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Iraq For Sale:
The War Profiteers
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September
19/07
OPINION
Also published in
under politics
The Will Of The People
I was writing my topic,
captioned above, when I paused to listen to the President’s Thursday
September 13th speech, in which he mentioned:
1--an “enduring
relationship” with Iraq’s government, 2--that
he was grateful for the contribution of troops from “36 nations,”
3--and that he follows the
advice of his generals.
Huh?
1- an enduring relationship with a non-existing government that
recently took a month’s vacation?
2- troops from 36 nations? Was he counting the hometowns of his troops,
from places like Harlem and Minneapolis and Kansas City?
3-- advice of his generals? Did he mean the list of four stars he fired
who didn’t agree with his disastrous agenda?
Or is Bush, unlike Bill Clinton, inhaling something?
Hot News!: 1- Retired Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, in his new book says,
“The Iraq war is largely about oil.” Really? When did he discover that?
2- There are as many private and unbelievably expensive contractors in
Iraq as there are servicemen and women. And half of them, international
mercenaries, are armed to the teeth, as are the bully boys of Blackwater,
a far right organization which has contributed funds to Republican
coffers. This is news?
Okay.
Bush/Cheney and their
neo-con cohorts have simply never appreciated the concept of the will of
the people; an example of which was loudly expressed in the November
elections, on which they continue to trample. A mandate the wimpish
Democrats, who can‘t get their act together, have failed to exploit to the
satisfaction of their antiwar constituents. Unfortunately, the neo-cons
and an incompetent Bush are the only ones with vision; albeit in the
neo-con’s case, cynically ideological; and in Bush’s case, messianic and
dangerously hallucinatory.
So The will of the people in most matters, as usual, is too often
discounted, especially by the far right who have long had a concept that
is basically incompatible with the public will.
In our society:
Conservative thinkers tend to frown on the possibility of unregulated
voters having too much to say, and have a way of demonizing them by
suggesting they may be too uninformed to understand anything nuanced, for
instance the need for unregulated capitalism. Too uninformed to understand
the conservative fairy tale of how the rising fortunes of corporations
will always brim and trickle down to provide the societal paradise of Joe
Six-pack’s American Dream, which it did for awhile in the post-war era of
this country.
A time, for instance, in 1952, when General Motors CEO Charles Wilson
said: “What is good for General Motors is good for America…“ and added:
“What is good for America is good for General Motors.“ The latter
statement being important in explaining a fairly positive relationship
between worker and corporation. A time when CEOs earned basically
according to merit, and workers might increase their relative wealth
according to merit, as well, and move into the middle class. But no more.
Americans have lost most collective bargaining, have lost their
collective voice, are working harder for less, are losing pensions and
health coverage, and are afraid of losing their jobs. Social intervention
in America, something most developed countries take for granted, like
universal health care, is a threat to conservative ideologues; and Social
Security and Medicare have always been menaced by conservatives who voted
against these initiatives from their inception. Whereas at the same time
there has been plenty of intervention in favor of big business, with
secretive energy policies, subsidies and lower taxes, and rescuing
corporations from failure when they operate recklessly; as exampled by the
unregulated subprime mortgage industry which is devaluing the dollar and
pulling our economy into the toilet.
Our voices have been drowned out by overpowering corporate influence
which has corrupted our political process. There are many special
interests: labor, teachers, nurses, fire and police, and so on; but these
interests amount to scraps in comparison to the bursting bellies of
corporate lobbies, and the lobbies of foreign governments. Democracy is
not working for us. Pardon--our Republic, so espoused by
conservatives, is not working. To explain:
Continued......
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March 10/07
OPINION
Also published in
under politics
Cheney In His Land Of Make Believe
While Scooter Takes The Plunge.
And it's still about oil, folks,
plus a few questions.
