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personally filthy as it is with this one. People would have been appalled at no-bid contracts for the V-P's buds at Halliburton, and billions 'disappeared' in the war zone. People would be in jail for it. Cheney would be long gone. But the truth of the matter is that the Vietnam War was manufactured by the military-industrial complex, which had never been demobilized, as it should have been, at the end of WW II. Our economy was kept on a war footing UNNECESSARILY. Vietnam would have been--wanted to be!--our ally against Communist China. They were afraid of China, and had been fighting off invasion by China for 5,000 years. Yeah, the people of Vietnam wanted Ho Chi Minh as their president, and it would have meant a communist government, but it would have been a FRIENDLY government. Ho Chi Minh wrote letters to Eisenhower quoting Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. They had just thrown out the French colonialists and they thought we would approve of self-determination--just as we had insisted upon, from King George.
God, what a tragedy that was! Eisenhower disallowed free elections in Vietnam (one of his worst errors), and the die was cast. Kennedy ultimately tried to stop it (as he had stopped the invasion of Cuba), by executive order. He was assassinated (I am convinced now because he was a peacemaker--as were the other two victims of assassination in that era--his brother, RFK, and ML King). And LBJ totally gave in to military/corporate liars who said Vietnam was a threat, and I believe that LBJ did it mostly for ECONOMIC reasons. The economy was so dependent on military expenditure by then--with all the WW II corporate contractors having geared up, rather than down, during the Korean War (a somewhat more justifiable war, with UN backing), and all of them lobbying for long term porkbarrel welfare--an albatross on the American people that we are living with to this day.
The argument against communism--the infamous "Domino Theory" (that, if one country in Asia "fell" to communism, they all would)--was mostly a contrived bit of nonsense, created to foment hatred of anti-capitalist countries (and all "socialist" ideas), and to justify a permanent, huge military budget. By the end of his term of office, Eisenhower had begun to see how it worked, and he warned the American people against "the military-industrial complex"--especially as to military contractor lobbying--but it was too late. These forces and their allies in the secret government (CIA et al) were too powerful by then. They tried to strongarm JFK on Cuba and on Vietnam. He resisted. They offed him, and got what they wanted in Johnson, a gungho military spender.
I don't think Johnson was personally corrupt, like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and this lot of fascists--and I don't think he would have tolerated their magnitude or type of corruption. I've been listening to the LBJ tapes from that era (his phone calls with various people) on C-SPAN radio for a while now, and what I perceive is real wheeler-dealer, with an intimate knowledge of Congress and the details of government, and a sort of schizophrenic belief in democracy and lawfulness, on the one hand (evident in many different ways), and a real manipulator, on the other (but merely a manipulator--a master manipulator--not a Hitler). His phone calls just after the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi are very interesting in this respect. 1964. He wheels and he deals and he twists arms and jawbones--senators, congressmen, governors, cabinet, press, FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, local law enforcement, nat'l guard and military forces--to bring law and order to Mississippi, to STOP the killings and protect the civil rights workers, without having to take over the government of the state. He is brilliant. I don't know what might have been going on in the background (off the phone)--for instance, I know that civil rights workers were not entirely trustful of the FBI (because I was one of them--a civil rights worker), and Hoover was spying on ML King--but he was nevertheless brilliant in manipulating all these levers of power to get something good done--to find the bodies of the dead civil rights workers, to catch the perpetrators and to establish some kind of decent order in Mississippi. He also pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress, in direct opposition to the wishes of his fellow southern politicians.
This is the same man who, in OTHER conversations, was contriving to escalate the war in Vietnam--where, ultimately some 2 million people would be slaughtered (in Vietnam and Southeast Asia), because of his actions. I think that, like Bush, he thought it would be a cakewalk. He would satisfy the military-industrial lobbyists (and their corrupt congressional advocates) and give them their big budgets, but I doubt he expected the difficulty of it, or the carnage. The Vietnamese, defending their country--poor brown people in sandals and straw hats, with very limited equipment and almost no air force--foiled him, completely. And foiled Nixon (who got elected by promising "peace with honor" but didn't mean either). The Iraqis are similar, to the extent that they are defending their country's self-determination (and not just engaging in religious war). But the presidential motivations are quite different. Bush, Cheney and their entire cabal have a personal interest in the oil cartel. Cheney has a personal interest in high military expenditures to his own company. He is a war profiteer himself. Johnson may have understood war profiteers, and wheeled and dealed with them--but he wasn't ONE OF THEM. He had some sense of being President of the United States--of really being President, of all of the people. And U.S. corporations have become global corporate predators--who now run our news media, our Congress and our President. There was some sense, back then in the '60s, of the good of the nation, of the common interests of the majority. While Johnson was conducting his war, he was pouring resources into anti-poverty programs, and bucking his own southern establishment on civil rights. He was a torn man. He had a conscience. And when Americans rejected his war, he stepped down (didn't run for a second term). Not so Bush. The war profiteering and dominating Mideast oil take total precedence over the good of the nation. There is no such things as "the good of the nation" to the Bush junta. There is only the good of Chevron and Halliburton. They are total thieves and criminals. They have no conscience. They have no patriotism.
I don't want to defend Johnson too far here. He (and Nixon) slaughtered a lot more innocent people than Bush has, so far. I guess what I'm saying is that there is a CONTINUUM of war profiteering, that started after WW II, and has escalated and solidified over the years, since then--to the point that there is really no more control by the sovereigns of this land, the American people. Back then, when we protested the war, it was headlines; it brought down a President. Now, when we protest the war, we put far MORE people on the streets than we ever did back then, and...nothing. Deaf ears. They don't give a damn that 70% of the American people oppose this war.
The reason is out-of-control war profiteering--not, as with Johnson, to continue the WW II economy "for the good of the nation"--but for its own sake, the nation be damned. A $10 trillion deficit? Who cares?
And the method is corporate-controlled electronic voting, run on "trade secret," proprietary programming code (a coup of the Anthrax Congress and its biggest crooks, Tom Delay and Bob Ney).
Non-transparent elections = endless war. That's the formula.
Back then, Presidents still had to run for office. Now they don't. They get "selected" by rightwing corporations who "count" all the votes under a veil of secrecy.
All war profiteering all the time. That's what we've got--with no hope of change, until we smarten up and get rid of these Bushite-controlled voting machines, which is still a doable thing (at the state/local level where decisions on voting systems are still made).
If we can RESTORE our right to vote, we will still have a mountain of problems. For one thing, the military budget should have been busted down long ago, about 90%, to a true defensive posture. And there are a number of global corporate predators that need to get busted, and their assets seized for the public good. That's how we pay for the recovery. (The Corporate Dems--Pelosi--are ALREADY talking about a "balanced budget." Har-har. Put it all on the backs of the poor! No way! We need government spending to recover from this looting binge. And who better to provide it than the looters themselves?) We also have to deal with the corporate news monopolies--who have been polluting OUR airwaves with unrelenting corporate and war propaganda.
But we can't get to any of this until we have TRANSPARENT, VERIFIABLE elections again. And if we DON'T achieve restoration of our right to vote, then we can expect to be looted down to our last dime and our last scrap of food. And we can expect a widened war in the Middle East, against our will, for the foreseeable future.
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