How long are we going to permit this vicious tomfoolery to continue?

Every time there's an embarrassing incident, a charge of official malfeasance, or some nasty revelation to cover up, the powers that be stage a terrorist incident — randomly throw away the lives of an arbitrary number of innocents — and then blame some fantasy enemy as an excuse to further ratchet up the corrupt oppression of ordinary people.

Notice how the accused perpetrators are never caught — often, as with 9/11, never even adequately identified — or if they are, they turn out to be some brainwashed patsy like John Hinckley or Timothy McVeigh, both of them (and all the assassin-type villains who have been publicly caught and liquidated since JFK's public murder) obviously incapable of carrying out the demonic deeds they are so sensationalistically accused of — without some serious assistance.

The London bombings remind me of the Madrid, Istanbul, and Bali bombings. No one is ever caught. Stereotypically rabid Arabs are blamed. And innocent people everywhere suffer the consequences.

When are we going to put together the pieces and see that this worldwide terror threat that is so ballyhooed in the totally corrupt establishment press is nothing more than stage-managed chaos designed to further consolidate the profit-making power of the super-rich, that all these senseless murders are nothing more than anecdotal sacrifices to the financial plans of the capitalist titans who control most of the world and covet the rest of it?

Will we ever realize what this awful game really is?

We've had plenty of chances, a half-century's worth, at least.

And we've flubbed every single one. We've failed to halt this demonic progression of corporate totalitarianism every time. And as a direct result, each new calculated terror gambit has been a little bit worse.

Yes, plenty of people do see what this demented game is, but they are not the powerful people. It remains the eternal shame of the American people that not a single person in the U.S. representative form of government has had the courage to even acknowledge that serious questions exist about the government-sponsored massacres on 9/11 in New York City or on 4/19 in Oklahoma City.

Oh sure, a few trendy liberals have dipped their toes in the water and mentioned in a barely audible murmur that maybe the Iraq war — which is surely the most cruel and irresponsible action the U.S. government has ever taken (in a long, sorry list of reckless actions taken that have used hollow lies as their justification) — is not quite on the up and up, but even those timid would-be patriots have received no support from the mindlocked corporate media.

And as a result, people are afraid to speak out, for fear of losing their jobs, or even their families, or — in the cases of someone like Paul Wellstone or Hunter S. Thompson — their lives.

So what I want to know is how long we are all going to cower in fear, and continue to make believe that the big U.S. newspapers and TV networks are telling the truth, when it should be clear (IMHO) that they are lying — just like their president and Congress — about just about everything?

It should be clear by now that if we continue to do this, they're going to pick us off, one by one.

But who will have the courage to stand up and say — Hey, wait a minute! This is our own government doing these things to us at the behest of the influential people who control them. How else could Halliburton keep getting all those contracts as judges’ heads snap in the opposite direction whenever the subject is mentioned? How else could all those pharmaceutical companies get senators to legislate them immunity for putting poisons in their medicines that create millions of vegetative children?

How much longer are we going to tolerate this egregious level of corruption? Surely we must realize that everything we thought we held dear has already been destroyed by this kind of behavior. I mean, does everybody still secretly harbor the fantasy they will turn into Kenneth Lay and suddenly be able to bilk the public out of hundreds of millions of dollars and then escape because they are protected by their contributions to the Republican National Committee? Is that the new American dream?

I was thinking about these things one recent day as I was riding the train into New York City and perusing its formidable skyline, which of course is now forever missing those two tall square edged towers that used to be the symbol of American fortitude. They are still there, in my mind, ghost towers in the sad shadow of memory, exuding horrifying memories of smoke and dust and little stick figures forever falling into the uncaring abyss of time.

I have among other things said that the entire Congress and thousands of people who work for the federal government should be indicted as accomplices to mass murder and treason for abetting all the horrible things that the American government has done to the rest of the world — not to even mention its own people — over these past few years, and I began to think about that.

I’ve been one to advocate not voting at all because the process has become so corrupted, and I’ve insisted that in order to fix what is wrong with America and the world the whole rotten system has to come down. Ship everyone in Congress to Guantanamo and let all those innocent Arabs and Afghanis go home to their families where they belong.

But then I started to think about what the system really is — people who rely on their government for their disability checks in order to breathe and eat for another day; millions of government employees at all levels who raise families on their paychecks, worry about medical bills, and try to get their kids into college; millions of other who wouldn’t even live more than a few days should the whole system suddenly crash.

And yet, there it was, staring me in the face, right where the ghost towers stood. The system that made all these people’s lives (including mine) so palatable, so enjoyable, so viable, was the same system that invented (with the help of Israeli intelligence, British bankers and the Muslim brotherhood) the al-Qaeda terror concept, and under the tutelage of the Mossad, MI-5, and the CIA, was setting off all these bombs all over the world and blaming them on fantasy Arabs so that sad amputees could get on buses in Queens and news vendors could hawk the venomous, hate-crime-advocating New York Post on oily street corners in Manhattan and thereby feed their families and find a little joy in their mundane little lives, which were really not that different from mine.

And I thought (as I have so many times), what a warped deal this whole thing is. Do we really have to kill so many, and lie so often, to get so little, even though we need every bit of it?

So then I turned off my mind and turned back to my cuddly companion and thought how lucky I was to be in this time and space, healthy and happy if a little overcritical and introspective.

Later I would think that we are each one of us all alone in this world, and that if we didn’t insist on being honest and not killing people we didn’t have to kill, would the world fall apart because of that? In other words, is all this dramatic killing necessary to enable we Americans to live the bounteous lives we have become accustomed to?

And if it is necessary — if George W. Bush is really right about the way the world is — is this any kind of world I would want to be a part of? I don’t think so. And yet, as a sometimes thoughtless American, I take part in the bounty, I reap the dividends of (relative) affluence and amusements that America affords me, and that everyone in the world continues to covet.

So in that sense, I share in the responsibility for the trauma America’s war machine wreaks around the world.

So if forced to make a choice, which one would I choose? The powers that be are continuing to blow up innocent people to make America a soft and sweet place to live. Could it be such a place without the carnage? Without the lies?

Is our dalliance with Super Bowls and Xanax directly dependent on murdering people of color who happen to be sitting on oil we desire?

Is why most of us don’t say anything about what our government does to innocent bystanders because we are deep down the same kind of people as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and can look the other way when somebody has to be eliminated in order to provide us with our creature comforts?

If we are that kind of person, then we shouldn’t be upset about 9/11, about our government’s killing 3,000 of our own citizens, or about blowing up a few people in London, because it needed to be done so we could play our iPods in peace.

But if we are not that kind of person, isn’t it about time we realized that the 9/11 massacre — just like the London bombing — is something that will inevitably happen to us, because we have tolerated violence in the name of profit for more than 200 years, and we have profited mightily from it. Did you really think we could live our whole lives without paying for what we have done to the world?

You who are reading this right now — pretend, just for argument’s sake, you are an American. What do you think is a fair price you should pay for what you have done to the world?

And when the cops are really the crooks, who will you turn to for help, that one fine day, when the bomb the power elite put there to convince the public the enemy is nearby, is ticking on YOUR bus?

John Kaminski is an internet essayist whose stories have been seen on hundreds of websites around the world. They have been collected into two anthologies titled “America’s Autopsy Report” and “The Perfect Enemy” and are for sale on his website, http://www.johnkaminski.com/, as is the booklet “The Day America Died,” written for those who still believe the government’s false story of what happened on September 11, 2001.