It’s Really Very Simple: Bush and the Neocons Want Endless War

The punditry of the “What the hell is the matter with Bush and the Neoconservatives?” school has made something of a career out of misreading and misunderstanding George W. Bush and the neoconservative movement of which he serves as figurehead. Like so many other contemporary paleo-conservative and libertarian columnists, Paul Craig Roberts repeats an error of logical assumption in his latest column. He assumes that the sheer madness behind what passes for Bush and company’s Middle East foreign policy is merely blind folly on the part of the Administration. I believe he is wrong; the Bush Administration and its neocon puppeteers are deliberately wreaking havoc on the world’s most volatile region in order to hasten the implementation of their ideological agenda.

My reasoning? Simple: What better way to guarantee the expansion of executive power, the empowerment of one’s cronies (and lifeblood) in the industrial and “defense” sectors, and the appeasement of one’s evangelical backers than by fomenting conditions for endless war that will eventually lead to complete executive dictatorship, followed ultimately by the Armageddon that is the insane evangelical movement’s ultimate fantasy? Despite various opinion polls (of what origin, one is tempted to ask) allegedly asserting that nearly seventy percent of the American public now distrusts Bush and opposes his global wars of empire, that seventy percent is about as likely to actively oppose Bush as Congress is to impeach him and remove him from office. In other words, the American public is the cowed, frightened, disunited and spineless entity that the machinery of State needs it to be in order to maintain and expand power. The system, in other words, isn’t about to collapse anytime soon and the powers-that-be know this, enabling them to wage war and violate the Constitution with complete impunity.

Roberts fails on two levels to understand his subject. First of all, like every other pundit, he fails to appreciate just how cunning and carefully calculating the neoconservative puppeteers behind the Bush regime really are. Second, and related to the first, he also makes the fatal assumption that Bush, or indeed any other individual occupying the Oval Office, has the ability to wield any actual power, forgetting that all modern Presidents (at least those throughout the twentieth century onward) are nothing more than figureheads for the shadow government of moneyed and politically powerful special interests that put presidents into office. Can Roberts really assert with a straight face and clear conscience that a creature as obtuse as Bush would ever be allowed to wield any actual power of state?

Roberts approaches his understanding of the regime’s actions from the standpoint of a rational, logically thinking individual who assumes that in the final analysis that amorphous entity called “government” really does, at its core, have the best interests of the nation at heart. He asks at one point “[i]f terrorism is the threat to America that Bush says, why is Bush working so hard to enlarge the power and influence of terrorists and of Islamic politicians hostile to US hegemony in the Middle East?” The simple answer is, because doing so means creating conditions conducive to expanding the State's power, allowing the State to demand ever more latitude to fight “terrorism” at the expense of the people’s civil liberties, a demand that the ever-cowed, ever-frightened, never-thinking American body public will gladly hand over to him, no questions asked.

The obvious fact is that concern for America, its people, and the freedoms upon which it is founded are very clearly the farthest things from the minds, souls, or concern of the ruling cabal. The only interest this parasitic entity has is its own aggrandizement, something that it will see to fruition at any cost, and for which the people and government of the United States serve no other purpose than being tools for this goal. It’s really that simple and has long been painfully obvious to those of us not deep in denial. As far as the MICC-controlled neoconservative regime is concerned, if the path to wealth, power, and total control is the waging of endless and ultimately destructive war with the rest of the world, then so be it. In the end, those who matter, that one-one hundredth of one percent who control ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of the world’s wealth, will not only survive, but will grow wealthier and more powerful than ever, and it will be at the expense of the civilization that nurtured them.

Oh, and there isn’t a damned thing Paul Craig Roberts or the rest of us can or will do about it.

My advice to all of you paleo-libertarian pundits out there is to stop analyzing the current regime from the standpoint of a rational human being who assumes that his subject is mad. It cannot and will not work. While the neoconservatives at the controls of state are definitely the epitome of evil, they are not insane. They are perfectly aware of what they are doing and the consequences it will bring, and that’s the most horrifying aspect of the situation.

