News of the Month

October 9, 2004

This month, I’m going to talk mainly about why the Bush junta must not be returned to power this November. Of course, I think neither wing of the Republocrat Party deserves to be in power in this country, in any of the three branches of government. The entire system, and everyone in it, are so shot through with corruption that none of them should be there. Of course, the reason they are there is that the all-powerful corporations, who have bought and paid for them, give them enough money to re-buy their offices, year in and year out. Don’t think that’s true? Ask yourself – when was the last time you voted for a candidate you hadn’t seen on a sign, or a TV commercial, or a radio ad? When was the last time you even heard of a candidate who didn’t have the money – mostly, corporate money – for a massive media presence?

Remember Benito Mussolini, the man who invented fascism? He defined it as the merger of government and corporate power. He also said, “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 familiar?

I guess if he invented it, his definition is the one we should use; and by his definition, the United States today is a fascist nation. We’ve already begun accumulating colonies: first Iraq, then – why not Iran? Here’s part of an article in the New York Times from September 21, by Steven R. Weisman:

“Last year, when it was trying to reach out to Tehran for cooperation on Iraq, the administration stated that it did not support regime change in Iran, though President Bush also spoke out in favor of greater democracy there. Administration officials say that there was an internal debate last year but that the idea of giving aid to dissidents who might try to overthrow the Iranian government had been dropped for lack of any credible groups to support.

“Yet the cause of regime change in Iran is expected to be revived if President Bush is re-elected, administration officials say. Leading the charge is John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for nonproliferation, who gave a speech last month saying that Iran's conduct did not ‘bode well for the success of a negotiated approach to dealing with this issue.’ A colleague called him ‘the self-appointed tip of the spear’ in the discussions.”

And, speaking of the media, here’s another of the reasons I pass on occasionally why corporate-controlled media cannot be trusted to bring you the truth. This is from a report by Greg Palast, the man who uncovered the story of the theft of the 2000 election in Florida, on a speech by Dan Rather that he could only make in Britain, and keep his job:

“In June 2002, Dan Rather looked old, defeated, making a confession he dare not speak on American TV about the deadly censorship – and self-censorship – which had seized US newsrooms. After September 11, news on the US tube was bound and gagged. Any reporter who stepped out of line, he said, would be professionally lynched as un-American.

“Dan said all these things to a British audience. However, back in the USA, he smothered his conscience and told his TV audience: ‘George Bush is the President. He makes the decisions. He wants me to line up, just tell me where.’

“ ‘What is going on,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry to say, is a belief that the public doesn’t need to know – limiting access, limiting information to cover the backsides of those who are in charge of the war. It’s extremely dangerous and cannot and should not be accepted, and I’m sorry to say that up to and including this moment of this interview, that overwhelmingly it has been accepted by the American people. And the current Administration revels in that, they relish and take refuge in that.’

“What is hot news this month in the USA is a five-year-old story to the rest of the world. And you still wouldn't see it in the USA except that Dan Rather, with a 60 Minutes producer, finally got fed up and ready to step out of line. And, as Dan predicted, he stuck out his neck and got it chopped off.”

When I was commissioned as a US Army officer, I swore to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Well, friends, George W. Bush is that enemy domestic. Coward, thief, murderer, traitor – and who knows what else?

In this year, in this state, the only alternative to the old politics of money, power, and influence is the Libertarian Party. And don’t be fooled by that old lie that “unless you vote for one of the two ‘major’ parties, you’re wasting your vote.” George W Bush has this state sewn up – so much so that his political machine isn’t even bothering to do any advertising here. As Patrick Buchanan said on The Daily Show last week, “I live in a red state, so my vote doesn’t count.” Because of the Electoral College structure, all of Texas’ electoral votes – the only votes that really count in a Presidential election – are going to go to Bush.

So if you don’t like Bush, you have two choices next month:

· You can vote for Kerry, and watch your vote be invalidated when it comes time to choose “electors” to cast the real Presidential ballots, and

· Or you can vote your hopes, not your fears. Vote for the Libertarian Presidential candidate, Austinite Michael Badnarik – a man of iron-clad integrity who is firmly on the side of freedom. Your vote still won’t count come electoral college time, but if enough people tell the Republocrats, “A plague on both your houses – and on your corruption!” things will begin to change.

