On the weekend before President Bush’s second inauguration, The New York Times described how his first round of tax cuts had already brought our tax code closer to a system under which income on wealth would not be taxed at all and public expenditures would be raised exclusively from salaries and wages. Their political strategy was to neutralize the independent media, create their own propaganda machine with a partisan press, and flood their coffers with rivers of money from those who stand to benefit from the transfer of public resources to elite control.

Along the way, they would burden the nation with structural deficits that will last until our children’s children are ready to retire, systematically stripping government of its capacity, over time, to do little more than wage war and reward privilege. Their religious strategy was to fuse ideology and theology into a worldview freed of the impurities of compromise, claim for America the status of God’s favored among nations (and therefore beyond political critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and immoral.

At the intersection of these three strategies was money: Big Money. They found a deep flaw in our political system and zeroed in on it. Our elected officials need huge sums of money to finance their campaigns, especially to buy television. The average cost of running and winning a seat in the House of Representatives — the so-called “People’s House” — now tops one million dollars.

Bill Moyers | AlterNet (read more. . .)

March 24th, 2006 || PermaLink

Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy

Kevin Phillips begins to outline these three pillars with the acceptance of the argument that America’s economy is the petro-economy, and that there are three dangers that follow directly from this:

“The Glory of the 20th Century is now the burden. Oil has soaked deeply - in all likelihood indelibly - into the politics and power structure of the United States, partly because over two bountiful centuries it has also seeped, spouted, and oozed up from so many sections of so many states. More than a fuel, oil became a heritage and also the basis of a lifestyle.”

He argues that this produces a capital dependence in America, namely that more and more of what we have relies on the petroleum economy. He argues that this means that there is a petroleum way of life. The “energy culture” of oil combines with the oil lifestyle to produce an oil politics. This oil politics is what allowed George W. Bush to build a coalition that allowed him to invade Iraq, even though he had a very weak political mandate.

Phillips connects the oil lifestyle and the backlash against the civil chaos of the 1960s and the “social engineering” of LBJ. He argues that the South, as the core of rejection of the values of the liberal coalition and as the area where the era of roads brought with it the most change, became the dominant political partner in American politics - that “The Civil War is no longer the height of southern ambition.”

This first part of the argument - of oil dependency and the coming of peak oil - is not new with Kevin Phillips, in fact, it is a story that has been told elsewhere. Nor is the geopolitics of oil economics new here, this too has been recounted before. But Phillips is not an economist, nor really a historian, but a social critic. He seeks to find the textures and tapestries that bind people to their political affiliations. He identifies a force which others have identified, namely the evangelical and fundamentalist form of “Christian Reconstructionism,” and that this social movement, when joined to the flow of money from the oil economy, is driving the transformation of the Republican Party into America’s first religious party.

Stirling Newberry | t r u t h o u t (read more. . .)

March 23rd, 2006 || PermaLink

America’s Blinders

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?
The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen—rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq.
A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

Howard Zinn | Progressive (read more. . .)

March 22nd, 2006 || PermaLink

Why Are We Here?

On Saturday, during her national radio response to the president, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the Bush administration of “incompetence” in the Iraq war.

What would be a competent way to pursue the war in Iraq? How would you drop huge bombs on urban neighborhoods in a competent way? How would you deploy cluster munitions that shred the bodies of children in a competent way?

How would you take hundreds of thousands of people from their home land and send them to a country to kill and be killed — based on lies — in a competent way?
How do you ravage the housing and health care and education of communities across the United States, while war-profiteering corporations post bigger profits — how would you do that in a competent way?

Senator Feinstein went on to say that it’s so important, for the war in Iraq, for the United States government to “do it right.”

How does one do this war right, when every day it brings more carnage? The only way to do this war right is to not do it at all.

Norman Solomon | huffingtonpost (read more. . .)

