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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 1, 2005)
TIM E S EA G LE N O RTH C O A ST VO L27N O 3 50C EN TS OCTEMBER 2005 ‘In a dark time the eye begins to se e ' T u c n r tn o c o n ru h 'C BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER My friend Max says the Rs (by which he means the current crop o f American usurpers) have spent the past forty years destroying the average American's faith in his/her own government so that none o f us will look to government to bring us out o f peasantry. They venture to convince us that govern ment is the enemy and that they are the only force that can save us; they being the new aristocracy o f corporatism (unmentioned in the Constitution but wholeheartedly advocated by so-called “strict constructionists"). Max also says the Rs have successfully promoted the desocialization o f society, that we are all alone trying to make the best we can instead o f being part o f a cooperative and mutually interdependent society. The middle class nearly gone, fringe desperation succeeds unified political action. And of course, those who create the whirlwind ignore the consequences of what they are doing (onerously criticizing their critics as “traitors"); they hope to get all they can while they can and let some other poor fools (the rest o f us), whom they have set up for the sure certainty, to reap the devaluation. Max says we have come a long way from the man who said that all we have to fear is fear itself (FDR) to the man who says the fear works for him — GUV, of course. It might be useful to think of the Bush administration as a “criminal conspiracy to take over and use the federal government for their own conspirational purposes," as Clarence Darrow once said of a group of railroad CEOs called the ‘General Managers’ who illegally used federal troops to break railroad strikes by implanting toadies into the U.S. Attorney General's office. Bush and his ideological cabal are committing what might very well be considered a monumental tragedy on the American people: he and his patrons are dissolving American democracy to conform to the dictates of capitalist theology, which depends as much on throttling the Bill of Rights and civil liberties in the USA as it does establishing a worldwide politonomic empire. Only a few laws prevent the Bushites from excesses such as occurred in Germany in the 1930s, but they have been whittling at these laws since they came to power.Their premise that one political party can take complete power and shut out every other political option in the belief that only one ideology is right is the most dangerous aspect of current politics in the USA. Ideology is powerful, especially when blind and pander ing to ignorance and fear. Coupled with conspicuous avarice and class discrimination, it is a recipe for the disenfranchisement of ordinary Americans whose lives clearly deteriorate as a result of reactionary economic policies — jobs lost and/or sent overseas, labor unions eliminated, workers’ rights and wages reduced, hours of work increased without compensation, benefits and retirements shaved, health plans diminished or abolished. Yet many people still seem indoctrinated by right-wing arguments that socialist-style government is ripping them off as well as corrupting their morality with flagrant godless secularism (especially when Democrats hold any office). People are persuaded to believe that business rewards them but government takes it away. Yet obviously much of what government appropriates from the average paycheck (excepting all too visible waste and pork) is used to sustain the social infrastructure that no nation or community can survive without — and despite current wars, fatal bureaucratic ineptitude and criminal mismanagement at the highest levels of an illiberal administration that seems ideologically determined to manipulate constitutional government into eradicating itself, emergency disaster preparedness, compensation and relief is a vital part of the tax package. Corporations, on the other hand, take the money they have weaseled from their workers — including raiding their long- promised pensions and healthcare — and construct their own personal infrastructures designed to keep everyone else away. They also design elaborate tax havens domestically and on Caribbean islands (one hopes the latest hurricanes have wiped out at least a few of these shelters) leaving their wage-reduced workers (those who still have jobs) to pay higher shares of taxes to make up the escalating deficits caused by corporate barons who receive substantial tax breaks on their probably falsely inflated profits. And of course, there is the subject of war profiteering, as ancient and onerous as it is unfair, in particular to the very classes of people who suffer most in expended blood and treasure while their exploiters abjectly deny any existence of class structure in the good old USA while demonizing critics as fomenters of “class warfare.” War profiteering works at many levels; through grossly inflated contracts with the military, enormous tax cuts to “vital" war industries (which can be just about every corporation, from makers of underwear to cornflakes as well the obvious manufac turers of poor quality weapons and scantily armored combat vehicles), and through capital gains accrued from enemy