total of
what is important in the world. Another common
assertion, supporting the status quo is that humans
are living longer today because of capitalism. This
51

assertion is based on a broadly generalized myth.

Sierra Leone has a life expectancy of 36 years, while
in the US, those that make less than $9000 and there
are tens of millions of them, have three times the
mortality rate compared to those that make $25,000
or over. Just given the sheer rise in population from
times when humans were hunter gatherers means
that today the absolute numbers that are dying
needlessly at younger ages are much higher than
those that died at younger ages in any time in early
human history. The misery of a larger number of
humanity, in a world of plenty, has become greatly
magnified compared to times when human societies
were less structured.

52

7. Peace in the Middle East: Is it possible?

Posted: October, 2005
The Israel/Palestine problem is not
complicated: we have an occupying power (Israel)
and an occupied people (Palestinians), and a huge
disparity of power and control between the two, all
within the context of International Law, and the UN
which has already decided upon the solution (see
http://israel.rationalreality.com). If the occupying
power desires peace, it can be readily achieved, given
its dominant position. So why has peace not become
a reality in around half a century?
In the 1950s C. Wright Mills wrote about
the Military Metaphysic- the military definition of
reality deeply espoused by the US elite. Why the
Israel/Palestine problem will not get resolved and
has not been solved so far can be understood, in my
opinion, in light of what Mills wrote:
"The expectation of war solves many problems of the
"crackpot realists"; it also confronts them with many
new problems. Yet these, the problems of war, often
seem easier (for them) to handle, (compared) to
political policies that are distasteful to many
politicians...The terms of their long term solutions,
under conditions of peace, are hard for the capitalist
elite to face." (Page, 87, Causes of World War
III)
53

What is distasteful to the US and Israeli elite,

is peace in the Middle East, and the resulting effect
that might have on regional development in the Arab
world and US hegemony in a resource rich region. In
their uneasy alliance with corporations, whose
leadership positions they normally hold when they
are not posing as politicians, the Neo-Cons in the US
(Israel's strong supporters) have found a dual
fulfillment of purpose. The terms of the "long term
solution" to the "Palestinian problem" are what they
do not want to face. If that can be avoided, any
"practical problems" that a new war or a new
Intifadah might bring are easier for them to handle. In
all such alliances to further power and wealth, human
suffering and misery become at best, background
noise justified by moral symbols, unconnected events
(like the holocaust), media distractions, and stage
management. The US and Israel together (and not
only Israel), are to blame for the lack of peace and
development in the Arab world.
I do not think that peace in the Middle East
will ever become a reality as long as US hegemony in
the current world system continues to exist. Even if
(in an imaginary scenario) the Palestinians voluntarily
leave the West Bank and Gaza and hand it over to
Israel on a silver platter, Israel will invent a new war
in that region, in tune with the desires of the US elite.
There will still be no peace.
Peace is possible only if the current world
system with its structure of power and manipulation
is altered to one that places humanity and its well
being before wealth, resources and profits. Peace,
54

working within the current system, dominated by the

US power elite, is impossible to achieve. History
bears witness to the fact that regardless of the face or
political label of the person in power, or the
terminology used for the various peace plans, there
has been no peace in Palestine and no end to the
Israeli occupation.
M. Asadi
Published by Egypt's Al- Ahram
(http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/763/letters.htm)
6 October 2005.
Summary Analysis of the Conflict
In the 1948 war that Israel won (and Israel
had numerical superiority in the field of battle
contrary to popular mythology of the little David
beating the big Goliath), it expelled over 700,000
indigenous Arabs of Palestine from that area (see
Benny Morris conclusive study on the issue).
The UN partition mandate of 1947 gave the
implanted Israeli entity 55% of historical Palestine
even though their population was third of the
population of the region and most were immigrants
from outside. Then, after siding with Britain and
attacking Egypt in 1956- a preemptive aggressive
war, it preemptively attacked the Arabs in 1967 and
captured the rest of the 45% of historical Palestine
that was given by the UN to the Palestinian Arabs. In
Oslo in 1993, the Palestinian leadership told Israel
that they will accept that it keep, instead of 55%
55

(given by the UN partition plan), 78% of historical

Palestine and let them have 22% out of the 45% that
they were given by the UN. Israel has refused and
does not want peace; the situation is as simple as
that.
The UN resolution 242, asks as "point
number 1", for Israel to give back the territories it
captured in 1967. Israel refuses. After point number
1 is fulfilled, the UN asks all of the neighboring
countries including Israel to recognize the
sovereignty of the others.
In Palestine, (a historical entity under both
the Ottomans and the British, that had indigenous
Palestinian Arabs living there for centuries, over 13
centuries- the vast majority of them), we have a
simple case of an occupying force and an occupied
people. The cause of the conflict is the occupation,
the Israelis do not want to get rid of the cause but
they want to get rid of the effect, i.e. the Palestinian
liberation struggle. That is not possible and morally
reprehensible because what that means is that they
want to continue the occupation and also want the
Palestinians to be happy in their impoverished and
subjugated state. The Palestinians reject that and all
people of conscience in the world regardless of
religion, and nationality also reject that. We see the
empirical proof of this in the UN voting on
resolutions against the Israeli oppression. Except for
the US and Israel and a couple of Island States, no
one sides with the Israelis in their oppression of the
Palestinians on diplomatic fora.
56

8. Slavery: Past & Present

Posted: October, 2005

We are often told that slavery is a thing of

the past. However, the current world situation
reveals that slavery still exists and its strongest and
most vocal proponents are the U.S. power elite.
Modern American society and by extension the
World System is three tiered: 1. Those at the very
top, the elite (a microscopic minority) 2. Those at the
very bottom, the excluded class, and 3. The
disorganized middle, wherein is rapidly emerging a
standardized mass society.
As we study the world situation, we are
reminded of Malcolm Xs statement regarding two
types of slaves, during the (chattel) slavery era in
America: the House slaves and the Field slaves. The
House slaves were often treated better than the Field
slaves; they looked after the masters house, often got
better food and clothing, and as a result came to a
somewhat happy acceptance of their condition.
There was no total acceptance but there wasnt any
complete rejection either. They considered
themselves to be privileged and of a higher status
than the Field slaves, whose status and living
conditions were inferior to their own. When the
Field slaves wanted to escape the masters
oppression, and sought help from the House slaves,
that help seldom came. When the master, who rarely
57

did his own fighting, wanted to bring the rebelling

Field slaves back in line, he often mobilized the
House slaves.
Looking at the situation within the U.S, as
well as around the world, we note that the U.S. elite
are the current day masters, whose brutality is no less
than the masters of old: the scale of that brutality
(real and potential) has massively increased due to
technological advancement, even as oppression is
made impersonal and business-like (Mills 1960:88,
Causes of World War III). Having total control over
material resources, they have created the material
world after their own image (the objective world).
They also manage the dissemination of culture, being
in command of the cultural apparatus (the mass
media and formal education): language, technology
and status (thereby influencing peoples subjective
world). Over time, elite generated reality assumes
an existence of its own and becomes sui generis, in
the form of social facts: it cannot be questioned, it
exists on its own, separate from individuals.
Those in the middle, the mass society, are
conditioned to happy acceptance of this created
world; they are the House slaves of today, what C.
Wright Mills described as the Cheerful Robots: the
guards that are mobilized at the masters bidding.
Conditioned by a bureaucratic society, with its strict
rules of rewards and punishment, they have adapted
and become standardized, like a uniform product off
a conveyor belt (http://robots.asadi.org). This leaves
them with limited capacity to transcend their society,
58

and an inability to view the machinery that is pulling

their strings.
"Just as on the one hand, we have become slaves of
the production process, so, on the other, we have
become slaves of the products. That is...by means of
technology (is offered to us) mastery over the selfreliance and spiritual center of life through endless
habits, endless distractions and endless superficial
needs. Thus, the domination of the means has taken
possession not only of specific ends but of the very
center of ends...Man has thereby become estranged
from himself; an insuperable barrier of media,
technical inventions, abilities and enjoyments has
been erected between him and his most distinctive and
essential being. There has never been an age in which
such an emphasis on the intermediate aspects of life,
in contrast to its central and definite purposes was
totally alien to that age. "
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
(1900)
At the very bottom lies the excluded class
(todays brutalized Field slaves). The oppression and
lack of opportunity they face, coupled with
segregation and rejection by the mainstream, has
created a powder keg situation, waiting to explode.
The elite recognize this, so they mobilize the guards,
the House slaves to pacify them. In this context we
can understand police brutality in the inner cities of
the U.S. and an extremely high rate of incarceration
(over a third of young African American males have
59

been involved in the US criminal justice system).

Internationally, the Iraq war is an example of the
same phenomenon. For those who are not
authoritatively controlled, control is achieved though
more (implicit) structural means: the cultural
manifestation of the cycle of poverty (and
structural control through domination of markets
and global finance on the international level):
The accumulation of advantages at the very top
parallels the vicious cycle of poverty at the very
bottom. For the cycle of advantages includes
psychological readiness as well as objective
opportunities: just as the limitations of lower class
and status positions produce a lack of interest and
self-confidenceEnergetic aspiration lives off a series
of successes; and continual petty failure cuts the nerve
of the will to succeed. (C. Wright Mills, The
Power Elite. 1956:111)
"(The Code of the Street) is nothing less than the
cultural manifestation of persistent urban poverty. It
is a mean adaptation to blocked opportunities and
profound lack, a grotesque form of coping by young
people constantly undermined by a social system that
historically has limited their social options and until
recently rejected their claims to full citizenship."
(Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street
1999:146-147).

60

The world's 500 richest people, according to

UN statistics (UN Human Development Report)
have as much income as the world's poorest 416
million people (Reuters Oct 5, 2005), and assets
greater than 2.3 billion people (UN Human
Development Report 1996). According to the UN,
around 50% of the world's population lives on less
than $2 a day. Among them, many live on less than
$1 a day: According to the United Nations' Least
Developed countries (LDC) report (2002 & 2004),
during 1995-1999, 81% of the populations in the
LDCs lived on less than $2 a day. When adjusted by
purchasing par parity (PPP), it comes to an average
consumption of $1.03 a day (1985 PPP).
Of the African LDCs, 87 percent of the
population was living on less than $2 a day, with an
average consumption of 86 cents a day ($0.86). From
1965 to 1969, 48 percent of the people in the LDCs
were living on less than $1 a day, now its almost 50
percent. Taking into account the population increase
from the 1960s, that comes to more than twice the
number of people living at less than $1 a day now
than did back then (138 million then, 307 million
now).
According to the Federal Reserve, in the
1990s, the richest 1 percent of America owned
around 40 percent of its wealth - the greatest level of
inequality among all rich nations, and the worst in
U.S. history since the 1920s. Currently, according to
economist Edward Wolff of New York University, if
home ownership is taken out of the equation (wealth
61

in housing is the most widely-dispersed of assets),

the richest 1/2 of 1% (0.5%) together (about 450,000
households) now own 42% of the nations financial
wealth. Exclude owner occupied homes from wealth
calculation and the richest 1% own over 50% of US
wealth (Neubeck, 2005:188). The bottom 40%
owned 0.2% (a fraction of one percent) of wealth in
the U.S., and many of them were in debt.
Slavery never ended, it merely changed
forms, became bureaucratized, (thereby enslaving a
greater percentage of humanity than ever before),
and the power of the masters became ultraconcentrated. However, the political economy of
slavery is always tenuous and uneasy, it contains
built-in antagonisms. Every day a few individuals
recognize their condition of bondage, the fact that
they live in a world they did not make and they
realize that their actions and words have no real
consequence for the structure of their society,
regardless of the official platitudes.
They come to understand and recognize the
causes of their alienation, causes that were previously
masked by the opium of mass consumption. They
come to recognize the meaningless and narrow
natures of their lives; the purpose of which, they
were told through incessant media messages, was to
maintain consumption at a maximal level. They now
attain a position, a vantage point from which they
can view directly the puppet masters that control
their movements and determine their life-chances.
Such personality types increase in number when
62

material circumstances become acute, due to the

ever-increasing flow of wealth towards the very top,
inherent in the capitalistic mode of production.
Discovering how to stimulate the rise of such
personality types is the key to emancipating
humanity. Those best suited to discover this key are
the intellectuals; will they rise to the occasion or
become obscure as technicians in a bureaucratized
social system?

