News of the Month

August 9, 2003

I want to lead off with the editorial by Austin Chronicle editor Lewis Black last month, on the mess that the Republicanazis have made of the “redistricting” issue. Although written in July, it’s just as pertinent today – this time it’s the Senate Democrats who have chosen to fight with the only weapon left to them, their absence. Governor Goodrug (And have you seen that rug he’s been wearing lately?) has been told by his massa in Sugarland to waste yet another $1.7 million of your dollars in his quest to waste $10 million to redistrict the state. Mr. Black says:

“The full obscenity of the redistricting battle is easy to lose sight of in the midst of the constant maneuverings. It is driven solely by Tom DeLay, without grassroots demand or even much interest – and in recent weeks widespread public opposition – and the tiresome partisan refrain is that when the Democrats were in power they did the same thing, and the Republicans are simply demanding fair, constitutionally guaranteed representation. When Texas was a one-party state controlled by gerrymandering Democrats, goes the Republican whine, no one complained; now it’s our turn. Unfortunately, the actual history contradicts this argument.

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“The only agenda being served is DeLay’s. He wants both breathing room on close House votes and to be House majority leader…. The vast majority of people throughout the state who have spoken up on redistricting – regardless of their party affiliations – are opposed. The goal of the current Republican leadership is a one-party, one-ideology country, in contradiction to every basic principle of American political precedent, the ambitions of this country’s Founding Fathers, and the U.S. Constitution.”

This thought was echoed by Lloyd Doggett, speaking of a totally separate issue in the US House:

“My friends, this is how tyranny begins. It is our responsibility to stand against a police state, to stand in favor of open dialogue rather than to permit a bill to pass with only the votes of one party, and move toward a one-party state.”

And understand – we are moving towards a one-party America, and a one-party Texas. The Republican Fascists are bound and determined to rule this country on behalf of their corporate masters, crushing anyone who gets in their way. (Just look at what happened to Paul Wellstone!) And, if you think I’m being extreme by calling the Republican/mega-corporate conglomeration a Fascist construct, let me remind you what Benito Mussolini, the creator of modern Fascism, said:

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

He also said something about a Fascist state’s tactics:

“The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone.”

Sound anything like what’s going on today – our Homeland Gestapo, the first and second (so-called) PATRIOT Acts, etc.? You know, if there ever were to be a second American Revolution – and of course, I’m not advocating one, and in fact, all Libertarians have to sign a pledge that we will not advocate the overthrow of the Government by force of arms – but if there ever were to be such a second American Revolution, speaking hypothetically, it would probably be a lot more effective if its targets were CEOs, rather than government executives. How does the Declaration of Independence put it?

“… Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed – that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government. … when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future security ….”

Wow! No wonder the people in power think the Declaration is a subversive document! On Independence Day, for example, on the Esplanade in Boston, some people were harassed, and in one case arrested, for trying to distribute copies of the Bill of Rights to the people in that park. As long as it’s safely under glass in the National Archives in Washington, it’s OK; but let the people actually read it, and find out what it says, and our benevolent rulers quake in their boots. You remember we were talking a couple of months ago how much our just speaking out scares them? Well, you know what? They need to be scared.

Of course, is Bush even listening? (We know his puppeteers are – you can tell by the way they stage-manage the reaction to uppity people like the Dixie Chicks.) But does Bush hear anything – or anyone – except his puppeteers? Yes, he does. He has, he says, a direct line to God himself! Listen to this article, from the June 24 issue of Ha’aretz, an Israeli newspaper. In the last paragraph of that article there’s this quote from Bush, related by Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Here is what they report that our Emperor said:

“God told me to strike at al Qaeda, and I struck them; and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did; and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you can help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.”

Remember a few months ago we heard evidence that Bush is certifiably insane? Well, that was another stinking … ah, smoking gun to that effect. And an article from the San Francisco Chronicle of July 7 agrees:

“Over the years I’ve met a handful of people who regularly talk with God, but they usually do so only when they’re off their medications. … Getting direct orders from God makes a president’s life simpler. If God has spoken, the president doesn’t have to observe the niceties with which presidents usually contend, things like getting congressional approval or United Nations agreement. Bush’s very own personal God connection explains a lot of things. Like Bush’s disinterest in global warming.

“So what we have in the White House today is a megalomaniac with a messianic complex, a man who believes that he and he alone can resolve the world’s problems. ‘I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East,’ he said. I, I, I, I, I! With Bush it’s always ‘I.’ In a job that requires great humility, we have an egomaniac.”

