In the conspirators desire to save Rome from an all powerful Caesar they instead destabilized Rome and sent it into decline. I sometimes think that mankind's epitaph will be. "Too smart for their own good and not half as smart as they imagined."

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I am not a proponent of conspiracy theories per say. Yet when the facts simply do not add up and the official explanations make no sense, you're left to sift the sands of possibilities. Conspiracy has always been the way of mankind, we are those violent, vile, little monkeys with a thirst for blood. The conspirators slew Julius Caesar not because they did not love Caesar, but that they loved Rome more.

In the conspirators desire to save Rome from an all powerful Caesar they instead destabilized Rome and sent it into decline. I sometimes think that mankind's epitaph will be. "Too smart for their own good and not half as smart as they imagined."

In November of 1963 President Kennedy was a assassinated while riding in an open car. The official theory was that he was murdered by a lone nut with a rifle, a very bad rifle with a misaligned scope. A suspect with ties to intelligence groups and a very dark and murky background. The best evidence for conspiracy is not the murder its self but the actions after the murder.

The chief of the Dallas police declares the suspect guilty. The suspect is interrogated without an attorney present, and no one kept notes. The suspect is then murdered while in police custody. The inconsistencies are glaring and make no sense, the President's autopsy is handled by doctors who are bureaucrats and key pieces of evidence quietly disappear forever.

President Kennedy's murder was a pivotal turning point in American history. It changed everything, just as Caesar's murder changed everything in Rome. With a bullet the will of the American people was overturned.

To the American right wing, especially the extreme right wing, Kennedy was too soft on the Soviets. They complained bitterly of Kennedy's refusal to allow American air power to be used at the Bay of Pigs invasion. The President complained to his brother that he felt that he was being manipulated into starting a war. The right wing saw Kennedy's negotiations with the Soviets during the Cuban missiles crisis as a capitulation. History has proven Kennedy correct as the conflict could have very easily gone nuclear. Soviet Submarines had the weapons on station and authorization to use them if attacked.

They killed Kennedy not because they did not love him, but that they loved America more.

So we had the escalation of the Vietnam war and our new policy was to get tough with the Soviets. Martin Luther King had helped to lead the Montgomery bus boycott and had become a national leader on civil rights. He faced death threats almost daily, but at the same time King was known to be non-violent and open to accommodation. He was a pragmatic man willing to take the long road, while his contemporary Malcolm X was not nearly so pragmatic. Malcolm said things that scared the bejesus out of white America. He was a man of character and principle, unyielding and incorruptible. When he split from the Black Muslims over the character and corruption of its leader Elijah Mohamed, Malcolm was a marked man. He was seen as a threat to both the Black Muslims and to White America.

When Malcolm was murdered in 1965 was it a conspiracy? Of course it was, but were the FBI or CIA involved? They were involved only in the negative, if something you want to happen, is about to happen, then you just let it happen. Could the FBI claim they had no intelligence about the actions of the Black Muslims?

When Martin Luther King was murdered he had gone to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. He was still involved in championing the rights of African Americans but his message was changing. He was no longer speaking exclusively for African Americans, he was speaking for all poor Americans and he had begun to speak out against the Vietnam war.

"Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."

Martin Luther King spoke these words one year to the day before his murder. Murdered by yet another lone nut with a gun. An unemployed man with a new car, a man who claimed he was given money to go buy a rifle and was then ordered to take it back and to exchange it.

In 1968 political firebrand George Wallace ran for president as a Democrat and garnered a great deal of support from disaffected Democratic voters angry about civil rights and liberal policies. In 1972 Wallace ran again, this time as an independent, his policies were conservative and he threatened to take more votes from the Republicans than the Democrats. Wallace was shot and nearly killed by yet another lone nut with a gun.

This on the heels of Robert Kennedy's murder in 1968. Robert Kennedy had just won the California primary, it would have been difficult to have stopped him from becoming the Democratic nominee. A Democratic nominee with a cache, carrying a torch for peace. To complete his fallen brother's vision and to some, that vision was very, very dangerous. Machiavelli wrote, "But when cities or countries are accustomed to live under a prince, and his family is exterminated, they, being on the one hand accustomed to obey and on the other hand not having the old prince, cannot agree in making one from amongst themselves, and they do not know how to govern themselves."

"And he who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, for in rebellion it has always the watch-word of liberty and its ancient privileges as a rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will ever cause it to forget."

That kind of puts the troubles of the 1960's in perspective, doesn't it?

As Robert Kennedy's blood poured out on that dirty kitchen floor it wasn't just Bobby dying, it was the Democratic party. Three progressive leaders, who championed Peace, progress and Liberalism were dead by assassin's bullet's in five years. Who would dare to pick up that mantle and fearlessly walk down that road again. When the candle is extinguished, the light goes out.