So: why would be return of the Bush junta to power be a disaster to this nation? Hmm – let me count the ways. We talked last month about all the things he and his henchmen did in 2000 to steal the election from then-Vice President Gore, primarily by denying the right to vote to Black citizens of the state of Florida. Jim Crow, here we come! (And if you don’t remember what that means, ask your friendly neighborhood web search site about “Jim Crow laws.”)

Then, of course, he and his minions lied to the American people, the U.S. Congress, and the United Nations to justify his illegal war of aggression in Iraq. As Sidney Blumenthal reported in The Guardian of Great Britain on September 16, “[m]ost senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale.” Let me give you some excerpts from that article, which quotes several military experts who say that the Bush junta’s conduct of the war is, to say the very least, incompetent:

“… according to the US military’s leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush’s war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: ‘Bush hasn’t found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it’s worse, he’s lost on that front. That he’s going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It’s lost.’ He adds: ‘Right now, the course we’re on, we’re achieving Bin Laden’s ends.’

“Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: ‘The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We’re conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It’s so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong.’

“Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: ‘I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There’s no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan.’

“General Odom said: ‘This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies.’

“General Hoare believes from the information he has received that ‘a decision has been made’ to attack Fallujah ‘after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it – after the election. The signs are all there.’ “

In other words, besides being a war of cold-blooded murder of thousands of innocent civilians, it’s being waged stupidly … or is it? It’s almost as if the neo-con men are deliberately doing everything they can to honk off the entire Muslim world – it’s as if the people who are supposed to be protecting us are really trying to goad the Arab world into attacking us. How many of our freedoms do you think that would let them yank away?

Next, let’s get a little background on just what kind of man George W Bush is. He and his flacks would like everyone to believe he’s a dedicated, religious, compassionate leader who cares more for his country than for himself. But listen to what Yoshi Tsurumi, one of W’s professors at Harvard Business School, has to say about him. This can be found in the article “The Dunce” by Mary Jacoby in Salon Magazine of September 16.

“Trading as usual on his father’s connections, Bush entered Harvard in 1973 for a two-year [MBA] program. He’d just come off what George H. W. Bush had once called his eldest son’s ‘nomadic years’ – partying, drifting from job to job, working on political campaigns in Florida and Alabama and, most famously, … not showing up for duty in the Alabama National Guard.

“Bush, Tsurumi said, ‘showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him.’ When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, ‘Oh, I never said that.’

“Bush once sneered at Tsurumi for showing the film ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ based on John Steinbeck’s novel of the Depression. ‘We were in a discussion of the New Deal, and he called Franklin Roosevelt’s policies “socialism.” He denounced labor unions, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Medicare, Social Security, you name it. He denounced the civil rights movement as socialism. … And when challenged to explain his prejudice, he could not defend his argument, either ideologically, polemically or academically.’

“ ‘At first, I wondered, “Who is this George Bush?” It’s a very common name, and I didn’t know his background. And he was such a bad student that I asked him once how he got in. He said, “My dad has good friends.” ‘ Bush scored in the lowest 10 percent of the class. The Vietnam War was still roiling campuses, and Harvard was no exception. Bush expressed strong support for the war, but admitted to Tsurumi that he’d gotten a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard through his father’s connections.”

Somebody once said, “The rich are different from you and me.” For a long time, I didn’t believe it. Then I opened my eyes. Just in this decade, not even 5 years old yet, we’ve seen:

· Over 2,800 innocent civilians killed in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks (all civilians because government employees got told not to go to work that day)

· Over 1,300 innocent civilians killed by our ruthless carpet-bombing of Afghanistan

· Over 14,000 innocent civilians killed by our attacks in Oil War II alone – never mind the soldiers killed in that fish-in-a-barrel shoot at the end of Oil War I, or the number of children killed by our embargo of medical supplies and food between the two oil wars

· Over 1,000 US soldiers dead in Iraq

· Uncounted thousands of U.S. soldiers doomed to cancer and early death by our use of depleted uranium in Iraq – not to mention the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians who’ll have to live the rest of their short lives in an environment that’s been terminally poisoned by the tons of depleted uranium we’ve left lying all over the ground

· And when our soldiers get back from that desert of destruction, they’re faced with a system that doesn’t care one whit about them – human warehouses instead of hospitals; incompetent and ineffective medical “care;” families forced out of base housing into corporate housing they can’t afford on a private’s salary, denial of overtime pay to anyone who learned their trade during military service – the list goes on and on

The rich, including George I and George II, are different from you and me – they don’t give a damn about anyone but those in their own class. We’re just pawns to them, to be used – even killed – if it will further their accumulation of power. And I’ve given you just the barest outline of the situation. So who among the Presidential candidates is not among that wealthy elite? George Bush? Oh, great jumping Jehosephat, no! John Kerry? He’s a member of the same elite secret Yale society that W is, Skull and Bones. Michael Badnarik? Yes. You have one vote next month – make it count.

