May 30, 2003 by lonbud

The Way Things Are

Is it just me, or does it feel like the lull before a storm?

Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as promised, the Bush Administration has been kicking ass and taking names. The Taliban have been driven from Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein has been ousted from power in Iraq. The entire world has been shocked and awed by the overwhelming might of the multi-billion dollar-backed American military, at least insofar as it fares against poorly organized, poorly trained, poorly equipped conscripts in devastatingly barren outposts of the so-called 3rd World.

Several other countries are on notice they, too, could get an ass whupping if they don’t quit dabbling in nuclear R&D and harboring anti-American terrorist fanatics.

The whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, Saudi renegade and poster boy for Islamic fundamentalism, remain unclear. In Afghanistan, women and their interests remain subordinate to the male-dominated squabbling of psychotic warlords; an impotent council of earnest though ineffectual leaders dares not venture beyond the outskirts of Kabul.

The fate of Saddam Hussein also remains uncertain, though Iraq has been devastated, its cultural history looted and destroyed, its infrastructure reduced to rubble, and its populace left in utter, lawless chaos.

But American oil service companies and engineering contractors are on the scene, making sure the world is safe for Iraqi oil. Time will tell how the riches generated by producing that oil will end up benefiting the Iraqi people, though it seems clear the officers, directors, employees, and shareholders of Bechtel and Halliburton will see the immediate benefits of our American military handiwork.

All that ass kicking and name-taking has come at a price, of course. We can start with the handful of names of American military personnel who lost their lives doing the Bush Administration’s bidding. Never mind that a significant percentage of the deceased died, not heroes’ deaths, but in accidents and through the miscalculations of their fellow soldiers –remember y’all, war is hell.

And let us not forget Iraq’s civilian casualties, whom Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department refuse to even try to count; though we’ve been assured our modern precision guided bombs and missiles killed far fewer civilians than perished in, for example, Dresden during World War II.

Then there is the actual monetary cost of the Shock and Awe Roadshow. Numbers fly about like gnats and mosquitoes in the summer dusk: $100 billion, $350 billion, $1 trillion. Who knows the real tab to provide Fox News with the inspirational video shown alongside the jingoistic cheerleading broadcast daily from their studios? The only certainty is that the money, however much or little it may actually be, is not presently in the Treasury. Nor is it likely to arrive any time soon, given the massive tax relief Congress just awarded to America’s wealthiest citizens. Couple the gift to those who need it least with rising unemployment, all-time-high rates of personal & corporate bankruptcy, a growing Federal deficit, and dwindling resources available to state and local governments – and it seems my unborn grandchildren’s children may end up holding the bag, assuming, that is, the human race hasn’t assured its own demise by then.

Everyone remembers why all this cock-strutting, chest-thumping rage got unleashed, right?

Osama bin Laden and his network of Al Qaeda terrorists killed over 2000 innocent people in New York and Washington DC on that beautiful September day nearly two years ago. They destroyed two landmark symbols of our country’s financial and cultural preeminence, and were on the verge of halting the progress of Western Civilization itself.

So George W. Bush sent the bombers and the Humvees, the Bradley fighting vehicles and the Special Forces to Afghanistan to bring back that madman –Dead or Alive, I believe, were the words he used.

Anyone who questioned the wisdom of such a course was roundly berated as a Supporter of Terrorism and a Traitor. Our military men and women were, in addition to their headhunting task, on a mission of mercy, charged with uplifting the Afghan people from their 16th century squalor, to free them from the repressive rule of the Taliban, sent to bestow upon them the wonders of democratic government and a free market economy.

Well, as I mentioned already, the Taliban appear to be gone. Mr. Bin Laden we don’t know to be dead or alive, though he definitely hasn’t been brought back. Has the squalor in Afghanistan been elevated to that of, say, the 18th century? One might hope, for their sake, Afghanis won’t see 20th century squalor for another several hundred years at least. I don’t keep up with the news every single day but I believe the first free and fair democratic election in Afghanistan has yet to be staged. The aforementioned Leadership Council was cobbled together from representatives of the various tribes and warlords who have controlled sundry regions of the country for years, though a couple of the most powerful and well-equipped factions refused to participate, and there is presently no actual government or controlling authority outside Kabul.

