From Sea to Shining Sea, American Politics

Beginning particularly with the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, a global shift in world power configurations began with the ascendancy of an Islamic regime that was willing to reject American hegemony in the Middle East. The 444-day standoff saw 66 Americans held inside the American embassy in Tehran by revolutionary students under the new regime. In the aftermath, the American right discredited President Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan was installed as the new US President, and a systematic and methodical dismantling of FDR’s social safety net of programs to ameliorate some of “free enterprise’s” more glaring inequities was initiated. Ronald Reagan set his union-busting sights on the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), the majority of whose members he fired in the summer of 1981. It was to spell the death knell of collective bargaining as a legitimate device for working people to ensure themselves some modicum of control over their own economic destiny.

Over the course of the ensuing 25 years, America has seen corporations close thousands of manufacturing facilities and relocate them in underdeveloped nations, where there were no troublesome regulatory constraints and labor was plentiful and dirt-cheap. The US citizens who used to work in those facilities saw their livelihoods disappear before their very eyes. McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Target and a host of minimum-wage employers moved adroitly to fill the vacuum, further marginalizing American workers and creating a huge permanent underclass of “working poor”, people who labor 40-plus hours per week and still find themselves barely able to survive economically. All this was done in the name of “free enterprise” and “globalization”. Basically, these code words connote massive shifts of wealth to the upper stratum of the elite, always at the expense of the mass of the population. Always these ploys are couched in terms of promoting “free trade”.

By June 1990 the East German Government had officially dismantled the Berlin Wall and a year later, on Christmas Day of 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from power and the USSR officially dissolved. These events were to have a significant impact upon the American population, but not the one they expected. The projected windfall that, by right, ought to have accrued to the citizenry of the USA never materialized. Americans felt that, finally, the financial and material resources that had for 75 years been diverted to “fighting communism” would now be applied towards improving living conditions for millions of American citizens. They were about to be bitterly disappointed.

The reality of “politics” in the USA today, a quarter century later, is that there has been a massive rightward shift in public discourse that significantly predates 9-11-01. It started with Clinton’s attacks on welfare “cheaters” and has continued unabated ever since. Clinton immediately abandoned most of his progressive agenda as soon as his “handlers” convinced him he needed to move to the right in order to win re-election in 1996. The vicious and unrelenting Republican hatred for Clinton notwithstanding, the two “sides” were not then and are not now substantively different in their views on how to “govern” the nation.

Basically a new external enemy has been created, cultivated and proliferated…a much-needed distraction to supplant the COMMUNISM that so effectively served wealthy elites for 75 years until the demise of the USSR. After all, nothing would anger the wealthy more than having to direct such massive budget surpluses as existed before 9/11 towards the health and welfare of the American general public. War always enables those in power to usurp democratic freedoms and aggrandize executive power. A cursory review of presidential behavior during every American war will point this out. One of many examples from the George W. Bush Administration is highlighted below:

On August 17, 2006 a Federal judge ruled that the government’s warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it. The judge, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit, ruled that the National Security Agency’s program violates the rights to free speech and privacy as well as the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

Exacerbating these usurpations of power by the executive branch of government is the unfortunate demise of a truly independent free press. In a modern first world democracy, the function of the vaunted Fourth Estate (the press) is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. American history is replete with examples of genuine muckraker reporting that exerted a restraining influence upon otherwise unbridled corporate greed and abuse. The population was at least minimally protected by the media’s willingness to expose particularly heinous abuses of power and public trust. Not so any longer. Especially since 1979 and the Iran hostage episode, the media has assumed a particularly obsequious and subservient role in the political arena.

If there is any question about media bias, one need only ask oneself this: “Is there any difference between (A) the manner in which the media treated Bill Clinton over a sexual dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and (B) the manner in which the media treats George W Bush over his lies to the nation about weapons of mass destruction in order to drag the country into a war with Iraq?” One offense did no harm to the nation. The other offense has caused ongoing, possibly irreversible damage to the USA as well as Iraq. Yet the Republicans appointed Kenneth Starr as special prosecutor and spent over million to investigate and try to impeach Bill Clinton. No such outrage is being directed at George W. Bush and his Administration even though thousands of civilians have died since Bush’s decision to take the path to war with Iraq based on lies. Let the reader be the judge. Is the media really “Liberal”?

Attacks on “liberal media” are a convenient ploy by the elite who run the nation. After all, one need only consider that the “media” are owned by, and completely serve the interests of, very large corporate structures, which are, in turn, owned and controlled by very wealthy elites within American society. Nevertheless, labeling the “media” as “Liberal” creates a sham debate among the general populace…a debate in name only, never in substance. In fact, the terms “Liberal” and “Conservative” no longer have any substantive meaning in American political discourse.

