History As It Never Was

With Karl Rove's attempt to foster the blame for the Bush Administration's misadventure in Iraq on the old GOP Congress of 2002, we see again the cynicism of the new right that truth is whatever they say it is. If they keep repeating the same message over and over in all the media owned, controlled or influenced by them the American people will eventually believe that it is true.

When that truth becomes inconvenient, their strategy is to ignore the inconsistency of inventing a new truth to replace the old truth using the same method as before.

Rove's recreating history in a different image will be continued in the future by the the same guys who meet Wednesday mornings in Grover Norquist's office. They will no tire of what they do. They have vast amounts of money supporting their effort.

The George W. Bush Presidential Library will be the most massively funded in history. It will also be the most restricted and secretive. The right-wing think tank that will be based at the library will be dedicated to employing the most clever researchers, writers, and pundits in America to create the history of the Bush Administration and to market it to the media and to publishers of the nations school textbooks on a scale no one currently believes is possible.

One day your grandchildren may read in their textbooks:
• How George W. Bush was a unifier of American society;
• How he sought to rebuild New Orleans over the objections of liberals and progressives;
• How he wanted a reasoned approach toward dealing with Saddam and was forced to military action prematurely by a militant Congress stampeded into action by Democrats;
• How Bush tried to bring a better school experience to children in public schools through No Child Left Behind but was hampered by teachers and school boards across America;
• How Bush fought against the liberals who wanted to spend more and more on the defense industry;
• How Bush saved America's natural resources for future generations over the objections of so-called 'green' pseudo-environmental groups;
• How Bush defended the rights of all women to bear children over the greedy objections of murderous groups such as Planned Parenthood and the ACLU;
• How Bush protected the rights of all Americans to be safe from terrorism and from the progressives who tried to undermine homeland security by opposing the USAPATRIOT Act and Un-warranted eavesdropping on potential domestic terrorists;
• How Bush reluctantly won the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq only to have ultimate victory snatched away by the liberal media and the lack of will spread through the American public by Democrats and other traitors;
• How Bush's ideals of installing free markets and democracy in primitive Muslim lands were thwarted at every turn by appeasers of Islamofascism;
• How Bush was the most Christian President and most moral President in the nation's history;
• How Bush walked twice as far as did Lincoln to return a loan or told Poppy Bush that it was he and not Jeb that cut down the cherry tree;

Don't expect any wild claim to be overlooked. The goal will be to create a George W. Bush Presidency that transcends all previous Presidencies while relegating anyone who questions the new history to the same dank corners of foul ignominy that anti-Zionists and pro-social welfare advocates inhabit. No "doubters" will get tenure. No "doubters" will have good paying jobs. No "doubters" will have children who get top jobs either.

The Business of America

If it is true that the “business of America is business,” then is it altogether unrealistic to wonder whether the business of American foreign policy of might not also be business? Though garnished with neologistic flourishes intended to convey a sense of freshness or originality, the politicoeconomic concept to which the US government adheres today has not changed in a century: the familiar quest for an “open world,” the overriding imperative of commercial integration, confidence that technology endows the US with a privileged position in that order, and the expectation that American military might will preserve order and enforce the rules. These policies reflect a single-minded determination to extend and perpetuate American political, economic, and cultural hegemony – usually referred to as “leadership” – on a global scale.

Every imperial project – in fact, virtually every public undertaking of every modern state is accompanied by declarations of benevolent intention, more or less frequent and elaborate according to the scale of the undertaking and the degree of public skepticism in is value that is anticipated. These declarations have no evidentiary value at all. They are merely part of the manufacture of consent in democratic and even in non-democratic societies. For example: it might have been difficult to gain popular support for military intereventions in Central America by insisting on the necessity of preserving a favorable investment climate for large corporations; or to sell the invasion of Iraq by announcing a determination to control the world’s energy resources. As any public-relations executive or media consultant wold have pointed out, the product in both cases needed “packaging.” Fear of Communism, revenge for 9/11, or appeals to popular generosity with fables about bringing “freedom and democracy” to those less fortunate – these worked much better at whipping up public support for policies that ensured the economic gains anticipated.

For the real purposes of US foreign policy, now and historically, “democracy” means the freedom to vote for candidates who can be counted on to allow unrestricted American capital flows; American ownership of vital resources; privatization and control by American corporations of water, health, utility, and banking systems; the opening of domestic markets to cheap (usually subsidized) foreign imports by American corporations; the repeal or lax enforcement of environmental, worker-safety, public-health, and minimum-wage laws; an American investor friendly tax code; drastic reductions in social-welfare spending by the local state; the suppression of union, labor, or peasant activism; and, upon request, providing facilities for US military forces.

Today multinational American businesses and banks pin their hopes for future profits on export markets abroad – and salivate at the thought of transferring industrial production and even routine service jobs to low-wage workers without trade unions or civil rights in Third World countries. A new free-trade coalition allies American based multinational industry and finance with export-oriented agriculture in the South and West against industrial workers in the Midwestern industrial heartland of the country. This low-wage, low-tax, low-public-service economy is a shift of historic proportions that has the potential to destroy the twentieth-century achievement of middle-class living standards for a majority of Americans. It also will prevent the vast majority of Third World citizens from ever achieving middle-class living standards.

Why do you stand by meekly and let it happen?

[I am grateful to Michael Lind, Andrew Bocevich, and George Scialabra for their words, thoughts, and inspiration for this entry.]

Iraq: Seeing a Victory

There are no disasters; there are only opportunities. – Dick Cheney

News from the Middle East might seem to suggest that all is not well with American foreign policy. However, if one understands the war on terror as free-market capitalist enterprise rather than as some sort of public or government service to the local natives, then the nightly news broadcasts reveal to us victory upon victory not defeat. In this light, President Bush’s oft misunderstood statement, in May of 2003, of “mission accomplished” can be seen as not only completely accurate but as heralding a new age of riches for the richest that has not been equaled in American history.

As is usual and to be expected, the witless liberal media get the story wrong, mistaking innovative business practice for waste and fraud, grotesquely characterizing superior sales technique as a crime against humanity. Their biased commentary misconstrues both the purpose and the high quality of the work in progress. Measure our government’s achievement by the standards that define a commercial success – maximizing the cost to the consumers of the product, minimizing the risk to the investors – and we discover in the White House and the Pentagon, also in the Congress and the Department of Homeland Security, not a crowd of incompetent fools as so often depicted in the pages of the New York Times, but rather a company of visionary entrepreneurs, worthy of comparison with the class of Americans who built the country’s railroads, mines, and who liberated the Western prairie from the undemocratic buffalo. Hear the message served with every Republican banquet speech – that private interest precedes the public good, that money is good for rich people, bad for poor people – and who can say that the war in Iraq has proved to be anything other than the transformation of a godforsaken desert and dangerous threat to American interests into a defense contractor’s Garden of Eden?

