The following is from my memory, as my reference materials are not with me here in [current country name withheld], so please excuse me if any of my names or facts are incorrect in the following text. Also, I have left out a lot of information because I don't have the materials at hand.

I also wish to emphasize that just because there are some questionable people in American politics and government, that does not mean that American officials and policies you may encounter are flawed. The vast majority of American officials and government representatives are good people with the highest principles, by my experience. Just because they work for the U.S. government doesn't mean they agree with their leaders, nor does it mean they are always willing to duly implement the policies of dirty politics as sometimes instructed. Law enforcement officials are particularly good now.

Likewise, most American policies are probably good, though there are clearly some which are not good for the people of some other countries, and which don't reflect the wishes of the majority of American people. We get only one President, and usually don't agree with all his policies, if even most of them...

As is the case in many countries, the problems are with the power crazy people at the very top, not most of the people in the mid to upper levels, nor most of the people in the ranks.

Few people know this, but a majority of historians generally that Republican Vice President Nixon really beat Democrat John F. Kennedy (JFK) in 1960, but Kennedy won due to election fraud in Illinois and Texas. This is generally accepted as fact by objective historians. The fraud in Illinois was orchestrated by powerful parochial mob and labor interests.

JFK was the son of Joe Kennedy, a diplomat but also an underworld figure, who used his wealth and influence to promote a generation of Kennedy sons -- John, Robert and Ted. (The eldest and most loved Kennedy son died before reaching political age. If I recall correctly, he was Joseph Jr.)

Once JFK reached the presidency, he and his brother Robert, as Attorney General, turned around and started the pursuit of ridding America of the mafia powers that had brought JFK to power. JFK had great charisma, and his popular appeal with the American people was a tremendously powerful force. JFK wasn't dependent upon any special interest power bases any more, as he had great popular support talking directly to the American people as President.

(There is a book titled "Double Cross" by Sam and Chuck Giancana which goes into great detail. Sam Giancana was one of the biggest mafia bosses in America and controlled most of the Chicago underworld at the time of Kennedy's election. Giancana was instrumental in the mafia stuffing the ballots in Illinois. The title "Double Cross" is in reference to JFK and RFK turning around and attacking, rather than supporting, the mafia. Sam was eventually killed in mob style fashion, and his low key brother probably wrote most of the book, published after Sam was dead and not prosecutable. There are many other research books that correlate with this one.)

The private sector mafia wasn't the only conservative force that JFK was bucking. Another major force was the goverment contractor businesses involved in "the military industrial complex" (the words of President and General Dwight Eisenhower, in his warning in his final, televised speech to the American people as President). After his assassin, some of the relations of Oswald and Ruby (discussed below) were critical of Kennedy's statements on policy regarding Vietnam, Latin America, American government support for repressive military dictatorships, and perhaps even the CIA (splitting up some powerful elements). Despite the superpower rhetoric, Kennedy had his doubts about the CIA strategy of using some of the oppressive and unpopular foreign military dictators of less developed countries abroad. (Notably, JFK invented the Peace Corps.)

JFK was assassinated in Dallas in November, 1963. Here are a few facts:

There was unquestionably a lot of difficulty in getting facts and information from the local Dallas authorities, in whose jurisdiction the assassination occured. The Mayor of Dallas (Cabell) was an extreme adversary of JFK, as the mayor's brother was a General associated with a CIA operation to invade Cuba and overthrow its new President (discussed below, see also "Operation Zapata" or "The Bay of Pigs"), and JFK refused military support to the General, resulting in a disaster with great loss of life to the General's CIA-trained mercenary forces (discussed later on this page).

In addition, if I recall correctly, within the top Dallas police brass was the brother of John Foster Dulles, the fanatical Secretary of State under the previous Republican President Dwight Eisenhower (and Vice President Nixon), e.g., Dulles' policies of "rollback" of "the godless Communists".

At the street level, there is a lot to say about the Dallas (and New Orleans) links between some political elements of those times, military contractors, and various mercenary elements loosely linked to the CIA. Dallas and New Orleans had a lot of mercenaries involved in pro-business, repressive and anti-communist activities in Latin America, often corruptly supported by multinational fruit corporations, hence the slang name "banana republic".

Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, was formerly a U.S. military man of ordinary rank assigned to a top secret spy base in Japan (the U2 reconnaissance planes) but who had defected to Russia for a few years, and had then returned to America with his Russian wife. He looked like a Communist more than anyone else. Oswald came to Dallas via New Orleans.

After the assassination, Oswald had spent hours (4 hours?) talking his head off in closed door, behind the windows interviews with top Dallas police officials, as attested by multiple witnesses who were in the Dallas police station at that time. Oswald is well known for his brief passage in front of the press when he went up to the microphone and said he was "just the patsy", and that the whole story would come out soon. Yet, not a single note or comment is known from that meeting.

Oswald's planned passage from the local Dallas police station to a federal holding center was inexplicably delayed for an hour and a half (remember that, you'll know why in a moment). The press and all the federal operations waited and waited. Eventually, they started the transfer, as Oswald started the one minute walk from his holding cell through the police station towards a back door with a waiting car. Oswald was assassinated inside the Dallas police station about halfway in between, by Jack Ruby, right in front of the TV cameras on a live TV broadcast.

Just about five minutes before Oswald was assassinated, Ruby had wired money to a prostitute via Western Union, as is noted in Western Union's accurate time receipts. How did Ruby get from Western Union into the secured Dallas police station and in front of the crowd so he could shoot Oswald? Is that why Oswald was delayed an hour and a half?

The story at the time was that Ruby entered through the back door near where the car was waiting for Oswald. However, there was a guard there, and security was supposed to be tight. The guard said that he had allowed Ruby to enter there, though nobody else had seen Ruby enter there. A few years later, as the result of a defamation lawsuit, Dallas police station employees were required to testify under oath, and they all reported that Ruby entered through the front door and went down the elevator with some top officials.

It appears that Oswald was made to be the patsy because the people orchestrating the scheme wanted to blame the Communists, since Oswald was a high profile Communist sympathizer.

A lot of key witnesses died, some by a ruled "suicide" or an unusual accident, some by violent means, in short time thereafter.

The official investigation was headed by a reluctant Republican Supreme Court appointee, Earl Warren, who headed the so-called Warren Commission, which included several notables including a relatively low profile Republican congressman named Gerald Ford (who would become President about 10 years later). Nobody knows for sure, but some Washington veterans perceived that Warren wanted to maintain national stability, in view of JFK's strong popularity, the ... ummm ... possibility of some forces related to national security at play against JFK, and how various possible scenarios could unfold. Afterwards, there's the very limited and sanitized information supplied to the Warren Commission upon which to base its findings. Anyway, the Warren Commission found that Oswald was a lone gunman and knew nobody else of significance, that Jack Ruby was also acting alone out of anger towards Oswald, and that Jack Ruby had no connections to organized crime. In other words, no leads, the case stopped at the late Oswald and the current Jack Ruby.

The claim that Ruby had no connection to organized crime was the most laughable because Ruby was so well known. Ruby grew up in a Chicago mob neighborhood and was well known to have worked for top mobsters there (namely Al Capone), starting as a teenager and moving himself up through the ranks, before moving to Dallas and helping with mob operations there. That's all he did his whole adult life -- work for the mob! The Dallas police knew Ruby very well for years, and Ruby even co-signed loans for police officers. (Did the mob influence individual policemen also by to debts to the mob, or simply buying them, or other conventional mob methods?) Ruby himself had tremendous money problems at the time of the assassination, and some claim that his problems didn't stop with money. He cut a package deal.

Ruby himself said on a recorded deposition (which is now publicly available) that he could never tell the truth in Dallas, and requested that he be transferred to Washington, D.C., for questioning and to tell the whole story. The only two Warren Commission members to interview Ruby were Earl Warren and Gerald Ford, in Dallas under the control of his captors. They always denied Ruby's requests to be taken out of Dallas, and Ruby eventually died in a Dallas police jail in 1968 from cancer.

A few little tidbits:

There are a lot of opinions on this issue. Many came out after Oliver Stone created the movie JFK, about the assassination. (I actually helped one of the attempted scriptwriters communicate with Stone ("Stoned", in my opinion) during the early development of the script, but Stone cut off the best people and relied heavily on some dramatic and questionable bookwriting conspiracy theorists without question, resulting in a movie of mixed fact and fiction.)