Meanwhile, start buying gold while it’s still on the market, and if you have any children (male or female) approaching draft age, plan on having them go into hiding soon. Better yet, hope and pray that Burt Rutan can finalize his space travel program in time for you to relocate to a distant planet. Heaven knows that ours isn’t long for existence as long as American neoconservatives are in power.

Alright, What Happened to the Real Charley Reese?

I’ve just finished reading Charley Reese’s latest column, posted three times per week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) on King Features Syndicate’s website. I really look forward to my thrice-weekly “Reese’s fixes” and normally agree with at least ninety-seven percent of what Charley has to say. Today, however, he takes on Equal Opportunity and winds up missing his target by a very wide mark. I almost wonder if his column wasn’t ghostwritten by someone from The Nation, AARP, Ebony, or National Review.

If you read today’s column you’ll notice that Charley starts off on a sound enough footing by stating, correctly, that while equal opportunity is a very laudable goal, equal outcome, the unstated goal of today’s government policies, is simply impossible, for there is no way that every single human being will automatically succeed in life, regardless of the environment in which they are born, bred, and live.

So far, so good.

But he starts to stray off course in paragraph seven in his prescriptions for righting what few correctible problems there are in the realm of equal opportunity. He states here:

Public schools, which are 100 percent creations of the government, should be equal in material and human resources. There is no excuse for children in one part of town to attend a broken-down school while children in another neighborhood attend a fully equipped modern school. Equality of government resources is achievable.

I’ll lay aside, for the sake of focus, any discussion of the fundamentally dysfunctional nature of public schools as an entity and focus on the economics and politics of Charley’s statement. While his premise seems reasonable on its face, what Charley seems to forget is that government is inherently based on a system of coercive redistribution of wealth between individuals of varying economic backgrounds, usually taking the form of confiscation of wealth from society’s most productive segments and the subsequent conferring of same wealth upon non-productive members. Yet what ultimately determines where government’s purloined largesse is spent is political influence and in the average American locality, the wealthy who dominate the political process are not about to allow their confiscated tax dollars to be spent on the infrastructure of poorer school districts at the expense of their own children’s schools. Thus we have the disparity in public school “quality” (a very relative term, I might add) between wealthier and poorer districts. The only way to remedy this is to centralize tax collection and distribution at the state or federal level, a remedy that Charley must surely admit is worse than the affliction he seeks to cure. For all of his (justified) bellyaching about our inefficient, unlawful, runaway central government, what would lead Charley to believe that this same central government will effectively redistribute resources to remote local school districts based on each district’s need? We’ve seen how unworkable this process is in other areas in which the federal government has insinuated itself, so why on earth would anyone believe it would work with education funding?

Charley then digs himself even deeper into a hole in the next paragraph when he talks about health care, saying:

I've come to believe that we must adopt a national health-insurance program that will provide basic medical care to all citizens regardless of age or income. Every other industrialized nation has already done this, and the U.S. needs to junk its patchwork system and get on the train.

Well, Charley, that “train” you so admiringly speak of is headed for derailment. Would you care to ask one of our northern neighbors what they think of “national health insurance programs” and why it is that if such a program is so wonderful and so readily meeting the citizenry’s health care needs, so many Canadians head south to Detroit, Milwaukee, and Buffalo for lifesaving medical treatment? You might also want to ask our British cousins what they think of the National Health Service, now so burdened by cost overruns and resource shortages that it often takes a minimum of three months for patients with life-threatening illnesses to even schedule an initial examination.

More to the point, just look at what the already-evolving socialization of American medical care is doing to clinics and hospitals around the country due to congressionally-mandated “minimum care” laws. Briefly stated, emergency medical facilities must, by law, provide whatever lifesaving treatment a patient needs regardless of their ability to pay. The natural result of this is that emergency rooms are flooded with indigent or uninsured patients who are unable to pay even the minimum costs required fund their own care, costs that are seldom reimbursed to the provider in a timely manner or at all and which therefore must be borne by third parties – that is, you and me, the taxpayers. Worse still, those same patients, absolved of any responsibility for providing for their own health care, routinely use emergency rooms as a substitute for non-emergency outpatient treatment, diverting precious resources away from emergency care and in the process jeopardizing the lives of other patients with more critical needs. No better example exists of this than in the ever-increasing number of states overrun with “illegal aliens” who take advantage of the minimum care law to shift the costs of their health care onto the backs of the American taxpayer. This practice has resulted in the closure of a number of hospitals in around the country (here is just one example), thus aggravating the “shortage” of healthcare. So, Charley, are you sure this is the solution you want for America’s healthcare “crisis?” Or did you, like most of your generation (which includes my own parents) simply assume that Social Security and Medicare will take care of you as your body breaks down with age and therefore did not bother to save any money for your care in your declining years? Yes, that’s a brutally frank question with some very unkind insinuations, I admit, but it’s probably one that probably hits closer to home than you or your peers care to admit.