Just as both major parties marched in tragic lockstep towards the horrendous misuse of American power in Southeast Asia from 1957 to 1975, so now also have they done vis a vis the Middle East. Then the external enemy was Marxism. Now the external enemy is Terrorism. The current “ISM” is a far more effective tool for focusing the attention of the masses. The “threat” is ongoing, ubiquitous and ever changing. An example is this story headlined on CBS News:
Bush: America Safer, But Not Yet Safe
US will be fighting terrorists for years to come – Bush
WASHINGTON, Aug. 15, 2006

First of all, this “ISM” is not confined to any one readily identifiable nation state. This enables the elite to project its military power with impunity wherever it sees fit.
Secondly, this “ISM” lends itself to constant change in definition, depending on the current needs of the elite. Thirdly, it can just as easily be applied against internal as external “undesirables”. An impervious assault upon long cherished Constitutional rights and liberties is being aggressively pursued. Unwarranted wiretaps, the questionable election results from 2000 and 2004 (the first of these having predated 9-11-01 argues in favor of elite scorn for democratic practices BEFORE terrorists gave them a convenient bogey man), and “rendered” prisoners are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Michigan men released from jail; terrorism charges dropped Columbus Dispatch
US Drops Terrorist Charges Linked to Cell Phone Purchase
Voice of America

Fourth, new “terrorists” are easy to “create”, based on the definition fed to the populace. There are many more parallels between the two “ISM”s that have dominated public discourse since 1917. I will not bore the reader with further detailed enumeration. Suffice to point out that, once again, the elite has effectively found a “cause celebre” to distract the masses and allocate society’s wealth and nature’s resources in such a way as to massively benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Historically this is not new. What IS new is the degree to which the powerful can get away with outright lies to justify what they want to do. Witness the article by David Corn included below:
Better Saddam Than Dead
David Corn
August 16, 2006
David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). Read his blog at http://www.davidcorn.com.

Better dead than Red. During the Cold War, that was the rallying cry of the diehard anti-communists, many of whom never had to face the choice. During those years, hundreds of millions of people—in the Soviet Union, in China and elsewhere—did not adhere to such an extreme slogan. They may not have fancied living in lands without freedoms, but they believed it was preferable to reside under repression than to die trying to topple tyranny.

There have always been brave souls—the rebels of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the members of Solidarity in Poland, the dissidents of the Soviet Union, the champions of Tiananmen Square—willing to sacrifice their own existence to achieve freedom for their fellow citizens. But let’s face it; most of us would rather be red—or any other color—than dead. And that’s hardly an irrational choice, for even in a dictatorship, one is often free to enjoy family and friends and some of the mundane pleasures of life.

Which brings us to Iraq. The chaos and mayhem there has reached (or surpassed) a point when it may not be unsound to say that Iraqis were better off under Saddam Hussein. Think of it this way: in the years since George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. The most recent statistics are staggering. In May and June, according to the United Nations, six thousand Iraqis were slain. Recently, the health ministry noted that 1,850 Baghdad residents were killed in July alone and 3,438 civilians were killed throughout the country. That is, in a three-month period, about 10,000 Iraqis have lost their lives in the troubles the invasion—and the poorly planned occupation—gave birth to. Yet despite these harrowing numbers, President Bush, according to The New York Times, is befuddled by the lack of public support among Iraqis for the American mission in their country.

As we all are aware, pre-invasion Iraq was a nasty place in terms of human rights and political freedoms. But in the years prior to the invasion, there was not this level of slaughter. Amnesty International’s 2002 report (PDF here ) notes that “scores of people, including possible prisoners of conscience and armed forces officers suspected of planning to overthrow the government, were executed.” Scores of suspected government opponents were arrested, and their fates and whereabouts were unknown.

Scores of people killed—that’s what now happens on a daily, rather than annual, basis. Of course, there were brutal and horrific acts of mass murder during Saddam Hussein’s reign. The Anfal campaign of the late 1980s—which included chemical weapons attacks on Kurdish villages—led to the deaths of tens of thousands and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands. Saddam’s repression of the Shiite rebellion of 1991—which came at the end of the first Persian Gulf war after President George H.W. Bush called on Iraqis to overthrow the dictator and then did nothing to support the uprising—resulted in about 30,000 Shiite deaths. Since the invasion, the discovery of mass graves has reminded the world of these atrocities.

But the United States took no action at the time of these nightmares to stop the killings. And in the years since the Gulf War, a weakened Saddam had not repeated such genocidal acts. That is hardly praise. But let’s be blunt: Far many more Iraqis have died due to the war Bush started than were killed by Saddam in the years prior to the invasion. The total number of civilian Iraqi deaths may well be more than 100,000. (The equivalent loss for the United States would be more than 1 million people.) This is much more than the recent death counts in Lebanon and Israel—which spark justifiable outrage on each side.