63

64

9. Recycling Human Misery:

AID & the Pakistan Earthquake
Posted: November, 2005

Karen Hughes, the public face of the Bush

Presidential Campaign (in 2000), was sworn in as
undersecretary of state for public diplomacy on
September 8, 2005. In Pakistan at a news conference
(reported by The Dawn newspaper 11/15/05), Ms.
Hughes stated, "The Bush Administration was
seriously concerned about the devastating Oct. 8
earthquake... (and was) urging the international
community to play its due role." This comment when
read in the context of the recent report by Oxfam, a
non-government global relief agency reveals the
organized hypocrisy that defines the U.S. elite.
Oxfam documented figures showing that the rich
countries including the U.S. were failing to respond
to the UN appeal for funds for the earthquake
victims (Oxfam press release - 26 October 05). With
winter approaching, people in the hundreds of
thousands were at risk of death, but were being
widely ignored by the U.S. elite, except for a few oftrepeated public relations stunts, like the Karen
Hughes news conference, massively advertised by
local media, to win over the hearts of the people.
Summarizing the figures of how the rich
countries are failing to fund UN relief for the
65

earthquake victims, Oxfam states: Governments that

have given less than one fifth of their fair share include Japan
(17 per cent), Germany (14 per cent), US (9 per cent) and
Italy (7 per cent). That Karen Hughes would turn a
miserly 9 percent fulfillment of her country's
responsibility to the UN into a well publicized "care
campaign" is expected from an Administration that
was congratulating its own "response" to the
Louisiana hurricane disaster even as the poor that
were left stranded were drowning in New Orleans.
Compare the minuscule aid given for
earthquake victims by the U.S. to the lucrative F-16
contract given by the government of Pakistan to the
U.S military industries, which ensures profits of tens
of millions of dollars for the U.S.corporate elite.
Pakistan agreed to purchase 77 second-hand F-16s
(since they are being purchased from a third country,
probably Israel and upgraded by the U.S.) from the
U.S at a price tag of $40 million a piece. This
contract is one of the many cases of the poor
countries feeding the profits of corporations in the
developed world because the military and state
institutions of the poor country are controlled by
proxy by the U.S. elite. Now, compared to this huge
amount taken from a poor country, the U.S. returns a
minuscule percent of it in the form of aid that comes
with conditions that circumvent the sovereignty of
the recipient nation. The U.S. elite exports poverty to
the developing world and imports wealth from it.
Operating with a specific worldview, in control of
the worlds wealth and the apparatus of public
relations, these elite ensure that their decisions will
66

prevail over all others. In such relationships, the poor

countries lose on every occasion.
Aid & the Pakistan Earthquake:
At the International Donors Conference
held on Saturday 11/19/'05 in Islamabad, Pakistan
(Dawn 11/20/'05), international donors pledged $5.8
billion for earthquake victims. Raw figures become
easy propaganda tools, used for deceiving the
masses, well understood by those in command of the
apparatus of public relations, even though the reality
of this feigned "sincerity" is much different.
Historical and comparative analysis can reveal a
clearer picture: Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey
together have pledged $ 923 million while USA, UK
and Japan (the wealthy trio) together have pledged $
750 million (as a percentage of GDP, the U.S.
amount comes to a minuscule figure compared to
that pledged by a much poorer country like Iran).
With history as a guide, particularly the on-going Iraq
war and what the U.S. is "pledging" over there, we
can be sure that most of these promises of funds,
made by the U.S., will never materialize. Out of the
$5.8 billion pledged by the world to Pakistan, only
$1.9 billion are grants, the rest are loans that will
plunge the country into further debt and impoverish
the people, even as finance charges, that become
profits of banks in the developed world, take a larger
chunk out of the poor country's budget (which as is
allocates very little for social services).

67

Past IMF/World Bank loans show, and it

has been well documented (see Michel
Chossudovsky: Globalization of Povery.2002), that
these "pledges" come with strict conditions on who
gets the contracts and where this money eventually
ends up. Most of the money will be recycled back to
the West in the form of lucrative contracts given to
their firms for reconstruction or project
management. As part of the conditions of these
loans will be attempts at structural adjustment
required by the IMF/World Bank, which translated
into English reads "making exploitation of the poor
country's resources and wealth easier for
corporations in the developed world". Let us
consider Iraq as the most recent example which
provides empirical evidence for this claim: even
though the U.S. is said to have pumped tens of
billions of dollars to "liberate" the Iraqi people, social
indicators reveal that the Iraqis were better off under
Saddam than they are under U.S. occupation:
Electricity and water for most of the residents has
not been fully restored, unemployment is up (70%
unemployed according to a study by Baghdad
University, reported by the Toronto Sun 7/31/'05),
water and sewage systems are in shambles and
widespread breakout of diseases, a real concern
(according to the UN only 54% have access to clean
water). (Also see summary health report by Relief
Web-July 2005)
Child malnutrition under Saddam was 4%
while under U.S. occupation it has increased to 8%
(according to a study by a Norwegian institute
reported by USA Today 9/4/2005). Not mentioned
68

in the above are the findings of the study conducted

by researchers at Johns Hopkins University,
Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya
University in Baghdad (reported by CNN,
10/24/'04), which found that the probability of
death by violence was 58 times higher in Iraq after
the U.S. occupation than it was before the war. Note
that saving people from being "mass graved" is one
of the reasons that is still repeated by the Bush
Administration to justify the invasion of Iraq, even
though the probability that an Iraqi is going to get
killed violently under U.S. occupation is 5800%
greater than it was under Saddam.
A July 26, 2005 news report about Iraq
distributed by the Knight Ridder news agency states:
"Electricity production is up to 16 hours a day in Iraqi homes
according to U.S. military documents, but most Iraqis say they
get eight hours of power a day on average, sometimes as many
as 12. In poor areas such as New Baghdad, in the east of the
capital, people go days without power, they said." Quoting an
Iraqi civil engineer who is working on the U.S. reconstruction
projects, the report states: "If I had $2 billion I would have
done three to five times more," Timimi said. "The Americans
told me this is our money and we will spend it towards our
plans. They do it their way."
The American cycle of our destruction of
the infrastructure of an entire country (in the Iraq
case) and then using our money to give to our
corporations (like Halliburton & Bechtel) to
"rebuild" because it is our way has become an all
too familiar occurrence in the developing world. The
aid and finance business is good for American
69

corporations and their hegemony around the world, a

very effective tool of implicit control. As far as
alleviating human suffering is concerned, it has
proved to be a mere farce. To those who understand
this world system of recycling of wealth and human
suffering, dominated by the U.S. elite, it will come as
no surprise when we observe, in a few years, that the
conditions in northern Pakistan are similar to or
worse than the level they are at today. Forced by
circumstance and no substantive help, the poor in
those areas (those who survive the winter) will
reconstruct their own houses, in similar fashion to
what they had before. When a new earthquake strikes
and strike it will, they will suffer similar destruction
even as an impersonal world watches on, yet once
again.
Published by Globalresearch.ca & Political Affairs
magazine, November 2005.

70

10. Islam: Image & Reality Post 9/11

Posted: November 2005

Taking advantage of the negative sentiments

generated against Islam and Muslims post 9/11
(helped of course by the U.S. corporate media),
websites and books attacking Islam and universally
condemning Muslims as criminals, popped up in
large numbers. The arguments used in these writings
(websites and news commentaries) reflected old-time
Christian Evangelical propaganda against Islam, and
the tactics were similar to those used by lynch mobs
of old. Given their methodology and mode of attack,
none of the arguments used would get a second
hearing, intellectually speaking, because they lacked
logical formulation (mostly unrelated connections or
Ad Hominem attacks) and relied on sources, in most
cases, other than the only reliable source of Islam,
the Quran. If presented in a court of law, such
"evidence" would be thrown out immediately as
inadmissible.
The "lynch-mob" mentality of alarmism, of
Islamic ideology as a global threat, that was (and is)
commonly portrayed in such writings was also not
justified: the number of terrorist acts committed by
those who claim to be Muslims and in the "name of
Islam" as a percentage of the total number of
Muslims, even as a percentage of the total number of
crimes committed in the world, are statistically
71

insignificant as cause. The numbers of people

harmed by such acts (of criminals) are also far less
than the number that have been killed in the name of
"democracy and freedom" and free markets: a look at
the military adventures of the U.S. elite in the post
World War 2 era should suffice as empirical
evidence. Also, the FBI estimates that around 19,000
Americans are murdered every year, not by Middle
Eastern terrorists but by fellow Americans. The
alcohol and tobacco companies by selling highly
addictive and harmful products collectively kill over
400,000 Americans a year, year in and year out;
however these anti-Islam humanitarians do not
condemn such polite killings by these
corporations.
Contrary to what these agenda driven
writings present, Islam has the strongest organized
social justice component within its system, compared
not only to most other religions, but to most secular
systems as well. Not only does it suggest a
community-style society of humankind by pointing
to the natural world as guide (Quran 6:38), with
humanity as trustee, not owner of resources (Quran
2:284, 57:7 etc.), it encourages the distribution of the
surplus of every individual (Quran 2:219) in the form
of a social fund (Quran 9:60) administered by those
in charge of governance. It makes the fulfillment of
basic necessities of the needy a "religious" duty,
without which the ritual of prayer itself is mocked,
yes mocked by the Quran itself (Quran 107:1-7).
Such "socialistic" emphasis on social justice,
organized within a religious system is unheard of in
the world of religion, which according to Marx often
72

served as the "opium of the masses". The Qurans

emphasis on the sanctity of human life, comparing a
single one to all of humanity (Quran 5:32) is also
unsurpassed in world literature, and the common
bond, the "human consciousness" it intends to create
based upon common origin (Quran 4:1) and one
creator God, who created all equally according to his
nature (Quran 30:30) is equally unsurpassed as
humanitarian doctrine and is demonstrated as fact
during the Hajj pilgrimage.
All systems have been abused and misused
for political/economic motives and Islam is no
exception, but condemning it as an inherently antihuman ideology is dishonest and unjust. (Often the
distorted, reactionary version of Islam has been
implanted from "outside" as was the case of the
proxy Cold-War that the U.S. was fighting against the
Soviets in Afghanistan: here you had the CIA, most
of whom were non-believers in Islam, promising the
Afghans a sure ticket to heaven if they died fighting
the Soviets, Stinger missiles were an added bonus;
supporting Zias Saudi Islamization of Pakistan
etc.)
Those who study Islam and its history, easily
recognize that the sources used as evidence by
these self proclaimed "humanists, like the Hadith
(sayings attributed to the prophet), collected by
Bokhari (d. 870 AD) and Muslim (d. 875 AD), and
other pseudo-historical collections of the life of the
prophet (based on secondary sources, quoted by
other secondary sources, e.g. the work of Ibn Ishaq
(d.768 AD) survives only in quotations in Tabari (d.
73

