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America - Land of the FREE?

One of the chapters from the upcoming book by R. Baird:
"The Unnecessary War"

Despite Watergate and the coup d'etat which surrounded the assassination of JFK we find many Americans still harbor illusions or delusions of being the protectors of democracy and freedom. It goes so far as to find American druggies of the Russell Opium Trade freeing Afghanistan after the Taliban had stopped the Opium exports and it involves a huge enterprise far bigger than just oil and the various spoils of war and financial things like BCCI and Aloha or Carlyle. The American people are programmed to believe and they are culpable by supporting the acts of this cabal or corruption that has colonized the world for corporations. There are many great illustrations I could bring forward at this juncture but I have chosen J. Edgar Hoover and that bastion of bureaucracy known as THE Bureau.

CORRUPT BUREAUCRACY AND THE BUREAU:

A young J. Edgar Hoover was utterly ashamed of the Bureau of Investigation that he found himself working for. Daugherty, Means and other deviates had been able to control President Harding due to some egregious sexual peccadilloes. J. Edgar learned well the nature of politics at a very early time in his diligent career that resulted in what I consider the greatest tyranny ever witnessed in the annals of history.

"Hoover's good name meant a great deal to him. While applying for a charge
account in a downtown store, he was denied credit. Asking the reason, he learned that there was another John Edgar Hoover in Washington, who had been running up bills and bouncing checks all over town. From then on he signed all his memos "J. Edgar Hoover." Hoover's concern with preserving his good name became an obsession, one which extended to the organization of which he was now a part.

Often, when he told people where he worked, they responded with knowing grins. In Washington, during the Harding administration, the Department of Justice had become known as the Department of Easy Virtue. After a time Hoover simply said he worked for the government.

According to Don Whitehead, the situation became so bad that Hoover considered resigning. Although there is no evidence to support this, it no doubt bothered him to be connected with an organization in which he could feel no pride.

Together Daugherty and Burns had very quickly turned the Bureau of Investigation into a dumping ground for political hacks. The number of special-agent posts being limited, many of the new arrivals were hired as dollar-a-year men. {No doubt people on the street were told these men were compassionate volunteers.} Some, especially those who worked on Prohibition cases, banked up to $2,000 a month. {And the acts of Old Joe Kennedy had no doubt something to do with this and the lifelong feud Hoover had with the Kennedy's.}

Yet this was a pittance compared with the take of another Burns appointee,
Gaston B. Means. {Dickens would not do any better in naming a character like
Mrs. Malaprop.} Even Burn's own background appeared clean alongside that of his former operative and close friend. During the war Means had worked for both the Germans and the British, spying on each for the other. One of the greatest con men of his time, Means would brag to associates that he had been charged, and acquitted, of every crime on the statute books, including murder. Because of Mean's notoriety, Burns avoided giving him a title, {At least J. Edgar gave a title to his live-in man for many decades.} but he did give him an office, which was just down the hall from Hoover's.

'At his disposal were badge, telephone, official stationery, an office, and the complete files of the Bureau of Investigation,' wrote Francis Russell, a biographer of the Harding era, adding. 'That was all he needed.' (1)

Already well acquainted with members of the underworld {I have every reason to believe from personal experience with the Buffalo and Detroit 'Purple Gang' and the stories of my father, that Hoover would also have been associated with them from even before going to Washington.}, Means sold Bureau protection to some, their own bureau files to others, and the promise to 'fix' federal cases to anyone interested. He also sold liquor licenses to bootleggers and pardons to those foolish enough not to buy licenses. Apparently he did quite well. Although he received only seven dollars a day
as a 'special employee' of the Bureau, he managed to maintain a huge house,
three servants, and a chauffeur-driven Cadillac.

Means also took on numerous 'special assignments of a confidential nature' for the administration. These ranged from suppressing a book which claimed that President Harding was of 'mixed blood' to spying on Democratic members of Congress and their families." (2) All in all I think George the First would have been proud to have this man on his team of dirty tricksters - what do you think?

Hoover's Hovering Hatreds:

The American government had many Nazi sympathizers as did the British. In fact Hitler had good reason to think he did not need to invade England and if he had he might have won the war before it barely even started. That will be part of the issue I will deal with as this book comes together. There was a eugenics program in the US and I do not blame Margaret Sanger and others who saw some of the good that can come of such programs. There were also many doctors who were just as bad as Mengele in all parts of the world. In fact Germany was the only nation that required forms and justification of humans being used in research. I still consider the testing of drugs on patients to be involving human as research guinea pigs. The extent of intrigues in all of this is more than some people can stand thinking about as they see the kind of morals involved. We must take a real look into things before they will be able to change. Here is a little something about the most fearful un-elected tyrant since the time of Christ - in my humble opinion that is J. Edgar Hoover.

