The Song that Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction

0:00Margaret Atwood's poem, Siren Song, begins, this is the one song everyone would like to learn, the song that is irresistible, the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see the beached skulls. Our rulers know how to sing that song, and they sing it day and night. The beach skulls are those of our fathers and our sons, our friends, neighbors, for whom the song proved not only irresistible, but fatal.

0:47The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised, a fire that that at best can be controlled for only a short time before it or leaps its improvised containments and spreads its flames far and wide. Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state's depredations and therefore augments the public's multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency, war and other crises comparable to war in the seriousness of the threats they pose.

1:45States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war, not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects. The state's most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is robbery. The state gains its very sustenance from robbery, which it pretties up ideologically by giving in a different name, taxation, and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary. State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral They fall into such erroneous moral reasoning because they are told incessantly that the tribute they fork over is actually a kind of price paid for essential services received, and that in the case of certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty and property, only the government can provide these services.

3:08provide the service effectively. They are not permitted to test this claim by resorting to competing suppliers of law, order and security, however, because the government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged services and brings violence In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket. All governments are, as they must be, oligarchies.

3:55Only a relatively small number of people have substantial effective discretion to make critical decisions about how the state's power will be brought to bear. Beyond the oligarchy itself and the police and military forces that compose its Praetorian Guard, somewhat larger groups constitute a supporting coalition. These groups provide important financial and other support to the oligarchs and look to them for compensating rewards, legal privileges, subsidies, jobs, exclusive franchises and licenses, transfers of financial income and wealth, goods and services in kind, and other booty, channeled to them at the expense of the mass of the people.

4:48Thus, the political class in general, that is, the oligarchs, the praetorian guards and the supporting coalition, uses government power, which ultimately means the police and the armed forces, to exploit everyone outside this class by wielding or threatening to wield violence against all who fail to pay the tribute the oligarch's demand, or to obey the rules they dictate. Democratic political forms and rituals, such as elections and formal administrative proceedings, disguise this class exploitation and trick the masses into the false belief that the government's operation yields them net benefits.

5:39In the most extreme form of misapprehension, the people at large become convinced that owing to democracy, they themselves are the government. Individual passages back and forth across the boundary between the political class and the exploited class testify, however, to nothing more than the system's cunningly contrived flexibility and openness. Although the system is inherently exploitative and cannot exist in any other form, it allows some leeway at the margins in the determination of which specific individuals will be the shafters and which the shaftees.

6:26At the top, a modest degree of circulation of elites within the oligarchy also serves to mask the political system's essential character. It is a sound interpretive rule, however, that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats The threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all. The mass belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of Stockholm Syndrome writ large. Yet, no matter how widely this syndrome may extend, it cannot alter the basic fact that owing to the operation of government as we know it, That is, government without genuine, express, individual consent, a minority lives on balance at the expense of the rest, and the rest therefore lose on balance in the process.

7:34While the oligarchs, elected or not, it scarcely matters, preside over the enormous web of criminal organizations we know as the state. Notwithstanding the ideological enchantment with which high priests and status intellectuals have beguiled the plundered class, many members of this class retain a capacity to recognize at least some of their losses and hence they sometimes resist further incursions on their rights by publicly expressing their grievances, by supporting political challengers by leaders who promise to lighten their burdens, by fleeing the country, and most important, by evading or avoiding taxes and by violating legal prohibitions and regulatory constraints on their actions, as in the so-called underground economy or black market.

8:34These various forms of resistance, together, compose a force that opposes the government's constant pressure to expand its domination. These two forces, working one against the other, establish a locus of equilibrium, a boundary between the set of rights the government has overridden or seized and the set of rights the plundered class has somehow managed to retain, whether by formal constitutional constraints or by everyday tax evasion, black market transactions and other defensive violations of the government's oppressive rules. Politics in the largest sense can be viewed as the struggle to push this boundary one way or the other.

9:25For members of the political class, the crucial question is always, how can we push out the frontier? How can we augment the government's dominion and plunder with net gain to ourselves, the exploiters who live not by honest production and voluntary exchange, but by fleecing those who do? National emergency, war or a similarly menacing crisis answers the political class's crucial question more effectively than anything else. Because such a crisis has a uniquely effective capacity to dissipate the forces that otherwise would obstruct or oppose the government's expansion. Virtually any war will serve, at least for a while, because in modern nation In some states, the outbreak of war invariably leads the masses to rally around the flag, regardless of their previous ideological stance in relation to the government.

