Truth Warrior
08-27-2008, 05:05 AM
How – Actually – Does the State Work?
'Do As You Are Told, Or We Will Kill You'
by Jeff Knaebel (http://www.lewrockwell.com/knaebel/mailto:%20jksatmitra@rediffmail.com)
"Communism is power based upon force and limited to nothing, by no kind of law and by absolutely no set rule."
~ Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, page 361
The (American) "security organs" can designate and kill as they see fit
"Solicitor General Ted Olson has described the process: 'There is no requirement for the executive branch to spell out its criteria for who qualifies as an illegal combatant. There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations made by the executive that are going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.'"
"In other words, what is safe to say today, might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the 'law' is merely whim of the leader and his minions: their 'instincts' determine your guilt or innocence, and these gut 'feelings' can change from day to day. This is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government. And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder."
"Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people. But that is our reality. To overcome what seems to be widespread cognitive dissonance, we need only examine the publicly available record. There is nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know – if they choose to know it."
"Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval. Nor is it necessary any longer for the president to approve new names added to the target list…the 'security organs' can designate and kill as they see fit. There is no way of knowing how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally… the death squads are able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to enter countries surreptitiously." – Chris Floyd, truthout.org (http://truthout.org/), 2 October 2006
"Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice. Nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity."
~ Lord Acton
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
~ Patrick Henry
George W. Bush: "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck at them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did …" – as reported by Palestinian leaders to whom Bush spoke after the Iraq invasion.
There you have it, folks. In a nutshell, the quotes above tell us our place in the system: do as you are told, or we will kill you. The rest is all detail. One nuance of history might be highighted for the reader. The men who possess these powers of life and death have rather consistently exhibited patterns of psychopathic behavior in the form of mass murder and torture. In addition to Bush, Hitler and Lenin quoted above, you might consider, among recent others, Mussolini, Stalin, Truman, Mao, Suharto. The list continues ad nauseam throughout history. Hierarchical power structures appear to be an evolutionary dead end for humanity.
My Experiential Observations of Power (abridged)
I've served my country in foreign war zones and returned to face the derision of protestors whom I was supposedly "protecting." I rotated myself from resentment to an understanding thatthey were correct. My friend who had chained himself to other war protestors while they burned their draft cards was a braver man than I.
For them it had worked. Neither conscripted nor prosecuted, they were too hot to handle. I have arrived at a deep respect for the moral competence and physical courage of my young friend. Nonviolence is not for cowards.
I saw "over there" some of the same big construction contractors who, after merger and consolidation, are now gorging on Iraq war profits. I recall a naval leadership journal which carried photos of a French tank mired in a rice paddy circa 1948, alongside a photo of an American tank mired in a rice paddy circa 1968. Paired images of a killing field, stalked hyena-like by cold-blooded central bankers and their political consorts. The dead are but abstractions reported to a balance sheet as corporate dividends. Political payoffs are footnoted as "other expenses."
Today we are viewing the updated remix as "Shock and Awe" murder-of-every-living-thing-from-a-safe-distance. It would pound the earth itself into submissive dust on the Emperor's shoes. An imperialist gone mad in its greed for oil, for corporate dividends, for unlimited power, its mass murder spares not woman nor child nor cow. The revolving door of power brokers rotating between government-defense contracting-banking leads to the same bloody dead end, generation after generation.
Of Power, this much I know from experience both over and under:
It aggrandizes itself, feeding upon everything in its path
It comes as corporate CEO and abusive husband, as admiral and chairman, as dictator and patriarch
Greed is its energy and cowards it crushes, although itself cowardly
Courage it cannot withstand, especially moral
It corrupts absolutely kindness into cruelty
It knows no limit of acquisitiveness
It attracts the corruptible and the corrupt
It is pure evil in the hands of no matter whom
It usually wears a mask
In the five generations with which I have had direct contact it has brought misery, murder, rape and pillage
And the nuclear bomb
The battle is for the mind of man. The prize is no longer in vanquishing some "other." The battle is either all against all or all for all. There is no "other" to conquer. We are all in it together. We either grow a garden together or we cannibalize each other in the course of turning the earth into a desert. We can either plant trees together, or race to be the last person standing to cut down the last tree.
ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMICS OF THE STATE
"Total war is the invention of the modern State."
~ Michael Rozeff, 2 August 2005
"Since a human being has no power to create life, he has, therefore, no right to destroy life."
~ T. N. Khoshoo, 1995
The State as an organization keeps on running with periodic changes of management called elections. Because of its ability to make laws and impose taxes, its power is limited only by the tolerance of the people for their exploitation. The State can coerce its members without reciprocal consequences. It operates without fear of reprisal. It can use aggressive force to make others do things against their will. Its "managers" are protected by sovereign immunity. Because it both rules and taxes, it suffers no agency costs for its errors: it simply shifts the cost to taxpayers.
"To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed adding insult to injury. But that is exactly what the State does. Read the Congressional Record; follow the proceedings of the State legislatures; examine our statute books. Testing each Act separately by the law of equal liberty, you will find that a good nine tenths of existing legislation serves not to that fundamental social law, but either to prescribe the individual's personal habits, or worse, to create and sustain commercial, industrial, financial and proprietary monopolies which deprive labor of a large part of the reward that it would receive in a true free market."
~ Benjamin Tucker, 1890
The US is not a contractual State in the sense of an organization owned by its principals, the citizens. It has become a predatory State in the sense of a corporation owned and operated by a small group. This evolution was made inevitable by the weaknesses of the Constitution and actions of the power brokers and legislature. Rozeff (3 August 2006) estimates that the top management group of USA comprises between 15 and 60 members. These members rotate in revolving door fashion between and among various centers of social and political power. The figureheads and mouthpieces – the Kennedys, Nixons, Clintons, Bushes – are all fungible, each can be replaced by another without perturbing the system. In this manner do elections always come to a choice between two morally indistinguishable candidates. Likewise, no matter who you vote for, the political establishment always gets elected.
A few dozen people control the vast bureaucracies. The State's power depends upon holding the loyalty and obedience of these career employees within the power structure. This is done by passing out special privileges and emoluments. Napoleon noted the amazing lust of men for awards and decorations. The final tool in the arsenal of control is to heap honors upon those who have been corrupted.
M.S. Rozeff (see Lew Rockwell website) argues that the State lowers the cost of immorality, and people subsequently demand more State. Those who do occasionally resist face an "immortal" foe that owns the law-making power. People will rationalize their greater demand for immorality with new ideas of right and wrong. Giving up liberty in exchange, they will come to worship authority, equality, the use of force, and power. They will move away from self-reliance, responsibility, obligation to elders and the disadvantaged of society. They will accept, even enjoy their new situation. The State corrupts social morals and human beings.
"Buy the law-makers, buy the laws, and you become the law itself. That is the definition of corporate freedom."
~ William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org (http://truthout.org/), 2 July 2006
The State Corrodes the Moral Fabric of Society
Rozeff continues with a logical listing of how the State weakens society.
The State's power is desirable to many in itself and for what it can enable. It is a focal point for any group that wishes to gain at the expense of others by using State power. The State's existence arouses political competition for power that diverts people from productive activity to theft from others.
The State's existence provides incentive for expansion of power that can be used for one group's gain at expense of another.
The State is an endorsement of immoral behavior (theft) that is declared legal. This encourages similar behavior within society.
State monopoly over law and justice in itself weakens society. Individuals must use the State to settle disputes, thus losing the remedy of private institutions to mediate justice. They lose pathways of communication, consort and cooperation with each other. They can no longer forgive trespass in a regime of State prosecution. Compassion is sacrificed at the altar of greed.
State-made law displaces deeper and more permanent sources of natural law, thus cutting ancient roots and destabilizing society.
The State offers opportunities for gain available to its "management class." This not only fosters immorality, but provides incentive to keep on increasing the State's power.
