The GOP Record in Texas May Predict the Future

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

If Texas is the GOP 'lab' experiment as some have said then one may be justified in drawing several conclusions:

• In TX, the GOP deliberately neglected education; high school graduations dropped to dead last (nationwide) under Bush/Perry;

• As a result, crime rates rose; Dallas became the nation's murder capital;
• Only the CORPORATE OWNED prison system benefited from the resulting rise in crime which the GOP had the NERVE to demagogue!

The GOP is not a political party; it's a crime syndicate with characteristics of a kooky whacked-out cult! Now they want to apologize to the ruling 1 percent that their stupid, incompetent economic policies created by

1. exporting U.S. jobs and industry to China;
2. creating a vast gulf between rich and poor;
3. attacking Detroit, a city that had been the center of a VIABLE U.S. auto industry.

The GOP would make quick work of that! Now we import cars from Japan. And how about Pittsburgh? It was at one time the center of world steel production. Alas ---the GOP POX struck there as well. You will find Japan making and exporting their steel and employing their work force in the process. If you wish to see the result of GOP policy, specifically, the effect of GOP incompetence upon America's stand in the world, you need only visit the CIA's World Fact Book. China is at the very top of the list with the World's Largest Positive Current Account Balance. That ranking is the result of the fact that China manufactures products and, notably, sells them to the U.S. by way of Wal-Mart.

Now --scroll down to the bottom of the list. That's where you will find the United States, dead last with the World's largest NEGATIVE Current Account Balance, formerly called the Balance of Trade Deficit.

The GOP deserves NO respect and gets none from me. The GOP should run for office in either China or Japan as both nations have benefited greatly from the policies of the GOP! Certainly --the U.S. of A has not benefited but suffered at the hands of a 'party' that is either crooked or incompetent or both!

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Orwell's '1984' Revisited

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Margaret Atwood called George W. Bush, the greatest threat to world peace to date! What Atwood did not mention was that Bushco derived its power from the deliberate and well-planned attack on truth by way of language. George Orwell predicted it; his works remain the textbook example of how governments may manipulate people by first manipulating the language.

If all else fails, a totalitarian regime may make the telling of truth a crime. Traditionally, the names given those truths are treason or sedition. A young United States experimented with the Alien and Sedition Acts giving near dictatorial powers to President John Adams, specifically, the power to imprison or deport aliens upon the mere suspicion that activities posed a threat to the new national government.

To his credit, Adams made no use of them but neither did he rebuke the Congress for passing them. George W. Bush proved a greater threat. Bush arrogated unto himself the power to 'define' the very word "terrorist"! Bush could create a 'terrorist' at will by merely re-defining a target. Indeed --Bush assumed and asserted the power and authority to make you a 'terrorist' by merely 'deeming' you to be one!

Orwell's classic cautionary tale, 1984, describes a fascist, totalitarian government spying on its own citizens, denying reality and creating an alternate state that exploits a fictional enemy in order to wage a perpetual war. Orwell's Big Brother tried to re-write history and succeeded.
In "It Can't Happen Here" Sinclair Lewis describes the dictatorship of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip who might have been inspired by George W. Bush had 'he' not preceded him. In both '1984' and in Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here", a fascist state justifies an omni-present dictatorship by maintaining states of perpetual war and perpetual terror.

The lesson of 1984 is less about the state itself than about the individual. When states are absolutely powerful, the individual ceases to exist. Philosophically, individuals robbed of free will are denied person-hood even as mere 'legal abstractions' (corporations) are made 'persons' by decree. In the U.S. 'corporations' are decreed to be persons by way of a bogus and dishonest decision by our Supreme Court, It remains the very worst decision since Dredd-Scott legitimized the keeping of slaves.

"In order to acknowledge the collapse of Soviet Communism and the failure of fascism to reemerge as a potent political force, I ditched Orwell's oppressive totalitarian state in favor of an entertainment-fueled nihilism in which dimwitted citizens frittered away their lives watching web TV and working at slightly overpaid jobs to buy worthless junk ... on web TV, natch. Where Orwell envisioned endless rows of soldiers marching in perfect unison to the strains of the Two-Minute Hate, I saw a world where nations had been replaced by trading blocs and the objects of hatred were the immigrants in our midst."