"A mutual friend, the boxing champion Gene Tunney, provided the introduction. Hoover listened attentively as Stephenson (code Name Intrepid) presented the British proposal. The argument was made even more convincing by Stephenson's disclosure that a code clerk in the American embassy in London-the domain of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy {A Nazi and worse, if you study a lot more than the media the Merovingian control.}-had been intercepting communications between Roosevelt and Churchill and turning them over to the Germans.

Hoover responded by saying that although he would welcome working with the British, he was prohibited from doing so by the State Department mandate: 'I cannot contravene this policy without direct presidential sanction.'

'And if I get it?' Stephenson asked.

'Then we'll do business directly,' Hoover replied. 'Just myself and you.
Nobody else gets in the act. Not State, not anyone.'

'You will be getting presidential sanction,' Stephenson {A Canadian} told him." (3)

FDR, JEFFERSON AND COUNT RUMFORD:

COUNT RUMFORD: - Why did FDR say Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and
Count Rumford were the three most important Americans? (4) Why did the Holy
Roman Empire and the Hapsburgs make Benjamin Thompson a nobleman? James Bond had nothing on this man of mystery. This man seems to have been a lot like
Francis Bacon or John Dee in his interests about the esoteric alchemical world and spying. Might he have known some things about the Holy Roman Emperors of the Hapsburg House (and their Rothschild blood) that made him a lot like Saunière of Rennes-le-Chateau?

Zinn and Zorro:
HOWARD ZINN: - "THE HEROES AROUND US
By Howard Zinn

Recently, meeting with a group of high school students, I was asked by one of them: "I read in your book, A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, about the massacres of Indians, the long history of racism, the persistence of poverty in the richest country in the world, the senseless wars. How can I keep from being thoroughly alienated and depressed?

That same question has been put to me many times, in different forms, one of them being: 'How come you are not depressed?'

Who says I'm not? At least briefly. For a fraction of a second, such questions darken my mood, until I think: the person who asked that question is living proof of the existence everywhere of good people, who are deeply concerned about others. I think of how many times, when I am speaking somewhere in this country, someone in the audience asks, disconsolately: where is the people's movement today? And the audience surrounding the questioner, even in a small town in Arkansas or New Hampshire or California, consists of a thousand people!

Another question often put to me by students: you are taking down all our national heroes - the Founding Fathers, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy. Don't we need our national idols?

Granted, it is good to have historical figures we can admire and emulate.
But why hold up as models the fifty-five rich white men who drafted the Constitution as a way of establishing a government that would protect the interests of their class -- slaveholders, merchants, bondholders, land speculators? Why not recall the humanitarianism of William Penn, an early colonist who made peace with the Delaware Indians instead of warring on them as other colonial leaders were doing? Why not John Woolman, who in the years before the Revolution, refused to pay taxes to support the British wars, and spoke out against slavery. Why not Captain Daniel Shays, veteran of the Revolutionary War, who led a revolt of poor farmers in Western Massachusetts against the oppressive taxes levied by the rich who controlled the
Massachusetts legislature? Why go along with the hero-worship, so universal in our history textbooks, of Andrew Jackson, the slave-owner, the killer of Indians? Jackson was the architect of the Trail of Tears, when 4000 of 16,000 Cherokees died in their forced removal from their land in Georgia to exile in Oklahoma? Why not replace him as national icon with John Ross, a Cherokee chief who resisted the removal of his people, whose wife died on the Trail of Tears? Or the Seminole leader Osceola, imprisoned and finally killed for leading a guerrilla campaign against removal? Should not the Lincoln memorial be joined by a memorial to Frederick Douglass, who better
represented the struggle against slavery? It was that crusade, of black and white abolitionists, growing into a great national movement, which pushed a reluctant Lincoln into finally issuing a half-hearted Emancipation Proclamation, and persuaded Congress to pass the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Take another presidential hero, Theodore Roosevelt, who is always near the top of the tiresome lists of Our Greatest Presidents. And there he is on Mount Rushmore, as a permanent reminder of our historical amnesia - forgetting his racism, his militarism, his love of war. Why not
replace him as hero - granted, removing him from Mount Rushmore will take some doing - with Mark Twain? Roosevelt had congratulated an American general who in 1906 ordered the massacre of 600 men, women, children on a Philippine island. And Twain denounced this, as he continued to point to the cruelties committed in the Philippine war under the slogan "My country, right or wrong".