I imagine that hardheaded advocates of the war will say that such is the price of liberty, that eggs must be broken. Yet here’s the rub: The Iraqi people did not decide that such a cost was worth bearing. They had it imposed upon them. In the examples of anti-communist rebellions cited above, freedom fighters in those countries were willing to take the risk and put their own lives at stake. They could determine if they wished to be dead rather than red. In Iraq, there was no such indigenous calculation. People in another country decided they knew what was best for Iraqis. And they then botched the job.

The Saddam regime is gone; that’s true. But given what has taken its place, it would not be an irrational choice for many Iraqis to prefer the Iraq of 2002 rather than the Iraq of 2006. Think about it. Most Iraqis before the invasion—like most citizens in most repressive states—managed to get by. They may not have had freedoms, but they had their friends and relatives. They still fell in love, had sex, had families, played with their kids, followed sports. The lucky ones—like the lucky ones in all countries—had meaningful work. Now millions of Iraqis have lost a loved one. And in return, they have a country that is unstable and on the brink of collapse, and their daily lives are marked by crime and deep uncertainty involving life and death. It’s a different sort of terror than what George W. Bush speaks of.

Is it better to be free in an environment of violent chaos than safe in circumstances without freedom? I’m not arrogant enough to say that I know the answer. I might well choose a life without political freedoms rather than lose my wife or children. Live free or die, they say in New Hampshire. But how many people really believe that? In any event, that choice should be left to those who are actually willing to die to make the point. The 100,000 or so dead Iraqis cannot tell us what they would prefer.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and the other supporters of this war are responsible for the consequences of their actions—or they ought to be. One result is that tens of thousands of Iraqis are now dead who would not have been had the invasion not happened. Given that Bush hails the preciousness of each life when the subject is embryonic stem-cell research, I wonder why the Iraq war is not judged—and acknowledged—an abysmal failure by its creators. Do they not believe Iraqi lives are as valuable as frozen embryos?

Before the war, Bush and his aides said the primary rationale for the war was neutralizing a direct WMD threat to the United States. That turned out to be bogus. They also claimed that bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq would have a positive effect on the entire Middle East. Strike that, too. Additionally, they claimed the war would save the Iraqi people. Instead, it has created a hell for many Iraqis. The carnage that has come about due to Bush’s invasion is unforgivable. In defending the war, Bush often points to the fact that a brutal dictator has been removed from power. But so profound is Bush’s failure in Iraq that there is increasing merit to the argument that this single positive achievement was not worth the cost.

Let’s ask all the dead Iraqis what they think.

The total lack of American leadership accountability is extremely blatant and obvious. The weakened condition of democracy within the USA has been an ongoing process. One might easily argue that this process is a direct outcome of elite rule. After all, power hates accountability or restraint, and privilege disdains oversight. Democratic principles are inconvenient to those who wield enormous power and privilege. Witness the concerted propaganda campaign that was unleashed upon the American citizenry to justify military attack and invasion of Iraq. Witness the massive discrepancy between what the Bush Administration said about the likely duration of that “war” and the bleak reality of what the world sees now in the Middle East. Of course, both American political parties fully supported Bush’s march into the current military insanity. No entity seems willing or capable of holding the Administration accountable for its actions.

In the meantime, the powerful in the USA have contributed mightily to massively destabilizing the Middle East and, therefore, the entire world. Such destabilization, of course, plays directly into their hands and serves their interests. After all, if enough people can be significantly terrorized and frightened, they will grant any and all power to the “authorities” that hold out a promise to “protect” them. How convenient that these “authorities” have not been able to find, capture or kill Osama Bin Laden or his lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiri. How convenient that, only when Bush suffered a huge decline in his “approval” ratings, suddenly the “authorities” were able to find and kill Abu Musab al Zarqawi. The list of outrageous crimes committed by the powerful in America, in the name of a powerless citizenry, has earned scorn, ridicule and hatred worldwide.

On August 11, 2006, headlines regarding the terrorist plot to explode several airplanes uncovered by the British government have been accompanied by additional headlines that read:

Democrats assail GOP fundraising effort Jordan Falls News
Terror Plot Could Have Impact on US Elections Voice of America
Politically, a chance to score points Boston Globe
By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer 6 minutes ago. WASHINGTON – Democrats assailed the Republicans Friday for e-mailing a fundraising appeal mentioning the war on terror hours after British authorities disclosed they had disrupted a plot to blow up aircraft headed to the United States. “In the middle of a war on terror, we need to remain focused on furthering Republican ideas more than ever before,” former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said in a letter that asked for donations to the Republican National Committee. “Once the RNC learned of this error we ceased distribution of the e-mail,” said Tracey Schmitt, a party spokeswoman.