Frank Herbert, an author who died back during Ronnie Ray-Gun’s term, said it this way:

“Personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it. Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it.

“This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don’t give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero’s facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.

“It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power, and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced – in a word, insane.”

If you’ll remember, that is exactly what the experts we heard from earlier said of our beloved emperor – that he’s a megalomaniac with a messianic complex. Insane, in other words. Isn’t it comforting that even though our “president” is insane, he has a band of dedicated people around him, conscientiously pulling all his strings at just the right times? I’m comforted.

Here’s another view of the W situation, from a reader of my web site in Ohio:

“The reason Dumbya looks so much like a chimp or a horny monkey is those small, beady, close set eyes, the vertical wide space between his nostrils and his upper lip, and his really thin upper lip. All classic symptoms of FAS, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome….”

Maybe Barbara did to him what he did to his twins. Poor people.

Speaking of insane, how insane is it to shout a lie at the top of your voice, hoping that the people hearing the lie will think it’s the truth just because it’s loud, even if they already know it’s a lie? Yeah, well, maybe not all that insane, because the mindless masses seem to be buying the lie anyway. This time, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of our insane policy in Iraq, is doing the shouting. An article by Tim Harper in the Toronto Star on July 28 reports:

“Wolfowitz, in a series of interviews on U.S. television networks yesterday, appeared to ignore intelligence reports which have discredited links between Iraq and Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism. He sought to defend President George W. Bush’s administration against charges that it had misled Americans on the threat posed by deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, saying the government cannot wait for ‘murky’ intelligence to crystallize because it may be too late. ‘The battle to secure the peace in Iraq is now the central battle on the war on terrorism,’ Wolfowitz said on Meet the Press.”

“Wolfowitz, who just returned from Iraq, said the deaths of Saddam’s sons has increased the amount of information being brought to U.S. officials. … Wolfowitz did not respond directly when asked if he was specifically linking the Iraqi invasion to the war against Al Qaeda. ‘I think the lesson of 9/11 is that if you’re not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, then you’re going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact now means after horrendous things have happened to this country,’ he said.

In other words, if you’re not willing to murder people on the outside chance that they might someday do something bad, then horrible things are going to happen to you. Wolfowitz is saying that since I think that George Bush not only might do, but is doing, bad things; that means I have the right to murder him. Bull-byproducts! If individuals followed what Wolfowitz and his cohorts laughingly call “ethics,” we’d be put in prison (or killed!) so fast we’d get windburn.

He mentioned that we murdered Saddam Hussein’s sons last month. That we did. And, given their records, it probably isn’t a bad thing that they’re no longer able to practice their little “hobbies” on their people. But listen to this editorial by Peter Lee on the “Smirking Chimp” web site (www.smirkingchimp.com) on those murders:

“The Uday and Qusay assassination fiasco eerily recapitulates America’s previous missteps that culminated in our bewildered conquerors presiding over a catastrophic spasm of looting and destruction in ‘liberated’ Iraq. A cathartic moment of American ultra-violence is followed by confusion, bewilderment, and the inescapable conclusion that the U.S. doesn’t have a clue about what to do after the killing ends.

“Now the great minds in the Pentagon are realizing that it would have been a heck of a lot better if Uday and Qusay, alive in all their undeniable and inimitable Hussein-ness, had been paraded before the Iraqi people, subjected to a televised show trial, forced to endure the tearful, furious indignation of their thousands of victims, and executed. Too late for that now!”

We don’t know what we’re doing there. We don’t even know how to protect our own troops. And the Iraqis know that! Listen to this report from the South Africa Mail & Guardian:

“A rocket-propelled grenade strikes from out of nowhere, incinerating an American Humvee military transport on a highway near Baghdad. One US soldier killed, three wounded. When the explosion is heard, a group of Iraqi civilians nearby gathers at the site of the smoldering aftermath, reports CNN’s Harris Whitbeck. When they realise it was an attack on a US military force, they erupt in cheers, and that cheering lasts several minutes. Another day in Iraq, another dead US soldier.

“Many US troops say they are not surprised by increasing attacks or displays of anger among Iraqis, the Washington Post reports. While no official statistics exist, Iraq’s civilian death toll since the war began March 20 is an estimated to be between 6,000 and 7,800. ‘Wouldn’t you be mad if they invaded your country?’ James McNeely, a member of the US National Guard, asks a Post reporter. ‘I want to go home.’ Another US soldier reported, ‘You know, there are a whole lot of our girls getting pregnant just so they can go home quick.’ ”

You mean the war isn’t going well? The Iraqis aren’t welcoming us as their friends, or hailing us as their liberators? They’re not throwing rose petals in our path? Well … why not? Listen to this report from Robert Fisk of Infoshop News on July 29:

“Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to 11, including two children, their mother and crippled father. At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants. The vehicle carrying the two children and their mother and father was riddled by bullets as it approached a razor-wired checkpoint outside the house.