For the friends of the free market operating in Iraq it doesn’t matter who gets killed or why; every day is payday, and if from time to time events superficially appear to take a turn for the worse – another twenty or thirty Arabs annihilated in a mosque, a BBC cameraman lost on the road to the airport – back home in America, with the flags affixed to every pickup and the executive compensation packages firmly in place, the stock prices for our reliably patriotic corporations rise with the smoke from the car bombs exploding in Ramadi and Falluja. Lockheed-Martin up from $52 to $75 between July 2003 and July 2006. Its hated rival, Boeing, up from $36 to $77; ExxonMobil up from $36 to $65; Chevron up from $36 to $66; Fluor up from $34 to $87; and king of all of them, Haliburton up from $22 to $74. From the proper perspective – the one extensively covered by the conservative media – the homeland’s economy is booming and everybody who is somebody is getting richer.

See our nation’s foreign policy as a juggernaut to keep the little nations of the developing world in their proper places – the stone age for naughty ones and the bronze age for obedient ones – never to rise to the level of near-potential competitor with our most esteemed multinationals, and more of our victories and economic successes become clearer.

Iraq, for example, in 1989, was generally the most modern, secular, cosmopolitan Arab economy and society on Earth. It was inhabited by a diverse population living in peaceful prosperity with each other. It enjoyed an ancient, extensive agriculture with a complex system of canals and waterways and pipelines irrigating vast fields of grain, fruits, and vegetables and supplying growing metropolitan areas with ample free potable water. Education was universal and free to all. Free health care offering the most modern treatments and ample medicines was provided to every citizen. Gasoline cost a nickel a gallon. Its great cities were lit up with neon lights thanks to inexpensive power supplied by one of the most extensive electrical grids in the Middle East. Commerce of many kinds was carried on 24 hours a day protected by the most powerful of Arab military establishments. All of this and more thanks to a state owned oil corporation that carefully managed the nation’s most valuable national resource for the good of most Iraqis. Politically it was one of the very few Arab nations who’s government was not run by a despotic monarchy – there were even elections both local and national.

In short, there was much about Iraq in 1989 to trouble American “interests” – that is to say, the richest and most powerful people living in America. Iraq had been a staunch ally of the West, particularly to America and the UK, for over twenty years, nonetheless, the excessive prosperity and social services spending there was only barely tolerated. Unfortunately, it gave a message of hope to millions throughout the Middle East that their everyday lives could be better. But all this bad news for American interests improved as the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, became more aggressive, perhaps coaxed by covert American advice. He began providing money for the families of Arabs and Palestinians who willingly died fighting against the Zionist state of Israel. He attempted a hostile take-over of Kuwait’s oil market that was thwarted by an international consortium organized by American interests (and paid for with other people’s money). Finally, in spite of a decade of harsh trade restrictions and other humiliating sanctions enforced against Iraq and paid for by American taxpayer dollars, in 2000, Saddam announced his plans to open his own oil borse where buyers and sellers of oil could transact in euros rather than petrodollars, furthermore, Iraq henceforth would only sell its oil for euros, an act that pointed an economic dagger directly at the soft, white financial throats of American interests. And so, his fate and that of the Iraqi people was sealed. Their story would become an example to all those in the developing world who might dream of one day rising above their station in life.

Today, Iraq is a near stone age economy. Gasoline costs nearly 100 times as much as it did in 1989 and is sold in bottles on the black market by roadside vendors. The electrical grid is destroyed with little power available on a sporadic basis. The dams and waterways and safe water supply are gone. The modern sewage disposal system of the cities is destroyed. Many schools and universities are barracks for American troops. Hospitals are understaffed, mostly unfunded, and perpetually short of medicines and supplies. The Iraqi farmers are forced by law to buy expensive seed, fertilizers, and equipment from American corporations or risk losing their farms. Unemployment is above 50% in many areas. Civil war atrocities and periodic revenge attacks by American military forces are commonplace. Tens of thousands of ordinary citizens are rounded up wholesale to be imprisoned and tortured or simply disappear. Billions of dollars of oil revenue is missing and cannot be accounted for. The state owned oil corporation is defunct so that now, American and British oil corporations are in control of an unaudited flow from wellhead to market generating huge profits that no longer must be shared in the form of social services to the ordinary Iraqi citizens. In short, American interests have every reason to be ecstatic over the windfall they gained – through no risk to themselves in either blood or treasure – and which will continue to amass to them for the foreseeable future without any operating cost assessed to them or ongoing investment required of them.

I am deeply grateful to Lewis Lapham (Harper’s, Sept. 2006) for most of the phrasing I borrowed from him in the first three paragraphs. He put into words my thoughts so beautifully.

HR 4167 Leaves a Bad Taste in Your Mouth

Big Food is not wasting a dime of their campaign fund investments that helped create a GOP led, big business friendly Congress. The newest attempt by them to disenfanchise health conscious voters and render various states' consumer groups powerless is the Uniformity for Food Act [HR 4167].

I hope you will join with me and others to urge our Senators in Washington to oppose the Senate version of HR 4167 that is expected to be introduced soon. It was slipped to the floor and passed over the objections of Democrats who wanted it sunshined for the American public to see. No major corporate broadcast network or newpaper carried mention of its tainted provisions, the slimy way it got passed, or even the information that it is now in the Senate. Why? Profits, of course. Take a look below.

Here are some of the disinformation, lies, and myths the food industry marketers are putting out:

• Myth: The bill would help consumers by replacing a confusing regulatory system with a single set of food safety and warning standards coordinated by the Food and Drug Administration.

• Truth: This bill will not help consumers. We are not at all confused by having the food industry regulated so as to provide us with safe food even though doing so may reduce their profits. The FDA’s national authorities are limited in the food safety area, and the agency is already overburdened, underfunded, and understaffed. The states have been leading the way in the food safety area. In fact, several states have enacted strong protections where the federal government has failed to act. For example, states require labels for cancer-causing substances and ensure the safety of shellfish, milk and other household foods. Besides who would expect Kansas to have regulations for the production of maple syrup or New Jersey to have regulations for the processing of Gulf Shrimp? Such protections are best left at the state and local level where local officials know the state’s products, hazards and consumers best instead of depending on politicians thousands of miles away (but who are very close to food industry lobbiests on K Street) to do it.

• Myth: The bill would strike a balance between states’ rights and consumers’ need for food safety information that is consistent from state to state. In instances where an existing state standard is different from the national standard, any state can ask the FDA to either be exempted or to set the state’s standard as the national standard.