The State leverages its power by exploiting the natural weakness of mankind. In order to increase its domination, the State makes immoral behavior acceptable by making it officially legal. It fosters immorality by making it a group action for which the individual is no longer held accountable.
States, being immortal, can wait indefinitely for its opportunity, always ready to amplify any lack of virtue or weakness in society. Such weaknesses include failing to take responsibility for one's own life, shifting burdens to others, extracting un-earned benefits from others, excessive fear or greed, desires for revenge or domination, communal rivalries with friction and hatred, exacerbating racial or class prejudice.
He discusses how the State maintains power. Although the rulers make some attempt to rationalize their costs of dominating society, given the Central Bank's power to print money, there is little incentive for cost control. Furthermore, it is always other people's money. Need more money for more bombs? Just crank up the printing press – and rob the people with the silent tax of inflation. Some of the means in current practice are here excerpted and adapted from M.S. Rozeff:
Removing constitutional checks and balances
Subverting the Bill of Rights
Abrogation of Habeas Corpus
Secret police and spying on citizens
National identification cards
Manipulation through tax incentives
Creating and exacerbating fears of terrorism
Ballot access control
Rigging of electronic voting machines
Public smear of dissidents (e.g., "they are soft on terrorism")
Creating error of psychological identification. Merging of one's native cultural identity into identity with the State, e.g., patriotism
Promote the error of attributing economic or social progress to the State
Illusion of order, playing on the fear of anarchy. Fear of one's fellow man fosters support for the State
Illusion of security. State has no resources other than what it takes from the people, thus actually increasing their insecurity. Aggressive foreign policy further reduces objective security, although propaganda makes it subjectively appear the opposite.
Feeding the lust for power and wealth through emoluments granted by the State to its loyal agents
Propaganda and encouragement of gullibility and ignorance.
Classifying government documents as "secret," beyond view of the people
Falsification government statistics on employment, commerce, money supply, debt, balance of payments, inflation, mortgage-lending funds
As per Representative Jim Cooper's new book (August 2006), keep two sets of books – a private citizen would go to jail for these and many other routine government abuses.
Diversion of Social Security Trust funds to general operating budget
Creating and financing sub-rosa "off-budget" government operations
Printing press expansion of money supply through the Federal Reserve
Direct State intervention in the market through the "plunge protection team" and the "market stabilization fund"
Innumerable laws and regulations to create economic incentives and disincentives in order to channelize subjects' efforts to the State's ends: "social engineering."
Money and banking regulations that place the citizen under surveillance and control the movement of money
Offloading agency and overhead costs onto the private economy, such as for collection of sales taxes, deduction of payroll taxes and social security contributions
Making spies of private citizens through banking regulations that require surveillance of customers and filing "Suspicious Activity Reports" for any "unusual" transaction It will be of little avail to the people, even that laws be made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood… if they undergo such incessant changes that no man knowing what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow …Public instability gives unreasonable advantage to the sagacious, the clever, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or affecting the value of different species of property presents a new harvest to those who watch for change and can trace its consequences. A harvest raised not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of their fellow citizens. Thus are laws made for the few, not for the many."
~ James Madison, Federalist 62
The Methods of Domination
The goal of power acting through the State is to increase its domination of society. This requires aggression against society which the citizens may at some point resist, often because of the economic burdens imposed to support power. Power does nothing economically productive – it is a parasite. There is an incentive to fool the people, who greatly outnumber the power elite. There are incentives to improve the technology of domination and to raise the costs for citizens to mobilize any resistance. A few of the many means of domination are listed:
Direct, raw violence perpetrated by the State
Onerous laws and laws so complex that no one can understand – you are never safe from "breaking" the laws, so numerous you cannot possibly be cognizant of them
Inculcate "ignorance of the law is no excuse"
Make public examples of lawbreakers by delay of justice or by issuing long sentences
Arbitrary imprisonment of innocents to make people afraid of power
Random and capricious police violence to induce fear in the people
Propaganda, lies and censorship
Concealment of true aims, actions and results thereof
Control of education to mold the minds of youth
Break up families by creating dependency on State welfare and public education
Spy on dissidents – install nationwide surveillance
Inculcate obedience as a primary virtue
Raise false fears and pretend to mitigate them (e.g., color-coded "alerts")
Conflate the State with country and love of country
Appeal to popular values like equality, universal health care, "no child left behind"
Make side payments to key individuals or segments of population to create belief in a "free lunch"
Spread the false belief that the subjects control the State, own it or are the State, and that the president or leader is hired by the voters
Pursuant to existing statutory National Emergency Powers of the President, delegate to him the authority to seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, restrict travel, take control of the stock exchange and more ….
