June 22, 2005 by lonbud
The Needle And The Damage Done
How does the man go on?
With every passing day new things go wrong for George W. Bush and his vision for America, yet he and his coterie of sycophants and beneficiaries would have the world believe they have everything under control –that every little thing is just fine and dandy.
Consider the dimensions of his, and our, failure in Iraq –something plain as day to any observer, like the new U.S. ambassador or the average citizen paying attention to the explosions of fire and steel and human flesh occuring there daily since Mr. Bush declared the mission accomplished.
Democrats in Congress are finally showing signs of life and making noises about the provably overt deception with which Mr. Bush took this nation to war, demanding he account now for the coming up on 2000 young American lives squandered in the name of ‘defeating’ terrorism.
They are having to literally rise from the basements of Capitol Hill to do it, but there is a wiff of political blood in the air, and the likes of MoveOn, Common Cause, and True Majority are not going away.
If anyone was “on the look” for additional reasons to condemn George W. Bush as the least competent president EVER, one came to light this week that puts him arguably in the same company as his trophy, Saddam Hussein, the recently deposed Iraqi dictator.
Granted, Mr. Hussein took the crude step of gassing a particular segment of Iraqi society he deemed subhuman, but Mr. Bush presided over the poisoning of millions of American infants and young children whose federally mandated vaccinations were laced with mercury in the form of thimerosal, a preservative found to be efficacious and profitable by the pharmaceutical industry.
While it is true information about the deleterious effects of thimerosal only became glaringly obvious near the start of Mr. Bush’s first term (having been known to science since the 1930s, this is actually one of the most egregious failures of governmental oversight in the history of the nation), it is nevertheless clear he took a pass on being the one to stand up for all the children he so famously promised not to leave behind. Instead, he allowed the whole matter to be given the hush-hush treatment, because doing otherwise would have inconvenienced Big Pharma and given the general public a well-deserved dose of skepticism about health care and the public health system in this country.
Last year, conservative television personality Bill O’Reilly published a book called “Who’s Looking Out For You?” I only bring it up because the title is germane –Mr. O’Reilly, in addition to being one of the most mendacious blowhards ever to emanate from the small screen, has a hard enough time looking out for himself. But, as the revelations about thimerosal, and the complicity of the Bush administration, the National Institutes for Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the pharmaceutical industry make clear, when it comes to your health and welfare in the the richest, most developed nation on earth, you are pretty much on your own.
Bubbles - June 26, 2005 @ 2:41 am
Letter to MoveOn.org
I too am outraged and I fully agree that this Administration must be held accountable for the horrors wrought by these corrupt charlatans who falsely wrap themselves in god and the flag and desecrate both in the process. However, I am equally troubled by the widely held notion that the Democrats do not have a plan and are not a party of ideas. I believe we must both preserve our democracy with prosecuting the crimes leveled against our Republic and we must simultaneously put forth a compelling platform for radical change in direction.
I believe there is an affirmative high-level message that MoveOn.org can identify itself with that accomplishes these goals, widens its base and leverages its origins and core strength. That message is: ‘decentralization and fair competition’. Thus the essential positive message of MoveOn.org must be that we can build a prosperous future where energy, communications, quality health care and education are abundant and affordable by reducing control of our political intuitions, foreign policy, economic policy, environmental policy, health care, energy and education from corporate interests and corrupt politicians and putting these policies in the true service of the American people.
To do this Democrats must dispel the notion that they are the party of ‘big government’ and that all ‘regulation stifles competition’. These labels are false and more importantly their premise is false. They are applied buy Republicans who are deceiving the American people. We must promulgate the idea that competition requires fairness and fairness requires uncorrupted referees. What the Republicans have brought us is deregulation without a proper role for regulation or with regulation by corrupted officials. Clearly, this Administration has never met a monopoly or dominate corporation it didn’t like. This has left us worse off than no deregulation. Conversely ‘Natural Capitalism’ will occur if its not choked off by excessive accumulation of market power and if science, planning and information are available and fairly applied.
