Subtitle: Longing for a True Third Party

My historical novel IMMORTAL briefly made one of the bestseller lists in Italy over the summer, and I went to Italy in October to do some PR to support the novel. There was a lively radio interview, and at the radio station, I was filmed for a website that promotes Tuscany. I have wonderful things to say about the region. It’s heaven. The art, the food, the wine, the land, the sky.

During the filming of the PR video, I cast aspersions on Berlusconi. He is openly corrupt, controlling the media in Italy and changing or creating legislation to suit his whims. Those are just two superficial examples of Berlusconi’s flagrant corruption.

After filming, I discussed my clip with the radio station manager, an intelligent man who was fluent in English. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Tuscany is the most left of all Italy. You can say what you want about Berlusconi.”

“But why do Italians elect him in the first place?” I pressed.

He thought for a few moments before answering. “Because people hope that if he is in charge, they will get away with corruption, too.”

Those words have stayed with me as I have surveyed the rank state of our country over the last few months. It’s almost impossible to know where to start, there is so much moral decay. Maybe Obama is the place to begin.

Wikileaks: in general, I support transparency. I like the internet as a place for truth to be exposed. We live in a world full of lies, lies, and more lies. We live in a world that is increasingly run by large corporations, and those entities do not have the best interests of individual humans at heart. Remember asbestos and Johns Mansville? Johns Mansville knew that “this disease (cancer caused by asbestos) is irreversible and permanent….” They knew this fact and continued to leave asbestos workers with no protective equipment: BECAUSE IT PROFITTED THEM TO NEGLECT THE WORKERS. (This quote is from Paul Brodeur’s book “Outrageous Misconduct.”)

Muse upon the cigarette companies and all the diseases caused by smoking cigarettes. Cigarette companies have known for decades that smoking causes lung cancer and a host of other painful, ravaging diseases. They hid this fact, and, it is alleged, actively campaigned to minimize the dangers: BECAUSE IT PROFITTED THEM TO DO SO.

Now consider the lethal dangers of msg and other excitotoxins that irreparably damage people’s brains and lead to a host of neurological disorders; high fructose corn syrup that damages the human metabolism and leads to obesity and diabetes; mercury in vaccines that is implicated in illnesses including autism; and pesticides and plastics that cause cancer, infertility, low sperm count, etc etc etc. Now think about who profits from poisoning the people this way: Big Pharma, Big Agribusiness, the food conglomerates, the medical establishment (which is largely run by Big Pharma), biotech companies.

Follow the money, always. Ask: who is profiting? That will show you who is lying, cheating, and defrauding individuals.

We have to pay steeply for organic food: when did it become acceptable for Americans to pay for the privilege of not being poisoned? What kind of upside down world is that?

Note that the big food conglomerate corporations have gotten involved with organic farming because of the monies involved—and they have diluted the standards.

Back to Obama, wikileaks, and corruption. In general, I support transparency because how else are we going to expose corruption and hold Big Pharma, Big Agribusiness, the food conglomerates, the medical establishment, biotech companies, and THE US GOVERNMENT accountable for their choices and actions? For their deceit and the harm it causes?

There is no evidence that Obama is interested in accountability.

Uphold transparency, but neither wikileaks nor anyone else should publish the names of individual operatives who are trying to help Americans. This goes back to protecting the individual. Yes, publish the names of executives who, for example, promoted the practice of predatory lending based on race, which left scores of African Americans and Hispanic Americans bankrupt and foreclosed. Publish the names of those crooks. But leave out the names of double agents in Al Qaeda. Those people have enough to worry about—they are in danger of their lives every moment of every day.

Re wikileaks and Obama, John Bolton at The Guardian writes that Barack Obama is a bigger danger than wikileaks because Obama refuses to understand that America’s interests are seriously threatened—are, in fact, at stake of survival.

But that’s not the only way that Obama has betrayed the American people. Let’s go back to predatory lending practices based on racial profiling. WHY AREN’T THOSE PEOPLE IN JAIL? Is it because, as Noam Chomsky says, Obama is a creature of the financial institutions, that they expected to be paid back and were?