Take control of necessary goods and services that empower the State to deliver essential needs
Rely on public apathy to maintain obedience
Use compulsory public education as tool of conditioning
Exaggerate government role in fulfilling needs of individuals and society
Disarm the populace
Increase ignorance and gullibility of the citizenry
Portray State as crucial to society and order and security
Conceal the costs of government
Conceal the facts and effects of government interventions
Portray State as an up-lifter of mankind, savior of the masses and downtrodden
Spread false belief that State speaks and acts on behalf of and for the people
Spread belief that State agents have been hired by the people to do a job
Absorb or co-opt creative power centers in society
Divide and rule – create factions and communal disharmony
Use payoffs and favors of all sorts to keep people quiet, to create obligations, to blackmail (see, e.g., Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man)
Inculcate the conditioning that it is social duty to accept State dictates even when you disagree, that majority rules – sometimes you get your way, sometimes the other guy gets his way – but we're all one country, all in it together
Suppress speech and communication (partly through threat of pervasive surveillance)
Enlist, co-opt and corrupt the press – buy them if necessary
Bestow public honors on those who serve the State agenda
Distract public attention with falsified reports of external threat
Distract the public with a culture of "bread and circuses"
Bureaucratic impediments of access to the truth
Executive orders that allow State seizure of private property
Executive Orders that legalize corporate collusion with government and concealment of records thereof
The catalog of evil is so long, all-pervasive and continuous, one could not finish it by writing to the end of his days...
To be continued. . . .
'Do As You Are Told, Or We Will Kill You'
by Jeff Knaebel (http://www.lewrockwell.com/knaebel/mailto:%20jksatmitra@rediffmail.com)
"Communism is power based upon force and limited to nothing, by no kind of law and by absolutely no set rule."
~ Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, page 361
The (American) "security organs" can designate and kill as they see fit
"Solicitor General Ted Olson has described the process: 'There is no requirement for the executive branch to spell out its criteria for who qualifies as an illegal combatant. There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations made by the executive that are going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.'"
"In other words, what is safe to say today, might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the 'law' is merely whim of the leader and his minions: their 'instincts' determine your guilt or innocence, and these gut 'feelings' can change from day to day. This is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government. And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder."
"Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people. But that is our reality. To overcome what seems to be widespread cognitive dissonance, we need only examine the publicly available record. There is nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know – if they choose to know it."
"Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval. Nor is it necessary any longer for the president to approve new names added to the target list…the 'security organs' can designate and kill as they see fit. There is no way of knowing how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally… the death squads are able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to enter countries surreptitiously." – Chris Floyd, truthout.org (http://truthout.org/), 2 October 2006
"Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice. Nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity."
~ Lord Acton
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
~ Patrick Henry
George W. Bush: "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck at them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did …" – as reported by Palestinian leaders to whom Bush spoke after the Iraq invasion.
There you have it, folks. In a nutshell, the quotes above tell us our place in the system: do as you are told, or we will kill you. The rest is all detail. One nuance of history might be highighted for the reader. The men who possess these powers of life and death have rather consistently exhibited patterns of psychopathic behavior in the form of mass murder and torture. In addition to Bush, Hitler and Lenin quoted above, you might consider, among recent others, Mussolini, Stalin, Truman, Mao, Suharto. The list continues ad nauseam throughout history. Hierarchical power structures appear to be an evolutionary dead end for humanity.