10:30Recall the situation in 1941, for example, when public opinion polls and other evidence indicated that a great majority of the American people, approximately 80 percent of them as as late as the autumn, opposed outright engagement in the World War, an engagement that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration had been seeking relentlessly by Hook and by Crook from the very beginning. When the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached the public, mass opposition to war dissolved overnight, almost completely. No wonder the neocon intriguers in a September 2000 report of the Project for the New American Century expressed their yearning for, quote, some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor, end quote.

11:30Although other kinds of great crises may not elicit the same immediate submission to the The government's announced program for the people's salvation. They may prove equally effective if they are sufficiently menacing and persistent. Thus, the Great Depression, which pushed millions of Americans into economic desperation in the early 1930s, was eventually viewed by almost everybody as, in Justice Brandeis' words, an emergency more serious than War. Other pregnant crises have included nationwide strikes or widespread labor disturbances, so-called energy crises such as those of the 1970s, perceived crime waves, great epidemics or health scares, and lately even a bogus scare about global warming. The news on that That front has not been good in the last 24 hours, and unfortunately I think it's going to get much worse in the future.

12:40In 2001, the attacks of 9-11 answered to perfection the neocon prayer for a new Pearl Harbor. An administration that had been wallowing without a breeze in its sails was suddenly In the Gallup poll taken during September 7 to 10, 2001, 51% of the respondents approved of the way George W. Bush was handling his job as president, 39% disapproved, and 10% had no opinion, yielding what I call an opinion vote.

13:24A few days later, while the ruins of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers were still smoldering, 86% approved, 10% disapproved, and only 4% had no opinion, an opinion balance of 76%, or more than six times greater than it had been just a few days earlier. Although Bush had done absolutely nothing to demonstrate an abruptly improved performance of his job as president, nearly the entire population, many members of which roundly disliked the president, suddenly showered approbation on his performance in office.

14:18A week later, the opinion balance had risen even higher to 84 percent on the strength of a 90 percent approval response. Afterward, Bush's job approval rating followed a long downward trend, interrupted by only brief upticks until it reached its present range. In the Gallup poll of early July this year, the opinion balance was negative 37 percent, and only 29 percent of the respondents rated the President's performance favorably. In more recent polls, the balances stood a few points higher in the President's favor, but such small differences have little significance.

15:09Following the long downhill slide, Bush's performance approval rating held up amazingly well among Republicans, but fell lower and lower among both Democrats and Independents, an expression of how normal political partisanship reasserted itself as the initial unifying crisis slipped farther and farther into the background. Other movements may be seen in the Gallup polls that ask respondents whether they view George W. Bush himself favorably or unfavorably, not the job he was doing but the man. Here the opinion balance jumped from 25% in August 2001 to 76% in November 2001, a three-fold When the public's approval of the President's actions is broken down by specific issues, we see that his greatest 9-11 related jump occurred in the area of, mirabile dictu, foreign affairs.

16:27In the Gallup poll taken during July 2001, the opinion balance in this area was positive 21 percent, but in the poll taken during October 2001, the opinion balanced a jump to 67 percent, more than three times higher. The lesson is clear. If the president conducts foreign policy so as to antagonize foreigners and provoke them to launch massively destructive attacks on this country, the American public will respond with an enormous outpouring of approval of his actions, as if to prove that in our political system no failure goes unrewarded.

17:15Bertrand Russell long ago stated the underlying condition for this sort of perverse public reaction when he remarked that, quote, neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. Indeed, the fundamental condition of the entire process by which the government leads people is widespread public fear, which causes people to put aside their normal distrust of the state and to turn to it, especially to its chief as a child turns to a parent for security and reassurance that everything will be okay if only people do as they are told.

18:06Not only did the events of September 11, 2001 cause the American public to look more favorably on the president as a person, as a president, and as the principal architect of U.S. foreign policy, but those events also apparently caused the public to express more trust in the federal government in general in its handling of both international and domestic matters. In the Gallup Poll of September 7-10, 2001, 68% of the respondents expressed a great deal or a fair amount of trust and confidence in the government's handling of international problems, whereas 31% expressed not very much or none at all, implying an opinion balance of 37%.

