Q. Related to that, the citizenry and most of Congress are kept in the dark with respect to special missions, proxy funding, CIA operations, and swaths of unknown unknowns constituting psyops, cyber ops, and regime change ops, all done in our name as U.S. citizens. The funds to support this sprawling "dark world" of sabotage and terror being inflicted on the rest of the planet, is also a secret. Now there's pervasive spying on U.S. citizens right here at home. What place does any of this have in "the land of the free"? Does this mean government of the people, by the people, for the people is just a sham?
A. I think you have implicitly answered the question. Of course, the prevailing system is corrupt and anti-democratic and that's why there is a pervasive illegal effort to survey society and persecute whistleblowers like John Kiriakou, Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and many other honorable truth-tellers. The powers-that-be know they have much to fear from public accountability and so they strive strenuously to suppress public protest and conceal their systematic criminality. Fundamentally, the US power is not just a violation of foreign nations. It is a violation against its own people who suffer from deprived and deformed society as an immensely anti-democratic result. But that is going to change as working people begin to organize and demand their long-overdue rights and indeed eventually compose the governing structures. That may take decades to eventuate, but history is on the side of the struggle for justice and peace.
Q. Recently we've seen some token but precedent-setting direct payments to citizens in the form of Covid relief. There is also the ongoing discussion about reparations to descendants of slaves. If it could be unequivocally established that the government has abused DOD funding, misused and squandered vast sums of money to promote unjustified wars, purchase unneeded equipment, unnecessarily expand U.S. military presence across the globe, and regularly lied to the American public to manufacture consent for these misadventures and fraudulent activities, practical and political considerations aside, do you see any constitutional or other legal barriers to the public identifying, expecting, or even demanding proper compensation? A cash refund or citizen reparations for massive, authenticated abuse of power?
A. The best manifestation of democratic justice would be for the majority of working people in the United States to finally create a government that works for their class interests. Litigate, so to speak, against the entire system by a mass movement of politically conscious workers and their families. Getting rid of the warmongering, oligarchic capitalist system and replacing it with a worker-directed socialist government that shares genuine internationalism with all other nations would be the most effective form of compensation for the many cruel decades of injustice.
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We are grateful to Finian Cunningham for his thought-provoking views. The interview was arranged by John Rachel, Director of the Peace Dividend Project. This effort embraces a powerful, unprecedented, end-to-end strategy for challenging the tyranny of neocon warmongers in Washington DC, ending the endless wars, and reversing the self-destructive foreign policy and military paradigm that now poisons U.S. relations with the rest of the world. We hope to further interview Finian for the full-length Peace Dividend documentary film, a devastating indictment of the corruption and fraud built into our excessive military budgets and imperial overreach. This movie will inform, unite and empower everyday citizens to have a voice in determining the future they want for themselves and their children.
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