• Truth: Actually, there is no disagreement between states and consumers over safe food for which a 'balance' must be made. In fact, H.R. 4167 is a sweeping rollback of any state's or local agency's or even of voters' authority to protect consumers. A state’s laws can only stay in place if the state jumps through federal bureaucratic hoops in a lengthy, burdensome, and expensive process. Even then it is not guaranteed to pass muster. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the process would cost FDA $100 million over five years – and that doesn’t even include the cost to states. No funding for such appeals was included in the act. The food industry will essentially be operating under nearly the same scant regulations and lack of enforcement that existed at the turn of the twenieth century (remember reading The Jungle??).

• Myth: The bill covers only food safety and warning information for packaged food, and other state food laws are exempt, including such items as those covering the ‘’sanitation of pecans and notices as to whether fish is fresh or frozen.’’

• Truth: The bill is extremely broad. Independent analyses by 39 Attorneys General and other state officials indicate that the bill covers “food,” and is not limited to packaged food. CBO has stated that 200 state laws would be impacted. Many of these laws protect consumers in areas simply not covered by Federal law. Important consumer warnings dealing with mercury in fish, arsenic in drinking water, and lead in cans are just a few examples of the state laws that would be tossed out. Will you feel better NOT knowing that what you are drinking is sweetened with lead or that the processed food you are eating is laced with carcinogens that extend its shelf life?

• Myth: Under the bill, states and localities, not the FDA, will continue to conduct sanitation inspections and enforce regulations covering food and milk preparation/service at local establishments.

• Truth: Not quite right. H.R. 4167 nullifies any state laws allowing states to take action against adulterated or contaminated food if state law is not “identical” to federal law. Consider disasters like Katrina. State officials are currently empowered to seize spoiled food after a hurricane, ensure seafood safety, and ensure safe operations at dairies. This act would change all that. The state or local disaster agencies could not seize any contaminated food products until they have applied to the FDA for permission. If the FDA does not act within a week or denies the request, the state or local agency must appeal to the federal courts for an order to seize the poisonous products. By then dishonest wholesalers or even retailers could have already sold off the contaminated food which starving victims might have eaten and become ill thence putting a further burden on the overwhelmed local health care services. According to the Association of Food and Drug Officials, it is essential that states retain their authority to respond to contaminated products quickly and without seeking Federal permission.

• Myth: Under the bill, warnings concerning the consumption of shellfish, important to many consumers, are exempt. States remain free to require these warnings as they deem appropriate.

• Truth: At least 16 states have shellfish safety laws, and officials at the state level have repeatedly expressed concern about their ability to enforce such laws under this bill. According to the National Association of the State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), “food inspection enforcement laws relating to . . . shellfish would be preempted.” Just think, under HR 4167, you could once again buy San Francisco Bay clams and mussels in in the seafood section of Wal-Mart or Safeway! For decades these shellfish have been banned due to very high levels of mercury contamination, itself the result of unregulated mercury processing of gold ore 150 years ago. Because there is no 'identical' federal law banning the sale of mercury contaminated SF Bay clams and mussels, the state of CA could not ban it either.

• Myth: This bill would raise the bar on food safety standards because they would be based on expert, consensus review, ensuring that sound science, not politics or fads, drive policy.

• Truth: These "experts" will be like the others appointed by President Bush to do jobs they had no experience at or training for. Strong food safety protections are not a “fad.” H.R. 4167 actually lowers food safety protections to the lowest common denominator between state and federal levels. Yet, states historically have led the way in the food safety area. For instance, it was California law that led to the reduction of arsenic in bottled water and elimination of lead in calcium supplements throughout the United States. This bill will bring a reactionary change by eliminating science-based state and local food safety activities and laws and restoring the bad old days of the nineteenth century laissez faire capitalism. It will upend state safety standards for foods such as milk, eggs, and shellfish, and laws authorizing inspection and protection of foods, restaurants, schools, nursing homes, and other food establishments. Consider that there are no federal regulations for dairy products that are not shipped across state lines, and none at all for raw milk. What will your children or grandchildren really be drinking in the school cafeteria or for that matter, right out of your refrigerator?

Please pass this on to others.

I am grateful to Susanna Montezemolo, and to Consumers Union, and to GMA, and to at least a dozen blogs for the information contained in this article.

President Bush in Denial

President Bush went to George Washington University on March 13, 2006 to give a speech in which he continued to deny what not only the rest of the world but increasing numbers of his own people know about the occupation of Iraq by American military forces.

If observers from Madrid to Beijing know that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in any of the places in Iraq identified in some detail by Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell in their famous speeches on the topic, and thus there was no chance that Saddam could have supplied al Qaeda (an international criminal organization he was never allied with but rather that he opposed bitterly) or any other organization with weapons of mass destruction as ominously speculated by the current Administration in its public relations campaign prior to the invasion, why doesn’t George W. Bush?

Bush’s hard core supporters steadfastly say that as the Commander-in-Chief, President Bush has access to information of a secret nature the rest of us do not know and therefore we all must trust that he knows what he is doing. Theirs is a faith stubbornly adhered to in the face of considerable evidence that it is faith wrongly placed. Blind faith, such as theirs, should only be given to religious belief and not to the real world, where the helpless are brutally tortured by soldiers serving under the orders of the Commander-in-Chief and the innocent are incinerated by white phosphorus bombs dropped by airmen serving under the orders of the Commander-in-Chief.

The Administration's scramble to create an El Salvador-style “banana republic” in the Persian Gulf region and claim the oil resources of Iraq (and the rest of the region) for wealthy American oil barons has created an endless state of misery for millions. Their evil goal of dominance over the world’s oil spigot has claimed thousands of American lives with no hope that the sacrifice of our nation’s blood and treasure will ever end.

If President Bush knows more than the people of the world and the citizens of the United States, why doesn’t he know that? We do.

The Coming Economic Disaster

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) compares “standardized measures of federal revenues and outlays. These are designed to separate out short-term effects and various technical issues and focus on the longer-term changes in tax and spending policy. According to the CBO’s estimates, standardized federal revenue fell from 19.3% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000 to a projected 17.0% in 2005. Since U.S. GDP is around $13 trillion, that shift of 2.3 percentage points means that the Bush Administration is taking in almost $300 billion LESS that it would have if tax cuts for the rich had not happened.

In spite of the rhetoric of the right to the contrary, the Bush Administration has not been compensating cuts in federal spending, it has risen by over 1% of GDP. This fact drives many true fiscal conservatives crazy. About ¾ of the increase can be accounted for by a build up of the military. Bush and the GOP Congress have hardly discovered the virtues of public spending on education or the environment for Congress just passed $40 billion in social spending cuts, concentrated on Medicare and Medicaid. But putting the tax cuts for the rich and the cuts to social services for the middle classes and poor together with the increases in military spending you see a huge shift in the federal budget balance from a surplus of 1.1% of GDP at the end of Clinton’s term in 2000 to a deficit of 2.1% of GDP in 2005 under Bush. The Reagan deficits in the early 1980s were larger to be sure but we are still talking about a boatload of real money.