The point here is not to deny that groups exist in the world at large, groups that are willing to resort to dastardly, heinous acts to inflict harm on innocent citizens to achieve their goals. Terrorism exists, to be sure. One must bear in mind, however, that one group’s terrorists are another group’s freedom fighters. The ability to define the terms dictates how these different groups are perceived. When the first world nations perpetrate a bloodbath against less powerful states, the perpetrators invariably couch such actions in terms of promoting “freedom” and “liberation”. When the much less powerful states respond with suicide bombings or other equally pathetic attempts at redressing the massive grievances they have, these people are labeled “terrorists”. When the USA bombs and slaughters millions with impunity, this is “liberation”, whether in Vietnam or Iraq. When 2 planes kill 3000 American citizens, this is “terrorism”.

This is only one small example of how the elite create the world they want and then use what they have created to further their interests, always at the expense of the masses. The one thing that they cannot do is control events globally. Once having unleashed the insanity of global military conflict, the powers in Washington now are at a loss to rein in what they have started in motion. Witness the total unpredictability of events in Iraq, followed by more of the same between Israel and Lebanon. The world may now be witnessing the opening battles of what might very well become WWIII. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, George W Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and all the other people who have played a significant role in these developments will be held to account only by a distant history written by minds that have perspective. Meantime, we all have to live with the results these people have given us. Whether the human species can survive what has been set in motion remains to be seen.

Yeah. Like, last night I had this bizarre dream about expensive military helicopters being pushed into the sea from the deck of an aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam, because the means to transport them back to the U.S. were unavailable. Where do these surreal, feverish images come from, anyway?

You’ll notice that Reid just proposed an extra billion or so for rearmament. Even a phased U.S. military some of our troops shooting their way out of some situations. The party line among the Shi’ite militias is to go a little easy on U.S. troops until it’s time for them to leave. The highway from the airport into Baghdad is still a scary transit, after several years. If this is what Iraq is like when most forces are holding back, imagine what it will be like if Shi’ite militias see every attack on our troops as an opportunity to pick up arms and materiel abandoned by our forces in all suddenly-necessary haste.

You want a fantasy world to live in, Balter? OK, here you go: we skedaddle outa there in three weeks (somehow unmolested), and with the supposed proximate cause of the violence removed, the Shi’ites, Sunnis and Kurds all calm down, retire to games of dominos over coffee, and work out their differences like reasonable mature adults. The insurgents all start using remote-control garage door openers for opening garage doors again, instead of for triggering IEDs. The Shi’ite militias decide that electrical drills are really better used for repairing schools in the New Iraq, rather than for torturing Sunni kidnap victims. The Kurds wake up and notice that Kirkuk’s population is a kind of potential rainbow coalition of ethnicities and religious faiths, living together in harmony.

I agree with virtually all of Michael T’s most recent two comments, which — far from being the product of ‘living in his head’ — cites real-world experience, facts about the scale of the Democratic majority, and current polling.

For encouraging participation in the United for Peace & Justice demo back in September 2005, I took heat here. Marc and others mocked the demands of the march (“Out Now”). I tried to defend the commonsense notion that people who support something a bit more nuanced than that when it comes to actual legislation and policy can still rally behind a clear demand, especially when the only alternative is more of the same.

UfPJ has moved up to January 27 a demo originally scheduled for March, in hopes of generating massive, visible popular support explicitly for withdrawal from Iraq, to create pressure on Congress. Now that Marc disparages nuance, and wants clear, non-focused group messages from Carl Levin and Harry Reid, can we get a little support for that demo? My experience is that we get as much ‘leadership’ from politicians as we demand from them.

More info about the January 27-29 events:

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=3436

http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm

The percentage of Americans favoring immediate withdrawal is not even at an all-time high. That point was reached in March of this year (50%). Those favoring immediate withdrawal are not a majority now–it’s at about 48%. We’ve still got a long way to go before we hit levels of discontent and revulsion reached during the Vietnam War–if we ever get that far.

“This may indeed be an effective strategy, but Democratic leaders assured us all through the midterm campaign that they would not do this. Why? Because they were afraid of being accused of undermining our troops or putting them in harm’s way.”

Shouldn’t they be?

“This is, of course, a ridiculous argument, since only those who left the troops in Iraq without guns, bullets, body armor and food would be guilty of that, rather than bending to the popular will and just pulling them out.”

I see you’ve never worked for any branch of the Federal government, Balter. Some of us have vivid memories of going without paychecks when Congress got deadlocked over appropriations. It’s really rather surreal when it happens. You’re sitting there, amazed: “If it were a company doing this to us, it would be lawsuit city!” When a private sector employer stops paying you, you can file a wage claim. Not so with the Federal government. But at least you’re not pinned down under sniper fire.

If the money stops, the supplies stop, and if the supplies stop, the troops are out there, hanging. The war supply-chain isn’t going to keep running because the companies involved feel its their patriotic duty to go bankrupt, if necessary, to keep our troops supplied.