--Ted Rall, Addicted To Perpetual War

The images from 1984 are seared into our memories --big brother, the telescreen, the grotty bedroom, the cubicle, the memory hole, the drab gray existence, the rat cage. But 1984 is as much about language. It is more than mere sub-text. Language, in 1984, is the means by which Big Brother creates an alternate reality. It is only in the 'alternate reality' that Big Brother has power.
Big Brother is the Wizard of Oz, an illusion, an image on smoke if not mirrors. If millions suddenly deny the illusion, the lies, the bullshit, Big Bro is finished. The bad news is that, like the cowardly lion, we dare not challenge the great and powerful Oz

The most glaring use of Newspeak is the invention of what I have chosen to call "focus group phrases"; so called because they are invented, full cloth, by consultants who most certainly know their way around a focus group. "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is just such a phrase. "911 Denier" is another. "Al Qaeda iln Iraq" is designed to make a lazy populace forget that the war was begun upon blackhearted lies about WMD.

"911 Denier" is 'Orwell-speak' or 'Newspeak' designed to shift the burden of proof when it is, in fact,  Bush who must prove his theory of 911 --a theory for which there is not a shred of evidence --let alone proof. Anyone believing it is either a part of the plot or stupid! The Bush administration used up several ex post facto rationales for war. None of them were true! "Al Qaeda in Iraq", for example, implies the existence of a shadowy enemy that was never defined! That was by design! A real enemy is defined and can be targeted! Shadows may be summoned up whenever they are needed! 'Al Qaeda in Iraq', we can be sure, tested well.

A lazy news establishment liked it because it saved them the trouble of trouble of describing reality! Orwell understood as few have the power of language and in, 1984 the "tool of power" is language. Language empowers the all-powerful party which dictates the nature and use of language. The institutions of state maintain their power by exploiting the power of language to shape the nature of thought itself. That is, in fact, the job of the protagonist, Winston Smith. Examples may be found in any study of the recent Bush administration.

The George W. Bush regime very nearly gave the game away with the use of the phrase Total Information Awareness. In response to criticism, the regime stopped using the phrase to denote their program of widespread domestic and illegal surveillance.

Orwell is, of course, most famous for 1984 but his great essay on politics and language should also be required reading. See: Orwell: Politics and the English Language. Orwell explores how politicians exploit language to accrue absolute power. Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

--George Orwell

All who have read Orwell's essay on how easily politicians debase the language for nefarious purposes have recognized in the Bush administration the very techniques that Orwell warned us about.

The White House saw September 11 as a golden opportunity. The first catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil sparked an unprecedented case of leadership projection: desperate for protection and answers (why do they hate us? can we kill them before they kill us?), Americans wishfully compared Bush to FDR and Churchill. Approval ratings hit 92 percent. But Bush's political advisors knew that peaking early wouldn't guarantee reelection in 2004. Bush's father had been turned out of office just 20 months after the Gulf War ratcheted his score up to 911.
...
The Bushies have lifted their reelection strategy straight out of "1984," and not just by creating ominous-sounding agencies like the Office of Homeland Security, the supposedly-closed Office of Strategic Information, and a "Shadow Government". As in "1984," the Bush regime tolerates zero dissent --a two-party system in name only has been distilled to one in which only Republicans express acceptable opinions. And an absence of follow-up attacks has been met by endless alerts, advisors and empty hysterics in the name of security, most recently culminating with Tom Ridge's much-mocked color-code warning system. 

--Ted Rall, Why Bush Is Addicted To Perpetual War

To be fair, it is not only politicians but bullshit artists who make us vulnerable to tyranny. This has been done by dumbing down the language and, thus, our ability to think critically. Until Bush, even Republican "Presidents" paid lip service to the Constitution.

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

—Sinclair Lewis, author of "It Can't Happen here"!

In It Can't Happen Here Sinclair Lewis showed us how it might happen here and in ways not unlike those predicted by both Lewis and Orwell. The characteristics of the fascist state so vividly described by both authors were found in abundance in Bush's fascist regime. Millions are still in denial, evidence that truth is tragically denied. A quote from Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here":

"Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we’re the huskiest nation going."

--It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis, page 20

Orwell and Lewis not only warned us, they predicted precisely how it would be done. As Shakespeare said: "All is true!" So --why didn't we listen? We did not listen because this nation has a fierce anti-intellectual streak which at its best makes us independent and at its worst makes us stupid!