Twenty two of the previous thirty years had been under true Democratic control.
Twenty four of the next twenty eight years would be under Republican control. Nixon left office in disgrace, Watergate? Or perhaps his plan to end the Vietnam war?

We have seen over the last few decades the acceleration of the accumulation of money. Over the past decade we have seen the acceleration, accumulation and centralization of police powers. As an American citizen you stand no freer today than the average citizen of the old Soviet Union. You have two wings of one central party where the conservatives want one annual report on the five year plan while liberals want a bi-annual report on the five year plan.

Just as in the Soviet Union, the party chooses the candidates. They promote the ones that they like and ostracize the ones they don't. Alan Greyson wouldn't play ball with the party and was out. Dennis Kucinich played ball with the party on health care and was in.

From the standpoint of the actual rulers of the American oligarchy, George W. Bush was a very successful President. He accomplished more of the things that the oligarchy wished to see done than even Ronald Reagan. His one glaring failure was the failure to privatize Social Security. The problem for the oligarchy was that George W. Bush was by now wildly unpopular, and Dick Cheney had lower approval numbers than even Lee Harvey Oswald. George W. destroyed the public base of the Republican Party.

It was clear long before the election that it would be extremely difficult for another Republican candidate to get elected President. So what's the oligarchy to do?

The sitting President was a smirking, sneering,inarticulate, little white man with a cold wife and rebellious daughters, ostentatiously steeped in hedonism, excess and power.

You need someone friendly, you need someone articulate. Someone with a beautiful, friendly wife and kids! Kids are great, especially young children, less trouble, better photographs. But how could you sell a commodity such as this to the American public? How could you make it special?

An African American? Great idea! But can he get elected? There is the problem, how can you be sure that he can gather enough support?

Simple, you pick a Republican to run against him who is grouchy. A Republican who likes to smirk and who wants to continue the Bush legacy. An old man who is not very photogenic, an old broken down Nixon against a young and vibrant African American John Kennedy.

So the leaders of the American oligarchy sit back and watch. Come the party conventions it's still too close to call. So what do you do now but throw the trump card, like something from a Hollywood farce, you pick an incompetent. You pick Goldie Hawn or Reese Witherspoon as your Vice Presidential nominee. You've made the Republican unelectable and the Democrat unstoppable.

The Democrat once elected continues the same policies as his Republican predecessor. Tax cuts for corporations, more troops for Afghanistan than even more than the the Republican candidate wanted. The card check bill evaporates, just like the public option and the President explains it as, "I tried but the Republicans are too strong and wouldn't let me." Despite making a deal on his own with the hospital association and the insurance lobby. Turning thirty million Americans over to a privatized Nixon heath care system.

The Republicans attack the President vociferously, "he's Mao, he's a socialist, he's a Communist, he wasn't born here." They never attack him as a stooge, a pawn or as a Trojan horse. The Republicans then begin to rebrand themselves, spontaneously of course. This gives them both a new platform to sell the same old crap but it also gives them a safety valve for 2012. If they want the Trojan Horse to continue in 2912 they will split the Republican party with a tea party candidate. The oligarchy wins either way, but they have to convince you that it was your idea.

The President appoints a committee to cut the deficit with exactly the same goals as spelled out in the 2008 Republican platform. The President's stimulus package is 35 percent tax cuts, his jobs bill is almost 100 percent tax cuts. Who approved deep water oil drilling on the Gulf after Richard Nixon banned it?

Now the poor, poor President has been bamboozled again, I don't want to give the Bush Tax cuts to the wealthy he moans, but the Republicans are making me do it. I want to draw the line at people earning $5,000 per week, you know regular working folks.

The co-chair of the deficit committee is a close personal friend of the former Vice President. The man who sold the scanning machines to the TSA is a former cabinet secretary. The Defense secretary is a Republican holdover and the Treasury secretary is a protegee of the Federal Reserve.

If you look closely and watch carefully you can see the wires, and the scenery ceases to look real. It is pathetic theater, an immorality play, an imitation of lawful government.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious--makes you so sick at heart--that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." Mario Savio

There's a time when even benign complicity makes you an accessory and a co-conspirator.

Authors Bio:

I who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that I am really.

Given a front row seat for the generation of the 1960's I lived in Chicago in 1960. My father was a Democratic precinct captain, my mother an election judge. His father had been a Union organizer and had been beaten and jailed for his efforts. His first time in jail was for punching a Ku Klux Klansman during a parade in the 1930's. I never felt as if I was raised in a family of activists but seeing it print makes me think, yes. That is a part of who I am.

We find ourselves today living in a world treed by the hounds of madness, a complicit media covering contrite parties. Multilevel media, giving more access to communication yet stunting actual communication. More noise, less voice, more sound less music, more law less justice, more medicine less life.