While I was writing this
piece, V.P. Cheney’s second in command, Scooter Libby, a man who left a
golden life in law to reach the much higher altitude of the most powerful
government in the world, was convicted on four counts of lying and
obstruction of justice. Turns out the jurors reacted like many of us,
believing Scooter was the fall guy for the rest of the gang, especially
Cheney, the man who orchestrated the vendetta against Joe Wilson with a
vengeance to prevent the unraveling of all his deceptions in the run up to
Iraq, the man who stood by without a word and watched his friend plunge
like Icarus from the heights of power.
So much
for Bush’s promise in 2000 to bring honor and dignity to his office.
Okay, the last time I saw
Vice President Cheney on television, his remarks stirred me from a
prolonged period of quiet to write the following rant. The most generous view of Cheney
is to believe that he has had one foot in a make-believe universe,
considering he recently told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “We’ve had enormous
successes.” No doubt Wolf was near to choking so as to restrain himself
from crying “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” And when asked by Wolf about a
possible anti-surge resolution, snarly Cheney replied: “It won’t stop
us,” a response so typical of a man whose arrogance has known no
boundaries. He also told Wolf, he was worried that Americans might “not
have the stomach to fight,” conveniently forgetting WWII, when Americans
had the stomach and the will for that legitimate cause. And may I
mention post 9/11 when we and much of the world were one?
Continued.......
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December 22/06
OPINION
Also published in
under politics
The Way Forward. And Don't Look Back?
To Surge Or Not To Surge
Caliphate terror?
Last summer it was
Bush’s “Operation Forward Together.“ Today it’s, “We’re not winning,
we’re not losing.“ Huh? Additionally, whatever name you give it, no matter
how it is accomplished, the Iraq Study Group‘s “The Way Forward” is merely
the way out. The group took 9 months to tell us what we already knew: “The
situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.“ One of the ISG members,
Vernon Jordan, said, “We
didn’t talk about how we got here,“ which must have been exceedingly
difficult, considering the majority of Americans can hardly think about
anything else. Which means, from the ISG point of view, we must not
look back. We must only look ahead, away from the negative. Away from
wire tapping. Away from American dissenters accused of being traitors. Away from Cheney lying
again and again about Saddam’s connection with Al-Qaeda. Away from
Cheney’s secret energy meetings and his no-bid contracts to cronies. Away
from torture and the loss of habeas corpus, and away from America’s loss
of its moral high ground in the eyes of the world.
No, don’t look at all that. Forget
how imperfectly better we were before the toxic Bush Administration came
into power. Forget that Bush, with his usual total disrespect for the rest
of us, said, “We’re absolutely winning,“ and in his mean-spirited way told
us that a vote for Democrats is a vote for terrorists, just before the
mid-term elections, which was the same as giving us “the finger.” No,
don’t look back, Baker tells us. Only look forward to the least damaging
resolution to our entrapment in a foreign civil war, and away from the
worst foreign policy disaster in this country’s history.
The President is currently
thinking of reversing and expanding the military for the “long struggle,”
a new term along with “surge” in his lexicon of words and phrases meant to
blow another smokescreen to hide the latest bait and switch; while the new
Secretary of Defense Gates is seen on television in Iraq, in a staged
setting, being told by a non-commissioned soldier that we need more
troops. Well if I were a soldier there, I too would want as much help as I
could get, and would respond in kind. The generals until now have been
steady in their opposition to more soldiers without a “well defined
mission,” whatever that means; but is it possible that Bush, in another
reversal, is bribing them into compliance with a big military budget
boost? Huh? Wish I knew.
Continued....
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October 20/06
OPINION
Also published in:
under politics.
The
Buck
Doesn't Stop Like It Used To
In regard to Rep. Mark Foley’s improper e-mails to teenage
congressional pages, the House ethics committee has approved subpoenas and
promised to go “wherever the evidence takes us.” Which could mean that the
buck might actually stop somewhere, as it did on that rare occasion when
it slammed into Tom Delay. Okay, maybe, maybe not. Seeing is believing.