As for Woodrow Wilson, also occupying an important place in the pantheon of
American liberalism, shouldn't we remind his admirers that he insisted on racial segregation in federal buildings, that he bombarded the Mexican coast, sent an occupation army into Haiti and the Dominican Republic, brought our country into the hell of World War I, and put anti-war protesters in prison. Should we not bring forward as a national hero Emma Goldman, one of those Wilson sent to prison, or Helen Keller, who fearlessly spoke out against the war?

And enough worship of John Kennedy, a cold warrior who began the covert war
in Indochina, went along with the planned invasion of Cuba and was slow to act against racial segregation in the South. It was not until black people in the South took to the streets, faced Southern sheriffs, endured beatings and killings, and aroused the conscience of the nation that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations finally were embarrassed into enacting the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Should we not replace the portraits of our Presidents which too often take up all the space on our classroom walls, with the likenesses of grass roots heroes like Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi sharecropper? Mrs. Hamer was evicted from her farm and tortured in prison after she joined the civil rights movement, but became an eloquent voice for freedom. Or Ella Baker, whose wise counsel and support guided the young black people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the militant edge of the Movement in the deep South?

In the year 1992, the quincentennial of the arrival of Columbus in this hemisphere, there were meetings all over the country to celebrate Columbus, but also, for the first time, to challenge the customary exaltation of the Great Discoverer. I was at a symposium in New Jersey where I pointed to the terrible crimes against the indigenous people of Hispaniola committed by Columbus and his fellow Spaniards. Afterward, the other man on the platform, who was chairman of the New Jersey Columbus Day celebration, said to me: 'You don't understand - we Italian-Americans need our heroes.' I replied that yes, I understood the desire for heroes, but why choose a murderer and kidnapper for such an honor. Why not Joe DiMaggio, or Toscanini, or Fiorello LaGuardia, or Sacco and Vanzetti? The man was not persuaded. Do not the same misguided values that have made slaveholders, Indian-killers, and militarists the heroes of our history books operate today?

We have heard Senator John McCain, especially when he became a presidential
candidate, constantly referred to as a "war hero". Yes, we must sympathize with McCain's ordeal as a war prisoner, enduring the cruelties that inevitably accompany imprisonment. But must we call someone a hero who participated in the invasion of a far-off country, and dropped bombs on men, women, and children whose crime was resisting the American invaders?

I came across only one voice in the mainstream press which dissented from the general admiration for McCain - that of the poet, novelist, and BOSTON GLOBE columnist, James Carroll. Carroll contrasted the "heroism" of McCain, the warrior, to that of Philip Berrigan, who has gone to prison dozens of times for protesting, first, the war in which McCain dropped bombs, and then the dangerous nuclear arsenal maintained by our government. Jim Carroll wrote:

'Berrigan, in jail, is the truly free man, while McCain remains imprisoned in an unexamined sense of martial honor.'

Our country is full of heroic people who are not presidents or military leaders or Wall Street wizards, but who are doing something to keep alive the spirit of resistance to injustice and war. I think of Kathy Kelly and all those other people of Voices in the Wilderness, who, in defiance of federal law, have traveled to Iraq over a dozen times to bring food and medicine to people suffering under the U.S.-imposed sanctions.

I think also of the thousands of students on over a hundred college campuses across the country who are protesting their universities' connection with sweatshop produced apparel. At Wesleyan University recently, students sat in the president's office for thirty hours until the administration agreed to all of their demands.

In Minneapolis, there are the four McDonald sisters, all nuns, who have gone to jail repeatedly for protesting against the Alliant Corporations' production of land mines. I think too of the thousands of people who have traveled to Fort Benning, Georgia, to demand the closing of the murderous School for the Americas. And the West Coast longshoremen who participated in an eight-hour work stoppage to protest the death sentence levied against Mumia Abu-jamal. And so many more.

We all know individuals - most of them unsung, unrecognized, who have, often in the most modest ways, spoken out or acted out their belief in a more egalitarian, more just, peace-loving society. To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the unnoticed heroes of the present." (5)

ZORRO: - Don Diego - WHERE ARE YOU? We need an ethical nobleman or turncoat against his class of criminals.

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America - Land of the FREE?

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