Just to get out of Iraq, a lot of our troops might have to take Iraqi service station attendants hostage to refuel their vehicles, probably coming under fire from Iraqis who themselves had hoped to get their cars gassed up before they headed for the Jordanian or Syrian border. Our troops would of course keep firing back until they … ran out of bullets. Oops, it seems Congress neglected to buy us more ammo ….

And you think this wouldn’t make the vast majority of Americans very angry with Congress, and especially with the congressional majority that stopped the money?

“Now that the Democrats have Congress ….”

No, what the Democrats have is a slim majority in Congress. They don’t have enough to overwhelm a presidential veto, unless they can get something like half of Republicans in Congress behind a bill.

” …. will they still be afraid of shadows that aren’t there or will they exercise some muscle?”

They don’t have much muscle. They have a slim majority. On the other side: a Republican president who is also still the leader of his party, a party that still holds something close to a majority of congressional seats. American democracy weights power toward the executive.

“… wait, just raising the question means suggesting that the Democrats might now bear some responsibility for Iraq.”

The only way they could NOT bear some responsibility for Iraq would be if they hadn’t been holding office. The questions are: how much responsibility have they had? (not much), and, how much control do they have now? (not much).

“I take it back, how unfair of me.”

While you’re at it, why don’t you take back that snide bit about how reg’s critical-thinking ability seems impaired on certain subjects? Yours is no prize.

It’s important to note, in fairness and shame, that Bush’s comments in Vietnam yesterday should surprise no one. The politicans lost Vietnam stuff is part of right wing scripture, though until Bush became President no one in real power believed it (only a cross section of the neocon “Vulcans” would really be down with it) or would have acted using it as a guide.
It helps to be a bumpkin who never read books.

The fact that someone that stupid in such fundamentaly important ways became President is the fault of Democrats and Jounalists. At least that was the case in 2000. The Dems, because they are too frightened or clumsy to challenge such vunerable points. The Journalists, because they dumb down the process in every way, shape or form, and are scared of the Liberty Dad lobby to challenge a Republican candidate on such nonsense.

Of course, as the years went by, bad mouthing the Vietnam War became assosaited with “bad mouthing the troops.” This con was not what not bravely answered even in the liberal press.
Anyway, I wonder if Bush, who was so moved to pass by the lake where they captured McCain, visted any of the victims of Genetic disease created by Agent Orange, or maybe the statue at My Lai.

“I am more committed than ever to put an end to this war.”

The Guardian, in its article yesterday announcing that the Baker-Hamilton plan will include an expansion of the force by 20,000, primarily to protect and intercede in Baghdad. The Guardian said something like: “the Democrats should support the Study Group’s recommendation for the 20,000 additional troops.” And politically it probably is safe, because in fact there is little reason to expect this to actually work….What are they going to do? Invade Sadr City? Guard the process servers bearing the arrest warrant for Dhari?

This issue is going to come at the Dems very quickly, with a lot of spin because it’s being pitched by a “bipartisan” committee. I think we have to say “no more”, not “how many more?” But it’s time to take a stand.

We sure are, that is, if we are counting on the Democrats to be effective in ending the war in Iraq. We should care plenty about what they do. How can you not realize that?

Actually I just read a transcript of Bush’s remarks in Hanoi, Stay the course!!!??? Vietnam as an example???!!!

And we’re worried about Pelosi’s judgement?

(sorry Marc – I promise no more today so you won’t feel too put upon)

From Sea to Shining Sea, American Politics

Beginning particularly with the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, a global shift in world power configurations began with the ascendancy of an Islamic regime that was willing to reject American hegemony in the Middle East. The 444-day standoff saw 66 Americans held inside the American embassy in Tehran by revolutionary students under the new regime. In the aftermath, the American right discredited President Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan was installed as the new US President, and a systematic and methodical dismantling of FDR’s social safety net of programs to ameliorate some of “free enterprise’s” more glaring inequities was initiated. Ronald Reagan set his union-busting sights on the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), the majority of whose members he fired in the summer of 1981. It was to spell the death knell of collective bargaining as a legitimate device for working people to ensure themselves some modicum of control over their own economic destiny.

Over the course of the ensuing 25 years, America has seen corporations close thousands of manufacturing facilities and relocate them in underdeveloped nations, where there were no troublesome regulatory constraints and labor was plentiful and dirt-cheap. The US citizens who used to work in those facilities saw their livelihoods disappear before their very eyes. McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Target and a host of minimum-wage employers moved adroitly to fill the vacuum, further marginalizing American workers and creating a huge permanent underclass of “working poor”, people who labor 40-plus hours per week and still find themselves barely able to survive economically. All this was done in the name of “free enterprise” and “globalization”. Basically, these code words connote massive shifts of wealth to the upper stratum of the elite, always at the expense of the mass of the population. Always these ploys are couched in terms of promoting “free trade”.