923 AD) and Ibn Hisham (d. 834 AD) and there
also, many versions of the events are given), date
from around 200 years after the prophet (d. 632
AD). Those who study Islam based upon historical
evidence, reason and reflection (recommended by
the Quran itself), would reject these extra-Quranic
sources immediately
(http://hadith.rationalreality.com). Just because
many believe in them dogmatically does not mean
that the prophet said those words or that those
words are what Islam is. Islam is defined by its
source, which is the Quran and the Quran alone.
Ibn Khaldun, the founder of Sociology, and
historiography recognized the shortcomings in the
accuracy of these pseudo-historical reports regarding
Islam and the prophet, and he quoted the Quran
defending his position, even as he developed
historiography in his Muqaddimah. That IbnKhaldun was a better authority on historical records
than the ideologically charged hadith collectors is
something most historians will not argue over, given
the unique position he occupies in the evolution of
their field. The verse Ibn-Khaldun quoted is the
same that Muslims quote today when informing
dogmatic traditionalists that these "extra Quranic"
(from outside the Quran) reports are not always
accurate (Quran 31:6): And among humankind are
those that purchase frivolous tales (Lahwal Hadith),
so that they may mislead from the path of Allah
(those) without knowledge, and to make them an
excuse to ridicule with.
74

The misuse of such historical sourcing by

these post 9/11 lynch-mob mentality supporters
forms a major chunk of their arguments against Islam,
even as they use these tales as an excuse to ridicule
with, just as stated by the Quran (above). Similar
arguments have been used for hundreds of years to
debunk Islam, but these authors claim to have invented
them anew. Most of the rest of what they present
amounts to Ad Hominem attacks against the prophet
and clippings from the Quran, bits and pieces of verses
clipped not only out of their context but out of their
sentence as well. The clipped verses are then presented
with their long (pages worth of) interpretations,
associating them with groups like the Taliban (as if the
Taliban were the word made flesh), or photographs
that are supposed to elicit stereotypical responses from
a fearful public.
Now, instead of wasting time trying to dupe
people, spending countless hours and tons of paper
doing so while over 40,000 human beings die every day
due to preventable causes in the world (like starvation
and disease), these self-proclaimed "humanitarians"
would do better to look at the socio-economic, political
and military links that produce this misery in a world
system dominated by the US power elite
(http://elite.asadi.org) and not the "phantoms" that
they have constructed: phantoms that become fear
generating marketing tools that feed the militarized
political economy dominated by the U.S. power elite.

75

76

11. Quran & Democracy: Are they compatible?

Posted: September, 2005

What has happened in modern bureaucratic

societies, that parade as democracies (like the USA),
is that the chance to reason and the ability to be free
has been lost (see http://robots.asadi.org) that is the
nature of a bureaucratic society: a society where
standardization is the norm and the person is
surrounded by rules that govern behavior from birth
to death. Such "democracies" exists in form only and
not in essence, here choices are not formulated by a
"public" but rather insinuated upon a highly
propagandized "mass society" that knows next to
nothing regarding public issues. This is achieved by
control of the "cultural apparatus" by a small
aristocracy, the Power Elite. The "cultural
apparatus"- language, education, status and
technology- with the media and the formal
educational institutions playing a dominant role, thus
ensures that these elite achieve cultural hegemony.
The person thinks he or she is free and living under a
"democracy" but the reality of the situation is much
different.
A democratic society assumes an "informed"
public, as against a propagandized "mass society".
Those in a "mass society" have their hopes and
aspirations conditioned by what others have told
them and unconsciously acquired habits based upon
77

such conditioning. Those in a public formulate their

values and choices themselves based on substantive
reason, as C. Wright Mills explained in the 1950s and
as the Quran made clear fourteen centuries back:
"Say: Are those who know and those who do not
know alike?" (Quran 39:9)
Under a system where the "mass society" has
not yet gained enough information to make choices,
to transform itself into a "public", democracy in
essence is impossible. Hence the Quranic statement:
"And if you obey the majority of those on earth they
will lead you astray; that is because they follow
conjecture, and that is because they only guess"
(Quran 6:116). A "majority of those on earth" does
not constitute an "informed Islamic public" and
never will (according to the Quranic statement).
Further we are told: "None can inform you like the
one who is aware" (Quran 35:14), a similar
recommendation is the case with Quran 25:59.
Once we have a semblance of a "public"
emerging, as happened after the first community of
Muslims emerged out of the previously existing
"mass society" in Arabia (Quran 3:110), even the
prophet was told to: Consult with them upon the conduct
of affairs(Quran 3:159). We are also told how the
process of governance is to be conducted in a society
of similar publics: And whose rule is based upon
consultation (Shura) among themselves (Quran 42:38).
This consultation (Shura) is to be totally in the public
record and not secret (Quran 58:10). Therefore, we
can conclude that an Islamic society would have a
counsel where the public consults with the decision
78

makers, the decision makers would be the ones "who

know" (as deduced above) i.e. are qualified in the
area in which they are making decisions. The
decision makers would be numerous, unless one
person claims to know everything in all fields, which
is impossible. A counsel of intellectuals with no limit
to their numbers that are in constant touch with the
public and consult with them is thus the Islamic
form of government. This would be democracy in
essence, since the entire society including the
decision makers would have equal status and would
participate in the decision making process. The
criteria for assigning status in such a society would
not be material possessions rather it would be the
level of social consciousness that an individual
possesses (Quran 49:13).
The framework under which decisions are to
be made would be the Quran (see 6:114 etc), and
specifically its "mohkam" (or standard setting)
statements (see Quran 3:7). These standard setting
statements are called the "mother of the book"
(Ummul Kitaab) in the Quran (Quran 3:7). Based
upon these verses not only are our new laws going to
be interpreted but also the other verses of the Quran
itself, "the motashabey" (the allegorical or
consimilar). The "mohkam" verses number a lot less
than the entire Quran, therefore the amount of
freedom that the Quran grants us is much greater
than any that is granted by a bureaucratized society,
where laws govern every aspect of life. What
traditionalists have done is to canonize their own
(extra Quranic) laws as a bureaucratized form of
"Islam", this is exactly what the Quran warns against
79

(Quran 42:21), because this not only stifles reason

but prevents freedom in that it reduces the
"consultation" part of governance and does not take
into consideration the historical era and the social
structure that exists in that era.
The Quran thus grants greater freedom and
the resulting ability to reason compared to any
(bureaucratized) system that exists in the current
epoch: "Those who avoid the greater (Kabair) crimes
and shameful deeds..." (Quran 42:37). The greater
crimes are less than a handful and can be extracted
from Qurans description of crimes, those are the
only ones we are told to avoid. Here the Quran is not
concerned about the smaller details that keep the
traditionalist "Islamic scholars" busy, even as they
ignore the bigger public issues that are causing great
problems among humankind. A truly Islamic society
would be one in which freedom and reason
flourishes and laws are minimal, it would be a truly
democratic society, where democracy is practiced in
essence and not just by slogan. Hence, the purpose
and judgment of life based upon choice "...to
determine which of you is best in deeds." (Quran
67:2).
Islamic State or Community?
Instead of state, a fairly recent phenomenon,
we need to talk about a self governed community of
Muslims, that takes care not only of each other but
non-Muslims as well, regardless of geographic
boundary (..the best community that has been extracted for
80

humankind. (not only Muslims) says the Quran). I

have taken the following points from my above
article:
1) It will not be a state governed by majority
rule ("And if you obey the majority of those on earth they will
lead you astray; that is because they follow conjecture, and that
is because they only guess" (Quran 6:116) ). At any point
those that control the means of wealth and
communication easily sway the masses, and hence
they seldom know what is to their benefit.
2) Rule is by those who are informed on
various issues, in other words a community of
intellectuals, and there is no limit to the number but
qualifications to entry. The Quran is clear on the
importance of knowledgeable decisions: "None can
inform you like the one who is aware" (Quran 35:14), a
similar recommendation is the case with Quran
25:59.
3) Next, there is to be a connection between
the governing intellectuals and the governed public.
Even the prophet was told to: ". Consult with them upon
the conduct of affairs." (Quran 3:159). We are also told
how the process of governance is to be conducted in
a society of similar publics: "And whose rule is based
upon consultation (Shura) among themselves" (Quran
42:38). This consultation (Shura) is to be totally in
the public record and not secret (Quran 58:10).
Therefore, we can conclude that an Islamic
society would have a counsel where the public
consults with the decision makers, the decision
makers would be the ones "who know" (as deduced
81

above) i.e. are qualified in the area in which they are

making decisions. The decision makers would be
numerous, unless one person claims to know
everything in all fields, which is impossible.
4) The "state" will not concern itself with
theological differences (6:159, which says do not
concern yourself with them or any of these matters;
Allah will explain it to them on judgment day).
5) It will be "socialistic" in economic
principles in the following way: It would take an
active role in redistribution of wealth, "so that it
makes not a circuit among the wealthy" and
employing people to undertake that redistribution
that is paid for by the state out of the same funds
(9:60) etc. People's legitimate basic needs would be
paramount before anyone can lay any claim to any
surplus whatsoever.
6) Islam does not include 1300 years worth
of bureaucratized laws that have entered its fold
under the garb of hadith, scholars interpretations of
their societies and fiqh. The only authoritative text on
Islam is the Quran and within the Quran a handful
of mohkam (categorical) verses are the framework
based upon which laws will be constructed by
intellectuals in consultation with the public. Unlike a
highly bureaucratized society like we have in the US
where laws govern every aspect of life, laws in a
Muslim society, according to the Quran would be
minimal. Real freedom would flourish.

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12. The Incoherence of the Incoherent

The Neo-Cons and their "Project for the new
American Century"
Posted: September 2005
The Neo-Conservatives wants Iran to
emerge rapidly as the new military threat facing the
U.S. in order to advance their "Project for the new
American Century." Being worried by the "timedelay" the Washington Post gives Iran in acquiring
nuclear weapons (not before 2015 will Iran have
them according to the report), Gary Schmitt of the
"Project" states that because US intelligence, by its
own admission, knows very little about nuclear
weapons development in Iran, their conclusions on
the "time delay" might be wrong. Iran (according to
Schmitts personal intelligence) could have a weapon
before that time. How he arrives at that implied
conclusion and how his intelligence capabilities are
worthy of greater trust than national intelligence
estimates, were not stated in this "memo", which was
written to the highest opinion leaders in the US. He
reminds the "opinion leaders" in the article that just
as national intelligence estimates were wrong on
Saddam Husseins WMDs before the first Gulf War
(they underestimated the threat according to him)
and the current Iraq war (they overestimated it this
83

time, according to him), they might well be

underestimating Irans nuclear weapons capabilities.
What is alarming about these incoherent
conclusions coming from the Neo-Conservatives,
more so than their blunt hypocrisy (note that this is
coming from the same camp whose friends in the
establishment were pressuring the intelligence
community to practically cook the WMD
"intelligence" on Iraq ), is the fact that such
incoherence is what dictates the foreign policy of the
U.S. power elite, and justifies the hundreds of billions
given to the military industries, while millions of
Americans go without adequate food (37 million)
and health care (47 to 82 million during any given
year). Little wonder that such "leadership" has
resulted in a world where over 40,000 die everyday
due to preventable causes, and the ecological
conditions to sustain life itself are being destroyed by
a mad grab for profits. This is the kind of
"leadership" that the "project" seeks to advance.
Why is a time delay in Irans alleged
acquisition of nuclear weapons causing problems for
Gary Schmitt, William Kristol and the rest of the
Neo-Conservatives that run this organization and
practically this country? Not being satisfied with the
mess and human misery they have created in Iraq,
and not concerned at all with the half a million
people displaced by hurricane Katrina (their Project
for the "American" century site does not even make
a casual mention of it), Kristols gang wants a new
"military threat" to emerge, in the area they are most
interested in, the Israeli neighborhood. They feel the
84