Subsequently, and what disturbs me the most, is that the most idiotic and crazy conspiracy theories that can be easily ridiculed were picked up and broadcast by the popular press, whereas the most rational ones were largely ignored by the most powerful and manipulative elements of the press. This created the image that the conspiracy theories were all crazy. They certainly were not. In fact, the official accounts of two lone gunmen are also crazy. Look at what forces were promoting the crazy conspiracy theorists, and what forces tried to attack the disciplined researchers and writers.

It's also notable that there's a close relationship between news agencies and the intelligence community. The news agencies rely on the intelligence community for information, in order to tell the news first in the competitive business world of media journalism, and to have the best extended stories. This means they must placate their sources of information. The intelligence community can, and does, easily manipulate the news with one-sided releases of facts and fiction. If a news company ever attacks the interests of a major source of information, what do you think will happen to their subsequent business?

If you want to read the one best book on the topic, read the one titled Crossfire, by Jim Maars, which is mainly just a collection of facts, and lets the reader look at the facts and draw their own conclusions. It does not put together any particular conspiracy theory, but instead lets the readers see all the facts and decide for themselves. It's a thick book, well researched and well written. However, the author was not successful in getting many interviews, whereas the crazy writers were.

There are many books out there, and a lot of money has been made on the JFK assassination. I've skimmed several but am not well read in this topic. The book Crossfire by Jim Maars is one of the most recommended books by level-headed people.

It's pretty clear that Oswald was involved in some way in the assassination and its plans. He was closely associated with suspects turned up by other investigative routes, and was reportedly seen bringing wrapped-up "curtain rods" to the building where some shooting occured, the Texas School Book Depository, a new, smalltime job lined up where JFK's motorcade was slightly diverted in the plans that day. (There are some questions about Oswald being seen downstairs calmly drinking a coke when agents ran in just moments after the firing from the fourth floor, but what is a more serious question is the fact that the gun Oswald owned and which was allegedly used for such an accurate shot had the sights badly misaligned (and besides, sharpshooters couldn't even shoot that quickly and accurately in a re-enactment using that gun, with bolt action reloads). There are multiple things which call into question the use of that particular rifle, plus its origins. However, it is fairly clear that Oswald was involved one way or another.)

JFK died from a gunshot wound to the head. The official autopsy was done at a U.S. government medical center in Bethesda, Maryland (suburban Washington, D.C.). JFK's brain, a crucial piece of the forensics investigation, mysteriously disappeared after being removed and chemically solidified for examination. There are some issues about the initial views at the Dallas hospital (bullet entry at the front) vs. the official Bethesda one (bullet entry from the back) by doctors who had seen many gunshot wounds.

Then there's "the magic bullet" (necessary for the lone gunman theory) which takes a bizarre course to cause multiple wounds through bones yet comes out pristine, and is mysteriously found laying on the stretcher at the hospital -- and is tracible to Oswald's controversial rifle.

In 1978, due to the relatively new U.S. Freedom of Information Act, in one of the batches of documents routinely released to the public (one which had about 100,000 pages) included a memo by then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover regarding a meeting immediately after the assassination with "George H. W. Bush of the CIA" regarding the possible role of mercenaries. When George Bush became CIA Director under President Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s, it was claimed to be the first time an "outsider" was appointed head of the CIA. A press inquiry to the CIA resulted in silence for a long time, then they said it was another George Bush who previously worked for the CIA, but this was soon discounted when the other George Bush specified was found. He was a low level employee for a short time in an unrelated field, and nothing anywhere close to the level to meet with Hoover. The CIA subsequently remained silent on the matter.

The George Bush Sr. we know apparently got rich when his small company, Zapata Oil, hit oil in Midland, Texas. Not long after that, he moved to Houston. Shortly after his move to Houston, the CIA launched the invasion of Cuba to try to oust Fidel Castro, who had recently risen to power in a popular revolt and kicked out the mafias. That operation, known to the media as the "Bay of Pigs" because that's where the mercenaries were defeated on the beach, was known in the CIA as "Operation Zapata". Armaments used by the mercenaries of Operation Zapata were shipped from North Carolina on two ships named The Houston and The Barbara. (George Bush's wife is named Barbara.) All coincidence?