By June 1990 the East German Government had officially dismantled the Berlin Wall and a year later, on Christmas Day of 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from power and the USSR officially dissolved. These events were to have a significant impact upon the American population, but not the one they expected. The projected windfall that, by right, ought to have accrued to the citizenry of the USA never materialized. Americans felt that, finally, the financial and material resources that had for 75 years been diverted to “fighting communism” would now be applied towards improving living conditions for millions of American citizens. They were about to be bitterly disappointed.

The reality of “politics” in the USA today, a quarter century later, is that there has been a massive rightward shift in public discourse that significantly predates 9-11-01. It started with Clinton’s attacks on welfare “cheaters” and has continued unabated ever since. Clinton immediately abandoned most of his progressive agenda as soon as his “handlers” convinced him he needed to move to the right in order to win re-election in 1996. The vicious and unrelenting Republican hatred for Clinton notwithstanding, the two “sides” were not then and are not now substantively different in their views on how to “govern” the nation.

Basically a new external enemy has been created, cultivated and proliferated…a much-needed distraction to supplant the COMMUNISM that so effectively served wealthy elites for 75 years until the demise of the USSR. After all, nothing would anger the wealthy more than having to direct such massive budget surpluses as existed before 9/11 towards the health and welfare of the American general public. War always enables those in power to usurp democratic freedoms and aggrandize executive power. A cursory review of presidential behavior during every American war will point this out. One of many examples from the George W. Bush Administration is highlighted below:

On August 17, 2006 a Federal judge ruled that the government’s warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it. The judge, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit, ruled that the National Security Agency’s program violates the rights to free speech and privacy as well as the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

Exacerbating these usurpations of power by the executive branch of government is the unfortunate demise of a truly independent free press. In a modern first world democracy, the function of the vaunted Fourth Estate (the press) is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. American history is replete with examples of genuine muckraker reporting that exerted a restraining influence upon otherwise unbridled corporate greed and abuse. The population was at least minimally protected by the media’s willingness to expose particularly heinous abuses of power and public trust. Not so any longer. Especially since 1979 and the Iran hostage episode, the media has assumed a particularly obsequious and subservient role in the political arena.

If there is any question about media bias, one need only ask oneself this: “Is there any difference between (A) the manner in which the media treated Bill Clinton over a sexual dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and (B) the manner in which the media treats George W Bush over his lies to the nation about weapons of mass destruction in order to drag the country into a war with Iraq?” One offense did no harm to the nation. The other offense has caused ongoing, possibly irreversible damage to the USA as well as Iraq. Yet the Republicans appointed Kenneth Starr as special prosecutor and spent over $40 million to investigate and try to impeach Bill Clinton. No such outrage is being directed at George W. Bush and his Administration even though thousands of civilians have died since Bush’s decision to take the path to war with Iraq based on lies. Let the reader be the judge. Is the media really “Liberal”?

Attacks on “liberal media” are a convenient ploy by the elite who run the nation. After all, one need only consider that the “media” are owned by, and completely serve the interests of, very large corporate structures, which are, in turn, owned and controlled by very wealthy elites within American society. Nevertheless, labeling the “media” as “Liberal” creates a sham debate among the general populace…a debate in name only, never in substance. In fact, the terms “Liberal” and “Conservative” no longer have any substantive meaning in American political discourse.

Just as both major parties marched in tragic lockstep towards the horrendous misuse of American power in Southeast Asia from 1957 to 1975, so now also have they done vis a vis the Middle East. Then the external enemy was Marxism. Now the external enemy is Terrorism. The current “ISM” is a far more effective tool for focusing the attention of the masses. The “threat” is ongoing, ubiquitous and ever changing. An example is this story headlined on CBS News:
Bush: America Safer, But Not Yet Safe
US will be fighting terrorists for years to come – Bush
WASHINGTON, Aug. 15, 2006

First of all, this “ISM” is not confined to any one readily identifiable nation state. This enables the elite to project its military power with impunity wherever it sees fit.
Secondly, this “ISM” lends itself to constant change in definition, depending on the current needs of the elite. Thirdly, it can just as easily be applied against internal as external “undesirables”. An impervious assault upon long cherished Constitutional rights and liberties is being aggressively pursued. Unwarranted wiretaps, the questionable election results from 2000 and 2004 (the first of these having predated 9-11-01 argues in favor of elite scorn for democratic practices BEFORE terrorists gave them a convenient bogey man), and “rendered” prisoners are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Michigan men released from jail; terrorism charges dropped Columbus Dispatch
US Drops Terrorist Charges Linked to Cell Phone Purchase
Voice of America

Fourth, new “terrorists” are easy to “create”, based on the definition fed to the populace. There are many more parallels between the two “ISM”s that have dominated public discourse since 1917. I will not bore the reader with further detailed enumeration. Suffice to point out that, once again, the elite has effectively found a “cause celebre” to distract the masses and allocate society’s wealth and nature’s resources in such a way as to massively benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Historically this is not new. What IS new is the degree to which the powerful can get away with outright lies to justify what they want to do. Witness the article by David Corn included below:
Better Saddam Than Dead
David Corn
August 16, 2006
David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). Read his blog at http://www.davidcorn.com.

