The "O" Word: The Great American Oligarchy

[Radio_Lady]

September 2 / 3, 2006

The "O" Word
The Great American Oligarchy



By STEPHEN FLEISCHMAN

I never thought I'd ever hear the United States of America called an "oligarchy". But now I have.

My dictionary says an oligarchy is a form of government where most or all political power effectively rests with a small segment of the society. As Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, puts it, "Oligarchies are often controlled by a few powerful families whose children are raised and mentored to be heirs of the power of the oligarchy, often at some sort of expense to those governed." Does that sound like the administration of George W. Bush?

For all my life, ever since grade school, I've been taught that the United States of America is a paragon of democracy. We have popular elections on every level -- local, state and Federal. We have two houses of Congress, a President and a Supreme Court, a system of checks and balances, a Constitution second to none, and a Bill of Rights, the pride of our forefathers. Most Americans see our country as Ronald Reagan did -- the shining city on the hill --beacon to the world.

But here we are, today, when, according to the most recent CNN/USA Today poll, six of ten Americans see the Iraq war as a huge mistake and want our troops out of there, yet they are incapable of making that happen. Why? It's simple. It's the oligarchy that's keeping them there -- that tight little group around Bush in the White House and Rumsfeld in the Pentagon, who run things for corporate feeders. You know who they are -- Halliburton, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin, to name a few of the no-bid war profiteers. They can make 18 billion dollars, allocated for the reconstruction of Iraq, disappear in the blink of an eye. That is really slight of hand.

The war in Iraq is the best example of an oligarchy at work-produced and managed to make money and to secure the remaining reserves of oil in the world. As they say, the world's oil has "peaked". It's all down hill from here, so we better grab it before somebody else does. To do this, we've got to keep a perpetual war spinning in the best oil-producing areas, the Middle East and the Caspian region. (We'd do it in Venezuela if we could.) With Iraq as a pivotal base, the oligarchy is planning to stay there into the foreseeable future. Any talk about drawing down troops is just that, talk -- a tease offered for the 2006 mid-term elections. Using Iraq as a military base also explains the moves on former Soviet states, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and others in the Russian orbit --targets of the giant oil conglomerates.

Oligarchies operate in secret. They spawn conspiracy theories. The 9/11 World Trade Towers collapse, for example. That garnered more than a million references in Google. Enough conspiracy theories for everyone. But the event caused a number of reputable construction engineers to raise their eyebrows. They saw it as a controlled demolition, as did Dr. Steven E. Jones, Physicist and Archaeometrist of Brigham Young University, who has done a major investigation on his own. He asks, why was this possibility not investigated by the 9/11 Commission and other governmental investigating agencies at the time? Not much help from the mainstream media, either. They accepted the Commission finding that it was an al-Qaeda attack. That's been the conventional wisdom ever since.

Everything is up for questioning. Does the media have the chutzpah to investigate any of them? No way. The Israel Lobby? No way. Untouchable.

Link to the full article here.

Stephen Fleischman, television writer-director-producer, spent thirty years in Network News at CBS and ABC, starting in 1953. In 1959, he participated in the formation of the renowned Murrow-Friendly "CBS Reports" series. In 1983, Fleischman won the prestigious Columbia University-Dupont Television Journalism Award. In 2004, he wrote his memoir. See: www.ARedintheHouse.com