All this deficit causes a long-term increase in the interest on the national debt that grows each year. The tax free debt interest payments mostly go to foreign nationals and the very richest Americans.

So what about the tax cuts? The richest 1% are reaping the benefits while the middle class and poor are doing much worse in terms of real dollars. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, a right wing advocacy group, households with incomes of around $75,000 got an average of only $400 from the 2003 tax cuts. Those with $50,000 saved less than $200 that year; those with $30,000 or less reaped almost nothing. But those with incomes placing them in the top 1% received over $25,000 back. Millionaires who don’t need the money got more back in taxes than about one third of American families have to live on for a whole year – no wonder the mega-rich are enthusiastic Bush supporters!

Now what about jobs? The tax cuts, Bush told us, would stimulate massive spending by the rich and corporations to hire millions of new workers. Not so in reality. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, since the recession began in 2001, corporate profits have soared 81% while the wages that corporations pay to non-supervisory workers (that’s over 80% of the workforce) increased just 14%. Guess who has been gathering in the sheaves there?

The job market under Bush is the worse in modern times. The economy, historically, has added about 3 million jobs each year. In 2005, there were just two million added. Employment has continued to fall nearly a year and a half after the official end of the recent recession. The last time that happened was under Bush I in the early ‘90s, when the job market lagged behind the economy by eleven months, so W has beat out his father there, too. Putting the long decline in jobs and the sluggish recovery together and it looks like we are at least ten million jobs below where we should be judging by historical averages.

Fewer folks earning money to spend to create increased economic activity has created a debtor society. The year 2005 saw the first time since 1933 that middle class and poor households finished the year in debt. That was at the height of the Great Depression. Since our economy does not appear to be in a depression now, that is a very strange thing to be happening. By the way, in the Clinton years the average household saved about 8% of after tax income. The new borrowing binge has been in the form of home equity credit.

According to Goldman Sachs, the amount of home equity credit extracted by households in the first five years of Bush’s Administration was around $2 trillion. Most refinancing of home mortgages includes additional principal that families often use to get them through a financial crisis such as a job layoff. Merrill Lynch considers that about 40% of the growth in consumption over the last three years has come from this limited source. It is like a watering hole that is slowly drying up.

If the US were an ordinary country the American bankers would dispatch the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to impose austerity programs, like it did in Mexico in 1995 and Thailand in 1997 (Clinton could be tough, too). Social services spending was all but terminated in those countries and the middle classes and poor fell into a deepening spiral of misery.

You got a net decrease in jobs that provide real dollars to the economy while Bush pledges to make more tax cuts for the rich (even ending corporate taxes on the richest companies). Then he talks of increased spending R&D for non-fossil fuels (right after his Energy Department has begun laying off scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory thanks to cuts in the budget – does that count as another Bush lie or just as another attempt to mislead us? ). The economy is temporarily kept afloat by families mortgaging themselves into deeper debt while the government increases the transfer of wealth to the richest taxpayers through military spending and is perniciously cutting the strands of the social safety net one by one each year.

When will the bubble burst? How long do we have before “austerity” measures are imposed on Americans? Maybe not long. There has been evidence of getting ready for the bubble to burst with its attendant dramatic social upheaval but few have put the visible pieces together to see them for the contingency plans they really are. Some of them are disguised as efforts to control terror and so go unnoticed by ordinary Fox News and CNN viewers.

Here are items to consider as a whole. The Bush Administration has formed a new Army Command for North America (the first in the nation’s history) whose mission is to have plans for containing massive disruptions across the nation. There is a new Department of Homeland Security whose focus is not on securing the nation from natural disasters or for rebuilding the lives and property of ordinary Americans in the wake of such calamities. Americans are being acclimated into accepting “free speech zones” and unprecedented denial of the rights of Free Speech and Freedom to Assemble. There are restrictions on movement through airports including so-called “watch lists” and “no-fly” lists with expansions planned for rail and bus terminals. Freeways have been blocked by Homeland Security to check the identification papers of vehicle occupants in rehearsal for things to come. There is unlawful spying on working class Americans by the government. There are massive federal grants to local police agencies for “anti-terrorism” training and equipment that consists of the same ingredients used for controlling large angry crowds of unemployed and hungry non-terrorists. The Bush Administration claims the right to detain citizens for life without a warrant or writ of habeas corpus. The new PATRIOT Act renewal would extend the power of the President to include extinguishing the citizenship of natural born Americans without judicial review or appeal and exiling them to lawless countries such as Somalia where their fate will be in their own hands. It would include giving the President power to secretly arrest citizens, conduct secret trials with secret witnesses and carry out secret executions all without judicial review or appeal. The are no-bid contracts to Bush/Cheney cronies in Kellogg Brown Root to build over $300 million in mass detention facilities around the country in anticipation of a need in the near future to lock up at least 50.000 additional citizens for an indefinite time. All of this points to a highly publicized effort by the Bush Administration to fight terrorism, but it also coincidentally points to those with the power to see the future setting in motion the foundations for maintaining rigid control over a disgruntled population when all comes crashing down.

So who you gonna believe, Bunkie? Bush or your own two lying eyes?

Wartime for All of Us in America

Wartime in America

There is a war in America. The war can only be won by destroying the enemy and capturing the long sought objective of the neo-liberal economists and neo-conservative foreign policy advocates.

The war on terror is a convenient red herring that has been be used successfully to distract the American public away from the real war and its goals. The various insurgents, terrorists, and their numerous attacks on American troops in foreign lands serve to cement the belief that our enemy is without not within the gates. Politicians quake at the mere thought of being branded by the opposition as being ‘soft on terror’ even as their fathers and grandfathers were fearful of being called ‘soft on communism’.

What then is the real war? What is the true objective? Who are the enemies?

The Real War

There is not a declared war. No declaration of war act as specified in the US Constitution has been passed by the Congress or signed by the President. There is only an authorization to allocate federal funds for the President to conduct operations against anyone he identifies as an enemy to America “using all appropriate force”. No nation is at war with America. America is at war with no nation.

The true war is more of a civil war within the borders of America. The combatants, in their most base form, are those who want to create an imperial Presidency with broad dictatorial powers not subject to review by anyone and those who stand in the way of that happening.

The objective of the Imperialists is to bring to America the policies that have for generations been visited by our government and corporations on the rest of the world. In this view, America itself is the last great economic prize left on the planet. They mean to have it for themselves.

The True Enemy

The Imperialists use savage aggression in foreign countries to spark reprisal attacks on American military personnel and civilians abroad. These attacks and casualties are then used as distractions to the American public but nonetheless are disguised as proof that our enemies are deadly and are foreign. This threat from without is supposed to justify more restrictions on dissent within America. Further restrictions on information availability are made as well. The goals are to give the Bush Administration absolute control over all information available to the American public and to stifle dissent to their objective.