The invasion of Cuba and the Bay of Pigs event was a major event in American politics, and which put JFK into an embarrassed position in both the domestic and international arenas early in his administration. It also caused a big rift between JFK and the CIA. JFK was against attempts to assassinate Castro or invade Cuba. However, over time he was pressured and persuaded to do something, so he agreed to the incursion on condition that no US troops could be used in Operation Zapata, only the rebel forces trained and armed by the CIA. However, Cuba seemed ready for them, and when they got pinned down in the Bay of Pigs, the American General Cabell (name?) asked JFK to send in air cover for an evacuation. JFK refused, and there were heavy casualties in the retreat, and incessant cursing of JFK thereafter. (The brother of Gen. Cabell was mayor of Dallas.) After that event, JFK was known to have been planning a shake-up of the CIA. JFK thought he was misled by the CIA and manipulated into making decisions to use force based on questionable information. JFK's problems with the CIA continued with many cases of designedly incomplete and/or inaccurate information being presented to the President.

That's the core of the situation. From there you can find links into the interconnected world of international arms dealers, money laundering, mafias, and so on.

You can read all about this kind of stuff in books in the bookstore. As always, you just have to be careful to not believe everything you read, but the more you read, the more you see where the authors are coming from and where they're going. In this world of a free press, it's not too difficult to figure it out and be an informed spectator.

Anyway, I will continue on to the present day and how this all relates to the present American situation...

The Peace Corps was founded by JFK, and this was one of the greatest legacies of JFK in his very brief presidency. Another was the man on the Moon.

Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) had wrapped up the Democratic nomination in 1968, and seemed destined to become the next President of the United States of America and pick up where his brother left off. RFK had been politically dumped by JFK's Vice President cum President, Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson, shortly after JFK's assassination, so that this was in effect the return of the Kennedy brothers to the leadership of American politics for the first time since the assassination in 1963, by the popular vote of the American people.

President Johnson had won re-election practically unopposed by his party in 1964, but his dramatic escalation of the Vietnam War had led to his demise, as the Vietnam War was quite unpopular with the American people, and Johnson bowed out rather than face certain electoral defeat in 1968.

RFK was assassinated in a kitchen detour. This time, the patsy was a Palestinian, by the name of Sirhan Sirhan. Sirhan was somehow involved, but the actual shot to the head came from behind at an angle and at nearly point blank range, not from well in front. There are multiple reliable witnesses to this, who were near Senator Kennedy at the moment, and also there is fairly clear forensic evidence.

However, this assassination job was performed much more carefully than the operation in Dallas, left far fewer leads, and was covered up much more professionally. The forces that murdered RFK had probably learned from the Dallas experience to hide trails. They were also most professional and elite.

On the other hand, I've seen much better TV documentaries on the RFK assassination than I've seen about the JFK assassination. This may be because it's much less known who was really behind the RFK assassination, and thus the case is far smaller. There are leads, but they aren't talking, and they also aren't getting sucked into libel court cases or other court cases with people testifying under oath. After all, it was a court case that revealed Jack Ruby came into the police station to shoot Oswald via the elevator with some big shot officials, not from the back door as was long reported in the media. (Of course, that's also how Paula Jones blew up the Monica Lewinsky case, and an impeachment of Clinton, based on Clinton perjuring himself when he said under oath that he didn't have a sexual relationship with Lewinsky.)

After Democrat RFK's death, Republican Nixon won in 1968 in a landslide, based largely on promises of ending American involvement in the Vietnam War.

Notably, RFK often fought with longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), who was essentially the FBI's founder and developer (1924-72), and who died in office after going senile, during the Nixon Administration. Some time after Hoover's death, it was revealed that Hoover was gay and had been caught "in compromising positions" on film by the mob and blackmailed. This explained Hoover's concerted and perplexing inaction against certain mob groups and indeed undercutting other authorities' efforts. After Hoover's death, the FBI transformed into a more accountable organization. The FBI is now one of the world's premier law enforcement agencies, and cleanest.

Nixon appeared destined for an easy re-election victory in 1972. The Watergate break-in (of his opponent's campaign headquarters -- Senator George McGovern) was unnecessary because Nixon was headed for an easy victory, but exemplifies his underworld operators' overconfidence (since they'd gotten away with much bigger jobs).

