This is not the end of the American Empire by a long shot. It’s the end of YOUR share in it.
Bush & Co, the Carlyle Group for example, and fellow owners of private capital, our oligarchs if you will, are pulling away from the station. They don’t need you or I anymore. The apparatus is in their hands, the control of money and the control of the weapons. The most powerful arsenal in the world is now protecting them. The rest of us, once stakeholders, join the downwardly mobile working class.
It’s hard to feel sorry for the American middle class, ejected at the eleventh hour from the gravy train. What was necessarily our right to claim the world’s bounty, gleaned from the health and happiness and lives of the poor, its rightful and needful inheritors? It’s not like we had been doing our best to invite everyone on board to share in earth’s resources equitably. Now at least we’ll get the share we deserve, the leftovers we thought good enough for everybody else. Exploitive capitalism lives on. For want of capital to invest ourselves, we are no longer members. We join the same side of the wall as the Mexicans and the Palestinians, the globalized masses.
Capitalism’s intellectual apparatchiks surround us from the TVs, newspapers, think tanks and college campuses. Are they your peers, in income level and security, as they maintain the fiction of your continued prosperity? When you finally face the impenetrable wall where you used to believe you had access to your ruler, the government that used to administrate communal affairs at your behest, you’ll see their smiling faces atop that wall, perfectly satisfied to keep you out.
Now the trouble is, where do we look for a break in that wall? We won’t get very far shouting HEY, YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO SHARE THAT LOOT WITH US!
There’s still a belief that truth and a sense of propriety could overcome the courtiers and Praetorian guard. But truth about what? WMD? Black-box voting? Nothing yet has seemed egregious enough. The folks behind the 9-11 Truth movement, seemed to know that all along. A few very brave people are still hoping their truth will win out.
It bothers me to think that there will be people who won’t get to see this video. It scares me to think that there will be those who have an opportunity to see this video but will refuse to watch. And it positively terrifies me that there will be many who will see this video and refuse to believe. These are the people who still think, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that George Bush is a good man.
I’m looking forward to the sequel: SEPTEMBER 11 RE-REVISITED. EXPLOSIVES WERE USED TO BRING DOWN THE BUILDINGS!
I saw a great bumper sticker yesterday that matched current semantics and the growing awareness of capitalism’s urbane sprawl issues. The sticker read “This is not an empire. This is a planet.”
That’s an awareness I definitely believe more Americans should consider: what is our global footprint? and what, in the names of civil rights and environment are we going to do to lessen the negative impact and consequences, both in aspects of our larger mechanisms (such as corporations) and ourselves (such as personal recycling)?
Yes, I’m glad that I have seen “Loose Change”, etc., and spent a small amount of time reviewing aspects of the many questions such documentaries raise. Personally, I believe that within such films are valid questions, yet they also seem to mix a whole lot of smaller questions to infer those questions (if answered) would resolve the totality of a bad situation.
For instance in the filmclip above, the expert states he has never seen a certain phenomona before, therefore it must be investigated. It’s true, we never have seen a kamikaze suicide hijack dive into the side of a sky scraper. This man certainly never had – not until 9/11. It’s probably true: the plane attack scenario was one of many possible terrorist scenarios that prior to occuring our own government outlined a need for awareness for, then “lost” those documents in a bureacratic backflow, perhaps much like FEMA surrendered a portion of protective efficiency to the same, when dealing with Katrina. It’s quite likely, there is more to be learned about 9/11. What? I don’t know.
Is there bravery in holding on to every aspect of a “conspiracy theory”? That I really don’t know either. The debate continues – was it internal bombs or were these tiny explosions part of the internal implosion that at certain points exceded the collapse of the external walls? Stealth airplane surveillance? or tiny fragments of imperfections in film and visual media?
I’m NOT holding my breath for these questions or their answers just yet. I think there are plenty of other more substantial trails to be followed and investigated – especially post 9/11 reactions and convoluted motives of suspicious escalation. And I think that solutions to future needs, i.e. electing better leaders, has many vital questions, including “How will the U.S. end this current war, and what will we do once it is over?”
To be sure… yes, I realize someday, anyday, it would be beneficial to learn that a pebble in the shoe of Joseph McCarthy was the source of his irritating rock-throwing nature to our country’s history. The desire to prove the pebble will either be “noble” (if proven) or potentially “disnoble”, as cargo cult, as distractor, as sideshow, if we don’t first stop the larger rocks that are already in the air.
Just what was Kennedy’s connection to Marilyn Monroe?
Is Britney Spears the doppelganger of terrorism?
Can a war of ignorance be answered by unproved speculations?
Yes and no. It’s important to weigh the questions, but moreso, it’s of greater important to first acknowledge the elephant in the room, then, maybe ask the shape of its trunk.
Since I’m back to the trunk, he’s another bumper sticker. “If voting counts, how come counting votes don’t?”. The answer of margins is to decrease the gaps.
End the greed war. Support alternate energy sources and corporate reform.
Honk if you love aliens.
The “conspiracy theorists” risk, for one thing, being tasered, possibly to death. (and beyond) and the Coward Pigs will get away with it. As they ALWAYS do, all they have to do is say that the prisoner was “acting crazy”.
Then the Piggies will gather around the torture videos and masturbate each other. That’s what they’re like.
There’s no such thing as a “Good Cop”.
Pigs are Pigs, and Real Humans are Real Humans.
A Real Human might convert himself into a Pig, get the necessary Pig training/brainwashing, but a Pig can never again regain Humanity.
I realize this answers two posts at once.
Jonah, you made a reply but hardly furnished an answer.
I wasn’t trying to challenge the right to ask questions or speculate answers, as with Eric’s post or those films or those journalists or theorists.