necessity of a new threat at this time because the

public is getting weary of their widely advertised
"Iraq threat", that is being recognized as nonsense by
the previously duped masses (as poll numbers
reveal). At the same time their banal "war on terror"
terminology is starting to cause problems for a
leadership that rushed into implementing this
ideologically inspired "project". Busy inventing new
threats, the Neo-conservatives have found a
comfortable home among Democrats and
Republicans alike, in the "organized irresponsibility"
(as C. Wright Mills put it) that describes the
American political establishment. The consequences
of that "organized irresponsibility" are what the
displaced in New Orleans are confronting today.
Gary Schmitt informs us in his concluding
paragraph: "There are numerous practical problems
we would confront in carrying out that decision (to
attack Iran militarily), even if that were in theory the
right one to make. But it does mean that we have no
reason to relax, nor can we postpone difficult
decisions indefinitely."
Unconcerned about the carnage and human
misery their "right decision" caused in Iraq, Schmitt
concludes that war (with Iran) in the not too distant
future, might still be "the right decision to make".
PNACs sister "patriotic" organization, the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)
mirrors these concerns about keeping the flame of
perpetual war burning (Report #514) when it says
Hurricane Katrina is an unmitigated disaster for the
people of the Gulf Coast. It shouldnt turn out to be
85

a look into the future for the rest of us. The look
into the future, according to their reports
implications, should always be 9/11.
As we read Schmitts advocacy of a new war
even though such a war might have practical
problems according to him, we are reminded of
these prophetic words from the 1950s, by C.
Wright. Mills, from his book, The Causes of World
War III (1958):
"The expectation of war solves many problems of the
"crackpot realists"; it also confronts them with many
new problems. Yet these, the problems of war, often
seem easier (for them) to handle.(compared) to
political policies that are distasteful to many
politicians...The terms of their long term solutions,
under conditions of peace, are hard for the capitalist
elite to face." (page, 87)
What is distasteful to these NeoConservative "crackpot realists" is peace in the
Middle East, and the resulting effect that might have
on regional development in the Arab world. In their
uneasy alliance with corporations, whose leadership
positions they normally hold when they are not
posing as politicians, the Neo-Cons have found a
dual fulfillment of purpose. The terms of the "long
term solution" to the "Palestinian problem" are what
they do not want to face. If that can be avoided, any
"practical problems" that a new war might bring are
easier for them to handle. The civilians who get killed
in the thousands and the US soldiers (chosen from
the lower socioeconomic classes) that become
casualties of war are of no consequence to them.
86

These are all practical problems that they feel they

can handle. In all such alliances to further power and
wealth, human suffering and misery become at best,
background noise justified by moral symbols, over
used excuses, media distractions, and stage
management.
The victors determine peace; why we see no
peace is because the US wants no peace, post World
War 2, similarly Israel wants no peace in Palestine.
There is nothing "reality based" about war; in fact
war has become quite irrational in today's world and
an end by itself. In days gone by, it was a means to
an end, be it self-defense or protection (moral or
just) or ruthless conquest, political or economic
(immoral or unjust). Now it has become a "fact" of
life that people have accepted as a way of life.
When institutions become bureaucratized,
assuming a life of their own, the rules become more
important than the purpose for which those rules
were designed, (the means become ends by
themselves), that is what makes the irrationality (or
rationality without reason, of todays wars, coupled
with the means of destruction available unlike the
wars of the past).
This "rationality" without reason that has
come to describe every aspect of US life, the
preponderance of means over the ends, which
become ends by themselves, happens when
corporate culture colonizes people's life world. It is
why we have in the US, an over-sexed society with a
falling birthrate, an obese though badly malnourished
society etc. This should lead us to analyze why a
87

technologically advanced society like the US is failing

to fulfill the basic needs of its citizens and thus can
be classified as a failed system.

88

13. U.S: A Failed System

Posted: March, 2006

How do we gauge social system failure?

Sociologists understand that an ideal social system
with its network of institutions, held together by a
culture, functions to fulfill needs of a society. When
it fails to meet those basic needs, we can conclude
that it has failed or become dysfunctional. With this
premise in mind, no "failure" of any system can be as
explicit as the fact that in the US, 1% of the
population controls more wealth than the rest of the
99% combined which means that life chances are
inherently unequal. No failure can be more complete
than the fact that in the wealthiest country on earth
over 82 million people at any point during two years;
if they suffer catastrophic illness will die or seriously
injure themselves because they do not have health
insurance
(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/janjune04/uninsured_06-16.html). No failure of a
system can be as obvious as the contradiction in its
operation regarding need fulfillment, when farmers
are paid to destroy food products for the sake of
price and where tens of millions of tons of food are
wasted every year, and food products dumped
overseas, putting foreign farmers out of business
(http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/tra
de/bp50_corn.htm), there exist over 38 million that
suffer from chronic food insecurity (in the US),
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according to USDA reports

(http://www.frac.org/Press_Release/10.28.05.html).
No failure can be more obvious than the fact that in
a nation where the rich own several million dollar
homes, there are over 7 million (according to some
estimates, in any given year) roaming the streets in
the dead of winter as homeless persons
(http://www.cohhio.org/resources/howmanyhomel
ess.html). No failure of any system can match the
failure of a very wealthy country, parading as freemarket heaven, a paragon of care and sensibility,
that ignores its masses in this manner while enriching
the very few that dominate its economic and political
institutions.
Fear and profit are perpetually related in the
capitalist world, dominated by the US elite. If it is not
fear of terrorism, it is bird flu they want you to be
scared of. All along behind this fear are big contracts
in the hundreds of billions, while the masses in the
world are dying everyday by the tens of thousands
due to poverty, which is exacerbated by the real
consequences that these fear tactics lead to.
Destroying millions of chickens to combat bird flu,
on whim of disease, will put tens of thousands of
people whose livelihood depends on them on the
brink of starvation. Forcing countries to alter their
agendas from focus on domestic issues to fighting a
war on terrorism has similar results.
Fear and its implied protection are always
focused towards the future in such a system, while
people die and live miserable lives today. And how
does the system control the fallout of all this fear
90

mongering? It blames the victims, the poor, for their

own misery and hooks them up on drugs and other
addictions that generate wealth for the rich or show
them fictitious visions of a heaven they will never
attain, through the corporate media. Here is our
world as it exists today, going fast to hell with the
American elite as its guide. They are the ones who
declare wars for economic and political reasons,
justified by images of "ideals" that dont exist even at
home, yet never fight the wars themselves but send
most from the lower socioeconomic classes (as is the
bulk of the US military) to do their fighting for them.
They reap the benefits of such wars while killing
other people's children. The people at the receiving
end of these wars are ruthlessly butchered in
barbarism that equals any practiced by Hitler. Nuking
civilian cities in Japan, napalming civilian villages in
Vietnam, using white phosphorous in Falluja, making
sure that the Afghans of the countryside fought the
U.S cold war with the Soviets to the last man (losing
over one million) and then abandoning them, forcing
the vast majority in the world, billions, to live in
debilitating poverty while concentrating wealth
among their tiny group, punishing countries with
back breaking sanctions that kill the most powerless
members of their society, how did Hitler overshoot
this barbarism?
A big deal is made of the US medias
independence by citing its criticism of the Vietnam
war. We have to look a little bit deeper (at the results)
to uncover the medias motivations at the time. Did
the US elite and their media apologize and change
their foreign policy after Vietnam and the well
91

reported atrocities of the US in that country? Did

they acknowledge that the war was an inhumane,
barbaric endeavor? Not at all, in fact even today this
media has not apologized on behalf of the elite: look
at what the media did in this past election. It picked
up on Kerry's opposition to such atrocities in that era
and labeled him unpatriotic. It then went further by
giving the "swift boat veterans" excessive coverage to
prove the same point. Why the media opposed the
Vietnam War towards the end was not because of
any independent moralistic considerations but
because elite agenda was turning against the war, and
not because of any popular movements, reporting
about which is always circumscribed by a wider
political and economic agenda.
Let us look at Abu Ghraib that is often
presented to us as showing the neutrality of the US
media: how has the media presented it? It was
presented as isolated cases of individuals and not
something that had institutional precedent that
required institutional restructuring. The people at the
top whose policies led to such atrocities, none of
them took consequential responsibility. The
reporting of these incidents also fulfilled another
function for the US elite, it sent their "private"
message, based upon their stereotypes of Arabs and
Muslims, that they consider all these Muslims hold
sacred to be violable (and worthless): Part of their
psychological warfare. The recent cartoons of the
prophet and how the media covered reactions to
them, can be seen in a similar light.
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The American media has two duties to fulfill

on behalf of the corporate elite, unlike the media of
most third-world countries who might have direct
coercive state control:
1. Domestic agenda to pacify the masses
2. International agenda to justify empire.
Merely because control has shifted from
explicit, coercive control to implicit bureaucratized
(and cultural domination based) control, makes the
emergence of so called "whistle blowers" an effective
propaganda tool in how business is conducted by
this media and the US elite and their system of
manipulation. Whistle blowers and their coverage by
the media, is nothing more than propaganda. If it
was anything more then their whistle-blowing
would produce results that had institutional
consequence. Has there been any debate in the
mainstream media stating that the Iraq war is
barbaric and illegal, after the reporting of Abu
Ghraib, or Guantanamo? None whatsoever. So what
purpose has that reporting or such whistle-blowing
fulfilled? Every night on this media, we still hear
about "Mission Iraq", "Iraqi Freedom", democracy
and all the other meaningless slogans that are pushed
on propagandized audiences to evoke predetermined
psychological responses. It has achieved zero change
in the US foreign policy or in the structure of US
institutions.
Poverty in the U.S: Indicators of a failed system:
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The USDA report, Household Food Security

in the United States, 2004, says that 38.2 million
Americans live in households that suffer directly
from hunger and food insecurity, including nearly 14
million children. That figure is up from 31 million
Americans in 1999. Out of this 38 million that are
classified as poor in the US, most households are
below the poverty threshold for a four-person family
unit with two children of $19,157 as revealed by
'living wage analysis', which puts the living wage
above $8 an hour based on this threshold, while the
actual federal minimum wage is slightly over $5 given
current dollars and a dollar less given constant
dollars
(http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774473.html).
So, if poor households have two TVs in the US (as
Heritage Foundation authors Robert E. Rector and
Kirk A. Johnson allege to prove that the US
poor are not actually poor), how many meals will
those two TVs buy if need be? And if one person in
that "household" has to work and needs a car that
takes up a huge chunk of his income (as car payment,
gas and insurance) leaving very little for all else, what
can he or she do given a public transport system next
to nothing in most US cities? Or if the "household"
cancels their $40 a month cable subscription, how
many meals will that buy to make them "non-poor".
If over 38 million are facing food insecurity in the
US, it matters little if they have access to durables
(which by definition last a while) like TVs that
cannot even be traded in for three days of food, for a
family of four. Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson are
using distraction indicators; these are not real social
94

indicators of well-being. The fact is that the poor

given all human development indicators, even access
to life (since they die at three times the rate and
suffer from diseases much more than those above
the poverty line) suffer tremendously.
Given the amount of wealth and resources
used by a small percent of this country (the top 1%
commanding more wealth than the rest of the 99%
combined), the 13% (officially) poor, which
translates into tens of millions is a huge number.
Above this huge number is another huge number
that is extremely poor and living on the margins. It is
an ongoing system of corruption and concentration
and waste, where the rich get richer and the poor,
poorer. There is everything wrong when the official
poverty figures place over 38 million (and the
unofficial almost double that) in a country of
extreme wealth. (The official poverty figures are
calculated as adequate food times three, the real
figures would include things like rent, actual fuel
costs, health care, proper education etc, which easily
doubles the official figures;
http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/povmeas/pa
pers/orshansky.html )
I would argue the poor suffer even more in
the US compared to other countries, due to greater
relative deprivation, poverty amidst plenty and the
breakdown of tradition and family to add to it.
Empirically, as a factor of GNI per capita, adjusted
for Purchasing Power, the official US poverty
percent is much worse than any country of the
world. For example, in Nigeria the official poverty
95

rate is around 58%, which is around four and a half

times more than the US official rate, but the GNI
per capita of Nigeria is 45 times less than the US. We
can repeat this exercise for any country of the world
and conclude the same. These figures are an official
disgrace and signify the failure of a system that
advertises its fictitious successes 24/7 and enjoys
near total cultural hegemony.