My Experiential Observations of Power (abridged)
I've served my country in foreign war zones and returned to face the derision of protestors whom I was supposedly "protecting." I rotated myself from resentment to an understanding thatthey were correct. My friend who had chained himself to other war protestors while they burned their draft cards was a braver man than I.
For them it had worked. Neither conscripted nor prosecuted, they were too hot to handle. I have arrived at a deep respect for the moral competence and physical courage of my young friend. Nonviolence is not for cowards.
I saw "over there" some of the same big construction contractors who, after merger and consolidation, are now gorging on Iraq war profits. I recall a naval leadership journal which carried photos of a French tank mired in a rice paddy circa 1948, alongside a photo of an American tank mired in a rice paddy circa 1968. Paired images of a killing field, stalked hyena-like by cold-blooded central bankers and their political consorts. The dead are but abstractions reported to a balance sheet as corporate dividends. Political payoffs are footnoted as "other expenses."
Today we are viewing the updated remix as "Shock and Awe" murder-of-every-living-thing-from-a-safe-distance. It would pound the earth itself into submissive dust on the Emperor's shoes. An imperialist gone mad in its greed for oil, for corporate dividends, for unlimited power, its mass murder spares not woman nor child nor cow. The revolving door of power brokers rotating between government-defense contracting-banking leads to the same bloody dead end, generation after generation.
Of Power, this much I know from experience both over and under:
It aggrandizes itself, feeding upon everything in its path
It comes as corporate CEO and abusive husband, as admiral and chairman, as dictator and patriarch
Greed is its energy and cowards it crushes, although itself cowardly
Courage it cannot withstand, especially moral
It corrupts absolutely kindness into cruelty
It knows no limit of acquisitiveness
It attracts the corruptible and the corrupt
It is pure evil in the hands of no matter whom
It usually wears a mask
In the five generations with which I have had direct contact it has brought misery, murder, rape and pillage
And the nuclear bomb
The battle is for the mind of man. The prize is no longer in vanquishing some "other." The battle is either all against all or all for all. There is no "other" to conquer. We are all in it together. We either grow a garden together or we cannibalize each other in the course of turning the earth into a desert. We can either plant trees together, or race to be the last person standing to cut down the last tree.
ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMICS OF THE STATE
"Total war is the invention of the modern State."
~ Michael Rozeff, 2 August 2005
"Since a human being has no power to create life, he has, therefore, no right to destroy life."
~ T. N. Khoshoo, 1995
The State as an organization keeps on running with periodic changes of management called elections. Because of its ability to make laws and impose taxes, its power is limited only by the tolerance of the people for their exploitation. The State can coerce its members without reciprocal consequences. It operates without fear of reprisal. It can use aggressive force to make others do things against their will. Its "managers" are protected by sovereign immunity. Because it both rules and taxes, it suffers no agency costs for its errors: it simply shifts the cost to taxpayers.
"To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed adding insult to injury. But that is exactly what the State does. Read the Congressional Record; follow the proceedings of the State legislatures; examine our statute books. Testing each Act separately by the law of equal liberty, you will find that a good nine tenths of existing legislation serves not to that fundamental social law, but either to prescribe the individual's personal habits, or worse, to create and sustain commercial, industrial, financial and proprietary monopolies which deprive labor of a large part of the reward that it would receive in a true free market."
~ Benjamin Tucker, 1890
The US is not a contractual State in the sense of an organization owned by its principals, the citizens. It has become a predatory State in the sense of a corporation owned and operated by a small group. This evolution was made inevitable by the weaknesses of the Constitution and actions of the power brokers and legislature. Rozeff (3 August 2006) estimates that the top management group of USA comprises between 15 and 60 members. These members rotate in revolving door fashion between and among various centers of social and political power. The figureheads and mouthpieces – the Kennedys, Nixons, Clintons, Bushes – are all fungible, each can be replaced by another without perturbing the system. In this manner do elections always come to a choice between two morally indistinguishable candidates. Likewise, no matter who you vote for, the political establishment always gets elected.