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The Emerging US World Police State

The US became the evil empire when it dropped two nuclear devices on two defenseless cities in Japan in 1945. It is claimed that "nuking" Japan saved some one million American lives still at war throughout the Pacific. In fact, Japan had already begun negotiating the terms of its surrender with the US. It was not the first time nor will it be the last time that the people of the US have been lied to by its own government. Nor is the first time the US had negotiated in bad faith. Every broken treaty with native Americans are evidence of that fact.

Bush, meanwhile, makes plans to nuke Iran and when he does so, it will be, like his war of aggression against Iraq, premised upon a pack of lies. He will claim that Iran has or is building nuclear weapons though every other credible source claims Iran is years away from weapons grade production. But for "patriotism" we are expected to believe Bush when, in every other instance about every other issue, Bush has lied his sorry ass off!

The US occupation of Iraq is simply the latest in a series of warning signs that American power, best symbolized by "the" bomb, has become the bane of humankind. The US loosed upon the world an evil genie when it became the first nation to use nukes against another. That act may ultimately prove to be the end of human civilization.

I had blundered into this desolate landscape as instantly as one might wake among the craters of the moon. The moment of recognition when I realized that I was already in Nagasaki is present to me as I write, as vividly as when I lived it. I see the warm night and the meaningless shapes; I can even remember the tune that was coming from the ship. It was a dance tune which had been popular in 1945, and it was called “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t Ma Baby…?”

The power of science for good and for evil has troubled other minds than ours…. Nothing happened in 1945 except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man; and conscience, in revenge, for an instant became immediate to us…civilization face to face with its own implications. The implications are both the industrial slum which Nagasaki was before it was bombed, and the ashy desolation which the bomb made of the slum. And civilization asks of both ruins, “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t Ma Baby?”

-Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values

Bertrand Russell wrote: "Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do." It is not only those who refuse to think who have died. It is also those who think and speak out against US imperialism who have died. I would be interested in seeing an accurate, scientific study of the many who have died suspiciously since the ascension of the CIA --JFK, RFK, Hunter Thompson, JFK Jr, Paul Wellstone, MO Gov. Mel Carnahan, Martin Luther King, Jr, et al. Of the one million plus murdered by the US in Iraq, only Saddam Hussein might have faced capital crimes charges. That Hussein died at the end of a dubious show trial by a kangaroo court underscores the illegitimacy of the US occupation. That is no defense of Saddam; but neither did Saddamn get one at his show trial. There is always the hope that statistics and computer technology will catch up with the GOP, a criminal conspiracy that has for too long hid behind the rubrics of unlikely, incredible coincidence assisted by false patriotism.

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called 'education.' Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.

It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.". Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.

--Bertrand Russell, "The Impact of Science on Society", 1953

As he wrote, Russell pointed out that "scientific societies" were still in their infancies. Russell believed, however, that advances in science, primarily physiology and psychology, would make possible the kind of control over human beings that previous totalitarian regimes had only dreamed about.

Jacob Bronowski did not share Russell's apprehension with regard to science. Bronowski found in logical positivism not only the philosophical basis for science, but a moral injunction, that is, the implied imperative that we ought to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so. Bronowski believed that genocide and atrocities are the result of ideology and dogma --not science. The most moving moment in the Ascent of Man occurred in an episode entitled: 'Knowledge or Certainty'. In that episode, Bronowski visited Auschwitz where many members of his family had died.


We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge.

Russell, however, would most certainly have agreed with Bronowski with regard to dogma, against which Russell maintained an unassailable record. Likewise, in the interest of fairness to both thinkers, Bronowski did not address the horrors to which technology may be applied by those who have no interest in the conduct of real science. Science may be hijacked and distorted. Russell wrote about the evil uses of technology; Bronowski seems almost to describe a preisthood, a "keepers of scientific inquiry". Certainly --those who would drop a nuke on a country that is in no way a threat to humankind have no interest in either science or morality but in conquest. This sort will utilize the very science it hates. It is not only ironic but tragic that an increasingly rabid, conservative GOP will deny "science" even as it embraces its destructive shadow for its own nefarious purposes. Indeed, those who used the Trebouchet to raze Castles to the ground were not interested in the physics of its construction.