The enemies of the Imperialists are many but none are foreigners in foreign lands. There is no foreigner capable of stopping their vicious quest for absolute power in America. But there are many enemies to their objective who are Americans. In fact, most Americans are their enemies in this.

The Real Objective of the Real War

Most Americans when asked about whether they support the moving of manufacturing jobs offshore are opposed to it. Most Americans when asked if they support the growing military budget are opposed to it. Most Americans when asked it they support Social Security, do. Most Americans when asked whether they support increased federal spending for social services such as education and transportation favor it. Most Americans when asked about health care say they want a single payer plan. Most Americans do not approve of wiretaps without a warrant. Most Americans believe the enormous transfer of wealth into the hands of weapons manufacturers is a waste. Most Americans believe in the Constitution and think that government officials should be bound to follow it. These Americans are the true enemy of the Imperialists in the war for absolute power because they oppose the real objectives of the Imperialists.

The neo-liberals have had as their objective a return to the unregulated economy of the Gilded Age. They have long stated their desire to eliminate the social reforms instituted by FDR to end the Great Depression. An event the neo-liberals chalk up to market forces at work. Human misery is not important to these monsters in their quest to create a real world example of their theoretical model of a market driven economy. In fact they do not want a market driven economy any more than neo-conservatives want global democracy. Neo-liberals want an economy they alone can profit from and that they control absolutely.

Thus, the real objective of the Bush Administration is for a return to the age of the Robber Barons. A time when poor people starved in America and a feudal few ruled over all with an iron fist.

To this end all other events must serve.

What's Wrong With America's Election Process?

Part 1: The Casting and the Counting of Votes


I have no objection to letting the people vote at any time on any issue and I will count their ballots. For elections are not determined by those who cast the votes but by he who counts them. –Josef Stalin


The elections of 2000 and 2004 produced many charges of fraud. In an effort to address those charges the Republican controlled Congress attempted to “reform” the election process by requiring the uniform use of electronic voting machines and ballot counting machines that local election officials must rent or lease from private corporations.


Most of these corporations, most notably Diebold, are owned and run by staunch Republican conservatives who have stated that they would do “whatever it takes” to produce Republican winners in the election.


The software code used in these computerized machines has been found by federal courts to be proprietary. This means that the corporation may refuse to disclose its code to government regulators. Thus, there is no way to objectively determine whether a particular corporation’s product has or has not been tampered with to produce a desired vote count outcome. The voter has only blind faith that the partisan owners of the equipment would resist the temptation to ‘fix’ the vote count with the sure knowledge that they would never be caught having done so.


This corporatization of the voting process has created another transfer of public moneys into the bank accounts of corporate owners while leaving the public with a deeply flawed, unregulated system open to dishonesty and fraud.


The privatizing of America’s election process has effectively ended democracy as it was previously known.




Part 2: Election Profiteering



Although the use of privately owned, unregulated voting machines and vote counting machines has probably ended democracy in America, there is a second, older, and more pernicious attack on democracy in America. That is the high price all Americans pay for media moguls' salaries and bonuses.


The single most challenging and expensive obstacle to overcome for a candidate running for elected office is informing the voters about the candidate’s message.


There are three avenues now available for educating the public and specifically voters to anyone who aspires to public office. The first is the print media. This includes signs, billboards, flyers, mailers, brochures, magazines, and newspapers. Of this group the least censored are the signs, flyers, mailers, and brochures. They may also be the least expensive due to competition among printers in the marketplace. The use of billboards, magazines, and newspapers, the mass print media, can be very expensive for placing ads and those ads increasingly are subject to the politics of the media owner. For example, Clear Channel, owner of the majority of the nation’s radio stations and billboards, has refused to publish ads from candidates and groups with which its primary owner disagrees. Rupert Murdock’s newspaper empire, NewsCorp, has also refused to publish at any price campaign ads from individuals and groups is has identified as “irresponsible” these have tended to be anti-corporate or anti-Republican groups.


The mass print media is largely owned and operated by political conservatives. The publishers and editors they hire are similarly conservative. To different degrees those media managers will exercise censorship over the message any candidate can give to the public via their publication. For many years however a sure way to circumvent editorial censorship was by purchasing an advertisement. The dollar cancelled censorship as long as the ad was within legal and moral bounds. In recent years, however this avenue has been shut by very ideologically inspired owners who see control over the message as being more important in the long run than achieving a profit in the short run. A liberal, progressive candidate will not be evaluated favorably by those owners and editors and they will exercise as much control as they can over the content of the message the candidate wishes to inform the voter of. The choice is that a candidate can attempt to publish an anti-business or reformist message in an ad but the media controllers and censors will now refuse to sell the ad space for that message.


The prices charged for political advertising is also marked up over commercial advertising. Some may argue that this is merely obeying the law of supply and demand, but in fact it is more closely akin to profiteering. Candidates are faced with the choice to pay the going rate or not communicate their message with the voters.


There is a basic law of advertising that repetition is the key to improving sales. The more the public is exposed to a message, commercial or political, the more likely they will believe all or part of it. So the candidate who wants to be successful will produce and get published as many advertisements as possible.


The broadcast media is the second avenue for publishing a message. Unlike the print media, the broadcast media utilize public property, the airwaves, to send out their product to the public. Each broadcaster must apply for a license to use a defined portion of the airwaves and pay a fee for that use. The exception to this is the public’s broadcasters (i.e. PBS) who are granted a portion of the airwaves gratis by statute. In theory, a broadcaster is regulated and the public is given opportunities to complain about the service or content that broadcaster has produced during the license period. At the end of the license period, the broadcaster must renew the license before the Federal Communications Commission. At that time the public’s input is supposed to be considered in granting a renewal, however Clear Channel’s owners changed the rules regarding this when they were successful in paying a fine of $2 million in exchange for having hundreds of public complaints cleared from their record just prior to license renewal hearings by the commission. To put it in perspective, that fine was equal to the revenue generated by just two and a half minutes of commercial time during a single Super Bowl, but the complaints regarding a variety of practices by Clear Channel had been accumulating for the entire license period, year and years.
The same censorship that exists in print media is present in broadcast media as well. Owners who tend to be political conservatives – indeed, too often they are the very same persons who control many of the print media outlets – are increasingly refusing to broadcast political messages with which they disagree. These advertisements or candidate messages are censored and labeled as “controversial” or “irresponsible” by the station owners who disagree with them and want to keep the public from learning of the content of the message.


