American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [119]
Doesn’t it also concern you that “We the Rabble” could be looking at a corporatized, militarized future where we’re tracked down by radio-tags and herded into camps for undesirable citizens who won’t go along with the program? Not to worry if you’re part of the elite. The insurance giant AIG has pioneered a special service for customers living in upper-class zip codes. During the 2007 wildfires in Southern California, its Private Client Group paid big bucks to AIG’s Firebreak Spray Systems to have their homes hosed down with a fire retardant—sometimes while the nextdoor neighbor went up in flames. A start-up company called Sovereign Deed, tied into the mercenary outfit Triple Canopy, has since developed our first privatized national disaster response center with a “country-club type membership fee.”68
Do you realize that, since 2002, there has been a 47 percent increase in American workers classified as security guards? And that as high as one quarter of our labor force is now centered around protection instead of production?69 That’s a culture increasingly based on fear. And, as Benjamin Franklin said in 1775, “Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
We don’t have to put up with this. When everything is built on lies, it’s built on nothing, isn’t it? It’s a house of cards waiting to fall. I’d like to believe that we as a people can handle the truth. But we don’t have a free media anymore. They’re corporatized and controlled. The proof is in the pudding, when Bush got caught paying off journalists to espouse the administration’s line. You don’t see much investigative reporting like we had in the old days.
So where do We the People start? I say, by demanding prosecution of the politicians who condoned torture on their lying road into Iraq. And by a new, legitimate investigation into what happened on September 11, a tragedy that’s been used ever since to justify all the lies and undermine our democratic freedoms. With President Obama, we voted for a fresh start, but now we’ve got to hold his feet to the fire and get to the bottom of what’s happened to our country over these recent decades.
I’ve not written this book because I get off on talking about conspiracies. I’ve written it because, until we face the terrible reality of the assassinations and the governmental drug dealing and the stolen elections and the rest—until we look at how, slowly and insipidly, the most venal of men took control of our nation, we don’t stand a chance of putting things back on track. I’m not saying that knowledge sets us free, but it does force us to wake up and realize that we’re on the brink of losing everything the founders of our country stood for and bequeathed to us.
“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery.”
—Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774
“Cherish . . . the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them.”
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787
Words to live by. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson.
EPILOGUE
“TRUTH BEING THAT WHICH IT IS CAN NEVER BE DESTROYED”
I close this book with that quote from Gandhi. Because, after I’m long gone, I believe there needs to be a record that some people thought things other than just the status quo of what the government has put out for us all to believe. I think it’s a duty we