To that end, the Bush administration has exploited the propaganda "ministry", a role assumed so eagerly and willingly by the Fox Network. Herr Gobbels could only have dreamt about a machine so incessant, so insidious as Fox which has very nearly achieved in a TV network what Fitche had hoped to achieve with schools, that is, an "educational" system aimed "...at destroying free will so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished." That, I submit, is a recipe for the death of the human spirit and intellect.

Because it is so difficult to imagine anyone truly desiring such an outcome, it is difficult to imagine the likes of George W. Bush, the GOP, the right wing in general. It is equally difficult to imagine any such outcome being, in any way, beneficial to society or even to the architects of such a heinous monstrosity. It is difficult to imagine any such outcome being any thing other than politico/socio masturbation designed to make an increasingly tiny elite feel good about being hideous, unfeeling monsters, sub-humans, mental cripples, psychopaths. The GOP has, in fact, become that. The desire to create totalitarian states is not a legitimate political position. It is a pathology!

One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected, is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will.

—Bertrand Russell, Ideas that Have Harmed Mankind

Mike Wallace Interviews a Candid Shah of Iran

Bush intends to strike Iran. The question is when. Just recently, two credible articles --“Was That Nuclear-Armed B-52 Flight Destined for Iran?” by Dave Lindorff, and “Was a Covert Attempt to Bomb Iran with Nuclear Weapons foiled by a Military Leak?” by Dr. Michael Salla --suggested than a US attack on Iran had been thwarted by the US military itself.

On August 30, a B-52 bomber armed with five nuclear-tipped Advanced Cruise missiles traveled from Minot Air Force base, North Dakota, to Barksdale Air Force base, Louisiana. Each missile had an adjustable yield between five and 150 kilotons of TNT which is at the lower end of the destructive capacities of US nuclear weapons. For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13 kilotons, while the Bravo Hydrogen bomb test of 1954 had a yield of 15,000 kilotons. The B-52 story was first covered in the Army Times on September 5 after the nuclear armed aircraft was discovered by Airmen (see: US Army Times ). What made this a very significant event was that it was a violation of US Air Force regulations concerning the transportation of nuclear weapons by air. Nuclear weapons are normally transported by air in specially constructed planes designed to prevent radioactive pollution in case of a crash. Such transport planes are not equipped to launch the nuclear weapons they routinely carry around the US and the world for servicing or positioning.

The discovery of the nuclear armed B-52 was, according to Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists, the first time in 40 years that a nuclear armed plane had been allowed to fly in the US (see: Newswire ). Since 1968, after a SAC bomber crashed in Greenland, all nuclear armed aircraft have been grounded but were kept on a constant state of alert. After the end of the Cold War, President George H. Bush ordered in 1991 that nuclear weapons were to be removed from all aircraft and stored in nearby facilities.

--Michael Salla, Ph.D.

At a time when good news is scarce, you can at least enjoy watching Phil Donahue kick Billo Really in the ass.

Billo Loses his temper, his sanity & the debate --but still keeps his "job"

Billo's job is that of packaging Rupert Murdoch's vision, embellishing it with venom and lies. Billos job is making goppers and other extremists feel good about themselves. Billo's job is to distract decent folk with smoke and mirrors even as he winks & nods to the GOP. If he had been any good at his "job", he might have been a little less obvious. It's hard to believe that anyone --even Bush partisans --might have fallen for it.

The darker places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

--Dante Alghieri

The United States faces its greatest crisis since the Civil War. Should Bush get away with nuking Iran, there is no guarantee that the US will survive its enemies within: the Bush regime, the GOP, and the corporatocracy that they have forged with the Military/Industrial Complex and their enforcers, the CIA.

An update:

Why are there no war crimes trials?

October 3, 2007

I've watched two episodes of Ken Burns' "The War." I don't think I'll watch any more. It was young men of my generation who fought those battles. The kids killed on Guadalcanal or storming Monte Cassino were only a couple years older than I was. Nor will I read the late David Halberstam's book The Coldest Winter about Korea. My friends died in that winter cold. War is inherently ugly, destructive, horrible. The lives of young men are cut short. Parents, spouses, friends, children are marked for life by the losses they suffered. It is astonishing that despite the four wars of the last half century, we Americans do not remember the horror. Instead we blunder into new wars, blithely confident that it will be easy, short and almost bloodless. We are always mistaken. Perhaps we don't want to remember.