The financial institutions were let off the hook and bailed out with billions of dollars: Obama was good to them!

With Obama at the helm, Big Business has won so many legislative victories that it must be considered State Sponsored. For one small example, note the recent passage of the fraudulently named “Food Safety Act,” which will limit American’s access to herbal and vitamin supplements—except the ones produced by, you know it, Big Pharma. This is a big score for Big Pharma, which runs the medical establishment by funding medical schools and thus controlling the information which doctors are actually taught. But I’m not surprised at the passage of this act. When Obama named Vilsack as secretary of agriculture, Obama was explicitly stating that he was indebted to Big Pharma. Vilsack is Monsanto’s bestest friend.

Regarding the “Food Safety Act,” I published on this blog a letter I emailed to my senators, Gillibrand and Schumer. Gillibrand did not deign to respond. Some lackey of Schumer’s emailed me a condescending, patronizing response that barely took notice of what I was saying. Here’s my question: how much has Big Pharma and Big Agribusiness contributed to Gillibrand and Schumer?

Why is it that big corporations with expensive lobbyists who lay a lot of money around are now controlling legislation? State sponsored business under guise of entrepreneurship: COMMUNISM. And have you noticed how the true American entrepreneurs, the real American heros, small businesses, are being taxed out of existence?

Obama talks about going beyond the constraints of the constitution; the sentence that will eventually follow this is “Some pigs are more equal than others.” You can bet that Obama that brilliant orator will say it so it sounds real pretty.

So Obama is weak, he is a communist, he refuses to protect America’s interests in the world or even to see the dangers we face, he has probably ordered state department employees to spy at the UN, he doesn’t pursue accountability for predatory lending practices based on racial profiling, and he has sold out to the financial institutions and to Big Pharma.

But the Republicans aren’t any better. It was their economic policies that landed the world in the economic crisis we are in. While the free market works good most of the time, it MUST be regulated. Why? Because People Are Corrupt. Some people. In an unregulated environment, clever, amoral people will figure out how to bend, twist, and distort the system FOR PROFIT. Those distortions will hurt the environment and lead to… the largest gap between the haves and the have nots in a long, long while. Robert Creamer on the Huffington Post wrote that “Republicans… eviscerated rules that held Wall Street, Big Oil, and private insurance companies accountable to the public. They allowed and encouraged the recklessness of the big Wall Street banks that ultimately collapsed the economy and cost 8 million Americans their jobs. They ignored exploding health care costs, gave the drug companies open season to gouge American consumers…” (posted July 13, 2010)

It comes back to this issue of accountability, which Obama refuses to face. Accountability is the dilemma exposed by wikileaks. And note to anyone reading this blog: I live in NYC, where all the bankers are doing just fine, financially. Hey Main Street, you are being screwed! Because while you suffer, Wall Street is still living real good.

Moreover, there is significant evidence that 9/11 did not happen as the Bush administration wants us to believe. Noam Chomsky claims there is no evidence that Al Quada carried out the attacks. Seven CIA veterans have come out to say explicitly that Americans are being lied to, that there is a massive cover up, that events did not unfold as the public is being led to believe. Raymond McGovern, a 27 year veteran of the CIA, wrote, “The present volume confronts us with evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by the (Bush) administration precisely so they could be thus exploited.” (see www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alan_mil_070922_seven_cia_veterans_c.htm)

So maybe the Bush administration engineered 9/11 so they could send America to War. At the very least, a group of knowledgeable people maintain that the official, sanitized version is just that: sanitized. Not to mention the racism in the Tea Party and even within the Republican party. And, oh my god, please, Sarah Palin? I really wanted to like her, as an expression of solidarity with other mothers, but her rank ignorance, vindictiveness (firing the librarian who refused to go along with Palin’s proposed book censorship), and corruption (check out the indications that the Palin camp was trying to skew Dancing With The Stars in Bristol’s favor)….

So the Democrats suck. The Republicans suck. What do we do about this sad state of affairs, about the decay of moral fiber in the US? A friend of mine said to me recently, “Traci, people are just more eviler than they used to be.”

Is that true?

~~~ “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”