Apparently still not trusting the power of the market despite all of his many years of conservative editorial rhetoric, Charley thinks that not only medicine, but food and housing are something for which our government should assume responsibility. The fact that government fails spectacularly in accomplishing far fewer and simpler tasks for which it actually has constitutional responsibility, let alone more than ample evidence of failure in these very areas of which Charley speaks, apparently doesn’t register on his radar screen. As Charley sees it:

We also need workable food and housing supplementary programs. A free market, distorted as it is today by speculation and inflation, does not do a good job of providing affordable housing for people with limited incomes. If we want a decent society, then we have to make sure that even personal failure does not result in sleeping on the street and suffering malnutrition or starvation.

I suppose this brands me as a liberal. Well, I've never feared labels. I simply do not want my grandchildren to grow up in a society in which they have to step over people's bodies and live in fortified compounds to protect themselves from mobs and criminals.

Here Charley finally jumps the track completely. On the one hand, he accuses the “free market” of failing to provide for people’s basic needs. But then in the next half of the same sentence, whether he realizes it or not, he admits the truth: what we have in today’s America is not a “free market” at all, but a government-induced speculation and inflation-based mess caused by the Federal Reserve’s unsound fiat currency and meddlesome, unworkable economic and monetary policies that distort and subvert the non-existent “free market” he speaks so ill of. I ask Charley the same question that I often ask the “liberals” among whom he is now content to group himself: How can you possibly think that a government that has caused all of the problems which you describe now will somehow magically solve those very same problems? I’m not going to bet that he’ll be able to answer that question in any logical or convincing way.

More importantly, how can Charley possibly reconcile his claim that it is government’s responsibility to provide the average citizen’s basic life necessities with his recurring conservative editorial mantra over the years that our government should be one of limited and enumerated powers and that individuals should be responsible for themselves? I might also ask Charley another question, one that I doubt he’d answer honestly either: When was the last time you looked at a person sleeping on the street and/or suffering malnutrition or starvation and thought anything other than “How much and what kind of drugs, booze, or mental illness drove this person to that condition?” If Charley were honest, he would admit that this is exactly the condition that drove ninety-nine point nine percent of street denizens to their present circumstances, not economic hardship. Far less than one percent of the current “homeless” population in America exists in its present condition due to “hard luck” caused by unemployment or financial crisis and those that do find themselves homeless due to such circumstances seldom ever stay homeless for very long, nor are there any shortage of private charities and organizations ready, willing, and able to help them help themselves. So for Charley to claim that hunger and homelessness in America is the fault of the free market or a “corporate” economy displays sheer ignorance at best and disingenuousness at worst. You know better, Charley!

As for not wanting your grandchildren to grow up in a dysfunctional society, all I have to say is that if you want government to assume responsibility for your grandchildren’s well-being without them having to take any for themselves, if you have no qualms about letting the government continue to inflate the national currency to fund its ever-exploding cornucopia of extra-constitutional programs to pay for the idealistic solutions you suggest, then you’ll see exactly that condition as your grandchildren’s lot and you’ll have only yourself to blame for not encouraging them to follow a lifestyle of planning for the future, financial prudence, self-sufficiency, and respect for private property. Let the libertarian principles of the free market, respect for private property, and responsibility for one’s own behavior become the norm and you can rest assured that the shortages and hardships you speak of will be things of the past in very short order. Do things your way, and we will accelerate the warp-speed flight to national catastrophe that we are now traveling.

