A reply to aden’s recent post about the mistreatment of foreign workers by US forces in Iraq, Debt Bondage, Fraud, & Coercion on US Bases in Iraq. (And an elaboration on my previous diary, Our Beautiful Minds as well.)
Aden writes:
“Along with fraud and coercion, the authors … found on US bases in Iraq widespread de facto debt bondage coupled with the routine confiscation of foreign workers’ travel documents.”
Please tell me how this is any different, except in scale, from the way almost the entire population of the U.S. is controlled?
The very picture of our entire advertising-based system and its extension, the advertising-based political system.
Coercion: Try to drop OUT of that system and see what happens. Try to live without insurance. Without recourse to the usury/debt system. Without paying that part of your taxes that is used in graft, inefficiency and outright criminal behavior and action.
Go on.
I dare ya.
I got yer “coercion” right HERE!!!
Read on…
“Widespread de facto debt bondage”. C’mon…why do most people work at jobs that they loathe?
Because they cannot afford to stop. They will lose their houses, their cars…NONE of which they really own…their families will suffer; they won’t be able to “afford” (read “borrow money for”) any of life’s little pleasures…
They are SCARED.
Sounds like debt bondage to ME…
Why is higher education so expensive?
So that they can get the elite in debt from the get-go. Turn them into debt slaves and then use them as overseers.
And “the routine confiscation of foreign workers’ travel documents”?
Well…we’re not exactly there yet.
But it’s coming if Homeland Security has its way.
A national ID card.
“SHOW ME YOUR PAPERS!!!”
“Look, Obergruppenfuhrer Schicklegruber sir!!! THIS one’s got a bad CREDIT RATING!!!”
“INTO THE TRUCKS WITH HIM!!!”
So what do we have here in this article?
Once again, a focus upon one little aspect of what is really going wrong here to the exclusion of the real root of the problem.
This whole system has gone rotten.
It is cancerous AT THE ROOT, and yet, in true modern American fashion, we are getting upset at the symptoms instead of the cause.
Support our troops?
OK…most of our troops are in the miliitary because of “fraud, coercion [and] widespread de facto debt bondage”. See the story of little Lynndie English…the dog leash lady from the Abu Ghraib photos…for more on THAT. From a debt-ridden West Virginia trailer to “See The World And Be All That You Can Be” in three easy steps.
1-Enlist. As a last resort because you have not been educated well enough to do much more than run a fast food restaurant cash register that uses pictographs and an automatic calculator just in case you are almost totally functionally illiterate.
2-Get “trained”.
3-Torture and humiliate in the name of Justice and the American Way.
Nice.
Why are we in Iraq?
Fraud and the coercion of the American people through a massively produced propaganda effort.
Why are we the subject of widespread hostile attention from most of the Third World?
Because for 60+ years we have used fraud and coercion to steal the resources of that Third World.
Including masses of deceived, sub-minimum wage workers. Inside AND outside of the borders of the United States.
HUMAN resources…the most valuable ones of all.
What are our tools of fraud and coercion?
Domestically?
The media defrauds…on every level, including advertising (Institutionalized fraud), and what we laughingly refer to as “The Justice System” coerces.
Internationally?
The intelligence system defrauds, and the military coerces.
What was that “Shock and Awe” thing, again?
Coercion, of course.
And we are shocked that this is happening on a much smaller scale to a few hapless Asian workers?
Please.
Look in the mirror.
We have met the victims, and they are us.
Wake up.
The fuck stops here.
STARTS here, too.
Fraud and coercion?
Why…it’s the American Way!!!
Wake the fuck up.
“US military contractor Kellogg, Brown, and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton”, IS America.
Today, anyway.
As above, so below.
Sleep tight…
Or…
Wake the fuck up.
But don’t make believe that you do not know.
You’ve been told.
Now, either wake the fuck up or stop complaining and surrender.
This halfway shit just will not do.
“Waaaaah!!!! They’re mistreating foreign workers!!!”
SHIT!!!
They are MURDERING “foreign workers”.
And they are “mistreating” YOU!!!
And your families.
You children.
Your children’s children, if we do not do something soon.
Wake the fuck up.
STAND the fuck up!!!
It is beginning to look as if nothing much less will do.
AG
P.S. Aden…I say again. Please please PLEASE do not take offense at this post. It’s not about you.
It’s about US.
to post a recommendation/tip jar comment this time.
I’ll be away most of the day.
Hope this one doesn’t sink too fast…
AG
Good diary Arthur.
“Just try to drop out of that system”
How true.