96

14. Nuclear Proliferation & the U.S. Elite

Posted: March, 2006

The US while actively promoting rhetoric

about non-proliferation is not at all concerned about
it. They know that these tiny nations can never face
up to the US and its arsenal of weapons, regardless
of the nukes they might develop. What is more
valuable to the US elite is the "fear value" such things
generate regarding who the popular enemies happens
to be at the current time. If the US were genuine in
its non-proliferation rhetoric then it wouldn't handle
North Korea in the manner that it has, with
meaningful talks effectively brought to an end by
Dick Cheney (according Colin Powells US State
Department: BBC World Service, June 1, 2006) or
Abdul Qadeer Khan, whose activates it was well
aware of long before the surprise that it showed
upon their public exposure, and as icing on this cake
of irresponsibility, it would not show desire to
develop tactical nukes for use in the battlefield or
sign a nuclear deal with India even as it is asking
Russia to stop cooperation with Iran, and asking the
world to unite against it and North Korea. Neither
would it, pump arms, into a region (India &
Pakistan) that they described as a nuclear tinder
box" (even as their people starve and their
governments cannot afford this expense).
97

Media analysis of nuclear non-proliferation

and US rhetoric is usually based on a "cops and
robbers" analysis, where the robbers (the official
"rogue states") sometimes outsmart the cops (the
US, presented as promoters of peace and
democracy), not realizing all the while that this
"nuclear anarchy" that exists is the direct
consequence of political/economic decisions or lack
thereof, driven by the military metaphysic of the US
power elite and their hypocrisy of legitimizing some
while de-legitimizing others (Israel is one of the cases
in point). By ignoring Pakistan and going after a
nuclear deal with India, the US elite revealed very
clearly for all to see that it does not want stability in
that region. Lack of stability in a "nuclear tinder box"
region is to the benefit of the US elite; it is good both
for business and to keep China and India in check as
they compete mutually for US favors. Pakistan to this
elite, is disposable and it is indifferent to any
potential "South Asian holocaust" that might occur
as a result of these policies.
The Middle East and the U.S. elite:
One wonders if peace in the general Middle
East region is ever possible given the fact that the US
jumps from one imagined "threat" to another in that
region. One also wonder, as in the case of Iran (prerevolution), that whenever a country in that region is
on its way to development, some upsetting event
occurs, almost without fail, taking that country back
several decades. A country tries to get too
independent, tries to detach itself from this global
98

system of economic exploitation, and they sanction

you, isolate you, and ruin you. They have a whole
institutional setup for that purpose as well as a
United Nations that will legitimize it. Then one looks
at the wars in the region and the long history of
conflict and how people's lives, generation after
generation, are circumscribed by war and want and
how that affects the very nature of their being, their
personalities and their culture. In all this "wondering"
one factor emerges as common, the US, its reaction
or lack of reaction and the catastrophic consequences
that has had for people's lives in that region.
One wonders if the US would be as
fascinated with the general Middle East region were
it not for the resources, as a factor in profit making
and not merely for their easy, cost-effective access.
One also wonders if Israel in that region were it not
for its "value" to the US elite in starting and
inflaming conflicts that serve their interests, would
exist in the form that it exists today. Then one
wonders how intricately all this has worked out for
the neo-colonial elite: divide the region into nation
states, play one against the other, dominate their
resources and thereby their economic and political
systems, arm both sides in a conflict, and to add
spice to it all, place a marauding base, the state of
Israel, in their midst so that whenever they desire
peace and development, control of their own
resources or unity, some conflict can be inflamed.
For people who look at all this from a humanitarian
perspective, rather than the "us versus them"
mentality that is nurtured and promoted by the world
capitalist system, the consequences of US rhetoric
99

about countries in the Middle East will boil down to

another human disaster in the area, and big profits
for the corporate elite, every few years, decade after
decade.
India, China & the U.S.
The US elite are not wooing India because they
want to build India up to face China militarily if need
be. They know India cannot manage a military conflict
with China, regardless of their help. So what is this
India wooing all about? The economy of China for its
super growth depends on the US, now if consumption
and manufacture can be shifted potentially to another
country with a large population, any misbehavior or
ultra independence by China can effectively be
controlled by this threat of withdrawal alone. That, in
my opinion is the major reason why the US is wooing
India and trying to build it up. China has already been
trapped by the global capitalist system, now its control
and domination is much easier. In other words, India is
being used as a cheap escort on a mock date to make
the girlfriend jealous.

100

15. The Jihadists and the US elite

Anatomy of a Farce
Posted: March, 2006

In order to create an enemy to justify their

many politico-economic motives, the US elite have
blown the reality of these rag tag Jihadists way out
of proportion, given them worldwide media coverage
and presented them as equal opponents. This has not
only created an image among the poverty stricken
masses in the third-world of a Robin Hood like
group, battling an empire, it has provided direct
legitimacy when the US treats them as a foe it is on
an official war with (on the mass media). The
Jihadists and the American elite thus have a
symbiotic relationship with each other, they mutually
feed and grow in their perversions based on each
others actions.
Islam is not described by what its alleged
followers do or do not do; you can find them doing
anything under the sun. Rather it is described by
what is contained in its only authoritative text, the
Quran. The agenda-driven corporate media picks on
the acts that it can capitalize on while ignoring the
vast majority of the rest of the acts of Muslims. That
is like saying that America is defined by the acts of
the rapists that rape or attempt to rape or sexually
assault, around 1 million women a year in this
country [According to estimates, around a million
101

women are victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual

assault every year in the U.S. (National Crime
Victimization Survey. Bureau of Justice Statistics,
U.S. Department of Justice)]. We wouldn't use that
criteria for the latter case but use lower numbers and
instances to describe the former. That is the nature
of subjective agenda-driven reporting.
Islam had as its source from the beginning
the Quran. Other items, like the hadith whose
volume and content grew with every succeeding
generation, is not its source, and can never be its
historical source. The political/economic elite in
order to justify their perversions attributed them by
hook or by crook to the prophet so they could justify
them to the people; religion being the most
influential institution in society in medieval times.
Take the present-day case of how the US
media presents Muslim women. As fact, women in
Western societies are oppressed, as much or more
(given social indicators of rape and domestic abuse)
than Muslim women (who are oppressed more by
their traditions than anything Islam or the Quran
teaches). The West makes a big deal (for propaganda
reasons) of the "Muslim veiling of women" (even
though there is no such ruling concerning that veil in
the Quran) yet it is busy veiling its own women by
making everything about them invisible (about their
personalities) both to themselves and to others,
except their physical appearance judged by male
standards of attractiveness. If all that is valuable
about you is your physical appearance, everything
else about you is effectively veiled from social
102

consciousness, from others and from yourself. Social

psychologists describe personality development
similarly: The looking glass self: you see yourself as
others see you.
In order to understand the US elite's
methodology of the "war on terrorism", let us move
back to the 'Cold-War' era: The Soviets lost 20
million in World War II, defeating Hitler, the US lost
less than a fraction of that, after the war, an ally was
transformed into a potential foe with which a
continuous war, with no end was to be fought (note
the similarity with the Jihadists in this
transformation, regardless of divergent philosophies).
This "Cold War" not only ensured US
domination and hegemony over the globe, gearing its
economy on similar war footing, the end was known
in advance to these neo-colonials that the Soviets
were in no position to outspend or outsmart them.
They affectively altered the agenda of the Soviets to
international militarism, rather than what they should
have been concerned with at home, transforming
them into a bureaucratic monstrosity of state
capitalism. The Soviets thus lost the 'Cold War' to
capitalism at the very start. They became an excuse
to strengthen global capitalism and little else.
After World War II, when the allies ganged
up against the Soviets, having lost so many, their
reactionary nature was to be expected. The structure
that existed in most areas of the world gave a greater
advantage to the former colonizers and the new
hegemonic power, the US that consolidated these
spoils. The US and the Soviets were unequal
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opponents but not as unequal as the rag tag

Jihadists are compared to the US. The war on
terrorism is a bigger farce than the cold war,
playing out in the grand theatre of the 21st century
world. Lives will be lost, personalities and 'realities of
existence' distorted, and much human potential
squandered, all caused by a numerically tiny powerelite following their narrow agendas backed by an
ideology that considers the vast majority of
humanity, disposable goods.
The Cold War helped the US elite, the
commanders of the capitalist world system to more
effectively install a neo-colonial setup and combat
and contain the desires of the majority world to free
themselves from their domination, while benefiting
immensely from the militarism that resulted, towards
which the US economy was geared, and still is.
World War II was pivotal in this form of a
'permanent war based economy'. Before that, these
elite were forced to bring socialist principles into the
working of their economy, which was very distasteful
to them. There was no communist threat to the US;
there was a threat of the US losing its hegemony (not
to the Soviets but to individual countries) and its
domineering economic standing if peace was allowed
to prevail. Thus peace was not tolerated.
Just like the CIA played a crucial role
designing propaganda to convince the Afghans of
the countryside that fighting the Soviets was a sure
ticket to heaven and in their interest, these elite are
now using this war on terror farce to steal massively
from their public by a paranoid atmosphere of fright.
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According to the 2006 US budget, the government's

discretionary spending on defense, almost $450
billion, is greater than its discretionary spending on
all other programs combined. Add to this
discretionary spending the non-discretionary part and
you come up with a whopping $800 billion figure,
according to some calculations of a line-by-line
analysis of the budget.
9/11 has been highly publicized, used and
abused by the US elite for their many motives. The
reality is that there is no threat from "political Islam"
or any external enemy. Factually, 9/11 is a non-issue
compared to even the murders committed in the US
every year that exceed those killed in 9/11 by over
10,000. There is certainly no threat facing the US
comparable to the scale of destruction it brings upon
whole countries or the chokehold it has placed upon
the majority world through its economic domination.
Only fools would believe that a country (US) with
the most massive military power in the world is
"threatened" by a few people roaming around in
caves, brandishing ak-47s and (world war 2 vintage)
RPGs, yet this farce has been sold (quite effectively)
not only to the U.S public but world-wide as poor
countries busy themselves to fight a "war on terror"
on behalf of the US, while ignoring their own
catastrophic domestic issues. We must reject this lie,
and reject it in totality.

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106

Remember, that those who have power, and who

seem invulnerable are in fact quite vulnerable, that
their power depends on the obedience of others, and
when those others begin withholding that obedience,
begin defying authority, that power at the top turns
out to be very fragile. Generals become powerless
when their soldiers refuse to fight, industrialists
become powerless when their workers leave the jobs
or occupy the factories. When we forget the fragility
of that power in top we become astounded when it
crumbles in the face of rebellion. We have had
many such surprises in our time, both in the
United States and in other countries.

