Thanksgiving Day 2018: 55th Anniversary of JFK’s State-Sponsored Assassination
by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman)
Hope springs eternal. One day there may be reason to give thanks – not while endless US wars of aggression rage, smashing nations for power and profit, responsible for millions of casualties and vast destruction.
Nor will it be while the nation’s inner cities are battlegrounds, while half or more of US households are impoverished or bordering it, while real unemployment exceeds 20%, while many wage-earners need two or more jobs to survive, while most jobs are rotten low-wage/poor or no-benefit ones, while millions of high-pay manufacturing and other good jobs are offshored to low-wage countries.
It won’t be while governance serves privileged interests exclusively, while America remains thirdwordized, while it’s a cesspool of criminality in high places, inequality, and injustice, while “we the people” means rich and powerful Americans, not everyone.
It surely won’t be while poverty in the country remains its main growth industry, while racism, sexism, exploitation, imperialism, state-sponsored ecocide, and social injustice remain official policies, while fundamental freedoms are targeted for elimination.
Nor will it be while you have to be asleep to believe in the American dream, with attribution to George Carlin.
Among all developed nations, inequality in America, the world’s richest country, is the most extreme. Most people remain in the class they were born into. A land of opportunity for everyone is hyperbole, not reality.
Higher education in America risks permanent debt bondage for countless numbers of students, victimized by the nation’s student loan racket.
America was never beautiful for ordinary people. The land of the free and home of the brave is pure hyperbole.
One-party rule with two extremist right wings mocks what democracy is supposed to be all about – what America never was from inception, a notion the founders abhorred, wanting the country run of, by and for its privileged class exclusively.
It’s always been this way throughout US history. The divide between super-wealth and the vast majority of Americans struggling to get by was never greater than now.
America first refers to benefitting its privileged few alone, no others, the rights, needs, and welfare of ordinary people increasingly ignored.
War on humanity at home and abroad for power and profit reflects what American values are all about – a plutocracy, not a democracy, sinister dark forces serving their own interests at the expense of most people everywhere.
November 22, 1963, 55 years ago today, a workday then, not a federal holiday like this year, a day that will forever will live in infamy, a day when CIA and secret service dirty hands assassinated Jack Kennedy.
Designated convenient patsy Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with well-planned state-sponsored murder – JFK eliminated largely for transforming himself in office from a warrior to peacemaker.
He wanted all US forces out of Vietnam by December 1965. He supported world peace over endless wars of aggression, rapprochement with Soviet Russia, nuclear disarmament, Palestinian rights, while opposing Israel’s illegal nuclear weapons program.
Chastened by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he refused to authorize another attempt lawless to topple Fidel Castro. He enraged energy giants, wanting their oil depletion allowance cut or eliminated.
He favored Federal Reserve reform. His Executive Order 11110 authorized replacing Federal Reserve notes with silver certificates whenever appropriate to take this action.
He deplored the CIA, firing director Allen Dulles and his deputy General Charles Cabell – once saying he favored “splinter(ing) the (agency) into a thousand pieces and scatter(ing) it to the winds.” It was reason enough to kill him.
His opposition to imperial wars increased in office, once saying he wanted a “negotiated settlement in Laos, (refusing) to put more troops in.”
He called Pentagon commanders “crazy” for wanting nuclear weapons deployed in Berlin and used in Southeast Asia.
Following the October 1962 Cuba missile crisis, he said he “never had the slightest intension” of attacking or invading the country.
He opposed Pax Americana enforced dominance, signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty with Soviet Russia, favored nuclear and complete disarmament, wanting wars avoided, not waged.
He was at odds with Pentagon commanders, the CIA, most congressional members, and nearly all his advisors.
He understood his vulnerability, paying with his life for supporting responsible policies, the lesson of his assassination not lost on his successors to this day.
Serving less than three years in office, he was favored to be reelected in 1964, another key reason why he was assassinated.
After dark forces in Washington cooked up Watergate to remove Richard Nixon from office on trumped up charges, angered about his social, environmental and geopolitical agenda, opening China, ending Southeast Asia war after escalating it, his agenda world’s apart from how Republicans and undemocratic Dems operate today, bipartisan US governance began shifting right.
Today it’s hard right, nary a profile in courage or peacemaker in Congress, why war on humanity rages endlessly.
What JFK, RFK, and MLK opposed, virtually all House and Senate members today support – going along with America’s permanent war agenda, in deference to the nation’s military, industrial, security, media complex.
Waging endless wars of aggression against invented enemies, because real ones don’t exist, risks eventually going nuclear.
It’s the ultimate nightmarish scenario, able to end life on earth if launched, ignored by major media, refusing to highlight the clear and present danger of Washington’s permanent war agenda – able to kill us all if pushed too far.
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My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."