And people don’t get how much our daily lives are controlled just by the very fact that we HAVE to function within the system as designed by the powers that be or we become one of those huddled on a subway grate trying to keep warm in the dead of winter.
And nobody wants that do they?
Fear will do the propaganda trick everytime. And at this point they don’t even need to pay marketers to make us feel this way… we get the picture each time we walk down the street.
How about finding a way to drop out of the system and showing others how to do so as well???
I think these are the types of solutions we need to be looking towards. Self-reliance, sustainability, etc. Do it ourselves and use the information technology we have to spread the meme/method.
Be rich.
Be rich enough to enjoy a passive income, rich enough to “self-insure,” to buy property, generators, solar panels, agricultural equipment, and anything else you cannot make or grow with cash.
If you are not quite that rich but somewhat affluent, you can drop out of credit cards simply by paying them off and not using them anymore unless you need to rent a car.
You will still have to work at the job you hate so that you can stay in housing, have transportation and obtain medical treatment, and you will still have to pay the insurance companies, but you might be able to have a small vegetable garden .
If, however, your income is not sufficient to pay off your credit cards and purchase the basics of life without them, it is just a matter of time before you are priced out of housing and health care, but it would not be advisable to sleep on a grate in the streets because that has been criminalized in most cities.
I have dropped out of it,…about 90% out, anyway, and looking for more.
But I cannot tell anyone else how to do it, because frankly I do not think that many people WILL do it.
Or can…
It’s about position, as much as anything else.
I was in a POSITION to do it.
Plus I was willing to take the hit. Which is severe, on one level.
I have no house.
I rent an apartment.
A cheap apartment, in a funky neighborhood.
I own my car free and clear.
A 200,00 mile car. 200,000 and counting.
I use no credit cards except those necessary to travel w/out carrying wads of cash.
I live VERY simply. (Read…very inexpensively.) No luxuries other than good food, really. And of course…independence. The most expensive luxury of all, these days
I do very little work that I do not damned well enjoy. That is not in some way “honorable”. By my own standards.
I have little or no insurance. INCLUDING health insurance. It has been said that the imminent prospect of hanging wondrously clears the mind. Well, living with no safety net wondrously makes one take care not to crash on ANY level.
I have learned to live with stresses that would have driven my former incarnation…married Momy/Daddy/kiddies w/a mortgage in the suburbs…right up the wall. But as I gradually moved TOWARDS this state, the other parts of my life just…dropped away.
The wife said “OH no!!! I can’t live like that.”
Bye bye…
The kiddies grew up and can take care of themselves to some degree, and I can still help them when they need it.
And I am free and clear.
I traded one set of stresses for another.
But I am MUCH happier and more productive now than I was then.
And…oh yes. I have a job that LETS me do this.
Traveling jazz musician/freelance NYC musician/high level music educator.
Can I ask anyone else to live like this?
No.
But I CAN ask people to wake up to the fact that they…and damned near everybody else here…are living under the debt bondage gun and that the entire society is going down because of it.
Which on the evidence that I see on the blogs even most of the SMARTEST of us seem to have somehow blocked from our line level consciousness because it is too painful to face. Plus the media-hypnosis system generously offers us a set of wonderful, made to order, safe-but-shallow mythic kiddie pools in which to splash away what little of our lives are left. What remains of our lives over which we actually have some control after the Corporate/PermaGov nexus is through with us, anyway.
Wake up to that fact, and decrease your reliance on this criminal system even 10% or 15%. Hell, if all the people in the U.S. stepped out of the system only 15%, the whole house of credit cards and loans would come crashing down and we would be able to start over.
That’s allI have to offer, anyway.
Try it.
You’ll like it.
(IF you have the courage to jump off of the cliff in the complete and unshakable belief that you will go up.)
Later…
AG
P.S GERONIMO….!!!!!!
OK Ductape & Arthur,
It is one thing to drop out of the pace of life in its commercial excess for yourself. But that is one hell of a way to not take care of children (and I’m not shooting at you personally Arthur, because you have kids. I don’t know the ins and outs of your specific situation). You have to come up with more than what an adult – an adult young enough to still be in reasonably good health – can do alone. The species does need to survive.
I’m not trying to get into a conversation here, as much as asking you to think seriously about what to do about raising kids “off the economy”, to be sane, not deprived of parenting, shelter, food, warmth, education, security, etc. Surely that doesn’t mean having to be enslaved to credit cards and hated jobs. But what and how? I’d like to see some ideas in that direction discussed by each of you here sometime in the future.
that it would be possible to raise children like that, unless, again, you are extremely wealthy and are able to essentially create and maintain your own separate society.
