("Quid coniuratio est?")
The local all-volunteer radio station, WEFT 90.1 FM, has a show that runs from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. every Saturday (Saturn's Day) morning. The show, called "News from Neptune," takes its title from a remark made by some television producer when asked about getting Noam Chomsky to appear on a show: "What? We can't have him on. That guy's from Neptune." The idea is, that if you try to talk seriously about a subject, beyond the pre-arranged, allowable limits already put in place by the mass media, you are going to sound (to the already brainwashed) as if you are from Neptune.
The following is an excerpt from the August 13, 1994, "News from Neptune" broadcast. Co-hosts are Carl Estabrook and Paul "The Truth" Muth.
[...]
CARL ESTABROOK: To comment on the crime bill: the... um, I actually did something I don't normally do, Paul. I sat and watched the debate on C-Span. I usually can't listen to these, uh this pond scum we have in the national legislature bat their jaws over things like this. But the other night, I wanted to hear this one simply because I was interested in checking what sort of report I had, uh we'd heard on the media, and the actual debate.
The whole thing is a bit of a mare's nest. The original crime bill, which the Clinton administration of course supported entirely, is a draconian piece of legislation, a repressive piece of legislation, something that should be defeated. Now what had happened, in its way through the Congress, is that the outrageousness of this bill was such that it had to be mollified in various ways. {1}. Various attempts to do some things um...
PAUL MUTH: The crime prevention, social spending, as it's called.
ESTABROOK: ...were added to it to try to take the edge off it. Exactly. And, I mean this is, you know, once again: people are not fools. All this trumpeting about building more jails, when the United States now imprisons twice as many of its citizens as the "Evil Empire" did at the height, I mean, the Soviet Union at the height of its power never imprisoned as many of its citizens. Never even came to, except to about 50 percent of the number of citizens the U.S. imprisons.
So to build more prisons is a questionable process. Anybody can see that. And so there was some attempt to say, "Well. We really do need various and sundry things that will stop the culture of crime." -- which is encouraged by American Capitalism. And so things like that were in it.
Well this was the thing that the troglodytes in the House objected. And the troglodytes all trooped into the well to say how much they objected to providing money for poor kids to play basketball after dark. And this became the symbol of what was wrong with the bill.
MUTH: "We've tried all that before. It didn't work, you know." Such a joke. {2}.
ESTABROOK: The bill is a terrible bill and it should be defeated, and the Clinton administration's a terrible administration and it should be defeated. So in that sense, the vote against the crime bill was good.
I think there's at least a chance that we're going to get back something worse, because of the machinations on both sides. The Democrats even behaved badly. Representative Brooks, apparently, "dissed" [i.e. showed disrespect to] the Republicans and they were all upset about that. I mean the real issue here was whether the "Texas po' boy" [i.e. Brooks] was nice to them or not. Um, and they also produced the actual...
MUTH: Now was this in the committee or something?
ESTABROOK: ...They actually produced the copies of this bill only at the very last minute! And then, uh Brooks said something unpleasant, to a few of these people. And that was the real issue here. So to see this as a triumph for democracy {3} I think is perhaps stretching a point. But we can hope, eh?
MUTH: Well, there's a whole lot bundled up in that. When you have to use a crime bill to try to get some of the aid to inner cities that is so necessary, and so warranted, from our earlier discussion. I mean, you don't have to apologize to some poor minority you see on the street. But it would be interesting if the State, uh...
ESTABROOK: Might be a place to start, yeah.
MUTH: ...well that's a personalist solution. I think it's actually more important for the State to actually make some redress.
ESTABROOK: Exactly. Exactly.
MUTH: And it's the...