Better dead than Red. During the Cold War, that was the rallying cry of the diehard anti-communists, many of whom never had to face the choice. During those years, hundreds of millions of people—in the Soviet Union, in China and elsewhere—did not adhere to such an extreme slogan. They may not have fancied living in lands without freedoms, but they believed it was preferable to reside under repression than to die trying to topple tyranny.

There have always been brave souls—the rebels of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the members of Solidarity in Poland, the dissidents of the Soviet Union, the champions of Tiananmen Square—willing to sacrifice their own existence to achieve freedom for their fellow citizens. But let’s face it; most of us would rather be red—or any other color—than dead. And that’s hardly an irrational choice, for even in a dictatorship, one is often free to enjoy family and friends and some of the mundane pleasures of life.

Which brings us to Iraq. The chaos and mayhem there has reached (or surpassed) a point when it may not be unsound to say that Iraqis were better off under Saddam Hussein. Think of it this way: in the years since George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. The most recent statistics are staggering. In May and June, according to the United Nations, six thousand Iraqis were slain. Recently, the health ministry noted that 1,850 Baghdad residents were killed in July alone and 3,438 civilians were killed throughout the country. That is, in a three-month period, about 10,000 Iraqis have lost their lives in the troubles the invasion—and the poorly planned occupation—gave birth to. Yet despite these harrowing numbers, President Bush, according to The New York Times, is befuddled by the lack of public support among Iraqis for the American mission in their country.

As we all are aware, pre-invasion Iraq was a nasty place in terms of human rights and political freedoms. But in the years prior to the invasion, there was not this level of slaughter. Amnesty International’s 2002 report (PDF here ) notes that “scores of people, including possible prisoners of conscience and armed forces officers suspected of planning to overthrow the government, were executed.” Scores of suspected government opponents were arrested, and their fates and whereabouts were unknown.

Scores of people killed—that’s what now happens on a daily, rather than annual, basis. Of course, there were brutal and horrific acts of mass murder during Saddam Hussein’s reign. The Anfal campaign of the late 1980s—which included chemical weapons attacks on Kurdish villages—led to the deaths of tens of thousands and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands. Saddam’s repression of the Shiite rebellion of 1991—which came at the end of the first Persian Gulf war after President George H.W. Bush called on Iraqis to overthrow the dictator and then did nothing to support the uprising—resulted in about 30,000 Shiite deaths. Since the invasion, the discovery of mass graves has reminded the world of these atrocities.

But the United States took no action at the time of these nightmares to stop the killings. And in the years since the Gulf War, a weakened Saddam had not repeated such genocidal acts. That is hardly praise. But let’s be blunt: Far many more Iraqis have died due to the war Bush started than were killed by Saddam in the years prior to the invasion. The total number of civilian Iraqi deaths may well be more than 100,000. (The equivalent loss for the United States would be more than 1 million people.) This is much more than the recent death counts in Lebanon and Israel—which spark justifiable outrage on each side.

I imagine that hardheaded advocates of the war will say that such is the price of liberty, that eggs must be broken. Yet here’s the rub: The Iraqi people did not decide that such a cost was worth bearing. They had it imposed upon them. In the examples of anti-communist rebellions cited above, freedom fighters in those countries were willing to take the risk and put their own lives at stake. They could determine if they wished to be dead rather than red. In Iraq, there was no such indigenous calculation. People in another country decided they knew what was best for Iraqis. And they then botched the job.

The Saddam regime is gone; that’s true. But given what has taken its place, it would not be an irrational choice for many Iraqis to prefer the Iraq of 2002 rather than the Iraq of 2006. Think about it. Most Iraqis before the invasion—like most citizens in most repressive states—managed to get by. They may not have had freedoms, but they had their friends and relatives. They still fell in love, had sex, had families, played with their kids, followed sports. The lucky ones—like the lucky ones in all countries—had meaningful work. Now millions of Iraqis have lost a loved one. And in return, they have a country that is unstable and on the brink of collapse, and their daily lives are marked by crime and deep uncertainty involving life and death. It’s a different sort of terror than what George W. Bush speaks of.