A few dozen people control the vast bureaucracies. The State's power depends upon holding the loyalty and obedience of these career employees within the power structure. This is done by passing out special privileges and emoluments. Napoleon noted the amazing lust of men for awards and decorations. The final tool in the arsenal of control is to heap honors upon those who have been corrupted.
M.S. Rozeff (see Lew Rockwell website) argues that the State lowers the cost of immorality, and people subsequently demand more State. Those who do occasionally resist face an "immortal" foe that owns the law-making power. People will rationalize their greater demand for immorality with new ideas of right and wrong. Giving up liberty in exchange, they will come to worship authority, equality, the use of force, and power. They will move away from self-reliance, responsibility, obligation to elders and the disadvantaged of society. They will accept, even enjoy their new situation. The State corrupts social morals and human beings.
"Buy the law-makers, buy the laws, and you become the law itself. That is the definition of corporate freedom."
~ William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org (http://truthout.org/), 2 July 2006
The State Corrodes the Moral Fabric of Society
Rozeff continues with a logical listing of how the State weakens society.
The State's power is desirable to many in itself and for what it can enable. It is a focal point for any group that wishes to gain at the expense of others by using State power. The State's existence arouses political competition for power that diverts people from productive activity to theft from others.
The State's existence provides incentive for expansion of power that can be used for one group's gain at expense of another.
The State is an endorsement of immoral behavior (theft) that is declared legal. This encourages similar behavior within society.
State monopoly over law and justice in itself weakens society. Individuals must use the State to settle disputes, thus losing the remedy of private institutions to mediate justice. They lose pathways of communication, consort and cooperation with each other. They can no longer forgive trespass in a regime of State prosecution. Compassion is sacrificed at the altar of greed.
State-made law displaces deeper and more permanent sources of natural law, thus cutting ancient roots and destabilizing society.
The State offers opportunities for gain available to its "management class." This not only fosters immorality, but provides incentive to keep on increasing the State's power.
The State leverages its power by exploiting the natural weakness of mankind. In order to increase its domination, the State makes immoral behavior acceptable by making it officially legal. It fosters immorality by making it a group action for which the individual is no longer held accountable.
States, being immortal, can wait indefinitely for its opportunity, always ready to amplify any lack of virtue or weakness in society. Such weaknesses include failing to take responsibility for one's own life, shifting burdens to others, extracting un-earned benefits from others, excessive fear or greed, desires for revenge or domination, communal rivalries with friction and hatred, exacerbating racial or class prejudice.
He discusses how the State maintains power. Although the rulers make some attempt to rationalize their costs of dominating society, given the Central Bank's power to print money, there is little incentive for cost control. Furthermore, it is always other people's money. Need more money for more bombs? Just crank up the printing press – and rob the people with the silent tax of inflation. Some of the means in current practice are here excerpted and adapted from M.S. Rozeff:
Removing constitutional checks and balances
Subverting the Bill of Rights
Abrogation of Habeas Corpus
Secret police and spying on citizens
National identification cards
Manipulation through tax incentives
Creating and exacerbating fears of terrorism
Ballot access control
Rigging of electronic voting machines
Public smear of dissidents (e.g., "they are soft on terrorism")
Creating error of psychological identification. Merging of one's native cultural identity into identity with the State, e.g., patriotism
Promote the error of attributing economic or social progress to the State
Illusion of order, playing on the fear of anarchy. Fear of one's fellow man fosters support for the State
Illusion of security. State has no resources other than what it takes from the people, thus actually increasing their insecurity. Aggressive foreign policy further reduces objective security, although propaganda makes it subjectively appear the opposite.
Feeding the lust for power and wealth through emoluments granted by the State to its loyal agents
Propaganda and encouragement of gullibility and ignorance.
Classifying government documents as "secret," beyond view of the people
Falsification government statistics on employment, commerce, money supply, debt, balance of payments, inflation, mortgage-lending funds
As per Representative Jim Cooper's new book (August 2006), keep two sets of books – a private citizen would go to jail for these and many other routine government abuses.