I don't want to get into Watergate too much here, as it's actually not as interesting nor as relevant to today as other events. However, it's remarkable because Nixon was revealed to be so close to ruthless political operators as his top advisors in the White House and the Executive Branch of the U.S. government.

The Watergate investigation helped bring some energy to the bogus investigations of the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations.

Notably, one of Nixon's top advisors, G. Gordon Liddy, had a court case brought against him by a prominent journalist, Jack Anderson, for conspiracy to murder Anderson. Among Nixon's aides, there were plans to murder Anderson for writing unfavorable journalistic reports about the Nixon administration, under a weak argument on national security grounds.

Liddy won the court case, and thus was cleared of the charges. In America, after 7 (?) years, you cannot be re-tried in court. Thus, Liddy was immune and free to admit in his book 7 years later that yes, they had planned to kill Jack Anderson. They were going to make it look like a robber had killed him on the dangerous streets of Washington, D.C. Those plans ended because some of the people involved were caught in the Watergate break-in. If they had not been caught in Watergate, then Jack Anderson would probably have been knocked off. Who knows what else Liddy and his power crazy thugs have done, or would have done, but aren't free to talk about without self-incriminating. Again, Liddy admitted this himself in his book of memoirs.

Carter was elected president based largely on a clean record, as contrasted to the Nixon Administration. Gerald Ford was never elected president, nor vice president. Gerald Ford had gotten to the presidency by two events. First, Nixon's elected vice president, Spiro Agnew of Texas, had resigned due to a tax evasion indictment, and he was replaced by Gerald Ford. Then Nixon was forced to resign, thereby making Gerald Ford the first American president who had never been elected as president or vice president. For those familiar with the Warren Commission's investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination, this seemed a real case of underworld politics gone amuck, but most of the American people were oblivious.

Notably, in the late 1970s, Congress opened a new investigation into the JFK assassination, which eventually contradicted the Warren Commission, and concluded that there was probably a secret conspiracy, and probably more than one gunman as well. However, the investigation was limited and cut short. It was already old news. The vast majority of Americans didn't believe the Warren Commission report anyway.

Where Nixon and part of his inner circle failed, Nixon's CIA Director William Casey and his CIA good 'ol boys later succeeded. With the advent of computer technology, it was no longer necessary to physically break into a place like Watergate to get handwritten or typewritten campaign strategy. With electronic surveillance, you can pick up the transmissions electronically.

It was acknowledged by top Reagan Administration officials that Reagan had a copy of President Carter's debate strategy for the two televised debates on national TV, unknown to Carter. Those two debates, more than anything else, turned around American public opinion and the vote. Some of the buzz around Washington is that Carter's debate strategy was intercepted electronically from the computer's natural electronic emissions. Carter was an engineer. It was the stupidest thing that a Democrat President had done since JFK drove down a Dallas street unprotected in a limosine convertible. The official line, albeit argued, is that a copy of Carter's debate strategy was passed out by Fawn Hall's mother. Who knows for sure? Not me. However, I do not consider this an issue of serious legal concern, and just note it in passing.

Cold War politics and the emergence of the national security apparatus had its clear drawbacks -- a secret underworld that sometimes threatened American ideals themselves. As the old saying goes: "I have seen the enemy, and it is ourselves!"

George Bush was Ronald Reagan's vice presidential running mate in the 1980 election contest against President Jimmy Carter.

In that contest, one of the biggest issues was the American hostages in Iran, an issue which was hurting Carter.

Carter was negotiating with the Iranians and appeared to be making significant progress for release of the hostages before the election. This event was feared by the Reagan camp, who had invested a lot of political capital in attacking Carter for being weak and ineffective with the Iranians. The Reagan camp was fearful of an "October Surprise" whereby the hostages would be released shortly before the November elections, giving Carter a big boost and the election.

All of a sudden the Iranians went silent in the negotiations, just before what looked like success, and the Iranians stayed silent until after the election, whereby the negotiations resumed with success as planned before. In the end, the hostages were put in an airplane on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President, and in fact sat on the runway for hours, until exactly a minute or two after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President when the airplane was finally given the go-ahead to take off from Iran.

What happened?

There are two books on this, both titled October Surprise. One is written by the top Iranian expert in the National Security Council (White House) for presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter. His name is Gary Sick. The other book is by Barbara Honneger (spelling?) who was on the Reagan for President election campaign staff, near the top.