19:00A month later in the poll conducted in mid-October, this opinion balance had risen to 67%, almost doubling. The public's perversely increased trust in the government had also spilled inexplicably onto its handling of domestic problems, Increasing this opinion balance from 22% in the early September poll to 56% in the October poll. I know this is tedious, but there's a story in all of these poll results. It's too loudly spoken to be denied. A final measure of public opinion, trust in Washington to do what is right, Right, as the Gallup poll puts it ludicrously, which is normally a fairly stable indicator, also rose in an unusual way owing to 9-11. In the Gallup poll of July 6-9, 2000, 42 percent of the respondents expressed confidence that the government will do what is right just Just about always or most of the time, whereas 58 percent responded only some of the time or never, which implies an opinion balance of negative 16 percent.

20:28When the pollsters next asked this question in October 2001, however, the opinion balance had risen to positive 21 percent, indicating a complete turnaround toward greater trust than distrust in the government. At the time of these events, as I considered everything that was going on, I was dismayed by what seemed to me to be a wholly unwarranted public stampede into the protective arms of the federal government, the same government that had been robbing and abusing most of the people in countless ways for as long as they could remember. Hardly anyone asked whether Whether the government's actions abroad might actually have provoked the 9-11 attacks.

21:18Of course most were so ignorant of those actions that they had no inkling of how the government might have created such a provocation. Many people seemed consumed by a combination of fear and rage that manifested itself in and a desire to nuke someone, anyone who might have had something to do with the attacks. Standards of proof fell precipitously. People didn't want investigation. They didn't want to get to the bottom of what had happened. Instead, they wanted action, and in particular, they wanted the government to strike back immediately at any and all plausible targets.

22:03As searching for the cause of this tremendous, rationally unjustified rallying around the flag, we do not have far to go. Such public reactions are always driven by a combination of fear, ignorance and uncertainty, against a background of intense jingoistic nationalism, a popular culture predisposed toward violence, and a general inability to distinguish between the state and the people at large. Because the government ceaselessly sings the siren song, relentlessly propagandizing the public to look upon it as their protector, Such alleged protection being the principal excuse for its routinely robbing them and violating their natural rights.

23:00And because the mass media incessantly magnify and spread the government's propaganda, we can scarcely be surprised if that propaganda turns out to have entered deeply into many people's thinking, especially when they are in a state of near panic, Unable to think clearly in an informed way, most people fall back on a child-like, us-against-them style of understanding the perceived threat and what should be done about it. If any resistance should arise to the ruler's war-making, the state has a time-tested means of disposing of the resistors. Perhaps the classic description of this tactic was given by the Nazi bigwig, Hermann Göring, when he was being held in prison during the trials at Nuremberg in 1946.

23:54This account comes to us from Gustav Gilbert, a German-speaking prison psychologist who had free access to all the prisoners during the trials and talked to them frequently in private. If you haven't read Gustav Gilbert's book, I highly recommend it, by the way. It's fascinating with all the accounts of what the men on trial were saying privately among themselves as well as publicly during the trial. On the evening of April 18, 1946, Gilbert visited Göring in his cell, and he later described their conversation as follows. We got around to the subject of war again, and I said that contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people were very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

24:51Why, of course, the people don't want war, Gorin shrugged. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war, neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple means to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. There is one difference I pointed out. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war.

25:46Oh, that is all well and good, Goring replied, but the voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. Göring was right, and matters have only become worse in this regard during the past 60 years. Of course, now you only have to tell the people that someone may attack them five or ten years in the future. It's not telling them that they are under attack. That's wholly unnecessary.

26:33Under the post-war regime in the United States, of course, Congress never declares war. It has made no such declaration since June the 5th, 1942, when it declared war on Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. And the President now wages war solely at his own pleasure and caprice, as if he were Caesar. I don't believe that's an exaggeration, by the way. Presidents wage war wholly at their own discretion in our system. If they notify Congress before or after the fact, it is only a courtesy. Dragging the people along, as Goring put it, remains as easy as ever, because as we've seen an initial incident, even when the government itself has provoked or trumped up, invariably causes the masses to rally round the flag.

27:33We've also seen, however, that the ardent enthusiasm and mindless support for the government's war making begins to erode soon afterward. When the people increasingly come to their senses, as casualties and other costs accumulate and as bits and pieces of the truth seep out, why does the system not revert to the status quo antebellum? The answer is that actions taken during the early days of the crisis, when the government responds practically without opposition to the public's fear and desire for retribution by vastly expending its powers, that's what I call stage two of the ratchet phenomenon.