One of the most famous examples of this kind of censorship was when an anti-war group, MoveOn.org conducted a contest to create a TV commercial that was critical of President Bush. The winning commercial, “Child’s Pay,” depicted small children engaged in menial labor and asked the viewer who they thought would have to pay for the enormous national debt President Bush was running up. It was a powerful video. MoveOn.org had raised the money to purchase commercial broadcast time during the Super Bowl game but the owners of the network refused to sell the airtime for the commercial to MoveOn.org saying that its was a “biased and irresponsible message.” There is no record of such censorship of messages by the same network supporting President Bush or his party or attack ads against his opponents for being “biased or irresponsible.”


Broadcast media also runs up the prices for airing candidate commercials. Unlike the print media where a newspaper, for example, could add pages to accommodate extra ads, the broadcaster has only 24 hours of broadcast time per day to sell. This induces a true competitive market between candidates in which the candidate with the most money can send his message to the public more often. The question is whether the best interests of the electorate are served by a market driven campaign system in which the voices and messages of the richest candidate are the only ones heard.


We see, then, that America’s electoral system is also deeply flawed as it regards political campaigns. The various privately owned media exercise extreme control over both content of political messages and who gets exposed to them. To a certain degree the censorship exercised by the media owners is related to profits but as we have seen, there are too many instances where profit was not involved. Most of the time it is though.


Thus, a candidate must, to be successful, raise substantial sums of money to purchase commercial time and advertising space. This can be done most efficiently by seeking donations from a relatively few very wealthy donors. Otherwise a candidate must gather small sums from hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual supporters. Although, Howard Dean’s campaign of 2004, opened a new source of revenue: the Internet appeal.


The third avenue available to a candidate to send a message to the public is the Internet. Much has been made of this possibility but it is unlikely that a candidate will be successful in reaching out to an undecided voter via a web page. By their nature, web sites are passive and voluntary. That is to say, that TV viewers who are undecided about who to vote for will watch whatever commercials shown during the program they viewing (research suggests the view may mute the audio though). An Internet user must seek out a candidate’s message thus the candidate is essentially fishing for viewers of a web page and those will most likely be supporters rather than undecided people.


A web page can be the least expensive of all of the three avenues of influencing voters during an election.


The influence of money on elections in America is overwhelming. Candidates do not have time to contact hundreds of thousands of people and convince them to give small contributions so they focus on persuading wealthy people to give large contributions. The rich, then, have a very great influence on election results and on the opinions of the voters, for people believe according to their experiences in life, and so he who controls those experiences controls how people will believe. It is also known as “controlling the message.”


To reform elections in America we must attack the root of the problem: money. There are many proposals that claim to do this. The various “campaign finance” laws that regularly are issued by Congress are merely cosmetic and none are designed to open up the election process to challengers to the status quo. To do this we must follow the money.


Politicians, the people’s servants, are dependent on wealthy donors. They need the donors’ money to buy commercial airtime and advertisements. Most of the money raised by a campaign goes into these two avenues of getting the message to the voters. So, any true election reform must address the power exercised by broadcasters and print media owners. Until the 1994 election this was done by the Doctrine of Fair Time. Under that doctrine, broadcasters and publishers were required to provide commercial and advertising space equally to candidates. After the Republican “Revolution” of 1994, Congress acted to change this doctrine to one where “the market” ruled the election process. Money became the only factor in the amount of advertising a candidate could expose the voters to. The cost of elections, and the corresponding windfall profits to the owners of broadcast and print media took off after the doctrine was dropped. The move increased the power of the rich dramatically.


How to fix it? Remove the influence of money for advertising. There are several methods that can be employed. One might be to restore the Fairness Doctrine so that each candidate has equal access to media. Another might be to restrict candidates’ media outlets. Say only to PBS television and radio where campaigns would have to “sponsor” programming much as corporations do. The profits from the “sale” of sponsorships for PBS programming by political candidates would benefit a broader spectrum of the public than does funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into the accounts of a relatively few number of media owners. If a cap on charges for such broadcast commercial time were also imposed the power of the rich in elections would be broken. More candidates with progressive or reformist messages could be heard by the general public, who polls show, favor liberal progressive social services programs such as health care and social security. It also would severely reduce censorship by media owners of the messages that they permit the public to see or hear, which, in turn, will benefit individuals and groups espousing liberal, progressive, and reformist causes.

Stopping the Gang of Four

When he was in college, George W. Bush lettered as a Yale cheerleader, but was a very unremarkable student who, in spite of the best of hired tutors and the influence of a prominent grandfather and father (both Yale men), graduated with a grade point average of C. His peers remembered him as a party guy who never bought a drink or a meal for anyone and lied without conscience. They also recalled that he was a very good cheerleader who was able to get the crowd on its feet.



As Bush entered adulthood he attempted to follow his father and grandfather into business. One of his first attempts was a start up wild-cat oil company he named, “Arbusto” believing arbusto to be Spanish for ‘Bush’ and thus a clever play on words. (Arbusto is the Mexican word for ‘shrub’ not ‘bush’.) Arbusto Oil never went anywhere but south into bankruptcy. Unable to succeed as a businessman, Bush then went to work for others as a ‘landman’.



In the oil business a landman is the guy who negotiates with the rancher to get the mineral rights and drilling rights to his land. The goal of a landman is to trick the farmer out of his oil for as little money as possible. It is a job, similar to used car salesman, in that it requires the ability to deceive with a straight face while appearing to be “technically” truthful, and to whip up enthusiasm for the project/car in the farmer/customer. His employers remembered Bush as being a pretty good landman.


Bush eventually was given another chance to be an entrepreneur by his family when he was installed in Harken Oil as an owner and board of directors member. Harken also went south soon after Bush jointed it and attempted to direct it. Bush was able to avoid the financial losses of a failed business because, a the member of the company’s audit committee, he gained key information that the company was on the verge of bankruptcy and was able to sell his shares privately to a family friend two weeks before the collapse. Selling them privately meant that Bush avoided indictment for insider trading that would have resulted by selling them on the stock market. Later, when asked why he bought the shares off Bush the friend said that it was a small price to pay for helping the son of the Vice President of the United States.



Without investing any of his own money, Bush was given shares in a baseball team. As an owner, he took on the job he had done so well in college, cheerleader. He attended every game and glad handed the crowd and players with smiling enthusiasm. He was not given any control over the finances of the team, however, by the other investors. Bush’s reputation as a businessman was poor and besides he was known to be a real boozer (he had been arrested twice: once for vandalism while drunk; once for drunk driving). But he was the eldest son of the Vice President of the United States and scion of one of the most prominent, wealthy, and influential families in America. Everyone knew that his family rewarded its friends even as it punished with a ruthless vengeance those who stood up to family members. (It was supposedly said by those close to the family that Bush inherited his mother’s short temper and vindictiveness.)



As a politician, Bush’s first attempt was a bid for U.S. House of Representatives. He campaigned hard. But those who voted against him recalled that he did not strike them as a man to be trusted.