Both books detail how the Reagan camp had secret negotiations with the Iranians to delay release of the hostages after the election. This effort was led by George Bush and Bill Casey. (Casey was CIA Director under Nixon, and again under Reagan.)

This eventually led to Iran-Contra, whereby the U.S. was selling armaments to Iran, and then using the money to pay for Congressionally-banned guerilla wars in Latin America. ("Contra" means "against" in Spanish, and "the Contras" were CIA-trained mercenaries fighting a democratically elected government in the Latin American country of Nicaragua which was hostile to the U.S. for supporting a previous dictatorship which was brutally repressive and corrupt. That was American multinational and Cold War politics-as-usual for the previous decades. Most of the voting American public did not see this as a significant issue affecting their vote, but Congress banned support of the Contras, both overt and covert, not that the CIA and underworld obeyed Congress...) This occured while the U.S. government diligently campaigned against arms supplies to Iran from other countries, based on principle. Of course, Reagan and Bush denied all knowledge whatsoever, and when the story eventually hit the press, Reagan fired the White House people involved (Oliver North and General Poindexter, names that also pop up in the secret war in Laos and drug-running to support other covert operations in the Vietnam War years...). North and Poindexter became heroes of the U.S. radical right, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the Iranian conservatives got the last, cynical laugh.

Continuing the story from the previous section, the Iran operations eventually backfired on Bush in his campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992. Just a few days before the election, when the race was a statistical dead heat and Bush had momentum, it was revealed by a special investigator that Bush had apparently lied under oath about his having no knowledge of Iran-Contra dealings, and Bush lost just enough ground in the polls (a few percent) to lose the presidency to Bill Clinton.

Questions have been raised about whether the announcement by the special investigator just a few days before the election was politically motivated.

The dirty politics in regard to the "October Surprise" and the Latin American "Contras" may have brought the Reagan-Bush administration to power for 12 years, but also put them out of power in the end.

A lot has been said in the newspapers already about the Florida election. However, I was sitting at a pub the other day with a guy from Florida, and he told me the following allegation which I've not seen in the local press:

Florida Governor Jeb Bush, brother of President-elect George Bush Jr., has resisted the modernization of the polling process in Florida. The reason is that it's easier to manipulate the election results with punch cards than it would be with polling centers which have voting machines where you pull a lever (as I had in backwater Arkansas back in 1980) or any truly computerized or better mechanical interface with the voter. This guy in the pub from Florida thinks that the Florida legislature has become so heavily Republican due to close races being swayed to Republicans by stuffing the ballot boxes. (Of course, those grateful Republicans were ready to hand Bush the electoral votes regardless of the voting results, via the Florida Legislature.) He points out the court case of the 25,000 ballots filled out by Republican Party people on the behalf of regular voters, and thinks that's just a drop in the bucket.

Of course, I don't 100% believe everything I hear from overconfident talkers on the adjacent pub stools, but he raises some valid questions which should be answered.

In my own opinion, if Gore had been ahead by 500 votes, it's easy for me to imagine the U.S. Supreme Court voting 7-2 to uphold, rather than reverse, the Florida Supreme Court, and to allow manual recounts of votes, with the majority opinion written eloquently by Antonin Scalia arguing that it's the Constitutional right of every American to have their vote counted, and not to rely on inanimate machines which are known to make errors, indeed proven in sample recounts, and are trying to optically count punch cards, which themselves are sometimes poorly designed and with ambiguous instructions...

In any case, I don't think it is right to condemn George "Dubya" Bush Jr. for any of the sins of others or the background events he was caught up in, as he seems as fine an individual as any near the top of American politics today.

This is American two-party politics, and operations surrounding the biggest government political power center in the world today.

Many readers are too young to have experienced the Vietnam War, or John F. Kennedy, or other elements of the above. However, those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it.

Lest anyone think I'm anti-Bush or anti-Reagan, I'm not, but I am against dirty special-interest politics.

I'm neither Democrat nor Republican, but am Libertarian, one of America's small parties, far behind the two major parties. I think it's great that in the year 2000, the Green Party took the victory away from Gore, and hope that a third party will start offering Americans an alternative to the same old two parties with the same special interest groups. We need a major third party in America to break the extreme power politics of the two party system, and to sway the two parties away from their arrogant positions.