Here at home, the situation is no longer deemed critical or newsworthy for the most part. Only those with a keen interest in Afghanistan have any idea what is actually going on there, or what might be the genuine prospects for the Afghan people.

And then there was Saddam. A bad man. A very, very bad man. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had affixed a target to the Butcher of Bagdhad as early as 1999. Eventually George W. Bush convinced at least as many people who voted for him, possibly more –Saddam was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For good measure, the President sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN to assure the World: Saddam possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction and a nascent nuclear arms program portending the imminent destruction of Western Civilization. Long-time allies and hundreds of thousands of people the world over were told to stuff their objections to unilateral aggression by the United States and Britain. Again, the bombers, Humvees, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Special Forces; again the cakewalk over an inferior, virtually non-existent foe. Statues were toppled, widows and orphans cried. Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue.

The Bush Administration had seen fit to secure contracts for rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure and for reinvigorating the exploitation of Iraq’s oil reserves well before the commitment of troops and arms for ending Saddam’s heinous regime. It should be no surprise the beneficiaries of those contracts are companies with extremely close financial and philosophical ties to the current administration – to the victors go the spoils of war.

They did not, however, plan for or enable any sort of reasonable search for weapons of mass destruction or nuclear weapons programs, and have yet to produce the first scintilla of evidence showing Saddam, bad man that he was, had even a minimal capability to say boo to Western Civilization. Bush’s assurance to the American people of the grave danger Saddam embodied, and Colin Powell’s insistence before the United Nations concerning verifiable evidence that Iraq possessed and was planning to use weapons of mass destruction against American targets, well, those appear to have been bald-faced lies. Our President and our Secretary of State employed deliberate mendacity in the service of attempting to justify an unprovoked attack on a sovereign, though badly governed nation.

Then, too, our camouflaged American envoys were to bring democracy, with its attendant splendors, to the much-abused Iraqi people. As we speak, some American military personnel share popsicles with Iraqi children while others hand out fresh, crisp $100 bills to get “on the ground” intelligence. People who really don’t want the US in their country are killing others on a daily basis.

Aside from providing security for American oil service personnel in the Iraqi oilfields and attempting to bring water and electricity to Iraq’s largest cities, the American military is left to play Marshal Dillon in a Wild, Wild West filled with bitter, suicidal strangers. At some point in a dim, indeterminate future the Iraqi people could be asked to vote for something, could be offered a taste of democracy’s sweet self-determination, but under no circumstance will their input be sought on the disposition of their oil reserves.

And should they eventually choose to create a government run by Islamic fundamentalists we can assume the American military will be on call to correct their error.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we now live in a color-coded state of constant Terror Alert, with an all-consuming thirst for Homeland Security. Three year-olds and grandmothers are asked to de-shoe and remove their belts at airports nationwide; people with Arabic names are asked to present themselves for questioning by federal authorities. American citizens may now be removed from their homes and detained, without charge or access to legal counsel, at the whim of federal officials willing to accuse them of being an “enemy combatant.” Is everyone feeling safer now?

What’s being done in the domestic fiscal arena is absolutely ludicrous. As it was put recently in a headline of the traditionally staid British journal, The Financial Times, “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.” Treasury Secretary John Snow pronounced it is government policy to support a strong dollar. When confronted with the American Peso’s rapid devaluation over the past year, he had the temerity to explain that he meant “strong” as in “difficult to counterfeit.” Hello? Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve have been printing dollars at between a 10% and 12.5% annual rate, flooding financial markets with dollar liquidity to keep an insane credit bubble inflated in a desperate attempt to spur consumer spending enough to stave off worsening economic recession. With interest rates at 45-year lows, over a million American jobs have been exported overseas in the past two years. American workers have had the value of their 401(k) retirement plans slashed in many cases by over 90% in the past three years. Health benefits, unemployment benefits, wage protections, and union representation have all been demonized as causes of the current economic malaise.