To promote change and gain further political momentum we need to identify ourselves with a handful of basic programs to change America.
Decentralized Renewable and Alternative Energy – This is widely discussed elsewhere but low interest loans and tax credits are needed for homes, businesses and communities to co-generate power, install solar, fuel cell, biomass and hydro technologies and we must have an industrial / tax policy that favors the production of hybrid increased efficiency vehicles.
Decentralized Telecommunications / Internet Access Policy this is a problem which is far less understood. The bottom-line is that the deregulation of telecommunications has turned out very badly for Americans and the technology economy. Even though we invented the Internet we are now behind half a dozen other countries in broadband deployment / penetration and next generation communications adoption. This is largely because other countries have fostered competition in their markets while we have allowed further consolidation in ours and poorly regulated our capital markets. Similar to energy there are decentralized systems which can be interconnected, for example metropolitan and community based fiber and wireless networks that could be opened to competition and provide low cost broadband access.
Decentralized Health Care Insurance and Health Care delivery, here too we have witnessed extraordinary consolidation under the rubric of competition. Clearly there is a census between health care workers and patients that they have lost control over the system to mega-corporations and that everyone was better off before that occurred.
There are numerous other examples like the decentralization of agribusiness, most importantly all of these policies would, create more and better jobs for Americans, efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world a more secure, just, prosperous, and life sustaining place. We can do this by inspiring business, civil society, and government to design and implement decentralized and integrated solutions that create true wealth across a broad base of Americans and simultaneously promote positive change in, foreign policy, economic and industrial policy, environmental policy, health care, energy and education. That is an affirmative vision, which constitutes a party of compelling ideas.
Lofton - June 26, 2005 @ 11:53 am
Well, this gets at the crux of the bisquit, but the Democrats have a similar problem. They, too are largely beholden to many of the same coporate interests that find such symbiosis with the Republican mindset. The greatest victory of the Republicsns in the past 40 years has been the turning of the American mind away from the idea that government is a useful tool for creating and maintaining a vibrant, secure society. Until Joe Sixpack re-embraces the idea that government is his tool for protecting himself and his family from the inhumanity and ravages of the neocon approach, down the tubes we all will go.
Bubbles - June 28, 2005 @ 11:18 pm
Fine. I’ll still write my letters. This one in responce to this: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB111990950692870845-aL_AAmPTU7wzVmAd4_nb_3MIbhc_20060628,00.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top
Subject: I’m Appalled By Your Article Today
Date: June 28, 2005 6:53:25 PM PDT
To: christopher.cooper@wsj.com
Cc: feedback@wsj.com, newseditors@wsj.com, wsj.ltrs@wsj.com
Mr. Cooper and others,
The lack of serious journalism by your organization is appalling and it one of the primary reasons I discontinued my subscription to the WSJ and Barons.
Has it dawned on you that the reason the downing street memo and the other half dozen documents that have recently been made public “demonstrate unusual staying power” is because they highlight the underling truth behind the war in Iraq? Does the fact that Iraq was under attack for for six months prior to Congress authorizing the use of force factor into your analysis? How about the 122 members of Congress and 600,000 Americans that have asked this Administration to answer some direct questions about these documents? How about the perjury committed in the Administrations written and oral statements about these subjects? All ignored by your article and the Administration.
To liken the longer-term publics reaction to the preemptive war that this administration has dragged us into under false premisses to the online ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ controversy is nauseating. 1000’s upon 1000’s have been killed and wounded you should be ashamed, but of course you’re not. Accepting for a moment that you have no shame you should recognize that the deviation this country has taken under this Administration from the rule of law is rotting the core of American capitalism. For years I was an officer in a publicly traded company who did most of my business in Asia, I always believed and expoused that what made our country different and successful was the reasonably fair application of laws and procedure. Now we have become the arbitrary and narrowly self-interested. Where is this taking us?
admin - June 29, 2005 @ 1:43 am
…to hell in a bucket.