During the 1980s, Bush campaigned for his father’s bid for President and Vice President. He also found religion. One story has it that on the campaign trail in Alabama, Bush attended a fundamentalist camp meeting and watched spellbound at how the preacher controlled the passions of the congregation and successfully extolled them for cash donations. Supposedly in an epiphany, Bush said that he could do that same thing back home in Texas. After the campaign, Bush began to attend a Bible study group in Texas where he learn more about the vocabulary of the fundamentalists. Professing to be an avid Bible reader, even after he became President, he gave some listeners doubts for, when asked what his favorite Bible passage was, he criticized the reporter for trying to catch him in a ‘trick’ question.



Bush has always relied upon men who were older and smarter. When he was teamed with Dick Cheney in 2000, it was a match made in neo-con heaven. Bush had the charisma and cheerleader enthusiasm to sell the public the conservatives’ bill of goods while Cheney was the man behind the throne.


Once elected in 2000, Bush appointed Donald Rumsfeld to be Secretary of Defense, a key position in any putz. It was Rumsfeld and Cheney who had been a young team during Nixon’s attempt at the creation of an imperial presidency back in the early 1970s, and it was Cheney and Rumsfeld who tried unsuccessfully to submarine the Freedom of Information Act by convincing President Gerald Ford to veto it. It was Cheney and Rumsfeld who helped conceal the Iran-Contra illegal deals from the US public and the Congress during Ronald Reagan’s Administration. They have a long history of making the work of the Executive Branch secret. Mostly that is because what they want to do to accomplish their goals has tended to be either contrary to law or would be unpopular with the American public – a fairly moral and law abiding group of people.



In the current White House workings, it appears that Bush has lots of time for working out on his bicycle, in the weight room, jogging, and taking extended vacations (so far, 366 days in five years). He is the point man for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld team. He is the 'land man' who has been told he has a silver tongue that can convince the rest of us to agree to anything in support of the eternal war on terror/evil. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Condolezza Rice have the important role of repeating the message over and over so that it is drummed into the media and thus into the peoples’ minds.



What is amusing to remember is that Cheney and Rumsfeld have convinced Bush that he is a smooth talker and that he does a great job as a communicator. In exchange, Bush lets them run the Executive Branch and leave him to more corporeal amusements and escapes. It must have been a wake up call to him when his erstwhile attempt to cheat the American public out of Social Security went flat. No matter how many times Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and a host of media surrogates repeated the message that privatizing Social Security would make everyone richer, safer, or more thin, the public refused to buy. Worse, the public began to question the “trustability” of the guy who was so brazenly trying to cheat them for the enrichment of a wealthy elite.



With each apparent reversal to their plans for a new imperial presidency, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice gang of four have come back with a more outrageous counterattack. For example, when Senator John McCain convinced first the Senate and then the House to pass his anti-torture bill, not the first law banning torture on the federal books, Bush quietly added a signing statement that basically declared that he would respect the law against torture if it suited him to do so and would not obey it when he felt that he did not want to for reasons of “national security”. Effectively, throwing down the gauntlet to Congress. The only way to stop the Gang of Four from firmly establishing a new imperial presidency that is above the law and outside the ethical and moral norms of civilized society, is by removing them from office.



It is very unlikely that Congress, whose majority members are dependent on the Republican Party for funding in their next re-election bid, will risk their own campaigns just to keep the Gang of Four from ending our federal republic. So, it falls to the Democratic Party, currently 18 votes short of a majority in the House and five votes short of a majority in the Senate to defend democracy and the rule of law in America. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party leadership has shown little interest in upsetting the status quo, preferring instead to safely remain the minority party.



Why is that? Well, the GOP controls most of the media through like NewsCorp in newspapers and television or Clear Channel in radio. The politically right wing owners of those have refused to hire “liberals” or Democrats as publishers, producers, or editors. They have refused to even accept ads non-Republican, non-conservative, groups have tried to buy in the conservative media.



The same attack media that stifled the Clinton Administration with a barrage of invented “scandals”, rumors, and spurious personal attacks, can be turned in a heartbeat on any Democrat who attempts to rock the Republican corporate profit machine (which is how they view the control of Congress coupled with the White House). Remember how they successfully attacked Al Gore’s credibility and John Kerry’s service record?



So it will take an especially wary electorate and an especially courageous Democratic leadership to save our way of governing ourselves. You can help by writing a flood of letters and email messages to newspapers, magazines, and the Democratic Party urging them to act decisively.

Does Texas Size Fit All?

In Texas there are three accepted defenses to a charge of murder. The first is innocence, the second is insanity, and the third is “he needed killing.”

That old joke is losing some of its chuckle as America increasing becomes a bigger version of Texas under the guiding hand of the Bush Administration.

What’s so wrong with becoming more like the great state of Texas you ask? Well, in America we have a tradition of one size, even Texas size, not fitting everyone. Now I am not about to “mess with Texas," but what works for some folks just is not the way other folks may want to live their lives. Consider the following unique qualities about living in Texas.

In Texas can be found the greatest percentage of polluted freshwater riparian habitat in America. Of the ten cities in America with the highest amount of smog, six are in Texas. This is the result of corporations in Texas influencing the Texas legislature to ease restrictions on environmental pollution. What some corporations call “government non-interference with a free market.” So Texas power plants that are nearly a half century old are not being forced to upgrade but rather are spewing out pollutants at a rate that exists in few other places in the country. That is not something that citizens all of the other 49 states may want to have forced upon them by a Texas run federal bureaucracy. Yet, the Bush Administration is systematically dismantling decades of environmental law without a whimper or whine of complaint from the corporate owned media.

In Texas the governor is little more than a figurehead. This is called the “weak governor” system of state government. Power rests more with the legislature than the executive. But the Texas legislature is prohibited from meeting more than once every two years. With that system, change from the status quo does not happen easily or quickly and that is by corporate design. Corporations fund virtually all of the campaigns for the Texas legislature so candidates without independent wealth or strong corporate backing have a very tough time being elected. The new Republican leadership in our nation was very opposed to a strong Executive in federal government while Clinton was the President, lauding the Texas model as the way for America to go.

That course of action changed 180° when George W. Bush took over the White House. Since 2001, the GOP has acted to centralize unprecedented power in the President. The PATRIOT Act is the most widely known of the actions that have help to centralize this power. Much of this authority is put to use to benefit corporate owners rather than the poor or middle classes. Some of it is used to stack the federal judiciary with former corporate lawyers believed to be willing to base their rulings upon neo-liberal ideology rather than evidence.

The Texas judiciary is elected to discrete terms of office. The justices who have the most corporate financial backing have the best chance of being elected and the others will be “also rans” in the race for a seat on the bench. If a judge does not rule in a way that corporate owners approve they threaten to pull financial support from the next campaign. So the corporation owners are able to exert great power over the legal system in Texas. No judge who rules against a corporation will remain on the bench for long. Thus, law west of the Sabine River is bought and paid for with corporation money. Think of it as a “free market system of justice.” Good for a wealthy few but overall not so good for the majority of us.