ESTABROOK: The local paper [i.e. Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette], Paul, is full of... You know, the headline in the local sad excuse for a newspaper is about the sale of drugs in the high school. Apparently someone was selling a little righteous weed over in the Urbana high school, and the cops suddenly came up with an "anonymous wiretap." The whole thing smells to high heaven. It sounds to me like what the cops were doing were wire tapping these people. They didn't have any warrants for it, and so they simply said, "Oh! Look what I found! I just found an 'anonymous wiretap.'" {4}. It just happened they had an anonymous wiretap with 30 or 40 voices on it which they all identified and busted these people. Hey, look: these guys got to prove that they're doing something [sarcastically] "against crime." And it's a lot easier to bust a 15-year-old, you know, who's smoking an herb, than it is to do anything that really has to do with real crime, like the... uh, what really happens in the S&L scandal, to take an example quite at random.
JOHN (Studio engineer): [inaudible]
ESTABROOK: [Pauses] Well, put that up, John. John just said, "Or the gangs on Vine and Tremont street." Now it seems to me that what we have in a gang culture in this country is exactly the sort of thing being encouraged by this society. An American Senator said, just after the end of the Second World War, "Look: We can do anything we want with the American people, if we scare them enough." Now the whole gang issue is being a way to scare people, to convince people to give up their rights, to convince people to support a police culture, to vote more money for police and more money for prisons and more money for crime bills -- because if you don't, "The gangs are gonna get ya." {5}.
The gangs are huddling together as for warmth. The poor and deprived people that, in a society which is based on killing. It shouldn't surprise us that these things exist. They're encouraged by the society.
But what's stopping them is not more Rambo-like cops, white suburban adventure seekers who have guns and get to go into the inner city and shoot black folks (which is our present way of dealing with it). What's going to change it is decent jobs at decent wages -- not minimum wage; nobody can live on minimum wage -- decent places to live, and real things for people to do. Not flipping burgers at McDonalds.
John, over to you.
JOHN: No, I was just gonna say, I was just gonna say that minimum wage isn't all that bad. Only thing is, that I have to work 2 jobs.
ESTABROOK: Well exactly. Of course you do. Minimum wage is not bad if you have 2 of them.
JOHN: Exactly. It works out much better that way.
ESTABROOK: A single person just might be able to live on twice the minimum wage.
MUTH: If you don't mind not having a life.
ESTABROOK: Yeah.
MUTH: Anyway. Moving right along. I don't want to be seen as being partial to the Clintons but, I mean, far be it from me to eschew a controversial issue, even though it might characterize me in that way. Uh, I don't know,...
ESTABROOK: Mr. Nader strikes again?
MUTH: ...Carl, if you've been watching the [New York] Times, whether they covered the same story that the [Washington] Post had. I only had it on hearsay, which is, an interesting thing that, this judge Sentell, who was the head of the 3-part, whatever, committee that selected Starr instead of uh, the other Republican, had meetings with Helms and Faircloth some days before and that he's also the judge that let Poindexter and North off the hook.
ESTABROOK: Yeah. We have a faction fight going on here, Paul. And it's a good faction fight, because it actually... When, uh when there's a faction fight in the American ascendancy, amongst the American elites, some things do come out. We had a faction fight at the time of Watergate, and we learnt more about American government, people learnt more about the American government from that, than we had from a lot of people like you and me saying exactly what turned out to be clear in Watergate, after the fact.
If a faction fight does develop around the Clintons -- and I thoroughly hope it does -- we may learn something about it. I'm very glad that they've got a guy who does seem to be fairly smart and has an axe to grind against the Clintons to do this particular prosecution. I commend the 3-judge panel who, for the worst possible motives, have produced a man who might really not participate in a cover-up of the Clintons' activities here. Go to it. And while we're doing it, let's rip the top off the rest of the S&L scandal and the RTC scandal. All this business about whether Altman said something inappropriate to somebody on several different occasions has far less to do with the fact that the Resolution Trust Corporation [RTC], which he headed, was itself one of the great scandals of the last part of the 20th century. Let's open this stuff up.
These elites get worried. Sometimes...
MUTH: You're, you're really serious that you think that someone with an axe to grind like that is...
ESTABROOK: It's the best we're going to get. It's the best we're gonna get.
People who were after Nixon had an "axe to grind." The Watergate folks. Nixon was never indicted on the real crimes he perpetrated in office. When Nixon...
