JFK was also moving to end the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict. In October of 1963 Kennedy with NSAM #263, announced his plan to have one thousand military men home by Christmas and all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. However, on November 21, 1963, in a stark contradiction to all previous Kennedy policy, McGeorge Bundy, then assistant to President Kennedy and a member of the National Security Council signed National Security Action Memorandum, NSAM #273 allowing the Vietnam War to continue. This was an act of outright treason by Bundy. How could this have happened unless Bundy knew that the next day November 22, Kennedy would not be around?
Before our President, our philosopher king, was murdered by the "deep state," money, and robber baron economics, the direct fraud of supply side economics which was essentially a repudiation of reality, loans to the rich that the middle and lower classes had to pay back, and ignore the future policy, had not turned morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic, justifying things that would otherwise seem outrageous and obscene, making greed good. Violence and the threat of violence with the new phenomenon of terrorism had not turned all human relationships into the cold calculus of mathematics. There was no hate media like Fox News and its dominance of right wing propaganda, its adherence to the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and its attempts to destroy our moral autonomy.
Lying and blatant fabrications had not become the growth industry of Washington republicans. Politics had not become an extortion industry, keeping the middle class un-empowered by creating a politically engineered anxious class versus the one percent class. The machinery of politics had not required our representatives to become agents of injustice. Politicians had not been blatantly compromised, with no sense of ethics or morality, operating in a vain- glorious system of conceit, deceit, debt and delusion, all the while with a friendly face, and with the solemn conceit of pretending to do the public's business.
The accumulated corruption of moneyed politics had not metastasized. In 1963 the Government had not been transformed from a public service and a public servant into a device for privatizing profit, eliminating the public sphere, totally liberating corporations, with sparse social spending. We were not living in a vile system where the hammer of freedom was divorced from the chisel of justice, and the common good, by the republicans in power, with their lobby money, and the uncontrollable corporate tyrannies that rule them.
The corruption that brought us to this stage of cancerous corporatism and fascism started with a 1971 memo by Republican activist Lewis Powell to the US Chamber of Commerce and the corporate multi-millionaires who belonged to the Chamber. Powell urged them to become actively involved in politics. The goal of the Powell memo was to build a large corporate and billionaire funded ideological machine of right wing think tanks and tax exempt foundations that capture and corrupt the US government. Powell wanted to put an end to the wave of environmental and consumer protections brought about by Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader. The system that Powell advocated has today become a corrupt oligarchy.
Powell was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1972 by Nixon and he unconscionably began to destroy our democracy by giving the right of oligarchs to own politicians in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo, ruling that political money is speech and 1978 in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti decision overturning state restrictions on corporate political spending, saying such restrictions violated the First Amendment.
The Federalist Society soon followed, which built a nationwide nexus of jurists, attorneys, legal scholars and politicians that would bring about a new generation's un-democratic legal system that said Corporate personhood is real, money is speech, and democracy is mob rule, and organized money should have power over organized people.
The Federalists Society was founded in 1982 by the fossil fuel oligarch Koch family connected Bradley Foundation.
Because of five right wing conservatives on the Supreme Court, that our Constitution in Article III explicitly stated was under the regulation of Congress, those five democracy corrupters transformed our political system with the assertion that campaign spending is a First Amendment protected speech, in Citizen United in 2010. The ruling overturned campaign finance laws dating back to 1908. The court vomited up the unconstitutional claim that money was for soulless corporations, speech not property, attempting to design a control grid over a free humanity. In 2014 the same five right wing conservatives in the case McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission struck down the individual spending limits in the Federal Election Campaign Act.
What has happened since that ignoble day in November of 1963 that has made Washington a pox on our souls?
Corporate America with businesses like Walmart have slammed competitors' margins to the bare minimum, in addition to the captured population of its supply chain, through its punishing network effects. Transnational businesses have become narcissists, totally blind to where real value comes from, including the web of global interdependence that is at the core of their own value.
Colonialism and cancerous capitalism, long fueled by envy and avarice, has imposed its predatory grim logic: what was ravishing was ravished, what was captivating became captive. The cruel history of our war mongering country brought bloodshed, and it took root, spreading across the world landscape like a toxic weed, nourished on injustice and inhumanity. The politicized human rights activities of Washington power politics have brazenly traded off the rights of citizens for the residual rights of the corporation. This unholy policy has hardened into the radicalized identities of world populations and an official institutionalization of discrimination and human abuse. It has distorted the ideals of sovereignty and citizenship and replaced it with a modern colonization form of trusteeship and ward-ship, with indentured servitude and loan-sharking imposed by the IMF, World Bank, and Wall Street banksters.
We have ended up with a maze of confusing paired opposites; egoism versus altruism, profit versus charity, materialism versus idealism, cold calculation versus spontaneity, none of which could ever be understood by us idealistic boomers, except by someone starting out from an amoral, craven, calculating self-interest in only unregulated market transactions.
What are we now? What do we believe? What economic model explains the criminal looting by the U.S. Treasury to bail out Wall Street banksters allowing them to make obscene profits? When will we reject the lie that globalization fosters democracy, enlightenment, worldwide prosperity and stability? When will we stand up and realize that unfettered global trade and corporate profit are the enemies of freedom and the common good?
"It is only in showing men the truth," wrote Baron d'Holbach, a French philosopher and prominent figure of the French Enlightenment in 1772. "Then they will come to know their most vital interests and the true motives which should incline them towards what is good. For the less people know, the more obdurate they are in upholding, what they think they know."
Nearly 250 years ago, our nation signed a promissory note; "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of property."
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