28:20Take the form of political, legal and institutional changes that set precedents or become so deeply embedded that not all of them are abandoned during the post-crisis stage of incomplete retrenchment, which I call stage four of the ratchet phenomenon. For example, soon after the Pearl Harbor attack, the government enacted the first War Powers Act on December 18, and the second War Powers Act on March 27, 1942. These sweeping delegations empowered the president to rearrange the executive branch as he pleased, gave him a free hand to contract with munitions suppliers almost as he pleased, and gave him far-reaching control over international financial transactions and censorship power over all communications between the United States and any foreign country.

29:19They expanded the government's powers to seize private property for war purposes, empowered the president to set priorities for deliveries of designated goods and services, and gave the president effectively unrestrained power over resource allocation in the domestic economy, a power he delegated to the War Production Board under his direct oversight. Wielding all this authority, the president and his lieutenants became, in effect, central planners of a command economy for the duration of the war. Similarly, just six weeks after the 9-11 attacks, the government enacted the USA Patriot Act, which, as Judge Napolitano described earlier, greatly trenched on civil liberties and long-established rights, effectively demolished the Fourth Amendment and gave a mighty boost to the U.S.

30:16police state. Other measures moving in the same direction followed soon afterward, including the nationalization of the airline security industry and creation of the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the The Department of Homeland Security, an organization as menacing in its ideological underpinnings as it is feckless and absurd in its day-to-day operations. Once the government has expanded greatly at the outset of a war or other crisis and then employed its new powers for an extended period, getting rid of all the new weapons in the Government's arsenal of power is virtually impossible, even when the emergency ends and people clamor for a return to normal arrangements. Of course, as Vice President Cheney told us immediately after 9-11, the present emergency will never end. In his vision, it is perpetual.

31:19Therefore, many of the crisis measures become permanent parts of the government's apparatus for Dominating and Robbing Those Outside the Political Class. Wartime organizations may be retained to carry out new functions. As, for example, the War Finance Corporation of World War I was kept going for six years after the war, providing subsidized credit to exporters, agricultural co-ops and rural banks. After finally having Having been discontinued in 1925, it was revived under a new name, Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In 1932, a huge lender to politically favored railroads, banks and insurance companies during the Depression and later the government's chief agency for financing a variety of military industrial undertakings during World War II.

32:20Retained after 1945, the RFC continued to make subsidized loans to privileged borrowers until it sank in a storm of scandal in 1953, only to be replaced as a political quid pro quo by a similarly egregious agency, the Small Business Administration, which has continued its politically driven misallocation of taxpayer money ever since. Since. Cases such as that of the Wharf Finance Corporation and its direct descendants exemplify how national emergency solidifies so-called iron triangles, alliances of government bureaucrats, congressional overseers and privileged private sector beneficiaries. These arrangements are called iron because they are so difficult to break. Their beneficiaries have great incentive to fight for the retention and even for the expansion of the Triangle's activities, whereas the general public rarely has much incentive to fight against them, even when it is aware of them, because the public burden per capita is normally too small to justify anyone's expenditure of much time or effort in the requisite politicking.

33:44Under modern conditions, high wartime taxes always stick to some extent, leaving the amount of the government's plunder much greater after the war than it was before the war. In the present so-called war on terror, the government has partially concealed this increased seizure of private property by running up the national debt, rather than by jacking up ordinary tax rates or imposing new kinds of taxes. But this financial trick does not alter the raw fact that the government has been using more of the people's resources for its own purposes, as shown by the rapid run-up of its spending, leaving the public on the hook to pay the increased interest and eventually to repay the principal or to suffer the consequences if the government should attempt in effect to repudiate its obligations to creditors by inflating the money stock.

34:43During the present Bush administration, treasury debt held by the public has grown from $3.3 trillion at the end of fiscal 2001 to $5.1 trillion at the end of fiscal 2007, which just occurred, or by about 53% in only six years. During the Great Depression, governments at every level greatly increased their tax revenues by imposing new kinds of taxes. State and local sales taxes, for example, or undistributed profits tax at the federal level. In fiscal year 1940, with the Depression still lingering, the government collected 57% more total revenue than it had in the prosperous year 1920.