Diversion of Social Security Trust funds to general operating budget
Creating and financing sub-rosa "off-budget" government operations
Printing press expansion of money supply through the Federal Reserve
Direct State intervention in the market through the "plunge protection team" and the "market stabilization fund"
Innumerable laws and regulations to create economic incentives and disincentives in order to channelize subjects' efforts to the State's ends: "social engineering."
Money and banking regulations that place the citizen under surveillance and control the movement of money
Offloading agency and overhead costs onto the private economy, such as for collection of sales taxes, deduction of payroll taxes and social security contributions
Making spies of private citizens through banking regulations that require surveillance of customers and filing "Suspicious Activity Reports" for any "unusual" transaction It will be of little avail to the people, even that laws be made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood… if they undergo such incessant changes that no man knowing what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow …Public instability gives unreasonable advantage to the sagacious, the clever, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or affecting the value of different species of property presents a new harvest to those who watch for change and can trace its consequences. A harvest raised not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of their fellow citizens. Thus are laws made for the few, not for the many."
~ James Madison, Federalist 62
The Methods of Domination
The goal of power acting through the State is to increase its domination of society. This requires aggression against society which the citizens may at some point resist, often because of the economic burdens imposed to support power. Power does nothing economically productive – it is a parasite. There is an incentive to fool the people, who greatly outnumber the power elite. There are incentives to improve the technology of domination and to raise the costs for citizens to mobilize any resistance. A few of the many means of domination are listed:
Direct, raw violence perpetrated by the State
Onerous laws and laws so complex that no one can understand – you are never safe from "breaking" the laws, so numerous you cannot possibly be cognizant of them
Inculcate "ignorance of the law is no excuse"
Make public examples of lawbreakers by delay of justice or by issuing long sentences
Arbitrary imprisonment of innocents to make people afraid of power
Random and capricious police violence to induce fear in the people
Propaganda, lies and censorship
Concealment of true aims, actions and results thereof
Control of education to mold the minds of youth
Break up families by creating dependency on State welfare and public education
Spy on dissidents – install nationwide surveillance
Inculcate obedience as a primary virtue
Raise false fears and pretend to mitigate them (e.g., color-coded "alerts")
Conflate the State with country and love of country
Appeal to popular values like equality, universal health care, "no child left behind"
Make side payments to key individuals or segments of population to create belief in a "free lunch"
Spread the false belief that the subjects control the State, own it or are the State, and that the president or leader is hired by the voters
Pursuant to existing statutory National Emergency Powers of the President, delegate to him the authority to seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, restrict travel, take control of the stock exchange and more ….
Take control of necessary goods and services that empower the State to deliver essential needs
Rely on public apathy to maintain obedience
Use compulsory public education as tool of conditioning
Exaggerate government role in fulfilling needs of individuals and society
Disarm the populace
Increase ignorance and gullibility of the citizenry
Portray State as crucial to society and order and security
Conceal the costs of government
Conceal the facts and effects of government interventions
Portray State as an up-lifter of mankind, savior of the masses and downtrodden
Spread false belief that State speaks and acts on behalf of and for the people
Spread belief that State agents have been hired by the people to do a job
Absorb or co-opt creative power centers in society
Divide and rule – create factions and communal disharmony
Use payoffs and favors of all sorts to keep people quiet, to create obligations, to blackmail (see, e.g., Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man)
Inculcate the conditioning that it is social duty to accept State dictates even when you disagree, that majority rules – sometimes you get your way, sometimes the other guy gets his way – but we're all one country, all in it together
Suppress speech and communication (partly through threat of pervasive surveillance)
Enlist, co-opt and corrupt the press – buy them if necessary
Bestow public honors on those who serve the State agenda
Distract public attention with falsified reports of external threat
Distract the public with a culture of "bread and circuses"
Bureaucratic impediments of access to the truth
Executive orders that allow State seizure of private property
Executive Orders that legalize corporate collusion with government and concealment of records thereof
The catalog of evil is so long, all-pervasive and continuous, one could not finish it by writing to the end of his days...
To be continued. . . .