And yet, the Bush Administration’s plan for addressing the situation features abolition of the Estate Tax (a direct benefit to no one other than those in the wealthiest 10% of the citizenry), abolition of taxes on corporate dividends (again benefiting only the wealthiest quarter of the population), and a $350 billion tax cut, the vast majority of which will benefit, again, the wealthiest among us. Bush and his economic “team” continue to push for privatization of Social Security, the only sure outcome of which would be a massive windfall for Wall Street firms, which employ and are run by the same wealthy folks who brought you buy recommendations on Enron, Worldcom, United Airlines, and a host of other failed companies right up to the eve of their bankruptcy filings.

President Bill Clinton lied about a lot of things, most infamously, about his not having “sexual relations” with a comely intern working in his office. Congress nearly impeached the man, and to this day many people in this country cannot say his name without redlining the blood pressure meter.

President George W. Bush lied about Saddam Hussein being an imminent threat to the peace and security of the American public. He ordered a half million American troops and billions of dollars worth of American military hardware to the middle east, waged an unprovoked, preemptive war against a virtually defenseless “enemy,” earning the enmity of a significant portion of the official international community, and thumbing his nose in the process at countless people the world over who demonstrated against his actions, begging him to find an alternative method for protecting American interests in the face of the threat of global terrorism.

He has brought this country to the brink of a fiscal crisis that could dwarf what we know as The Great Depression. And he enjoys public approval ratings that poll sometimes near 70%. He is confronted with barely a whisper of opposition in Congress or the mainstream media. It’s almost like 1984.

I get a lot of criticism for these rants against The Way Things Are, most of which centers on an implication that my protests bear no weight in the absence of proffered solutions to the problems I see. I am not a politician, nor am I an expert in economics or public policy; I’ve done no in-depth research into the many complexities and competing interests in play. Mostly I simply try to give voice to the incredulity I feel as a witness to what I see going on around me, and I guess it’s possible nearly 70% of the people in this country sometimes don’t see things as I do.

However, in this instance, at this juncture I must take a stab at a solution because the stakes are rising every day. I didn’t even begin to touch on the threat to the environment contained in the personal interests of our current leaders, nor on the threats to our way of life, and to Democracy itself, posed by the Bush Administration’s tolerance for corporate monopolies in everything from the media to telecommunications to transportation to food and energy production.

Discussion of the misrepresentation and utter fantasy contained in the Administration’s Budget for the coming year awaits another day as does some consideration of the long-lasting damage being done to our very ability to govern ouselves by the President’s appointments to the Federal judiciary.

To begin, Bush should be impeached. It seems clear such an idea is a non-starter, but it would be the best first step to a solution for the problem as I see it. At the very least, he must not be elected to another term in office. Every last one of the sometimes 30% of the people who disapproves of the President and his policies must become politically active. People must pick up the telephone, write letters, present themselves in person to their local, regional, State and Federal representatives in government and demand the Constitution be restored and upheld. We must demand that secretive, self-serving abusers of the public trust be held accountable for their crimes, and insist on fair and equitable distribution of our nation’s resources. Reasonable-minded lawmakers must be encouraged to mount some kind of opposition to an administration that is squandering the future of our children’s children’s children for the immediate benefit of themselves and those in our society who have more than e- fucking-nough already.

If I’m resorting to profanity, perhaps I should desist my protestation. This president and those with whom he has allied himself I find profane, however, and so I will simply leave it at this: We live in a great and beautiful, creative, magnificent country, perhaps the loveliest, most bountiful land in the history of human society. Our resources and human capital are like those of no other nation on Earth. The question is: should we govern ourselves accordingly and utilize the framework and powers granted us by the founders of this great nation, or should we simply agree that no government is the best government of all and leave the nation’s fate to the depredations of the rich and powerful among us?

Or perhaps it’s true we are pleased to be remade from a representative Republic into an imperialist Empire as long as we get bread (McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Jack, Bud, baloney, and Wonder) and circuses (MTV, Fox News, NBA, NFL, Disney, Survivor, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?).