The TV critic of the Wall Street Journal (a newspaper that never saw a war that it didn't like including a possible war with Iran) says that Burns is wrong. Americans know that "The War" was horrible, she said. They've seen all about it on the History Channel. Yeah, everyone watches the History Channel, don't they? If Americans remember how horrible the "good war" was, why do they continue to continue to support nutcase conflicts into which our leaders rush?

The only ones who remember how bad the "good war" was are those who fought in it or those who lived through it. It became real for me, a clueless 15-year-old, one night when I was praying in our local church. In semi-darkness, a young woman, maybe a half decade older than I, was kneeling in front of the gold star shrine, sobbing softly. Then she cried out in anguish, "Why didn't you take me instead of him!"

Dismayed, I got out of the church as quickly as I could, leaving behind a prayer to God, "You take care of her, I can't!" Since then I've often wondered what happened to that young woman -- and to the other young women who have lost the men they loved. Were those deaths necessary?

There is no question that the war that Burns so brilliantly brings back was necessary. However, even in necessary wars, stupid and evil things happen. Not all the killing is necessary, but it is in the nature of war that evil is often done in the name of good and the innocent suffer without reason. Inept and publicity-hungry commanders like Mark Clark and Douglas MacArthur make terrible mistakes. Civilians are killed randomly and recklessly as in the RAF night raids on German cities. Individual human life is cheap. Angry soldiers kill prisoners. Pilots kill parachutists. Americans drop atomic bombs. Killing other human beings becomes routine. ...

Note: Johnny Mercer wrote a 1943 version of Is You is or is You Ain't My Baby. I am inclined to believe that the recording Brounowski heard was by Louis Jordan, an American Rhythm and Blues pioneer who was born July 08, 1908 in Brinkley, Arkansas and died Feb 04, 1975 in Los Angeles. An Answer.com entry lists a "Representative Song" as Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby

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The Truth About US Imperial Oil Wars Is Even Worse Than You Suspected

Germans now call Bush America's Hitler and they should know. Iran, meanwhile, has officially labeled the US army a "terrorist" organization.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has consistently led the way in telling the story of what's really going on in Iraq and Iran. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke to him about America's Hitler, Bush's Vietnam, and how the US press failed the First Amendment. Bush is accused of accepting 'Ethnic Cleansing'it's been underestimated how much the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) knows. If you follow what
(IAEA head Mohamed) El Baradei (more...) and the various reports have been saying, the Iranians have claimed to be enriching uranium to higher than a 4 percent purity, which is the amount you need to run a peaceful nuclear reactor. But the IAEA's best guess is that they are at 3.67 percent or something. The Iranians are not even doing what they claim to be doing. The IAEA has been saying all along that they've been making progress but basically, Iran is nowhere. Of course the US and Israel are going to say you have to look at the worst case scenario, but there isn't enough evidence to justify a bombing raid.

--Spiegel Online International

Read the entire article for another eye opener from Seymour Hersh. However unpopular George Bush, the American people are still largely in denial. Multiple choice opinion polls don't have a check box for just how bad things have become.

The sorry state of America did not happen overnight. It's a case study of the arrogance of power, how power corrupts and maintains itself, how power compromises its opposition with assassinations, bribes, and paid mercenaries.

Iran/Contra almost gave the game away. Ronald Reagan, playing stupid and senile, beat a high treason rap. Nevertheless, Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh believed Reagan himself complicit in a treasonous scheme to sell arms to Iran while laundering and funneling the proceeds to a right wing terrorist organization in Nicaragua.

The underlying facts of Iran/Contra are that, regardless of criminality, President Reagan, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence and their necessary assistants committed themselves, however reluctantly, to two programs contrary to congressional policy and contrary to national policy. They skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried to cover up the President's willful activities.

-- Concluding Observations, Investigations and Prosecutions, Lawrence E. Walsh, Independent Counsel, Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters

If that's not a description of high treason, I don't know what is. Yet --Ronald Reagan got off with that scolding paragraph at the end of a lengthy report. May the traitor rest in peace! In the meantime, a POX on the GOP and every Democratic sellout will do nicely.

Former CIA Analyst, Ray McGovern says, of course, it's about oil. It is so much about oil that the US government has consistently subverted legitimate regimes in order to get control of their oil and, hence, control over the price of oil on the spot markets and the price of gasoline at the pump.