35:40in 1927. Let me repeat that. In 1940, the Federal Government collected 57% more revenue

35:51than it had in 1927. And people wonder why the Depression lasted so long. And that wasn't even the half of it. Federal taxes relative to GNP doubled between 1933 and 1940. Apart and 1940. Apart from the financial legacies that exacerbate the government's burden on the public, national emergencies leave institutional legacies of various kinds that enhance government power at the expense of the people's liberties. Rent controls of World War II, for example, never ended here in New York City for more than 60 years. They have denied landlords holds in tenants the liberty to contract on any mutually agreeable terms, and they have created incentives that foster the avoidance of maintenance for rented apartments and discourage the construction of new structures that would be built if only the housing market were free of these war-born fetters.

36:55The institutional legacies of the New Deal, of course, are legion, even now, nearly seventy 30 years after FDR's political momentum petered out. A vast system of agribusiness subsidies, intricate regulations of financial markets, union management relations and financial intermediaries, federal insurance of bank deposits, home mortgages and other financial liabilities, direct federal involvement in electricity production and distribution, the list goes on and on. More important, crisis has effects on the dominant ideology that work in favor of long-lasting government power and the permanent reduction of public liberties.

37:44During wartime and other crises, governments take many actions that would be more or less unthinkable in a reasonably free society during normal times because people would not tolerate them. Having tolerated them during a national emergency, however, people may come to regard them not only as permanently tolerable, but even as desirable. For example, nearly everything the U.S. government did during the Great Depression had an obvious wartime precedent in the Great War. President Herbert Hoover declared, quote, we use such emergency powers to win the war, we can use them to fight the depression.

38:31Everything from the depression era agricultural price controls to the industrial cartelization program, the public housing program, the schemes to control oil and coal prices, the tax hikes, the promotion of labor unionization, Organization, all had precedent during 1917-18. Obviously, many of these war-inspired public policies then became permanent after the 1930s, as did, later, the military industrial complex created from 1940 to 1945. People can get used to almost anything, especially if it has a plausible justification.

39:16War and other great crises managed by government soften up formerly free people and habituate them to government controls and abuses that they would resist, except for their alleged emergency necessity. In this way, government emergency measures change the very character of once free people by breaking down their will to be free and their determination to resist homegrown tyranny. It's important to appreciate that all the effects on freedom that I've been discussing occur regardless of the rationale for the war or other crisis intervention itself.

40:05One may regard a war, for example, as ever so necessary and desirable or not, yet these effects will occur in any event. The logic of a government at war asserts itself in more or less the same fashion, regardless of the war's provocation and purpose, because every major war requires the government to take a much bigger bite out of the people's resources quickly, and it cannot do so successfully without suppressing many normal liberties and rights, especially those that might be be exercised to obstruct the government's wartime programs and policies, or to persuade people to resist the war or to demand its discontinuation or settlement.

40:55Hence, as Goring noted, the government and its supporters vigorously denounce all those who stand in the way as traitors, and the state encourages the masses to act as amateur Great peacetime activities operate similarly. Many historians have noted the parallels between the government's intimidating public efforts to entice or browbeat people into cooperation with the National Recovery Administration and the Nazi extravaganzas being staged in Germany at the same time.

41:49Nowadays, for example, the government frequently encourages all of us to report any suspicious persons or actions to the police or the FBI, ostensibly to prevent terrorism. Needless to say, no free society can exist when everyone, in effect, has enlisted as a government informant, especially when the character of the threatening persons and actions is so vague that it is bound to give rise to abuses. Not uncommonly now, people are reported for nothing more than looking like an Arab or for speaking a strange language to strange-looking companions. This insidious enlistment of informants, so reminiscent of the atrocious American Protective League during World War I, is turning our once open society into a sort of East Germany redux.

42:42Horror stories abound of perfectly innocent persons taken into custody for interrogation or worse. While the government promotes mindless support of its war-making and may induce a sort of patriotic hysteria in the most mentally fragile personalities, many citizens swing into action as foe patriots on strictly opportunistic grounds. War contractors, for example, may be able to position themselves to make a killing, so to speak, off of the actual killing. Moreover, they may parlay their wartime business as government suppliers into profitable post-war business that long outlives the war itself.

43:32The aircraft companies that suddenly profited so greatly during World War II, for example, became permanent, highly successful feeders at the government's trough, where some of them are feasting lavishly even now, the current administration's military buildup having proved a godsend for them and a boon to their stockholders. Other people simply want a cushy job in the government's expanded wartime bureaucracy. The so-called war on terror has given rise to a huge industry that has emerged almost from scratch during the past few years. According to a 2006 Forbes report, the Department of Homeland Security and its predecessor agencies paid private contractors at least $130 billion after 9-11, and other federal agencies have spent a comparable amount.