“Amid the fury generated among the largely middle-class residents of Mansur – by ghastly coincidence, the killings were scarcely 40 metres from the houses in which 16 civilians died when the Americans tried to kill Saddam towards the end of the war in April – whatever political advantages were gained by the killing of Saddam’s sons have been squandered. A doctor at the Yarmouk hospital, which received four of the dead, turned on me angrily last night, shouting: ‘If an American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him.’

“… When another car arrived, US troops riddled it with more bullets and it burst into flames. It is believed that two people were inside and both were burnt to death. ‘The Americans didn’t try to help the civilians they had shot, not once,’ a witness said. ‘They let the car burn and left the bodies where they lay, even the children. It was we who had to take them to the hospitals.’ ”

Do you hear any of that on our corporate-controlled media? Now think: why not? Are they maybe making a little too much money to want to rain on a cash cow? Think about this:

On July 26, on George Stephanopolous Sunday show, Donald Rumsfeld said that this country was spending money at a “burn rate” of $4 billion dollars a month to occupy Iraq. (And if you add in Afghanistan, his estimate is $4.6 billion a month.) He actually used the term “burn rate.” They usually use that term for things like jet fuel, something that’s designed to be burned.

The US budget had a surplus of $236 billion the year before Bush’s puppeteers took power. The Office of Management and the Budget estimates that we will have a $455 billion deficit this year – a net drop of $691 billion since our Emperor’s reign began. That’s an average loss of $230 billion per year, or about $19 billion a month – and our “war” in Iraq is “burning” 4 of those 19 billion dollars. The rest? Going to Georgie’s investors, of course – they have to get a big enough return on their investment that they’ll be willing to invest their bucks into his re-election campaign. And remember, we’re not talking about the whole budget here – we managed to fund things pretty well during that last year before the Bush junta seized power; this is just the net drop in the surplus over that time, going to Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and the other killer hogs.

Then I saw another graph, from the Consumer Confidence Board, that looked at the degree of confidence that consumers have in the economy. It appeared in the American-Statesman on July 30. It shows the same general trend as the deficit graph – consumer confidence consistently fell, from 120 to 50, during the reign of King George I, then it rose, from that 50 to 145 during the Clinton administration. Since George II’s puppeteers have taken over, it has fallen from that 145 to 75, after hitting a bottom of 60 just before Oil War II jacked things back up temporarily.

Oh, let’s talk economics for a minute. Last month, I told you that one of the reasons the US attacked Iraq was that Hussein had started selling his oil in euros, rather than dollars, and that if that had caught on worldwide, there would be a lot less reason for other nations to hold their reserves of dollars. They’d be able to sell them – “dump” them is the phrase economists use – and all those dollars would pretty quickly become just so many not-so-pretty pieces of green paper. The US economy is already a “house of cards;” it’s weak in so many ways that some economists are actually surprised it’s lasted as long as it has. What makes it such a house of cards? Here’s just one answer – there are lots more; this one’s from a July 28 report by the Bloomberg Group, a nationally respected economic research organization:

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own or guarantee about 42 percent of the $7 trillion U.S. mortgage market. Fannie Mae’s mortgage portfolio is worth about $816 billion, while Freddie Mac controls about $573 billion of mortgages.”

So let’s do the arithmetic. Together, the two agencies own $1.4 billion in mortgages. Yet, they guarantee 42% of $7 billion, or about $3 billion. What are they using to guarantee that extra $1.6 billion, you ask? Take a guess: your money – shades of the Savings and Loan debacle. “But aren’t mortgages about the safest investment a rich person can make?” Well, usually. If you haven’t noticed, though, Greenspan-omics have tilted the seesaw away from inflation lately, towards deflation. That means prices are going to start falling instead of rising, which means things are going to start being worth less and less as time goes on. “So?” you say; “I’ll be able to buy more stuff!” Well, maybe – but what happens when you try to sell that $150,000 house? You discover it’s only worth $100,000; but you still owe $120,000 on it! Mortgages start defaulting; the Federal agencies start having to make good on those guarantees; and … well, you can see where this is going. Welcome to the Bush deflation – and God help anybody who’s taken out a long-term loan on property they expected to increase in value!