Howard Zinn

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108

16. Power & the people

Posted: March, 2006
When the media talks about "the people"
making a difference in what goes on in the US
political establishment, they want to deliberately
confuse their viewers with happy images of the small
town (Wild) West where power and control were tiny
and diverse, the people's guns were as big as the
sheriff's and social tradition, the dominating culture.
Similarly, the corporate and political elite bring up
images of the mom and pop capitalism of days gone
by to justify their current domination of the global
economy. They talk about free markets and
competition etc, even as they use all the forces of the
state to their benefit, denying the same state benefit
to the poor masses. That world of the (Wild) West
and the mom and pop capitalism and its political
setup, have long passed. Today, wealth and
ownership have become ultra concentrated and the
control, including mind control, desire control, and
aspiration control, on people is all encompassing and
bureaucratized through a media of mass
communication and a maze of reward and status
allocation.
The mass society in the US is effectively
controlled through a media with such levels of
propaganda, never before seen in human history.
Most decisions of national and global consequence
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are made in spite of them by an elite that has a social

profile quite unlike the masses while quite socially
homogeneous within their tiny group, regardless of
party affiliation. Wealth and power, intricately linked,
define the political economy of the US.
If people (the masses) were such movers and
shakers in the US political establishment, the top 1%
would never be able to command greater wealth than
the rest of the 99% combined, neither would the
class structure be intergenerationally permanent, nor
would two parties with little difference, both
circumscribed by wealth and corporate power, define
the political scene, nor would wars be conducted
with such ease or jobs relocated by the millions or
health care and food security denied to millions, or
corporate welfare and deficit spending that benefits
the corporations pushed to the maximum, while high
gas prices and ever shrinking discretionary social
spending, forced on the masses.
People in the US, the mass society are like
cattle; prodded in whatever direction the corporate
elite want them to go. The US media wants to keep
these elite elusively invisible, so it blames the
powerless for their own troubles. The facts are that
the world suffers immensely by the actions or
(inactions) of this elite that sit at the command posts
of all institutions that define the machinery of the
current world system.
Even the culture that describes America
today is a culture that has nothing to do with the
social tradition of 'the people'. Social tradition has
been colonized by corporate culture that is forced on
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people from every direction, families have been

dismantled and replaced by the company, for whom
the person lives and spends the best, most alert
hours of his or her life, and for whom he dies in
many wars conducted for just such greed. That is
what this capitalistic heaven has reduced humanity
to, ones that have lost track of the ends while they
keep busy with the means, resulting in countless
addictions and mind numbing habits even as they
throw away precious years of their lives.
All this mass consumption and countless
distractions are also good for profit maximization
and the corporate elite have a massive propaganda
network (the advertising industry) to keep this setup
going. Corporate greed and shenanigans and their
rule in the political directorate by fact and proxy
determines the size of the national economy, built
upon the backs of the poor to whom they deny basic
necessities like health care and nutrition and decent
education because it would cut into their profits and
ensure that their stranglehold on the people exists no
more. The liberating effect of basic need provision
can never be underestimated.
Given its wealth, the US is a disgrace not
only among the developed nations of the world in
how it behaves, both internationally and at home, but
also among under-developed nations. As a factor of
its Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, it has
disgraceful numbers all across the board, regarding
the poverty that exists, and how it fails to meet the
basic needs of a large number of its population
compared to even the poorest of the poor nations.
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The life-fate of the modern individual depends not

only upon the family into which he was born or which
he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the
corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of
his best years; not only upon the school where he is
educated as a child and adolescent, but also upon the
state which touches him throughout his life...If the
centralized state could not rely upon the inculcation of
nationalist loyalties in public and private schools, its
leaders would promptly seek to modify the
decentralized educational system, If the bankruptcy
rate among the top five hundred corporations were as
high as the general divorce rate among the thirty-seven
million married couples, there would be economic
catastrophe on an international scale. If members of
armies gave to them no more of their lives than do
believers to the churches to which they belong, there
would be a military crisis.
C. Wright Mills
The Power Elite (1956)

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17. Reality Versus

The Great American Celebration
Posted: Multiple, 2006

Science in the U.S

The tradition of pure (classical) science that
developed in Europe never told hold in America
where science was geared more to applied profit
making than anything else, and now, it is
concentrated in the military field. There is no
intellectual rigor, neither is there creativity unless you
consider inventions seeping into the civilian field
from the military as "creative". There is very little
honesty; the big "scientific" companies are busy
applying patents to natural products in the third
world so they can reap profits from them while at
the same time preventing cheap manufacture of
pharmaceuticals, regardless of whether lives are lost.
And what freedom is there under such a regime of
patents and copyrights? In other words, how can
science advance freely in such an atmosphere within
a major rat race of patents and profit making?
It is claimed by apologists of the US World
System that capitalism is good for innovation and
that any other setup would upset the atmosphere in
which innovation and discovery flourishes. This line
of argumentation is flawed for at least three reasons:
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1. The billions that now go without education

in a capitalist world system that concentrates
wealth for the few, if given proper education
would certainly innovate. That their now
wasted talents, when utilized would surpass
the so-called innovative gains that the
capitalists tout, is more than likely. That they
would use those innovations for human
benefit and not only for profit maximization,
through war making, is also very likely (given
an alternative system).
2. When capitalists are busy blocking access to
knowledge by applying copyrights and
patents, unequal transfer of technology etc,
we certainly cannot credit them for creating
an atmosphere in which innovations flourish.
Rather, innovations are deliberately
channeled and restricted to where others
cannot use or develop them.
3. Innovation, given conditions that make it
possible, and capital is not the only one
among them, is need driven, where the
"needs" are decided by the governing elites.
When the US locked the Soviets in a military
race, the innovations that came out of the
Soviet Union in the military field, even given
their late start and the devastated nature of
their country and economy after World War
II, were comparable to those coming out of
the US. They showed the world, that
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capitalism was not the only way for rapid

industrial development.
4. Technology can be a force for good or a
force for evil, the "demon" is in its use and
how it fits in with the roles and statuses
assigned by a given society. When that social
structure is busy breaking up all human
relationships, separating people for
extracting maximum surplus from them both
as workers and consumers and offering them
artificialities like TV and the internet as
substitute, that is when technology becomes
an instrument of oppression.
Blaming God not the Higher Terrorists
The earth as a habitable home, and
everything life needs to sustain itself was provided
for it independent of any effort people put in.
Sustenance precedes humanity. Humans, the elite
among them have usurped that provision and
monopolized it for their tiny groups while denying
basis sustenance and a decent standard of living for
the vast majority. Natural disasters like floods usually
kill the poor and the needy due to lack of material
resources or at least affect them more so, the rich
either live in secure dwellings or manage to escape in
time. How convenient to blame God and not the
Higher Terrorists, the US elite, who have created
conditions that ensure that natural and other
disasters will affect people disproportionately, based
upon wealth ownership.
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If we look from an adequate vantage point,

the US elite are the ones that create an atmosphere in
which powder keg situations the lead to terrorism
and crime exist and get easily ignited. People look at
the effects and the small time thugs that do the
burning, as a sociologist, I look at the big time
tyrants that provide the context for such petty
terrorism and then use it as pretext for their higher
terrorism like the Iraq war. These elite are guilty
both before such events occur and after. They are
the ones that need to be blamed and their official
mythology rejected.
Muslim reactions
Muslims are on the defensive more so than
members of other religions because non-Muslim
attacks against their religion have hovered around the
personality of the prophet (Ad Hominem attacks),
fictitiously perfected by the Crusaders, past and
present.
As traditionalists within Islam have politically
gained over the rationalists, such reactions have
become fermented in the Muslim mind, further those
Muslims that deviate from the traditionalist views are
attacked more so than any non-Muslim by these
traditionalists. The point being that reactionaries are
widely represented under all labels imaginable, and
Muslims certainly are not the only ones who have
monopolized membership of them. The reactions
among reactionaries of different religions are not
uniform merely because of the history of the kind of
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attacks faced by different religious groups. In the

case of Islam, the non-Muslim tactics have hovered
around attacking the personality of the prophet, so
Muslims are overly sensitive to such attacks.
Democracy in the Muslim world
Democracy or the lack thereof has more to
do with the position a country occupies in the global
division of labor in the world system and how it has
aligned itself with the major world players, rather
than any religious affiliation. Muslims are not the
only ones that suffer from lack of democracy in the
current world system; other developing countries do
so as well, almost across the board, producing
predictable results based upon their relationship vis-vis the dominant players in this international
system. The modern Middle East was a construction
of the colonials. Their politics and their economics
were defined more by colonial precedent than by
either Islam or their regional culture. The colonials
had a purpose when they put that setup in place and
that purpose was not peace and development. When
a so-called sovereign nation (Libya) can be brought
to its knees over an aircraft (Lockerbie incident), you
can note the worth of such "sovereignty" and the
ability of those that rule over them to do any
denying, regardless of the resources they are allowed
to get (out of the spoils). The entire world situation
will have to change for there to be any peace and
development in that region.

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The things that happen in the political

economy of the developing nations are not
happening in a vacuum, they are happening in a
world system, which has predetermined winners and
losers. If there were democracy in the Muslim lands,
surveys show, people would de-link from the US and
throw their oil corporations out. Do you think the
American elite want that or they will sit idly by and
let that happen. No, they have implanted Israel in
that area just so that there is no democracy and
development in the Middle East. You cannot look at
countries in isolation with the broader social arena in
which their histories are being written. If there is no
democracy, and the Muslims are not represented by
their governments, and their governments answer
more to the West than to their own populations,
how are Islam or the Muslims to blame for lack of
democracy in their lands?
Democracy & Military Dictatorship in Pakistan:
Blaming the politicians in countries like
Pakistan for their lack of democracy is similar to
blaming the victims. It is like blaming the poor for
their poverty, which has been caused by the
institutional structure in which they find themselves.
The political establishment in Pakistan is such that it
can only survive being subordinate to the military
institution, regardless of the rhetoric of even
politicians like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (even though he
had a golden opportunity after the 1971 war with
India to try to restructure it, given the weak state it
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was in, which was apparently squandered for easy

solutions).
If we move a little further back we recognize
the role of the colonial powers in making sure that
this military establishment (of Pakistan) was the
dominant one in this nation state given their
methodology and mess of the partition. Pakistan as
the smaller of the two states with a more messier
situation was more on the defensive than India and
so, the military in Pakistan morphed into what it
became, later vis--vis the American elite and their
geo-politics, it effectively became the occupation
force of the Americans in Pakistan.
I would also add another observation that
reveals the subservience of the political to the
military institution in that country. Every time a
dictator comes along and wants to implant himself in
the political arena he always avoid giving up his
uniform, because he knows how tenuous his position
is going to be once the uniform is stripped. They are
products of the same institutional setup and so
recognize that once the uniform is gone, their fate is
sealed.
Where is the solution to this going to come
from? 1) Not from the political establishment, it is
too weak 2) not from an outside occupation force, it
will merely form another indigenous occupation
force as it is doing in Iraq. The solution, if it ever
materializes will possibly come from the lower ranks
of the military itself, possibly motivated by a strong
political leader. It might be an insurmountable task
but not impossible.
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Muslim reactions to the cartoons