In closing I can only hope that this latest editorial flatulence was an aberration, the result of a bad day, a hangover, a bout of depression, a belated April Fool’s joke, or (heaven forbid) the onset of senility. This isn’t the Charley Reese I know and respect and I hope this alter ego doesn’t make any further appearances. If he does reappear on a regular basis, I’ll find myself removing yet another link from my blog.

Pentagon Backs Down And Uses Common Sense, At Least This Once

Apparently the public outcry to the story behind my last posting was so negative that the armchair warrior beancounters inside the Five-sided Asylum on the Potomac have backed down. That's great news, but don't expect this flash of rationality and decency to set a precedent. It's only a matter of time before the bureaucratic beast does something else to assault the sensibilities of decent Americans by spitting in the troops' face in some other egregious fashion. And you can take that to the Pentagon Federal Credit Union.

Tell Me Again Why ANYBODY Is "Staying Army?"

Yet another tale of a Pentagon bureaucratic screwup (one of many) that is destroying what little morale remains in an army on the brink of collapse. It's crap like this that feeds my fantasy of a million angry "Warren Terra" combat veterans, active or otherwise, including the several thousand severely disabled, marching on Washington.

Happy First Birthday, Liberrants!

It seems hard to believe that it was just a year ago that this humble little blog got started. I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank those of you who have visited and added your own words of wisdom (or virulent disagreements) to what I've posted. Your interaction has definitely been enlightening.

Here's hoping to many more years of enlightening (or not) discussions and more powerful rants in the future.

Cheers!

“Ethics Training”: The Feds (and My Corporate Welfare Queen Employer) Have Some Nerve!

Anyone who pays any attention to current events is no doubt familiar with the brewing Abramoff scandal, which is merely the tip of a massive iceberg of inside-the-Beltway corruption that grows ever larger in direct ratio to the American public’s apathy and ignorance. If you work for or are subcontracted to any company that does business on any level with the federal government, you are required to take part in an annual ritual called “ethics training.” I’ve just done so, and it was an absolutely surreal experience. In fact, mere words probably are not adequate to describe it, but I’ll do my best.

“Ethics training”, while it takes as many forms as there are beltway bandits and opportunists feeding at the government slop trough, consists basically of a pedantic lecture on the evils of conflict of interest, kickbacks, and violations of export controls, followed by a “test” reemphasizing the key concepts (a test, incidentally, that the individual can take over and over again until they arrive at the “right” answer and achieve a perfect score). What strikes the “indoctrinee” (that is, the hapless employee having to sit through this mind-numbing insult to one’s intelligence) hardest, other than the rank hypocrisy behind the very idea that the federal government has any business lecturing others on ethical behavior, is the vagueness that permeates the feds’ concept of “ethics.” Many of the terms written into current federal law pertaining to government procurement, contracting, and exports lack any meaningful definition. While this is typical of most legislation-turned-statutory law, it is especially blatant in those laws pertaining to federal procurement and export controls. Why is this, one might ask.

Well, for one thing, the elected class of thieves who write what today passes for law in this decaying shell of a nation are in a very sticky spot. They have to offer up some pretense, however transparently flimsy, of upholding the highest standards of law and order while helping themselves to the lucre that is part and parcel of the process of feeding the avaricious monster that is Washington, D.C. There is, after all, no other reason for these lowlifes to even be inside the Beltway except to enrich themselves at the people’s expense. Yet while the ruling classes are certainly aware of just how brain-dead the masses are, and grateful for it, they realize that even they cannot be so presumptuous as to simply write one set of laws for themselves and another for the people. Even John Q. Public isn’t stupid enough (yet) to take something that blatant sitting down. Therefore, the rulers write a single set of laws that contains language so ambiguous, so vague, so elastic that it can be stretched, twisted, contorted, and shaped to mean whatever the rulers and their bought-and-paid-for federal courts want it to mean. Put another way, the words can be stretched and skewed to let the rulers do whatever the hell they want while on a different occasion contorted and bent to prosecute John Q. Public for doing the same thing. Heads, the State and its friends win; tails, the little guy loses.