It would be difficult even outside of the US, there are places where it could be done, but it is unlikely that many Americans would wish to raise their children in a completely agrarian, non-industrialized culture.
Sadly, for those who are not in a high income class the prognosis is not good.
I don’t know. I have some relatives who live in rural areas or very small towns who do pretty well in avoiding the worst aspects of the culture. They do have gardens, do tons of canning and preserving, etc., but of course they aren’t self-sufficient.
I guess I’m thinking more of how to live without being contaminated by the culture, “in the world, but not of the world”, to make a poor use of writ. The essence, however, is not in the economic domain as much as the philosophical, emotional, and intellectual habits that have to be modeled, taught, and otherwise passed on. If people only rail agains the machine, or only grow up raised to do that, many will fall away as their sanity goes, or their cynicism is overwhelmed by the enormity of the obstacles. To avoid that takes resilience built in during childhood. That’s what needs some thought, as I see it.
Frequently they are extremely devout followers of one religious faith or another, they homeschool their children, do not have any media like TV, internet, radio, etc. and seldom venture outside their closed communities. Some rely on prayer in lieu of medical treatment, should the need for such arise.
In another situation I would argue that children thus reared are dealt rather limited choices regarding their future, their education will not be likely to prepare them for a “mainstream” university, nor their lack of socialization for many employments, however I don’t suppose that in the current situation they are more limited than their mainstream counterparts, whose career choices will be essentially limited to torturer or Wal-Mart associate, neither of which requires a high degree of traditional academic background, or exceptional social skills.
for over 15 years, until I thought my kids had a good grasp of what’s what. And their mtther is a VERY successful woman in her own right.
“Inside”…but successful in a middle/upper-middle class way.
So between the two of us..it all worked out.
Like I said…
Or can…
It’s about position, as much as anything else.
I was in a POSITION to do it.
Try everything…use what works.
For yourself and for those that matter to you.
I will also say again…hold back 15% of the usurious profit that fuels this nasty system, and the system breaks.’Live in a $350,000 or $500,000 home?
In a mostly white neighborhood somewhere?
Move.
Buy a less expensive home in a mixed-race. working class neighborhood. Your kids will be better off seeing the reality of life.
Got a $27,000 car?
Sell it.
By a good used Toyota or Honda or Subaru. 65,000 miles and up. $10,000 and below. W/a manual transmission. And take CARE of it.
There’s MORE than 15% right there
There are ways…
AG
Since my original post has fallen off the page, I’m crossposting my response.
At first, seeing “Aden please don’t take offense” I thought to myself “oh, oh.” But after reading your diary, I was very glad to see such a long response to my post, even if it was used in a way that at first seems contrary to my original intent.
Arthur, if you haven’t done so already, would you be willing to listen to the audio interview I have posted on the tradio21 web site?
I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on the matters you’ve discussed in your diary, after you’ve listen to the interview with Cam. I am making an assumption that you might not have listened yet to the interview, because there have been very few referrals from BT to the tradio21 site.
As I said, I find Cam to be very articulate and I believe he tells a very compelling story.
I have read your diary several times over. You have brought up some interesting points -I have not responded to all of them, but here is what I have come up with.
For me, I see a difference between the young Nepalese man described in Cam’s story and a recent graduate from an American college with $40,000 in student loans, possibly a $1,400/ month 30 yr. mortgage, a $250/ month car lease payment, plus living expenses and credit card debt.
As it plays out in the world we live in today, I find my concern and efforts drawn to a group of people that I consider to be in more vulnerable circumstances than the group you have chosen to include in your description of debt bondage, fraud, and coercion.
I think you have taken my post to imply that because I am focusing my efforts and attention on these acts of exploitative practices by subcontractors of KBR in Iraq, I am ignoring, or denying, the existence of a manipulative consumer based society that creates a type of self-perpetuating behavior.
I am sitting here in my local, independently owned, coffee shop on a beautiful chilly Chicago Saturday, watching a stream of cars painfully slowly inch by; giant SUVs, mini vans, old clunkers, trucks, vans, and a few medium & small size cars, almost all with at least 80% of their usable space empty. The occasional lone bike carefully tries to weave its way through this line.
I write my response to you, believing that I am watching the results of a complex powerful “system” that has embedded itself within the psyche of our culture. I believe this “system” has been built and reinforced through a long history of use of the US political system. Part of this “system” threw up a multitude of advertisements days after Sept. 11th making patriotism and the buying of a car one in the same.