So why the pressure for a wider war in which any victory will be Pyrrhic-for Israel and for the US? The short answer is arrogant stupidity; the longer answer-what the Chinese used to call "great power chauvinism"-and oil.

--Ray McGovern, CIA Analyst, Bush, Oil and Moral Bankruptcy

The issue has grown critical with the ever-growing US dependence on foreign oil. US "problems" with other countries are always with oil producing countries. East Timor barely got a headline in the US. But if Saddam Hussein so much as sneezed, he was likened unto Hitler by folk who actually helped Hitler. Bush's grandfather, in fact, financed Hitler, traded with Nazi-owned companies and plotted a treasonous fascist takeover of the US government. Treason, it seems, runs in the family.

The Bush family, sill supported by the Skull and Bones Society, the CIA, and members of the CIA in Skull and Bones forged an alliance with the US oil industry. That's why these Connecticut Yankees are not in King Arthur's court, but in a hell hole called Texas. To be fair to Texas, it was less a hell hole before the arrival of the Bush crime family.

McGovern reminds that a steady supply of oil has always been a US priority. That, and the oil depletion allowance, was a priority with US oil barons, at least as far back as Spindletop. One wonders: how long has the oil industry owned the US government which is in fact the industry's enforcement arm?

The US, when it fails to achieve its goals through traditional diplomatic efforts, has proven itself willing time and again to go to war for oil.

The US felt its "interests" in Iran threatened in 1953 when the government of Iran nationalized its oil. Nevertheless, as McGovern points out, George W. Bush was the first US president to start a major war. Most often the US has employed the secret services of the CIA and, most recently, a mercenary army --Blackwater USA, little more than George Bush's personal army. A Praetorian Guard?

The US will not tolerate someone like Hugo Chavez who dares to use oil revenues to improve the lot of the people of Venezuela. When Iran is laid waste to, will the US then strike in Venezuela?

An "enforcement" partnership between US big oil interests and the CIA was most certainly forged prior to the murder of JFK who had promised to smash the CIA into "...a thousand pieces" even has he threatened big oil with the loss of their big government hand out: the oil depletion allowance. You almost have to be from Texas to understand just how important that "oil depletion allowance" was to the likes of Clint Murchison and billionaire H.L. Hunt.

If we escalate tensions, if we succumb to hysteria, if we start making threats, we are likely to stampede ourselves into a war [with Iran], which most reasonable people agree would be a disaster for us...I think the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq.

--Zbigniew Brzezinski

The following videos by John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man " exposes US imperialism, the reasons the US is at war stealing oil in the Middle East

Part I

Part II:The second of a three part speech given to the Veterans For
Peace National Convention, Seattle, WA in August 2006.

Part III: John takes Q & A and discusses actions which can be taken to counter the globalization efforts of the multi-national corporations.

Additional Resouces

• Did the Texas Oil Industry Help Murder JFK?
• Clint Murchison, Jr.
• Oil Depletion Allowance
• Skull & Bones, Texas Oil, and the CIA
• How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power
• Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
• America Used To Be Really Goddamn Awesome
• What Democracy?
• The End of Suburbia
• The Good Shepherd

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Six years on: Amid a failed war and invasion, only 3 percent of Americans believe the US will bring Democracy to the Middle East

Some six years after 911, terrorism itself has gotten worse as Bush has mired this nation in an illegal occupation in Iraq, in fact, a war crime.[See: Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes] The "war on terrorism" is a failed boondoggle by a party that specializes in boondoggles, a party of pork, platitudes and perpetual war. At home, a mere 29 percent of Americans believe the United States is winning the war on terrorism, and, according to Foreign Policy magazine, 60 percent of Americans now believe that the attack and invasion of Iraq was a mistake. According to a BBC World Service survey 60 percent of Americans want the US out of Iraq! I have yet to read a poll, however, that accurately measures the palpable, growing rage in response to an unaccountable and out-of-control "Presidency".

U.S. forces in Iraq should be reduced significantly, according to a new study on Iraq's security forces that inflamed debate in Congress on how quickly that can happen without hurling the country into chaos.

The report, authored by a 20-member panel comprised mostly of retired senior military and police officers and led by retired Gen. James Jones, said the massive deployment of U.S. forces and sprawl of U.S.-run facilities in and around Baghdad has given Iraqis the impression that Americans are an occupying, permanent force.