Not every political theorist needs to practice being a vegan no more than peace marchers are exclusively Christian, Buddhist, Democrat, Republican, pacifists, radicals, pigs, coyotes, or birds on a line. Not every watch dog represents all dogs, and like Eric’s recent post at http://notmytribe.wpcomstaging.com/2007/media/dishonest-scholarship-and-street-justice.html – I believe misinformation abounds!
The existence of valid questions do not prove, will never prove every answer as correct.
Yeah, I just get a little harsh once I see a taser video.
The end of an empire is easy to predict, once the emperor makes that fatal remark, “We will prevail, because we have the mightiest army the world has ever seen”.
GW did that at the graduation ceremonies for West Point and Annapolis and the Springs here, in 2002. Then in February of 03 at Fort Hood Texas he said almost exactly those words.
Close enough to get the attention of God I suppose.
Empires are doomed as soon as they are thus declared.
I know a lot of people who will question if that’s God or if it’s a law of nature, but no matter. The fact that it always happens like that should teach the “Leader of the (free or otherwise) World” a little lesson.
Problem is, when your nation is turned over to an empire, your nation falls with the empire.
I kind of got used to America, you know? Most of the people are tolerably good.
I’m down with Will Rogers on that, there aren’t any strangers, just friends I haven’t met (Yet)
The film was pathetic and a waste of time except in order to study cultism and the psychology of conspiracy fanatics.
Eric, you and Marie seem to be increasingly lost in inner space. Neither you two, nor any of the other 9-11 conspiracy cultists, have even the slighest evidence other than your imaginations to back up your fantasy beliefs that the Bush Klan deliberately planted explosives inside the Twin Towers.
This film, that spent a lot of time with theologians and actors pretending to be authoritative voices, too, has nothing other than pure speculation and hatred and fear of ‘Big Government’ to offer the public. Checkout the web sites that have done copious debunking of your fellow 9-11 fetishists below, Guys.
The Popular Mechanics article “Debunking the 9/11 Myths” (March 2005, published as a book in August 2006)
The Scientific American article “Fahrenheit 2777: 9/11 has generated the mother of all conspiracy theories” (June 2005)
Implosionworld.com article “A Critical Analysis of the Collapse of WTC Towers 1,2 & 7 From an Explosives and Conventional Demolition Industry Viewpoint” (August 2006)
NIST’s fact-sheet: “Answers to Frequently Asked Questions” (August 2006)
E-Skeptic.com article: “Conspiracy Theories: The 9/11 Truth Movement in Perspective” (September 2006)
The Time Magazine article: “Why the 9/11 Conspiracies Won’t Go Away” (September 2006)
The Government Counter Misinformation Team article ”The Top Sept 11th Conspiracy Theories” (September 2006)
Counterpunch.org “Special Report: Debunking the Myths of 9/11” (November 2006)
Debunking911.com
911Myths.com
Why on earth do you think that the fall of the Twin Towers was a Bush plot?
You didn’t watch the video, did you!
I liked that here was NO speculation as to plot.
They simply offered the scientific evidence
that the official version does not add up.
and all but two of the links offered state in their titles that they are set up to ridicule any conspiracy theorist.
Like the USA PATRIOT ACT, how many hundred pages is it? Yet it was on the desk of every congressman within weeks.
Actually, I did watch the film, Eric, just as I said I had. It spotlighted people like Martin Sheen and David Ray Griffin, and I like I said in my earlier comment, these are actors and religious folk that were focused on a lot throughout the film.
What I found interesting was the connection with how many religious people are falling into believing all this conspiracy stuff. Especially the religious types connected with quasi religious cult centers like The Center for Process Studies. You seem oblivious to the cult like aspects of this belief that 9/11 was a Bush plot of some sort, and embrace them.
Now, I ask you and Marie once again to explain why you two think that the fall of the Twin Towers was a Bush plot? And, by the way, I wish you and the others the best of fates in the court case unfolding today and tomorrow.
Tony, I never said that I thought it was a Bush plot. Just that it didn’t seem possible that the towers would collapse as they did without human intervention. Planned demolition. Just like Tower 7 which was “pulled” using explosives that would’ve taken days to set up.
I, too, have been following the events and facts still being uncovered concerning the 9/11 twin towers collapse and the subsequent conspiracy theories.
The ultimate question in my mind has always been, continues to be, why Bush did not immediately support an investigation….? That alone, certainly lends more momentum to the conspiracy vortex. Only a fool would have resisted an inquiry and further investigation.
And Bush is just the fool to do it.
The patriot act is a big honkin’ piece of very detailed legalism.
There’s no way it could have been whooped together that damn quick, so it had to be in the wings, waiting.
My sister told me a couple of years ago that Bush wouldn’t kill 3000 of “His” citizens… it’s nearly 4000 just in the VietRaq quagmire.
He sure was quick to take full political advantage of it though.
And this link here:
The Government Counter Misinformation Team article ”The Top Sept 11th Conspiracy Theories” (September 2006)
Which Government? The same ones who promised to actually SPREAD misinformation as a weapon against al Qa’eda back in 2002?
And then told us a week later that it was all a lie, that they weren’t really setting up a official bureau of Lies.
Marie, the whole point of this film is to push the idea that the Bush Admisntration blew up these buildings. The idea is that there was a plot involving planned demolition inside these buildings with explosives that nobody has seen and nobody would have seen since it just didn’t happen that way, now did it?
Hey though! There is a real conspiracy that did happen though. Two of them, in fact. The conspiracy by the Carter Administration to fight a secret war against the Soviet Union using Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden. And the second plot was by Ronald Reagan to fight a proxy war aginst Iran using Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Are you or Eric interested in those conspiracies?