The response of Christians to derogatory
images of Jesus, in Europe or America, cannot be
compared to the Islamic response to the cartoons
because each has had a different history of
relationship with the West. The Jewish response, if
Jews were relegated to ghettos as Arabs are in
Europe today, would have been quite similar to the
Muslim reaction. Why it is not is because of different
social circumstances post World War 2. Muslims are
on the defensive much more, based upon social
circumstance and treatment, than either Christian or
Jewish communities, and these circumstances feed
into their relationship with their own religion as well.
The Crusaders have been labeling Islam and
Muslims as violent and "the other" or "outsider" for
a long time. When these new Crusaders (the
American elite) have had cultural hegemony for a
while, it is inevitable that that label will lead to a selffulfilling prophecy among certain marginalized
groups. Those who put these cartoons to print knew
that some such (not in the majority) reaction would
be produced, and they were waiting to capitalize on it
and use that selective empirical evidence to portray
Islam as violent and Muslims as barbarians. It is not
the fault of the Muslims. Similar riots broke out in
Toledo, Ohio (in the US) in October 2005 when
some Neo-Nazis arranged a parade in the inner city
where there was a big population of African
Americans- a similar phenomenon designed by
people who wanted to benefit from a predictable
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reaction. We have to differentiate between individual

vs. crowd behavior especially among marginalized
oppressed communities that are deliberately isolated
and labeled as the other before passing any
judgment about causation.
That said, we should note that the vast
majority of demonstrations were peaceful. People
have a right to say enough is enough, and they can
demonstrate as much as they want. They have a right
to say that the American elite are abusing our religion
for their politico-economic reasons and all the other
bigots under cover of that come out of the
woodwork to spew their age old hatred for Islam,
because somehow it is open season for all now. Then
the media, regardless of fact, picks on the few
instances of violence and condemns Islam and the
entire world population of Muslims.
The Jihadists are a convenient caricature of
Islam constructed by the Crusaders so that by using
them for various socio/political/economic motives
they can dominate the "real" Islam and Muslim lands.
That caricature is based upon the historical
stereotypes about Islam and the prophet
espoused/invented/propagated by the Crusader of
old, which have now been animated in Muslim lands
due to circumstance and self-fulfilling prophecies.
The Saudi regime has intricate connections
with the US elite, and with the Jihadists. The
Jihadists more closely represent the Saudi brand of
"Islam" which is the caricature of the Crusaders, a
fiction that is playing out in the grand theatre of life
in our times. Once brought to life it assumes a life of
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its own. Consider the ghetto in the US where African

Americans are isolated and segregated. In order to
maintain that setup does the US government need
day-to-day direct intervention? Of course not, it
maintains itself and ensures that people are kept in
their proper subservient position through a network
of institutional mechanisms and social forces. The
European elite have done a lot to marginalize
Muslims through the ages, why they haven't
constructed a whole oriental mythology around other
religions is because they never felt threatened by
them, as they did by Islam, and now the oil factor
figures into this equation as well.
Does the US elite really want democracy in
the Middle East? Surveys show that the people there
detest the policies of the US government, if a
people's government were to come to power there
they would change their relationship with the US and
the US corporations would suffer tremendously as a
result. Would the US corporations, the ones that
wield extreme influence in the US political system,
allow that? Of course not, so this democracy facade
is just popular sloganeering. Time and again the US
elite need to reinforce fears and to show their own
public and the world that these bogeymen they have
created (based upon fiction) are a real threat, and the
media, the Jihadists etc, are all part of the tools that
are employed by this elite for this very end.
9/11

122

Those that perpetuate mythology as "reality"

often make it out to be the only "reality" and
discredit all alternatives as loony or conspiracy. It is
very easy for the US elite to do so since at their
disposal are the corporate media of mass
communication and its global reach.
If their "intelligence" can be so wrong on
Iraq (as claimed and acknowledged by them) how
can they be "so accurate" less than a day after 9/11
(with zero witnesses that were left living) about who
the perpetrators were? Either they just made it up
(preplanned by them at some level of execution) or
they knew about the plot all along (facilitators on the
sidelines). All they found, much after they had
already announced and advertised the names was
circumstantial evidence (even going by their official
mythology). How they used the events for their many
ulterior motives, after the event (like the Iraq war and
military contracts in the tens of billions) reveals very
clearly the motive for their involvement in 9/11.
Managing Human Misery
Compared to societies of the past where
power and control was direct and coercive, modern
bureaucratic societies like the US have
institutionalized implicit control, and they have the
world as their playing field in order to "manage"
crisis. Natural demise of societies can thus be
managed more easily by these elite, who have been
able to extend their control over the globe crisis after
crisis. Those bearing the brunt of that "management"
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are the masses while the power of this elite is

strengthened and perpetuated through such
management.
For example economic cycles and downturns
are managed by the US elite via transformation of its
economy into a permanent war economy.
Reconstruction of Iraq (developing a devastated
country), and related growth in the defense industries
can thus translate into job and wealth growth at
home, and a quick recovery out of a recession, while
the public is kept busy with maximal consumption
and fear that perpetuates such a system.
Bad managers like G.W. Bush, who deny
crumbs to the poor while helping the corporate elite,
are thus a blessing for the world in that they reveal
cracks in the all encompassing shroud. During such
periods we hope that the public recognizes the
facade (or matrix if you will) that encompasses their
life, which is a mirage, based on false rhetoric of
freedom, democracy and human rights. During such
periods we have hope that this system of tyranny will
collapse due to public action- brought about by acute
economic circumstances.
Petty Terrorism, who benefits?
The message that is delivered by every act of
petty terrorism is the message the American elite
always waits to capitalize on. They need justification
for what they are doing and the massive amount they
are robbing from their own citizens to fund the
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defense industries and these incidents, hyped by the

media, serve as marketing fodder.
The forces that exist that lead to such acts by
these small time suicide bombers are much bigger
than any ideology they might carry. Rather, it is the
global system of tyranny imposed by US hegemony
upon that region that forces people into
circumstances that lead to an oppositional culture,
where suicide on a social level, given the numbers,
becomes a normal state of affairs. Promises of
"virgins in paradise" would not produce the result
the media alludes to if the social environment was
different. We can gauge the difference in the
frequency of suicide bombings in various
societies/regions and arrive at similar conclusions
empirically.
Syria, the US & the UN
As the UN considers action against Syria for
allegedly not cooperating in the Al-Hariri
assassination, let it also consider pressuring the US
regarding illegal wars where hundreds of thousands
are unjustifiably "assassinated" as collateral damage
and the life-lines of entire cities are cut off to force
mass evacuations.
Let the UN also pressure Israel for its
numerous, well-advertised, extra-judicial
assassinations of Palestinians, not to mention the
over 50 years of UN resolutions that Israel has been
violating and disregarding, supported avidly by the
U.S. The pressure on Syria proves once again how
the Higher Immorality, the impersonal yet massive
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corruption of the US elite operates: The assassination

of one person (Al-Hariri) can be used in order to
cause misery, suffering and death to millions by
economic sanctions and deprivation, helped by the
so-called "international" bodies like the UN.
Even though the conservatives in the US
(the myopic ones as against the sophisticated
capitalists among them) consider the UN with
suspicion, their intelligence being unable to transcend
the surface symbolism, the UN by its actions and
what it considers important and unimportant, proves
itself to be just another agency for legitimizing US
global hegemony, through its many "rackets" of
global partnership. The now defunct Iraqi
Information minister, Saeed Sahaaf, having seen the
objective effects (in 1991 and 2003) of the UN's
worthlessness as a force for global peace, with
diplomacy being a mere prelude to war, accurately
described it as a whore under the feet of the
Americans.
M. Asadi
Published by Egypt's Al- Ahram (Nov 3, 2005)
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/767/letters.htm
Ahmadinejad & the U.S.
Ahmedinejad has no clue about how things
work in the US and its political establishment. Here,
economic forces much more than any religious
motivation drives decisions and keeps them uniform.
He is living in his dream world and using rhetoric
126

that serves as fuel for the US elite to justify their

many motives in the region. He is not thinking about
how his worldview and these infantile letters will
affect the millions in Iran who are going to suffer
because he does not understand the real world
situation and the motivations that are now targeting
Iran. He is buying into what the US considers
important regarding Iran, the nuclear issue, while
forgetting about his people and the real issues at
home. He is thereby giving legitimacy to the desires
of the US elite, rather than ignoring them and their
nonsense.
If Ahmedinejad feels that Bush is going to
read his letter and say Allahu Akbar and close down
the shop that the corporations have set up in
America's political arena, he is dangerously naive. If
the purpose of his letter was to rally support of the
masses in the Middle East for the purpose of Iranian
hegemony in the region, he is equally naive, given the
situation in Iraq and Iran's role in sectarianism that is
in tune with the desires of the US elite.
Let us not forget that the US facilitated
Ahmadinejads coming to power by consolidating
public opinion in Iran around the nuclear issue,
which happened to be his main point of no
compromise, even as the moderates were gaining
before this confrontation. The US is now using him
and his rhetoric for their many perversions in the
region. Such confrontations, projected towards the
future, as threat, are good for profit maximization of
US corporations, like C. W. Mills said, they have
become for the corporations, "the business way of
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American life". We only need to look at the profits

of the oil companies for empirical evidence of Mills'
statement. These prices and profits will reach
astronomical levels (beyond the already astronomical
levels) once the conflict heats up.
These Ayatollahs sided with the British and
the Americans when they got rid of Mossadeq, when
the Shah got too powerful they once again conspired
with them for a transfer of power, when the
reformists were getting popular they brought up the
nuclear issue to consolidate the power of the clergy.
It is merely a cat and mouse game where the
opponents are not actual opponents at all. The
mullahs of Iran and the US elite are bedfellows.
Published in Egypt's Al-Ahram, May 2006
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/795/letters.htm
Democracy in the US
Democracy, the version of it that is
flourishing in the U.S, is indeed very beautiful for
the powerful and the rich (but spells disaster for the
masses and the dissidents) when the protestors reach
a few thousands (now and then when they muster a
big enough march) and the corporate elite reach tens
of millions in their media propaganda, twenty-four
hours a day, day in and day out. It is also very
beautiful for the corporate rich when it requires tens
of millions of dollars to get elected, after you have
sought membership in one of two elite parties. The
masses are effectively excluded by the abovementioned institutional mechanisms (checkpoints)
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even as the faade of voting, that is quite meaningless

given these filters, is widely advertised and
celebrated.
Education in the U.S.
If by education we mean the ability to think
consciously and be socially responsive then people in
the developed countries, especially America are the
most uneducated of the human race, considering
how they are destroying the earth due to
"bureaucratized" mass consumption and tolerating
the militarized economic system of their elite. When
modern education becomes a status-quo promoting,
fitting-in, enhancing mass consumption tool rather
than one that enhances human consciousness, not
only is it worthless, it is much more ideological and
dangerous than religion itself.
"...This citizen cannot now see the roots of his own
biases and frustrations, nor think clearly about
himself, nor for that matter about anything else. He
does not see the frustration of idea, of intellect, by the
present organization of society, and he is not able to
meet the tasks now confronting 'the (so called)
intelligent citizen.'...Educational institutions have
not (made him see) these things and, except in rare
instances, they are not doing them. They have become
mere elevators of occupational and social ascent, and,
on all levels, they have become politically timid.
Moreover, in the hands of 'professional educators,'
many schools have come to operate on an ideology of
life adjustment' that encourages happy acceptance of
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mass ways of life rather than the struggle for

individual and public transcendence.
There is not much doubt that modern regressive
educators have adapted their notions of educational
content and practice to the idea of the mass. They do
not effectively proclaim standards of cultural level and
intellectual rigor; rather they often deal in the trivia of
vocational tricks and 'adjustment to life'-meaning the
slack life of masses. 'Democratic schools' often mean
the furtherance of intellectual mediocrity, vocational
training, nationalistic loyalties, and little else."
(C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956))