Regarding the dominant two parties, Democrat and Republican, there isn't much to choose between, but I find myself more in line with Republican politics for one main reason: less government interference. The less government there is, and the less power government has, the fewer corrupt special interest groups there will be, and the less corruption there will be in America.

The free market is more accountable, yet the Democrat administrations have propped up more subsidized special interests to the detriment of the free market, e.g., labor protectionism, government contractor launchers in competition with private sector ventures, and some real dirty politics with big money involved.

In less developed countries, there is often a need for MORE government, as there are needed social and development programs. But America is a different situation. As is commonly said, socialism naturally precedes capitalism more than vice versa.

One foreign policy of the Republicans is free trade, which is better for the world. "Trade, not aid."

Of course, we all know the dirty tricks that the Clinton Administration played regarding the head of the World Trade Organization, when they pushed for New Zealand Labour Party leader Mike Moore over the highly respected free trade advocate (and as apolitical and objective as they come) Thai, Dr. Supachai Panichpakdi.

I should also emphasize that I'm in disagreement with the Republicans on many other kinds of issues, and there are some top Republicans who are mean-spirited and nasty, and who I wish would lose to Democrats.

Of course, I don't agree with everything Reagan-Bush have done, and I would have liked to see Reagan and/or Bush impeached or severely disciplined for Iran-Contra, with another Republican put in. I also don't agree with everything the Republicans are for, especially in the foreign policy arena, but as an American, I have only two significant choices.

I have long thought that moderate Republican George Bush Jr. is one of the better possible presidential choices from among today's likely candidates. However, I have my reservations about whether he can really stand up and lead by himself, and do the right things, or whether special interests will lead him too much...

Having lived in banana republics, I am quite familiar with "vote buying" and corrupt money politics. However, it's not really different in America, as "vote buying" in the form of a bigger tax cut will always sway a significant percentage of voters, and that can be the swing vote. The only difference in America is that the votes are bought with future taxpayer money, not in the form of cash to voters and election officials.

I should emphasize that all of the above is from memory, and could be incorrect. Any corrections would be appreciated. It has been years since I have thought much of these matters. It is also a very brief recount, as I don't have any of my books on these matters at hand here overseas.

I was born in 1959 (2502 B.E.), but I remember when JFK was assassinated. I also remember Oswald's assassination, and my father predicting that they'd never find out who was behind it all. I was raised by parents who were honest, trustworthy and idealistic, but who repeatedly warned to be cautious and skeptical regarding people who loved power. The Vietnam War and the American anti-war movement were a constant backdrop, as was the great Apollo program. I guess the 1960s were a good decade for going through one's young formative years. However, it wasn't until my adult life that I found out about the details of American power politics in my lifetime. It was apparent that much of it came as a result of the Cold War and the ability to keep secret many of the dirty tricks going on in power politics and the money-driven military industrial complex. Some call it "the intrinsic price you pay for national security", though I think that's a gross copout.

These kinds of issues come up when people are surprised about American politics. The only thing I'm surprised about is that other people are surprised.

One thing that really bothers me is when people are presumptuous to think that if I'm American then I support all American policies. Idiots! Most Americans think for themselves, and often disagree with their government's policies. Even those who work for the U.S. government often don't agree, but it's their job. I do not work for the American government, so I'm even more free to do as I wish. I do believe in a lot of things that America stands for, such as free speech (with responsibility), democracy, and many other things, and I'm certainly not "anti-American". However, I don't like many things about American democracy and many American policies around the world.

I also get a little bit uneasy when people from other countries find out that I'm American and do the thumbs up to me when they don't even know me. There are good Americans and bad Americans, just like there are good Auzzies and bad Auzzies, good Germans and bad Germans, good Thais and bad Thais, etc. There are both good and bad people in the underworld (some call them "godfathers vs. mafia" -- there are different circumstances that people are born into around the world, especially the underpriviledged and neglected, and they adapt different ways, usually understandably).

Enough said. I hope you have enjoyed reading my opinions, and I wish to thank you for your time and consideration.

For links to some of my websites:

...

www.permanent.com - my main website on how to save the human species from self-destruction -- inter-national security. I have also written a book on this topic, which you can buy from the website via credit card for $27.50 (includes postage).