44:34Thus, besides the military-industrial congressional complex, we now have a parallel security-industrial congressional complex. Between 1999 and 2006, the number of Federal Homeland Security contractors increased from nine companies to 33,890. Let me repeat that. Between 1999 and 2006, the number of Federal Homeland Security contractors increased from nine companies to 33,890.

45:22And by now, there are certainly many more. and a multi-billion dollar industry selling supposed security related goods and services has emerged complete with specialized newsletters, magazines, websites, consultants, trade shows, job placement services and a veritable army of lobbyists working around the clock to widen the river of money that flows to these opportunists. As Paul Harris wrote, America is in the grip of a business based on fear. The last thing these vultures want, of course, is an abatement of the perceived terrorist threat and we can count on them to hype any signs of an increase in such threats and of course to crowd the trough happily slurping up the taxpayers' money.

46:19And I might say when you look at what they're selling, you've got to call it money for nothing. What chance does peace have when millions of well-heeled, politically-connected opportunists of all stripes depend on the continuation of a state of war for their personal financial success? For members of Congress, the Department of Homeland Security has quickly become the most magnificent dispenser of pork and patronage to come along in decades. If you haven't read Jim Bennett's book on this, do so. It's an eye-opener. Everyone is happy here, except for the beleaguered ordinary citizens whose pockets are being picked and whose liberties are being overridden by politicians and private sector predators with utter contempt for the people's intelligence and rights.

47:20Yet, so long as the people continue to be consumed by fear and to fall for the age-old swindle that the government seeks only to protect them, these abuses will never end. Along the Gulf Coast, where I live, during the past two years, a legion of opportunists has similarly rushed onto the scene to take advantage of the unprecedented sums of federal money pouring into the area in the guise of financing recovery from the damage wreaked by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Bank accounts have been stuffed with this loot, to be sure, but little in the way of genuine recovery and reconstruction has sprung from it.

48:10Never mind. In the immortal words of President Bush, brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. The ridiculous brownie was subsequently sacked as head of FEMA, of course, But the heck of a job goes on as before, all at taxpayer expense and at great profit for the corporatist cronies, political favorites and other privileged parties who are appropriating the people's money after it has been duly laundered through the Federal Treasury. Recall Margaret Atwood's poem, Siren Song, with which I prefaced my remarks.

48:56It begins, This is the one song everyone would like to learn, the song that is irresistible, the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons, even though they see the beached skulls. And the poem ends, alas, it is a boring song, but it works every time. In the present regard, it works every time because the people falsely believe that those who sing it are their protectors, rather than their exploiters.

49:41Until people learn to disregard the state's siren song of beneficence and protection, they will continue to suffer and die as victims of the state's wars, foreign and domestic. People yearn for security and they look to the state to provide it, but they are calling on a wolf to guard the sheep. The state cannot refrain from crime because it is an inherently criminal enterprise, living by robbery, which it relabels taxation, and retaining its turf by mass murder, which it relabels war.

50:27Constantly singing the siren song, it seduces the people by giving back to them a portion of what it has previously extorted from them and by ceaselessly claiming to protect them from all manner of threats to their lives, liberties, property and even their self-esteem. If it protects them at all, however, it does so only as a shepherd protects his captive flock, not because he recognizes and respects the natural rights of the sheep, but only to keep them unmolested in his sole possession and control until he finds it expedient to shear or slaughter them.

51:16A peaceful state is an impossibility. Even a state that refrains from fighting foreigners goes on fighting its own subjects continuously to keep them under control and to suppress competitors who might try to break into the domain of its protection racket. The people cry out for security, yet they will not take responsibility for their own protection, and like the mariners of Greek mythology, they leap overboard immediately in response to the state's siren song. When the Israelites had fled from their captivity in Egypt, they made due for centuries with only judges.

52:08Yet they were not satisfied, and eventually they demanded a king crying out, We will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles. Well, they got a king, all right, just as we Americans have embraced one of our own, though we call ours a president. The Israelites, as the prophet Samuel had warned, were no better off for having a king. However, King Saul only led them from one slaughter to another.

52:53Likewise, our rulers have led us from one unnecessary slaughter to the next. And to make matters worse, they have exploited each such occasion to fasten their chains around us more tightly. Like the ancient Israelites, we Americans shall never have real, lasting peace so long as long as we give our allegiance to a king. That is, in our case, to the whole conglomeration of institutionalized exploiters and murderers we know as the state. Thank you very much.