Got Terror?

Terrorism in other places is complicated but we can grasp the basics. When we look at ourselves, here at home, our ability to understand what fuels it, and thus our ability to defend against it, is hampered by domestic interests of the marketplace and the political arena. This chllenge has been dangerously compounded by the fact that somewhere in the Cheney/Rove era we replaced our acting ethics with a merely spoken morality. It was a very dangerous sleight of hand.

Here is a litle example of why that is:

Somewhere near Salinas there is a pissed-off (illegal) immigrant from our failed (due to market-driven corruption) nation-state neighbor to the south. His wife (women learn new languages first, so she can read English) read him this Washington Post story. It details the dairy industry’s willingness to spend millions of dollars on efforts to collude, with abandoned ethics, against one individual entrepreneur.

Dairy Industry Crushed Innovator Who Bested Price-Control System

(Or the original AZ Republic story:)
Maverick Dairyman Fights Lobbyists and Lawmakers

The article made our immigrant friend realize that the Agriculture industry will pay a pro-corruption lobbyist more in an hour than they will pay a whole busload of his border-crossing, hard working, refugee, band-of-brothers in a year. Maybe it made him angry, because he understands that every wealthy nation has an immigrant low-wage labor resource and that the United States is the only wealthy nation in history whose immigrant labor class has never bread terrorism. He noticed that, as a reward for this good behavior we recently gave them 3 miles of worthless actual fencing and a 300 mile wall of state-sponsored rhetorical prejudice.

So he took a poop on the Organic Spinach last month.

Now his drinking buddy heard about that, and sees it the same way, and so he took a dump on the onions last week.

And if they have a buddy who works in a dairy, the lobbying/legal expense detailed in those articles will all be for naught.

I am willing to bet very few people outside of the dairy industry read both of these articles. But when the headline of this same paper says "GOT E-COLI?" every family in America, will promptly trade their $5 a week milk budget line for a gallon of free tap water, $1.75 increase to the Starbucks "soy latte' " budget line, and one more gallon of gas. The cash flow of a 30 Billion dollar a year marketplace could be shut down without a single explosion. Simply because we won't trade our spoken Morals, for our acted Ethics.

We can, and we should do all of the dark things we do to fight terror. We should spy on ourselves, steal elections and kill innocents. But if our morality remains only rhetorical (and wildly prejudiced), and our ethics further abandoned for widening greed and corruption, then America will fail in our lifetime.

Regardless of what the Mullahs do next.

Thanks for letting me try and express my thoughts.

A.