A couple of things related to export laws really stick in my craw. First is the whole idea of “export controls” over “sensitive” or “dual-use technology.” The idea is that certain products with “dual uses” –that is, products or technologies that can have both commercial and defense uses—cannot be exported to certain “restricted” countries without an “export license” (which, by the way, is basically a bureaucratese term for “Mommy, the all-knowing, all-powerful federal caregiver, says that you may sell your product or service –THIS TIME-- to the little boy on the other side of the globe who Mommy thinks is a bad influence and whom you should generally avoid”).

First of all, name one product mankind has ever invented that can be positively said to NOT have “dual use.” I’m hard pressed to think of a single one. Hell, a can opener can be considered “dual use” without too much stretch of the imagination. Secondly, for every product to which Uncle Sam says “No, thou shalt not export thy product to [insert rogue nation du jour here]”, there is at least one other nation waiting in the wings to sell the same product or technology to the willing buyer at a price they can afford and on terms mutually favorable to all parties concerned. Thus the prohibition against exports, whether in the form of legal controls or political acts such as sanctions and embargoes, has done exactly nothing to keep “prohibited” technology out of the hands of a “rogue” nations (See “Iraq”, “North Korea”, and “Cuba” for textbook examples). The only loser in this case is the American firm, which is robbed of both competitive opportunity and revenue, although I suppose if there’s any silver lining here, it’s that loss of revenue to the company also equates to lose of tax revenue to the Washington, D.C. monster.

Even more presumptuous is the feds’ assertion that a non-U.S. firm can be held criminally liable under U.S. export laws for reselling a piece of technology or service to a “prohibited” country, even if the product they are exporting is not a product of U.S. origin and even if the non-U.S. firm’s government does not consider the purchasing nation to be “prohibited” under its own laws. Just how Uncle Sap thinks he can enforce this arrogant and probably unconstitutional law is never explained. But no matter, since it appears that very few foreign firms really give a damn about what edicts Rome-on-the-Potomac issues anyway. If the French want to sell Mirage 2000 fighter jets to Iran, they’re going to do it, regardless of whether George Dubya and his harem on Capital Hill disapprove, even if the U.S. Commerce Department asserts the claim that some of the Mirage aircraft’s components are of American origin. What is Rome-on-the-Potomac going to do? Bring democracy to Paris, courtesy of the 101^st Airborne? All the Chirac government would have to do is start reciting the list of products on the U.S. export no-no list that both the Clinton and Bush administrations have knowingly sold to China over the last decade and a half. That ought to shut Uncle Sap right up.

Finally, there is the prohibition against U.S. firms participating in international embargoes against country’s that are “friendly” to the U.S. Would you care to make three guesses what country this law was tailor-made for? (Hint: the first two don’t count). If you answered “Israel”, go to the head of the class. Yes, folks, that’s right; AIPAC money bought a front-row seat in U.S. export law. Indeed, the "ethics" training course specifically mentioned our Levantine overloard as a primary example. What is means is that if your name is Ahmed al-Islami, a Palestinian-American who owns an import-export firm, and someone with Israeli connections wants, for whatever reason, to get their mitts on your product, you have to sell to them if they meet your price and sales terms, regardless of the fact that these are likely the same people who drove your family out its home and has been gunning your relatives’ children down in the streets of the West Bank in all the years since. Because Israel is on cozy terms with the Demopublican Dictatorship, you will, under penalty of imprisonment and asset forfeiture (or worse) do business with them if you have what they want. I’m hard-pressed to imagine for what other nation on earth the ruling classes on the Potomac would fight so hard for under similar circumstances at the expense of the American business owner's right to freedom of association and private property.

Let’s just say that the “knowledge” gained from this training is yet another reason that I’m accelerating my preparation to change jobs in a future nearer than I had planned for. I simply cannot continue to waste years of my life working for a company that spits in the face of everything I believe in. The private sector (or what little is left of it in this fascist-national socialist hellhole) beckons.

Oh, and by the way: I wonder if the former CIA director now on the payroll as a senior managing partner has taken this training as well. I also wonder if he’d like to lecture on the subject matter, telling the rest of us with a straight face that ethics are “non-negotiable” (a direct quote from our training course).

I didn’t think so either.