This is a preview of my new Kindle e-book, America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying. The preview gives the table of contents and a portion of the preface telling about the book.
I am providing this preview as a way to announce that beginning on September 8 and lasting until September 12, 2014 people who have Kindles can get a free copy of my book. I am doing this free promotion because I do not want to make a dime off of America’s miseries. I am also doing it in appreciation for Dissident Voice, its staff, authors, and readers.
Table of Contents
1. Unbroken Habits
2. Costly Habits
3. Black Boxes and Badvantages
4. The Addicted Government
5. The Addicted War and Spy Industries
6. The Habit Helpers
7. Breaking the Habits
8. America’s Future: Bleaker or Brighter?
Appendix A. Wars’ Litmus Tests
Appendix B. Our War and Spy Government’s Organizational Chart
Appendix C. The Largest War and Spy Industries
Preface
The oldest professions? No, but “America’s Second Oldest Professions” would have been a salacious title, and salacious this book is not. So I took a literary license. No license is needed, however, to say that America was born with a musket and spy glass in her hands and that she has never let go of them, never broken those two addictive, chronic, and costly. The toll of death, destruction, and human misery from her warring and spying over nearly 240 years is mounting as you read this.
And unless you believe it to be so, America was not born to be the land of the free, the land of plenty, and the land of opportunity. Those descriptions are mostly slogans and political propaganda, not widespread realities except for the privileged and power elite. That exception was the deliberate aim of her “founding fathers,” plutocrats who were not about to design and build a truly representative democracy, one that embraced the unwashed masses. Who knew that better than the Native Americans, the slaves, the indentured servants, the women? America was led astray by her leaders from the get go and the misleading has never stopped.
The colonists fought their way free of King George’s corpocracy only to let their leaders perpetuate it at home, a government not of, by and for the people but a government in collusion with and controlled by powerful corporate interests. I have called that collusion a “corpocracy,” and I wrote a book about it.1
This corporacy, which I sometimes also call America’s regime, is responsible for America’s lowest standing among so-called “advanced” countries on everything that matters: unemployment rate; prevalence of poverty; income inequality; quality of health and health care; quality of and demographics of education; homelessness; you name it.2 The most ominous for the future of America are her warring and spying addictions that are part and parcel of the corpocracy. Unless America can break those two habits she could someday be broken herself.
About this Book
This book is about those two addictive habits; their long history, what explains them, what their consequences are, how they can be broken, and what awaits America and the world if they are not broken.
Chapter1 traces the unbroken history of the two habits. Chapter 2 documents their costs and consequences. It is an appalling account of the damage and death America’s warriors-in-chiefs and spy chiefs have unceasingly caused America and elsewhere on the globe. Chapter 3 explains the warring and spying habits. You will read there about the “black boxes” and “badvantages” that explain the dark side of human behavior in general and the warring and spying habits of the current U.S. president and his predecessor in particular. Chapter 4 examines the war and spy bureaucracy of the U.S. government. There we will look into the public officialdom of the two habits, The Land of the Official Habbits, if you will, with apologies to J.R.R Tolkien. Chapter 5 examines the war and spy industries that feed off government’s addiction as well as their own. You will read there how contractors go about milking Uncle Sam, and how Uncle Sam, the reliable cash cow, knows and doesn’t care. Chapter 6 takes a look at the “Habit Helpers.” You might be surprised about who some of them are. I was once one of them. Chapter 7 proposes a seven-step program for ending America’s warring and spying. The last chapter presents some dismal scenarios of the future if the habits aren’t ended. Be sure not to miss Appendix A, especially if you believe there can be a just or necessary war. Appendix B shows the bloated organizational chart for the war and spy agencies, and Appendix C names the largest war and spy contractors.
I have tried to write the book in a conversational style, my talking directly to you, the reader. This style is a big departure from my earlier years of writing in academic circles. Speaking of habits, that one was hard to break (but I haven’t broken the habit of loading up on footnotes as you will see). I have also tried to be as humorous as possible when appropriate, starting with the book’s title, without making light of a very serious subject. Life is too short not to grin and laugh once in a while, wouldn’t you agree? But if you think the book is more controversial than conversational and humorous I would agree with you.
What is not humorous or controversial is that millions upon millions of the terminal victims of America’s warring and spying will never breathe again, let alone laugh. Regardless of whether they were Americans or the regime’s enemies or bystander victims, they ought to be on every American’s conscience, but they aren’t. We rightfully mourn our loved ones lost in battle but wrongfully not those of the enemies of America’s regimes.
Is this Book Unpatriotic?
Who is patriotic; the corporate CEO and board of directors who milk the government for all the handouts and immunities they can get and then turn around and relocate their company in some foreign country to get even better tax breaks, or critics who say American corporations should stay American and stop their greedy and unscrupulous practices?
Who is patriotic; politicians who buy their votes with corporate financing and yield to corporate lobbyists or critics who say America’s politicians should be honest representatives of democracy, not of corpocracy?
Who is patriotic; public officials and the war and spy industry that bomb, bully and snoop, or critics who say those practices are murderous, tyrannical, soil America’s image to the world, and invite dangerous blowbacks that harm the American public?
Who is patriotic; a retired general and former director of the CIA and NSA you will read about later who said that “We are gathering data to make America more profitable or for more commercial enterprises,” or critics who say his agencies’ intrusive and invasive spying is illegal and robbing Americans of their right to privacy?
Consider which of these two national sentiments helps sustain a nation’s warring and spying; “my country right or wrong” or “my country please do right and no wrong”? The first is jingoistic patriotism, or dangerous loyalty. The second is principled patriotism, or cautionary loyalty. Which sentiment prevailed during the Third Reich? Which prevails in America today?
- Brumback, GB. The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch, Author House, 2011.
- Some sources on America’s “sadtistics:” Blow, CM. “Empire at the End of Decadence“, New York Times, February 18, 2011; Buchheit, P. “Five Facts That Put America to Shame“, Common Dreams, May 14, 2012; Froomkin, D. “Occupy Right Again: U.S. Near Bottom In New Social Justice Index”. HuffPostBusiness, October 27, 2011; Sullivan, T. An America In Retreat? Crooks & Liars, July 15, 2013; and Zuesse, E. “How the U.S. Performs in Recent International Rankings; Hint: 3rd, as in Third World“, OpEdNews, April 15, 2013.