I’m sorry; I’d intended to stop here, but it just keeps getting worse and worse. Listen to this, from an article in the New York Times of September 24 by David D. Kirkpatrick:

“The Republican Party acknowledged yesterday sending mass mailings to residents of two states warning that ‘liberals’ seek to ban the Bible. It said the mailings were part of its effort to mobilize religious voters for President Bush. The mailings include images of the Bible labeled ‘banned’ and of a gay marriage proposal labeled ‘allowed.’ A mailing to Arkansas residents warns: ‘This will be Arkansas if you don't vote.’ A similar mailing was sent to West Virginians.

“In an e-mail message, Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, confirmed that the party had sent the mailings.”

Tom Delay came to Austin last Monday. He was supposed to speak at a Fund Raiser at 11:00 AM; but when he found out that the Democrats were going to “greet” him, he changed his plans. Late Sunday, he changed the event to 8:00 AM instead. Seems his supporters didn’t want anybody to find out who they were. Tom Delay is the most powerful man in the U.S. House, and a lot of people want to buy his favor – but they don’t want you and me to find out who they are. I have a hunch they also don’t want District Attorney Ronnie Earle to find out, either.

Did anybody else notice that gaffe Bush pulled at the debates a week ago? (“Which one?” you ask; there were so many!) At first, I just thought his handlers had over-medicated him, to make sure he didn’t fly off on one of his (privately) famous temper tantrums. But then I thought about it – that time he angrily blurted out, “"Now let me finish!" Trouble was, nobody else was saying anything – let alone interrupting him – at the time, and he had plenty of time left in his slot. Well, several people have watched replays of the debate, and noticed what looked like a wire running down the back of Bush's jacket.

At several earlier events, people have noticed that he appeared to be wearing a hearing aid at speaking events, though he has no known hearing impairment. Could it be that he’s taking a cue from Peter Popoff, a discredited TV evangelist who was revealed to use an earphone hooked to a wireless receiver during his “services,” to make it look as if he knew all about everyone he talked to? Maybe someone like Karl Rove, half-satirically called “Bush’s brain,” was backstage, walking our mentally challenged “President” through his answers?

Next, here’s a short story that appeared on the American-Statesman last Wednesday:

“Capital murder charges were dismissed Tuesday against a West Texas man who has spent the past 17 years on death row for a crime that might not [even] have occurred. Ernest Willis, 59, was convicted of setting a 1986 fire that killed two sleeping women in Iraan, about 230 miles west of San Antonio. … Willis would be the eighth death-row inmate freed in Texas since capital punishment resumed in 1974. …”

This, if nothing else, is an iron-clad reason not to put anyone to death – ever. Our technology for determining guilt is so fatally flawed that we’re murdering innocent people, and calling it justice. Take the case of Jesse Jacobs, who was executed in Texas in 1995, despite the fact that another person was tried and convicted of the same crime, and the prosecution for this other person’s trial admitted that Jacobs was completely innocent!

Finally, I’m sorry to have to report it, but the United States is bankrupt. Not morally bankrupt – we’ve known that for a long time – but fiscally, monetarily bankrupt. Specifically, the unfunded obligation of the Social Security system is so huge that there’s not enough money in the US economy to bail it out. An article from UPI (United Press International) last Monday says that:

“The latest report by the Social Security Trustees pegs the system’s unfunded obligation at $27 trillion, making transition costs pale in comparison. …

“Congress easily ignores the cost of these promises because it writes the budget the same way – considering only one year’s tax revenues and one year’s expenses. Congress does not consider the long-term obligations created by entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare that will be paid past an arbitrary 5- or 10-year window. …

“Lawmakers don’t have the luxury of time to dither over whether to act. Whoever is elected president this November will preside over the retirement of the first of the baby boom generation on Jan. 1, 2008. In 2009, Social Security’s surplus will stop growing, beginning the fast decline into a sea of red ink.”

Four or five years. Of course, in that time, our wise rulers will come up with a plan that will fix everything. We’ve already mortgaged our children to the hilt – how about our grandchildren?!