Meanwhile, Tom Delay’s man,
Speaker Dennis Hastert, after exposure and pressure and much hesitation,
finally said he accepted responsibility for failing to investigate the
complaints against Foley. He told us, “Ultimately…the buck stops here,” a
rather famous phrase he had the nerve to borrow from our flinty past
president, Harry S. Truman; though Hastert displays none of Truman’s
flint, a president who had the fortitude to fire General Douglas MacArthur,
the hero of the Pacific war and father of post-war Japan, who recklessly
wanted to widen the war in Korea by invading China. (Truman's desk
sign, above).
Compare Truman to President Bush, a man who
up to now has evaded the buck, who edged aside the experienced general,
Eric K. Shinseki, who (like Powell) sanely wanted to commit several
hundred thousand troops to Rumsfeld’s Iraqi shock-and-awe, to handle the
post invasion phase of that unnecessary war, for which we mostly abandoned
the still important one in Afghanistan. The then deputy defense secretary,
Paul D. Wolfowitz, attacked Shinseki’s estimate as “wildly off the mark.”
This same sage also said, in 2003: there was no history of ethnic strife
in Iraq. Really? Well the buck never got near him. Mr. Wolfowitz is now
safely out of the way in his job as the president of the World Bank.
Continued....
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August 21/06
OPINION
Also published in:
Terrorist Roundups, Endless New Euphemisms, & Iraq Rages On.
Speaking to the press, President Bush said his invasion of Iraq
did not “stir up a hornet’s nest.” The terrorists, he said, killed 3000 of
our citizens “before we started the freedom agenda” in the Middle
East. Is that what’s going on? A freedom agenda? No, this is just another
in a long list of euphemisms, trying to bog down logical thinking in
reasonable minds.
He also said that “nobody’s ever
suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack”
(9/11). The rest of us have known this for several years. When did he
discover it? Additionally he reassured those who wanted to hear him say
it: we’re not leaving Iraq as long as he’s our president, which means, I
suppose, ‘til January 2009 or until he’s impeached for misleading his
country.
While the
Brits did splendid work in closing down the awful bomb plot, Bush having
been kept informed by Blair, was able to exploit this event early on,
while Karl Rove worked overtime on how to spin the terror angle to Bush’s
advantage. i.e. Dems want to cut and run. Elect them in November and be
overrun by Al Quaeda terrorists.
Right. Continued....
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May 26/06
Gen. Hayden--NSA
To The CIA. And Gonzales, The Attorney General. Big
Brotherism?
OPINION
Also
published in:
I wrote
this opinion the day before General Hayden was approved. Subsequent
to said approval, President Bush said, "I look forward to working with...Negraponte,
General Hayden...as we continue to address the challenges and threats we
face in the 21rst century." Challenges and threats which the
president increased by invading Iraq.
The only
no votes to Hayden's approval were Democrats Ron Wyden, Russ Feingold and Even Bayh,
and Republican Arlen specter. My hat's off to these four who had the
guts to protest and not just go along.
After
9/11, V.P. Cheney wanted to intercept domestic telephone calls and
e-mails, without warrants, but was warned away by more cautious National Security Agency
lawyers, owing to the measure's illegality, and especially since they were
slammed in the 1990s for eavesdropping. But the nominee for director
of the CIA, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then head of the NSA, ultimately created a
collection program and sold it to the wary NSA officers, and a not-so-wary
President Bush.
Continued....
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April 22/06
The Bush Administration And Iranian
Anger.
Oil And The Rationales For War.
Greed And The Price At the pump. And
Brazil Did It, So Why Can't We?
OPINION Also published in:
Did you ever wonder about countries like Iran, why
so much
hatred is directed at the West? No doubt you’re thinking: What the
hell did we do to deserve this, huh? Well think about it. There
is a history there to ponder. Anger like this doesn’t simply
materialize in a vacuum. Right?
Continued.....
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