March 21st, 2006 || PermaLink

The Stuff That Happened

If the mission in Iraq was to create a stable democracy in the heart of the Middle East and inspire neighboring countries to follow the same path, the results have been crushingly bad - unless Mr. Bush regards the election of Palestinian terrorists as the leaders in Gaza and the West Bank as a step forward. Iran is extending its sway by the hour. In Afghanistan, American forces are too thin to do much more than protect the central government in downtown Kabul.

The idea that Iraqi security forces are poised to take over the job of protecting the people in a unified country is almost ludicrous. Many of those forces are actually sectarian militias that have been armed by the coalition forces, but not changed by them. So far, attempts at creating a government that could bring the country some modicum of stability have fallen apart. There are no leaders with the strength or credibility or even desire to rally anyone but their own co-religionists or ethnic group.

When Americans ask themselves whether anything has been accomplished in Iraq, they do take note that there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11. That has been an enormous blessing, for which law enforcement officials can offer no explanation other than somewhat perplexed guesses. It’s possible that the chaos in Iraq has distracted Al Qaeda, diverting its energy to fomenting civil war between Sunnis and Shiites in the heart of the Middle East. If that is so, we may have bought short-term peace while creating a training ground for terrorists and a no man’s land where they can operate with impunity.

The Iraq debacle ought to serve as a humbling lesson for future generations of American leaders - although, if our leaders were capable of being humbled, they could have simply looked back to Vietnam. For the present, our goal must be to minimize the damage, through the urgent diplomacy of the current ambassador and forceful reminders that American forces are not prepared to remain for one day in a country whose leaders prefer civil war to peaceful compromise.

While we are distracted by picking up the pieces, there is no time to imagine what the world might be like if George Bush had chosen to see things as they were instead of how he wanted them to be three years ago. History will have more time to consider the question.

The New York Times | Editorial (read more. . .)

March 20th, 2006 || PermaLink

The ‘Long War’? Oh, Goodie

We are inarguably facing more terrorists now than there were when we started, so the Pentagon has decided to fight what it is now calling “the Long War.” Has anyone asked you about this? Me, neither. Nor has anyone asked Congress. The administration — mostly Donald Rumsfeld — just decided we would have a long war and declared it, and is now committing us to fight against a fuzzy ideology no one seems to be able to define.

Our problem now is that we’re not fighting the people who attacked us — they’re still running around on the Afghan-Pakistan border while we battle Iraqis who don’t like us occupying their country.

As of Sept. 11, 2001, there were a few hundred people identified with al-Qaida’s ideology. Even then, it was unclear the American military was the right tool for the job. Now, Rumsfeld is apparently prepared to put the full might of the U.S. military into this fight indefinitely, backed by the full panoply of ever-more expensive weapons and the whole hoorah. I don’t think the people who got us into Iraq should be allowed to do this because, based on the evidence of Iraq, I don’t think they have the sense God gave a duck.

Molly Ivins | Daily Camera (read more. . .)

March 19th, 2006 || PermaLink

“A Recent Surge In Violence…”

This morning I learned that Pentagon officials have said that force levels in Iraq would not be cut “anytime soon,” apparently because of a “recent surge in violence” sweeping Iraq. But what struck me most about that news was votesomemore’s response in this thread claiming that, “There is ALWAYS a ‘recent surge in violence.’”

That got me thinking. Is there always a “recent surge in violence” in Iraq? I Googled the phrase, and discovered that the answer to the question is, well, yes.

There are a few notable periods where violence is not reported as a “recent surge,” (for example, Nov 2003 - Mar 2004) and there are a few notable periods where the violence is much worse (for example, May 2005).

But overall, it appears that there is a “recent surge in violence” reported in Iraq pretty much every few weeks.

Bear in mind that these results were just Googled with the phrase “recent surge in violence.” If anyone wants to try “recent wave of violence” I’m sure you’ll be able to fill in the gaps.

Oh, and one more thing: when you get down to the part where General George Casey calls the January 2006 “recent surge in violence” an “anomaly,” try not to fall out of your chair.

EarlG | democraticunderground (read more. . .)

March 18th, 2006 || PermaLink