spoils (such as, eventually, Iraqi oil; already a few billions of concealed profits have been exposed). Complicity and corruption are the twin juices that make it all possible. Separation of state and church is not only consistently blurred but actually annulled in the course of manipulating religiosity to serve the corruption of state power. The moral values that seemed to trump the last election (the vote is not in on the legitimacy of that election, or the two previous elections) were bitterly narrow concerns, certainly not about the morality of waging preemptive war or the escalating disparity of wealth in the USA, but about abortion and homosexuality, which missed the big point — a cash economy that has no other purpose than enrichment of a special class corrupts not only the moral found ations of a society, but also, in our case, devalues our treasured civil rights and liberties 1 1 1 ■J , J HENK PANDER FEAR & LOATHING IN BUSH’S AMERICA So are these enough to consider impeachment of Bush, to bring him to trial for high crimes and misdemeanors? Or is it more practicable to wait out the rest of his term and hope it won’t get worse — that a majority of the citizenry, finally awakened to the depredations Bush and company are capable of, might be able to hamstring their vile avarice until Congressional elections next year? Do the Bushites in particular fit the description they readily apply to those who oppose them — that they are, in full-blown definition of the word, “traitors" to this country? After all, Bush and company (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the aptly dubbed “Rovesputin" and their feckless cadre of “Mayberry Machiavellians") are recklessly destroying the fabric of the USA while pontificating its core values They are stealing this country from its people, subjecting them to contemptible and fraudulent governing that benefits an ideological and voracious cabal that would limit civil rights and make slavelike creatures of the majority of American citizens — the ordinary people our ancestors fought a revolution and developed a Constitution and Bill of Rights to establish as the true rulers of a democratic government. George Bush is as perfidious a saboteur of American democracy as the enemies he inspires to attack the USA — and just as radical Islamists claim for their own jihadism, he declares he is selected by God to speak and act in his name; a dark, proto-omnipotent vision of retribution and intolerance; a harsh unrelenting crusade against “evil" whether foreign or domestic (evil as represented by non-Christians) He and his cabal have instituted a massively sinister apparatus of domestic surveillance and police pervasion not unlike the infamous Nazi Gestapo: hundreds of FBI abuses of these sanctioned Patriot Ac,' spy-upon-the-people powers have been revealed bu, are dismissed as "administrative errors” — torturing and murdering political prisoners is an unpardonable and relatively useless method for information bu, certainly effect ive as an instrument of applied “counter" terrorism. This cabal has made a war that has killed possibly half a million persons by now (2,000 Americans in Iraq), with no other reasoning than a barrage of lies to inundate critical assessment, » and after all their deceits and deceptions have been smoked out, Bush proclaims the war necessary to avenge the Americans already dead, a justification tha, has bloodied history since the firs, wars. George W. is a warmonger who is personally a war deserter (even in peacetime AWOL after 30 days becomes desertion, and he wen, missing for a year during the Vietnam War) who lacked either or both the courage or moral fortitude to fight for his country bu, ostentatiously displays shameless and false bluster as Commander in Chief of a war his blatant lies and arrogant bullying precipitated. Twice he has stolen election as President from the people and in each instance has gone about feverishly dismant ling our democracy, snubbing laws made to prevent (or a, leas, restrict) such an usurpation by domestic pariahs consumed by Olympian ambitions. Any wonder why these self-righteous proselytizers of militant capitalist theology feel no sense of shame for seizing power through fear, deceit and outright fraud, and hold onto i, with lies, character assassination and political purges They are of course desperate to remain in power to conceal the evidence of their illegal seizure of it through blatant corruption of elections, which drives them to more intense corruption — yet their ship of state is foundering from arrests and indictments of smaller players whose malfeasance reaches to the highest levels: DeLay, Frist, Rovespierre I, is the prerequisite of the ordinary people of the United States to finally stand up to Bush and his cabal who have been erroneously allowed to ravage our democracy and the lives of of its citizens at home as well as abroad a, war — the latter a reckoning the Bushites owe humanity a, large To impeach him and those of his Party (and those also of the other Party) who have aided and abetted his seizure of our government Impeach him firs, a, home, establishing his guilt of crimes against the Constitution (many more than alluded to here — the most pernicious his theft of the American spirit) and afterward turn him and his schoolyard bullies over to the world court for the res, of humanity to judge I