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18. What can be done

We have analyzed and studied the problems.
Those problems have easy solutions, why they are
not tried is because of monopoly of power and
wealth at the command of vested interests. This does
not mean the alternatives both as solution and voice,
do not exist. Rather, it means that the alternatives are
choked to death before being tried, because the few
that dominate the current system have too much to
lose, even as the very existence of humanity is at
stake, about which they do not care.
Suppose you see someone raping your
family, holding you at bay upon gunpoint, and you
see a pattern of such rape going on in the community
you live in. Even if you do not have power to stop it
at the current time, will you not raise awareness and
try your best to stop it? The first step is recognizing
it for what it is, if you give up on the first step, throw
your arms up in the air and say, "I have a fork and a
knife, they have ak47s, what the hell can I do?"; then
chances are that the 1001 forks and knives in the
neighborhood will never become aware that
collectively their power is greater than the ak47s
wielded by these criminals. Now more than ever, the
stakes are too high: can you put a price on all the
lives that have been lost due to want, the millions
that have been denied the opportunity to grow up
due to high infant mortality, the billions that go
without an education, the hundreds of millions
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whose life expectancy is almost half that of the

wealthy among the Americans, in other words the
Americans get to live two whole lifetimes compared
to their one? These "costs" are much higher than any
benefit of default we get in the capitalist marketplace.
Are they not?
The Soviets tried to implement socialist
principles onto a rural/agrarian society, whereas
Marx's analysis brought forth the revolution in an
advanced capitalist stage. They preempted the
revolution, thereby converting their system into state
capitalism, whereas the Americans incorporated
socialist principles to abort the revolution.
Nationalism serves the same purpose as religion did
in the past; it is a distraction from the real issues and
a convenient tool of the elite in the current epoch.
Why should the vast majority of humankind
on earth fight over the crumbs within a system set by
the rich countries, which consolidate the surplus for
themselves (and not even for their populations as a
whole)? Why should we accept the status-quo? If you
look at the least developed countries today, the
percentage of their populations that are in poverty,
extreme deprivation has remained more or less the
same but the numbers of people affected are almost
double that of those that were affected 30 years back,
given population increase, which is related to their
under-developed condition. Fitting into the niche in
the current world system, dominated and defined by
the US elite, spells total disaster. Being "realistic" is
not accepting the default to total environmental
degradation of the earth and eventual destruction, it
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is to work to fix these problems and take away from

the thieves what belongs to humanity as a whole.
Existing realities dictate that our world has gone
terribly wrong and we need to stop this direction it
has taken and re-chart the course using radical
measures because time is running out.
The nation state system was not a natural
evolution of anything. They were artificial entities
that went against natural boundaries in most cases,
part of the neo-colonial setup to control what was
previously colonized in a cost effective manner. The
power elite, the neo-colonial masters have never
recognized any bureaucratic control or national
boundary where it concerns them, the whole world is
their playing field, and they do not respect national
sovereignty or laws. These controls that form
political entities, the nation-states only work to keep
in check the populations living inside them or to play
one against the other for exploitation purposes. The
needs of the developing nations are more or less the
same and have to do with basic human needs that are
going unmet. Self reliance, under these
circumstances would mean that they take care of
these needs first before squandering their resources
in export processing and useless military hardware
purchase from the West. They should reject the
issues that the West tells them are important and
define their needs for themselves.
People who study social movements know
the importance of resource mobilization in effective
movements. The elite have all movements out
resourced and so movements are co-opted unless
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they seek changing structure and nothing short of it

as the platform. These elite would physically and
militarily attack such movements. Given an advanced
bureaucratic/capitalist society, most people have
their lives and aspirations conditioned from on high.
Independent thought is nearly completely
circumscribed. In this atmosphere, the intellectuals
have the ability to transcend that structure and look
at the invisible strings held by the puppet masters
(the elite) that guide the movements of the masses.
The solution lies in the intelligentsia fixing their
moral default by withdrawing from the structures of
power, in which they are hired hands, and linking
with the masses.
In the next 50 years, according to UN
estimates, we will add another 4 billion people to the
already over 6 billion on earth. Most of this increase
will be in the poor countries- I do not see this neocolonial nation-state system existing or surviving this
increase, merely due to the inability of the poor
countries to provide for their populations- the status
quo of US hegemony and domination of trade will
eventually collapse, after this "human hell". People
are suffering immensely today, more than half of the
world's population lives on less than $2 a day with
many on less than $1 a day, unless we work to
change things now, change will eventually come but
it will be more painful. Let us begin our
emancipation with these Declarations of
Independence.

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19. DECLARATIONS OF
INDEPENDENCE
A common argument used by supporters of
U.S. global hegemony, runs as follows: the U.S. as a
human society has human shortcomings, the faults
that are all too "human", it might not be perfect (they
say) but it is still better than most other societies
around the globe. There are several problems with this
line of argumentation. First, it erroneously assumes that
societies are mere sums of individuals that inhabit
them. The total, society, is greater than the sum of its
parts. Problems of societal structure might not be
problems of individual members that inhabit those
structures. Such reasoning confuses public issues,
things that have to do with social structure and
institutions that transcend individuals, with personal
troubles of individual character. Take the example of
marriage: Inside a marital relationship, personal
problems might exist between the couple which may
lead to divorce, but when almost half of all marriages
attempted end in divorce in a society, it has to do with
the social institution of marriage and family, how it is
changing and how other institutions are affecting or
causing such change; in short it is a issue involving
social structure.
Arguments that seek to excuse social issues as
mere human shortcomings assume, as a premise, that
what is happening in the various countries of the world
is happening in vacuum-like conditions, where all
nations are separate and compete fairly based upon
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merit and goodwill. They also assume that history is

being made in the U.S. by the will of its people. Both
these assumptions are incorrect: in a capitalist society,
when wealth, power and administrative control of the
major institutions of society becomes enlarged and
concentrated, the decisions (that have enormous
consequences) are made by a microscopic minority that
controls the wealth and the machinery of the various
institutions. Further, the decisions of these power elite
have global life and death consequences for hundreds
of millions; they are not limited by geographic
boundaries of countries. For example, distributional
deprivation caused by the flow of enormous wealth
from the poor countries towards the rich industrialized
countries, in the form of massive military contracts
together with debt dependency (and structural
adjustments by the money lending institutions like the
IMF and World Bank), result in over 40,000
preventable deaths every single day, according to UN
statistics.
Further, the public in the U.S. is not making
history; it has become the utensil of history makers: the
power elite. As part of the technique used by these
elites for legitimating their rule, are the use of morally
loaded master symbols in the form of slogans
promoting democracy and freedom. These slogans are
fed to an otherwise starving world through their
domination of the public-relations apparatus. However,
the reality of the situation in the U.S. is that there is no
substantive democracy. A highly bureaucratized social
system molds and guides peoples aspirations and
choices, thereby totally restricting their freedom. As
cheerful robots (see http://robots.asadi.org) they
work the best parts of their lives in the corporate world
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thinking, due to bureaucratic adaptation and media

programming, that life spent in an office cubicle is
heaven on earth. In their free time they mass consume
based upon desires that have been insinuated into them
by a massive advertising industry.
That this mass society plays no part in the
decisions that affect them is evident by major decisions
being made by un-elected elites that populate the
presidents cabinet, influential policy boards and think
tanks. The fact that institutional mechanisms ensure
that major decisions, policy parameters, campaign
issues, campaigns and the people who will compete are
predetermined before any voting takes place shows that
the mass society is a mere spectator or forced actor
in this democracy facade. The ability to mobilize
resources for effective interest group formation as well
as access to power networks for successful lobbying are
dominated by the wealthiest. Supplementing this is the
fact that the few that diligently vote among the U.S.
public are given extremely restricted choices: choices
restricted by a two party monopoly, not much different
than a one party dictatorship, and further restricted by
being structured through mass-mediated information
controlled by privately owned media.
How else can you explain the fact that a
microscopic minority, 1% of the population of the
U.S., controls greater wealth and resources than the rest
of the 99% combined, with little or no objection? It
does not require great intellectual skills to conclude
from this that the resulting access to "life chances" and
success in a society based upon purchasing power is
inherently unequal. In this context, consider the case of
the highly advertised freedom of speech: Five large
corporations dominate the media in the U.S. that
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reaches tens of millions. These corporations are for

profit businesses and as such have highly structured
filters that manage the way in which news is selected
and reported.
As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
document in their book Manufacturing Consent, bias in
favor of government and big business is structured into
the news media by a few large bureaucracies subsidizing
the content of what is used as certified news by this
media. It is also structured by the over whelming use of
experts by them for their commentaries, which are or
were (a disproportionate majority) on the payroll of
government or big business. In addition to this, their
dependence on the market for advertising, which is
purchased by big corporations- and the fact that they
themselves are big business or their parent companies
are corporate giants like General Electric etc., results in
self management and uniformity of output. The
product that is produced by them as a result, is
scientifically predictable within a propaganda model,
in that it seldom deviates from the official/corporate
economic, social and political agenda. Thus, only the
elite have access to millions by domination of the
media airwaves, while the rest of us reach almost no
one and have no part in the production of information.
The First Amendment without information is not of
much use. When the information that the public
receives is being supplied by the mass media, controlled
by a few, the First Amendment (to the U.S.
constitution that guarantees freedom of expression), is
by fact and practice rendered null and void.
How do we reclaim our freedom in the face of
these overwhelming social forces of control and
domination generated by the elite? The first act of
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emancipation from this condition is to recognize it for

what it is, total enslavement. It is an act of
understanding the fact that the vast majority of
humankind in the world today have no say or control
over major decisions, economic, political or military,
they are mere spectators. They are acted upon but
cannot act, or when they do act, their actions have no
structural consequences for their societies or the world.
At any point when we recognize the true nature of our
oppression and develop human consciousness (not
merely class consciousness), we are forced to come to
terms with the fact that as individuals we cannot change
the social structures that exist in our societies and the
world system. However, we can surely learn how these
structures function and consciously reject them. In this
act of rejection is the first step towards eventual global
change.
How can one reject the rising tide of
bureaucratic control and not be marginalized in the
process? As individuals in a capitalist society, we are
objectively among a crowd, the mass society but still
subjectively alone (as psychological fact). It is in the
emotional void that exists in capitalist societies that the
advertising industry finds its effectiveness as cultivator
of interests, seeking to create mythic symbols of affinity
between the consumer and material objects that are
being offered for sale. An alienated individual, with
weak family and group ties, makes the ideal consumerthe type sought by corporations for maximum
profitability. Once a persons inner world awakes,
reason replaces material desires that were insinuated
into us from outside, consciousness develops and as a
result, life is experienced more fully compared to the
narrow existence offered by mere consumption. The
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corporate elite, whose mode of production is geared

towards profit maximization and not human need
fulfillment, are mortally afraid of the emergence of a
conscious society. This act of rejection is by itself a
magnificent victory over their domination.
The American power elite are killing the world,
directly through wars and indirectly through
perpetuating underdevelopment upon the world by
implicit control of the state and military institutions of
developing countries. It is no secret that the profits of
the American corporations depend upon access to
cheap resources, cheap labor and the inability of the
poor countries to manufacture what they buy at
monopoly price from these industrialized countries.
Their practice, as objective fact, of relocation and
domination of global trade empirically reveals this
relationship. If the poor countries developed and
started manufacturing products that would compete
with the products of these corporations, they would go
out of business and the economies of the overdeveloped countries, as centers of power, would
collapse. Operating with a specific worldview, driven by
the profit motive, in control of the worlds wealth and
the apparatus of public relations, these power elite
ensure that their decisions will prevail over all others.
As a result human misery perpetuates generation after
generation. We must begin by rejecting their official
myths and distractions. In this first act lies our
declaration of independence as a global human
community.
Muhammed A. Asadi
www.asadi.org
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Appendix

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142

143

144

Also By Muhammed A. Asadi

By placing facts within their institutional context, this book

uncovers the intricate connections between the military/
economic alliance in America and the resulting globalization
of poverty. Using the depth of the sociological imagination,
the author provides a picture of reality that is often
overlooked by journalists and commentators who routinely
report facts detached from their sociological roots.

ISBN: 1411612612
Order Information:
http://www.amazon.com or http://www.bn.com

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