Is it better to be free in an environment of violent chaos than safe in circumstances without freedom? I’m not arrogant enough to say that I know the answer. I might well choose a life without political freedoms rather than lose my wife or children. Live free or die, they say in New Hampshire. But how many people really believe that? In any event, that choice should be left to those who are actually willing to die to make the point. The 100,000 or so dead Iraqis cannot tell us what they would prefer.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and the other supporters of this war are responsible for the consequences of their actions—or they ought to be. One result is that tens of thousands of Iraqis are now dead who would not have been had the invasion not happened. Given that Bush hails the preciousness of each life when the subject is embryonic stem-cell research, I wonder why the Iraq war is not judged—and acknowledged—an abysmal failure by its creators. Do they not believe Iraqi lives are as valuable as frozen embryos?

Before the war, Bush and his aides said the primary rationale for the war was neutralizing a direct WMD threat to the United States. That turned out to be bogus. They also claimed that bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq would have a positive effect on the entire Middle East. Strike that, too. Additionally, they claimed the war would save the Iraqi people. Instead, it has created a hell for many Iraqis. The carnage that has come about due to Bush’s invasion is unforgivable. In defending the war, Bush often points to the fact that a brutal dictator has been removed from power. But so profound is Bush’s failure in Iraq that there is increasing merit to the argument that this single positive achievement was not worth the cost.

Let’s ask all the dead Iraqis what they think.

The total lack of American leadership accountability is extremely blatant and obvious. The weakened condition of democracy within the USA has been an ongoing process. One might easily argue that this process is a direct outcome of elite rule. After all, power hates accountability or restraint, and privilege disdains oversight. Democratic principles are inconvenient to those who wield enormous power and privilege. Witness the concerted propaganda campaign that was unleashed upon the American citizenry to justify military attack and invasion of Iraq. Witness the massive discrepancy between what the Bush Administration said about the likely duration of that “war” and the bleak reality of what the world sees now in the Middle East. Of course, both American political parties fully supported Bush’s march into the current military insanity. No entity seems willing or capable of holding the Administration accountable for its actions.

In the meantime, the powerful in the USA have contributed mightily to massively destabilizing the Middle East and, therefore, the entire world. Such destabilization, of course, plays directly into their hands and serves their interests. After all, if enough people can be significantly terrorized and frightened, they will grant any and all power to the “authorities” that hold out a promise to “protect” them. How convenient that these “authorities” have not been able to find, capture or kill Osama Bin Laden or his lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiri. How convenient that, only when Bush suffered a huge decline in his “approval” ratings, suddenly the “authorities” were able to find and kill Abu Musab al Zarqawi. The list of outrageous crimes committed by the powerful in America, in the name of a powerless citizenry, has earned scorn, ridicule and hatred worldwide.

On August 11, 2006, headlines regarding the terrorist plot to explode several airplanes uncovered by the British government have been accompanied by additional headlines that read:

Democrats assail GOP fundraising effort Jordan Falls News
Terror Plot Could Have Impact on US Elections Voice of America
Politically, a chance to score points Boston Globe
By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer 6 minutes ago. WASHINGTON – Democrats assailed the Republicans Friday for e-mailing a fundraising appeal mentioning the war on terror hours after British authorities disclosed they had disrupted a plot to blow up aircraft headed to the United States. “In the middle of a war on terror, we need to remain focused on furthering Republican ideas more than ever before,” former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said in a letter that asked for donations to the Republican National Committee. “Once the RNC learned of this error we ceased distribution of the e-mail,” said Tracey Schmitt, a party spokeswoman.

The point here is not to deny that groups exist in the world at large, groups that are willing to resort to dastardly, heinous acts to inflict harm on innocent citizens to achieve their goals. Terrorism exists, to be sure. One must bear in mind, however, that one group’s terrorists are another group’s freedom fighters. The ability to define the terms dictates how these different groups are perceived. When the first world nations perpetrate a bloodbath against less powerful states, the perpetrators invariably couch such actions in terms of promoting “freedom” and “liberation”. When the much less powerful states respond with suicide bombings or other equally pathetic attempts at redressing the massive grievances they have, these people are labeled “terrorists”. When the USA bombs and slaughters millions with impunity, this is “liberation”, whether in Vietnam or Iraq. When 2 planes kill 3000 American citizens, this is “terrorism”.

This is only one small example of how the elite create the world they want and then use what they have created to further their interests, always at the expense of the masses. The one thing that they cannot do is control events globally. Once having unleashed the insanity of global military conflict, the powers in Washington now are at a loss to rein in what they have started in motion. Witness the total unpredictability of events in Iraq, followed by more of the same between Israel and Lebanon. The world may now be witnessing the opening battles of what might very well become WWIII. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, George W Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and all the other people who have played a significant role in these developments will be held to account only by a distant history written by minds that have perspective. Meantime, we all have to live with the results these people have given us. Whether the human species can survive what has been set in motion remains to be seen.