I have written two pieces on my concern of the manipulation of US human trafficking policy to placate the obsessive consumption of oil and oil based products, here & here . The third is still in the works.
As I state in some of these posts, I feel there is a human cost related to the consumer cultures of the wealthy nations. I am a participant in the economy of wealthy nations. I consume. I try to do so with caution and consciousness of these hidden costs. I know I don’t always succeed in that effort because these “human costs” are very well hidden. I am a believer in a globalized economy, but I have deep disagreements with the current method of implementation -another audio interview, should you be interested.
When discussing the new bankruptcy laws that are now in effect in the US, I often find myself stating that a “new class” of people will find them self in a “type” of debt bondage. However, I would not write about these people in the same way I write about human trafficking subjects on the tradio21 site.
For me, there is a dramatic difference between the compulsions and desires of the middle and upper classes and the conditions of the many people in this world who live on less than $2.00 a day.
I have much more to say on this, and in rereading it see the need for refinement, but it has already become quite a lengthy response and I must get onto other projects of the day.
Thanks again for taking the time to put together an entire diary/ response to my post. I look forward to continued dialogue on these matters.
to listen to that interview.
A few short comments will have to do.
You say:
“For me, I see a difference between the young Nepalese man described in Cam’s story and a recent graduate from an American college with $40,000 in student loans, possibly a $1,400/ month 30 yr. mortgage, a $250/ month car lease payment, plus living expenses and credit card debt.”
Of course there is a difference.
But it is only one of degree.
As above, so below.
My point is not that we should ignore the injustices that are being committed in our names. My point is that to the people who commit those injustices, the “difference” between that unfortunate Nepalese man, a welfare mother, a working class, middle class or upper middle class American or just about any OTHER denizen of the planet Earth who is not of the ruling classes is damned near nothing. They see themselves as higher beings, and will quite happily eat ANY lower animal regardless of its place in the pecking order of financial evolution.
Compared to them a scuffling Nepalese and a $150,000/year middle executive are almost on the same plane of existence. The lower classes are there to be USED. ALKL the lower classes, including the overseer class. When you have an annual income in the multi-millions and assets/allies that reside in the BILLION dollar area, the difference between a barely survivable income and $150,000/year is negligible.
Barely worthy of notice.
Ypou say:
“I think you have taken my post to imply that because I am focusing my efforts and attention on these acts of exploitative practices by subcontractors of KBR in Iraq, I am ignoring, or denying, the existence of a manipulative consumer based society that creates a type of self-perpetuating behavior.”
Not at all.
Like I said, I just dove off of that particular board to go further.
If we are to stop these practices, we must stop THE WHOLE MACHINE. We too often focus in on one or another of the literally billions of enslaved, and the fact is, unless we reform the whole system not only can we not do much to help individuals or groups of individuals, but if we do not keep a clear eye on the entire mechanism that does the enslaving…that indeed enslaves almost ALL of us…then all we are doing is pulling out leaves of weeds without getting to their roots.
Listen… slaves cannot free slaves. ESPECIALLY if they do not even clearly realize the depths of their own slavery.
And that is my point.
The only political point that I have been trying to make in my short career on these blogs.
We are an enslaved people.
House niggers to the stars.
We have been fed a bill of media goods…an ongoing mythic control system…about how “free” we are.
AND EVEN THE OPPOSITION TO THE SYSTEM THAT FEEDS US THIS IDEA BUYS INTO IT!!!
You cannot help that Nepalese if you are only one rung of a million rung ladder above him.
And if you do not see and constantly recognize that scale, then…
“GOTCHA!!!” go the hustlers.
Gotcha.
You say:
“I am sitting here in my local, independently owned, coffee shop on a beautiful chilly Chicago Saturday… “
It is NOT “independently owned” if any money whatsoever is being paid out in loans. In exorbitant rent. In fixes to mob-run unions. Protection money. And if you know anything about the restaurant business in a major city…and I do, it’s in the family…then you know that the chances of that being “independently owned” are slim and none. IT is in the system just the same way as are the rest of us.
And the “system” has gone rotten.
All I mean to do here is to emphasize the necessity for complete and continuous understanding of whjat is up.
No faulting anyone…just a reminder.
We are all in the same boat, and as the prophet Micheal Ray Richardson (Yup…that’s the way he spelled it. You could look it up.) once said in another context…
“The ship be sinkin’.”
Later…gotta run.
AG