Accordingly, the panel said the Iraqis should assume more control of its security and U.S. forces should step back, emboldening Democrats who want troop withdrawals to start this fall.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said he will recommend to Congress on Monday a gradual reduction of forces beginning in the spring and acknowledged that the slow pace of political solutions in Baghdad had frustrated him, The Boston Globe reported.

--Associated Press, Study: US Should Lower Profile in Iraq, by Anne Flaherty

At the heart of American discontent is a "failed surge", which Bush embarked upon against the advice of a much touted Iraq Study Group. At the heart of the US discontent is the feeling that whatever unspoken goals Bush may have had, more worthwhile goals will not be achieved. Only 5 percent of Americans believe that al Qaeda will be weakened; only 3 percent believe the US will have brought Democracy to any part of the Middle East.

Why do Americans continue to die in Iraq? The surveys by Foreign Policy and others measure attitudes about perceived progress toward stated goals. The most obvious explanation for US failure is that Bush did not invade Iraq to achieve the goals about which people are polled.

Bush invaded Iraq to achieve a hidden agenda that he dare not tell the American people. Oil!Only 12 percent of Americans believe that if the US pulls out of Iraq, terrorists "will follow us home". But the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate. A dramatic loss, in war as in chess, is defined by ever diminishing options. Bush options now approach a theoretical zero. Just as a point at which a tangent may touch a curve is described accurately only by its co-ordinates, Bush is down to the no man's land between staying and a ignominious withdrawal.

In Bush's adolescent mentality, the world is a board game and the American people are merely tokens to be pushed around on a card board map. He has conducted his presidency frivolously, as if playing a game of Risk, the object being to conquer the world, acquire territory, defend it against opponents. To withdraw is to be "followed home". In this context, the words of a Buzzflash editorial of September 24, 2001 seem prophetic.

On Sunday, September 16, Bush characterized America's coming struggle to crush terrorism as a "Crusade."

It was an ill-chosen word that fed right into the fears of the Islamic world that the Christian West was once again coming to vanquish and slay the "infidels." The Crusades occurred from the 11th through 13th Centuries as thousands upon thousands of Muslims were slain in an effort to recapture Jerusalem. The tragic irony, of course, is that the Pan-Islamic vision of Osama bin Laden and his extremist clerics present the mirror image of the Crusades: an Islamic jihad aimed at bringing about the downfall of the Judeo-Christian West -- and to rescue the "Holy Land" from the Christian infidels (for example, American bases in Saudi Arabia). Bin Laden, as we know, maniacally considers all Americans and "Crusaders" as fair targets for murder.

Although the White House apologized for Bush's evocation of the "Crusade," the propaganda damage had already been done. If we are simultaneously trying to crush extremist Islamic terrorists while minimizing the possibility of the Middle East and parts of Islamic Asia from exploding in an armed uprising, then Bush's use of the word "Crusade" was like tossing a match onto a tinder box when the use of a fire extinguisher should have been the rhetorical tool of the day.

--Can Bush Play Chess?

I've played a bit of chess, enough to recognize an exposed King trapped on his own back rank. Checkmate in one move! That's how I once beat a grand master, the only high point in my chess career. He was careless and I was lucky. Bush is careless and now makes his own bad luck. He has no more moves and doing nothing is a certain loss.

Rumsfeld: "There isn't any debate about it!"

US Soldiers Taunt Iraqi Children

Additional resources

• Global poll slams Bush leadership
• Those five nukes on that B-52 may have something to do with Iran
• BBC: Most people 'want Iraq pull-out'
• Who Lost Iraq?
• When Congress Stops Wars
• 
  Council on Foreign Relations: Interactive Timeline
  
• September’s Battle Lines
• Bush Loses War on Terrorism; Begins War on Iran
• The Terrorism Index
• How Capitalism is Killing Democracy

Discoveries

• Liberty Bound
• The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror - Narrated by Ed Asner
• Tommy Emmanuel - Pegao
• Eric Clapton - Wonderful Tonight
• The Death Squads - Iraqi Ethnic Cleansing
• Fats Waller - Honeysuckle Rose
• Gypsy Guitar Masters: Stochelo Rosenberg, Mozes Rosenberg, Romane, etc.u

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