MUTH: He resigned before he could've because...
ESTABROOK: He was... [Contention for who will speak; both speak at same time] ... the indictment, the bill of impeachment went off. The bill of impeachment had nothing to do with the real crimes that Nixon had committed in office. What it had to do was what's properly described as a "third-rate burglary."
But the point was that Nixon had used the techniques that were always used: against the anti-war movement, against dissidents, against [the Black] Panthers, against anybody who was trying to make real social change in this country. He used those techniques against people who were within the system. And that couldn't be countenanced. Therefore Nixon had to be sent into the outer darkness.
Now that faction fight produced profound knowledge of the American government in the public at large. And that's why it's not repeated very often.
[...]
--------------------------<< Notes >>---------------------------- {1} Remember how Clinton shoved NAFTA down our throats. As Perot put it, "He opened the treasury and simply bought the vote." Will Clinton do the same in his attempt to revive this crime bill?
BTW, Bill Clinton, if you're reading this: Concerned about crime? Take a look in the mirror.
{2} Beware of new taxes coming in the disguise of social welfare spending. But, it would be much preferred if the billions of dollars already at hand, wasted on the stealth bomber [See, for example: Blank Check: The Pentagon Black Budget, by Tim Weiner. New York: Warner Books, 1990. ISBN 0-446-51452-7. Especially chapter 4, "A Wing and a Prayer"], could have been used for the benefit of the people of this nation. That is my objection to socialism: It sounds nice, but (a) it is a disguise for more taxes and (b) it gets wasted. So little winds up going to what it was intended for.
{3} "...a triumph for democracy." That is, the defeat of the crime bill being seen as a triumph for democracy. Exactly. Who the hell actually wants this bill? I have noted the television media pushing the myth that "No representative would dare vote against this bill because it provides for 100,000 new police." But really, Is there such unilateral support for 100,000 new police in our lives? The TV media has been pushing this myth that the American people are all united in their wish for more friendly snoops in uniform giving us the willies as we drive by. But do we all really want this? Are we all going to be so upset if we are "denied" this great "gift" of 100,000 new police sniffing about?
Another question: Are we perhaps a bit afraid to say that "Hell no. We don't want even more damn police!" You don't want to start getting traffic tickets, do you? You don't want to have them busting down your door at 4 in the morning, do you? Best to just nod your head and pretend that, yes, you want 100,000 more police.
It's not the representatives who are afraid to object to more police. It is us, we the people, who have at least some fear of daring to openly object to it.
{4} The "anonymous wiretap". Here is a relevant quote from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, which I came across in a periodical called Full Disclosure (PO Box 903, Libertyville, Illinois 60048):
Our government is the potent, omnipresent teacher, for good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law, it invites every man to come a law unto himself. It invites anarchy.
{5} "...the whole gang issue is being a way to scare people, etc." As Michael Parenti said in one of his talks, "But WHY?" Why do they want to scare us into accepting their police state? Why do they want to lock more and more of us up?
Hypothesis: Part of their tactic of enslavement is to wage a 2-pronged assault on us. One emphasis is to restrict the "non- criminal" citizen's access to weapons. The other emphasis is to "felonize" a larger and larger proportion of the population. For example, now that we have the American people by themselves, with no help from Big Brother/Big Sister, cutting down on tobacco consumption, here comes the FDA to our "rescue." Now, when the issue is becoming irrelevant, it wants to regulate tobacco. By doing so, it can create a whole new class of "criminals", i.e. tobacco smokers. If they can felonize tobacco smokers, they can take away their weapons.
Again, as Parenti has said, "But WHY?" Why do they want to enslave us? Aren't they "nice guys"? Why would they want to enslave us? Here is a hint: Don't expect the Nazis to be wearing SS uniforms this time around. Look for them to wear suits, ties, winning smiles, and to be seen, for example, as anchors on the CBS, NBC, and ABC Nightly News.
I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."
"Justice" = "Just us" = "History is written by the assassins."