There are probably corporation managers and owners though out America who salivate over the prospect of bringing Texas style corporatism to their own neighborhood. But where the people are still able to control their local governments this notion of government by and for the rich holds very limited appeal.

The best way to foil the attempt by the new GOP leadership is for voters like you to elect progressives who are more in favor of making life better for the middle class or poor segment of society. Si, se puede.

The Need to Constrain Power

“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” Alexander Hamilton


Alexander Hamilton was there at the beginning as the only delegate from New York to stick it out at the Federal Convention of 1787 that wrote our constitution. He was the great grandfather of our modern federal banking system. He was the most instrumental man at the conception of the Federalist Party. And it was perhaps his voice, more than any other that persuaded George Washington to serve a second term, a decision Washington lived to deeply regret.

Hamilton believed in a strong central government that would serve to rein in the human excesses caused by human greed. How very surprised he would be if he were alive to day to see how the Bush Administration with the collusion of the Republican Majority in Congress had corrupted the use of federal power to nurture the human greed in its friends and to create physical and financial misery in the lives of their fellow countrymen whom they nevertheless call ‘enemies’.

The Bush Administration is well known to have its philosophical roots in the neo-liberals and ex-Trotskyites of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their original design to supplant America’s traditional freedoms and civil liberties through classic Bolshevistic social revolutionary tactics is not as well known only because so few progressives, and conservatives, too, for that matter, have read their early writings.

People like Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Kristol, reasoned that the same strategies and techniques that brought political victory to the Bolsheviks in Russia or to the Maoists in China or the Communists in Viet Nam or the Castro forces in Cuba, could be used to subvert American democracy to the benefit of a wealthy elite of corporation owners?

In communist revolutions, the masses were persuaded to support the revolutionaries because they were promised a better life. They were persuaded to oppose the status quo regime as their enemies. They were convinced that the revolutionaries could protect them from the abuses of the old regime if the people would just turn over absolute power to the communists until the dream of a worker’s paradise could be fulfilled. It was a war on the rich; a war on elitism; a war on capitalism; a war on the enemies of the society and the state. And it was all a lie.

One of the early founders of what would become the conservative movement, wrote, “Let’s say you want another man’s gold. But he has a gun and therefore the power to protect it from you taking it away. You do not have to say to him, ‘give me your gun so that I can shoot you and take your gold. It is enough to smile in a friendly way at him and calmly say only ‘please let me hold the gun’. What follows will be easy enough.” We Americans have handed the GOP our gun.

Beginning with the GOP’s Contract With America, in 1994, the Republican Party, long the party of big business in America, convinced the masses that the old regime of a Congress controlled by Democrats was not only bad, but the enemy of all Americans. They convinced many people to sweep them into power with a warm smile and a promise of better things to come.

Once in power, though, the promised reforms, all of them, were forgotten. To date not one of the promises in the much celebrated Contract With America have been fulfilled. Clearly the purpose of the CWA was to fool enough of the electorate into handing the party of big business power. The gun was now in their hands and they knew what they had to do to consolidate power. Now in power, they began to take steps to ensure they would never lose it.

First step was to isolate the President, a Democrat. The executive branch was able to execute checks on the power of the Congress and so the new leaders in Congress sought though bullying and blackmail to curb President Clinton’s exercise of restraint upon their corporate dreams of avarice. It worked for a few years. They got the North American Free Trade Agreement passed by Congress and signed by Clinton, they overturned the 1936 Banking Reform Act, they ended the Fairness Doctrine in the broadcast media, they changed laws limiting media ownership, and they set their sights on the destruction of pro-middle class protections that had been in place since the New Deal.

But Clinton rejected the neo-conservative plans to invade the Middle East and capture control over the world oil resources – later to be called the “Project for a New American Century.” His punishment was to be dragged before a jury of his lessers and publicly humiliated over a secret consensual sexual liaison. Clinton’s impeachment was not pursued by the GOP Congress just as punishment for him but to serve as a clear warning to any politician in any opposition party of what he could expect if he dared to run for office against them. And it was repayment to rich GOP Clinton-haters, such as Dick Scaife, who had bankrolled the conservative movement for a generation.

In 2000 the GOP destroyed the integrity and reputation of Al Gore when he ran against George W. Bush. They used the well disciplined media empire that a few wealthy members of the conservative movement, such as Rupert Murdock, had acquired during the preceding five years thanks to the repeal of laws that had for nearly six decades restricted their insatiable lust for power and constrained their greed while protecting and promoting the middle class in America.

Now another five years have passed. And now the public is seeing evidence of corruption, incompetence, lies, and utter negligence by the Bush Administration. All this in spite of a well disciplined media owned by wealthy elite corporate owners who carefully censor what information the American public is given. Reporters who do not write as they are told are not just fired but blackballed form further employment in the industry to join the ranks of the permanently unemployed. Those who have made a larger transgression find that the cloud of retribution extends to their family members as well. This is a page taken directly from the Chinese revolutionaries who would execute not just the anti-revolutionary enemy of the state but his entire family to the third level. Let the terror begin.

The question being asked by more perceptive progressives is how to we stop these wicked people from not only destroying our nation but the lives of millions of humans around the world? The answer still may be through the ballot box, but that last loophole to the ultimate plan for the retention of permanent power by the Republicans will soon close, too, if they are able to block efforts to create recountable ballots.

So the first step in the battle to retake our nation from the hands of the elites of greed and corruption must be fought in the states and in the local election offices. Here we must take a stand to prevent the GOP owned electronic voting machines (and paper ballot scanners) from doing away with hand countable ballots. Once computers have the vote, the people will be doomed, for computers can be untraceably programmed to produce a narrow victory for the Republican candidate every time anywhere. The media will support the final “tally” no matter what the exit polls indicate because the media is owned by the same kind of wealthy elites who own the voting machines.

Act now if we are to keep a constraint on our leaders as Hamilton called for over two hundred years ago.

Making Change

The only way to make change in America is by ursurping power like the Bush Administration has done with the conivance of the GOP controlled Congress, or through the electorial process.

The Bush Administration has shown by its actions that it needs to test the boundaries of power. Domestically, Bush has tested what parts of the constitution he may violate without the courts or Congress intervening. Internationally, he has exerted military might to coerce nations with valuable resources to bend to the will of American corporate powers except for nations that are able to defend themselves either because they possess nuclear weapons, such as North Korea, or have protectors who have them, such as Iran (protected by Russia and China).

It is time that the American voters put the brakes on Bush by refusing to reelect Republicans to Congress in 2006. Without the majority in Congress, the GOP will be powerless to coverup the excesses of the Bush Administration or the graft and corruption of which we read nearly daily in the media and on-line.