A Compendium
A COMPENDIUM OF ARTICLES: CAPITALISM AMERICAN STYLE
AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S EFFORTS TO BRING
ABOUT THE END OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
Monday 26 November 2007
Fear is just another word for ignorance. - Hunter S. Thompson
Once upon a time there was Bad, and there was Worse, and there
was Worst, and that used to be it. Those were the only parameters
necessary when the time came to assess the severity of a given
situation and decide if the thing was merely wrong, actually
dangerous, or just plan ridiculous. Bad, for example, was Gerald
Ford's full pardon of Richard Nixon, which came in tandem with his
decision to let Nixon keep the tapes. That's pretty straightforward,
and the provided example should be clear enough: Bad means
something is pretty damned bad.
Worse, by comparison, was Oliver North's sale of missiles to the
same Iranian government that killed more than two hundred
Marines in Beirut back in '83, followed by his illegal funneling of
that sale's proceeds to fund a pack of kill-crazy fascists in Central
America who shot some nuns and other non-combatants down like
dogs using the good bullets they bought with thrice-laundered
American tax dollars.
All of which was taking place as Reagan slid further into the senility
that eventually left him capable only of pretending to be the
president. Rather than deal with the reality of the situation,
however, the decision was made to hand the entire hyper-
weaponized machinery of the federal government over to a bunch
of wild boys nobody ever voted for, whose abuse of that power
rapidly devolved into a mind-bending crime spree that almost got
their uncomprehending boss impeached.
As for Worst, well ... that's simple enough. Worst was a box in the
cargo hold of Air Force One that left Dallas with John Kennedy
inside of it, and was the blood pooling beneath Robert Kennedy's
head as he lay dying on a dirty kitchen floor in California, and was
Martin Luther King Jr. shot dead through the throat on some
inconsequential Memphis hotel balcony, and was Medgar Evers
shot dead in his driveway while his wife and children watched and
wailed, and was Malcom Little who became Malcolm X who
became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz before a dozen gunshots put him
down like Evers to die before the eyes of his wife and children.
That is a fair sampling of Worst, but only for openers, because this
file is the biggest of the three by orders of magnitude, fairly bursting
with names and events that sound in the reading of them like a roll-
call of doom and nightmare, for that is precisely what they are.
Worst was as terrible as it could get, or so it was believed, until
now, until the creation of a new fourth category became
unavoidably necessary. The bewildering and terrifying fact of the
matter is Worst has been fully and completely trumped by the
times, relegated to silver-medal status and the lower podium. The
grim reality of this brave new deranged world is that the nation is
now swarming with so many new and different horrors, which were
upon us in one brief and ravaging eyeblink of time. It went beyond
Worst just that fast.
As such, the new category is titled Beyond.
Beyond, for starters, is the fact nearly every American citizen
stands surrounded by a confluence of mortal perils that threaten to
completely unravel and eviscerate their country. Nearly every
American will be severely and painfully affected should these
dangers turn lethal ... and yet hardly anyone in America actually
knows this. Almost nobody understands or recognizes the cocked
and loaded gun pressed against their collective head, even as the
trigger is slowly yet steadily squeezed and there are live rounds
sitting in the chamber waiting for the hammer to drop.
One of those bullets is named George, just like his father, and he is
an unimaginably dangerous fellow. People still don't know that the
man sitting in the Oval Office of the White House is actively
working to destroy all the American government he can get his
hands on, because doing so is literally the bedrock of what passes
for his political ideology. Many newsroom pundits saw him veto
legislation to provide twelve million children with health insurance,
but brushed it off as nothing more than the act of a standard-issue
fiscal conservative. A renegade few on other news shows believed
his veto was actually motivated by the need to snatch the cash set
aside by the bill, so he could keep feeding the financial beast his
disastrous Iraq war has become.
Both opinions were almost entirely wrong, but had just enough
gristle on the bone to pass muster. Of course, Bush dropped the
veto on two Democratic domestic spending packages; and, of
course, he needs more money so he can keep losing two wars at
the same time; and, of course, these trains of thought reinforce the
conventionally-accepted story line of American politics; and that's
nice for the TV people, but has nothing to do with the truth of the
deal.
Bush vetoed those bills for one reason and one reason only: They
were going to create government programs that worked. The very
idea is rank heresy for privatizers like Bush, whose ultimate goal is
to privatize everything from Social Security to health care to the
pigeons in the park, because that's where the money his friends
and constituents have been lusting after can be found.
A government program that actually and effectively serves the
people is an intolerable thing to George, because that is the single
best argument against privatization. If we know anything at all after
all these gruesome years, it is that Bush simply will not tolerate the
existence of any fact or idea that might disrupt the spinning,
clanking, gear-grinding clockwork inside that craven pretzel-dented
bone-sack that wobbles above his spindled, slumping shoulders. If
he doesn't already believe in something, or if something contradicts
the popsicle-stick infrastructure of his beliefs, whatever it is can
basically go to Hell, because it isn't going anywhere else.
He vetoed those bills because they were going to work, period, end
of file.
THE END OF AMERICA Greg Palast
There is a man in the Oval Office of the White House working an
agenda for the destruction of American government. His partner,
Mr. Cheney, has been just down the hall taking care of the rest of
the job. Subpoenas are ignored, documents are not delivered,
Americans are put under surveillance without warrants by the NSA
with assistance from nearly every phone company in the country,
deep-cover CIA spies are blown to silence critics and
whistleblowers, American citizens are imprisoned and denied rights
that have been around for a thousand years, direct orders to
fraudulently elevate terrorism threat levels are issued to provide
cover for uncomfortable news reports, like the report on how many
blunt warnings came in before 9/11 but were ignored got itself
bounced to the back pages after the White House began yowling
about the imminent destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the
Statue of Liberty.
That is not even close to the half of it all, and this basic truth cuts to
the heart of the matter: The quickest way to destroy the
functionality of American government is to destroy the rule of law
itself. Declare the Executive supreme and beholden to nothing,
flood the Department of Justice and the federal courts with
lickspittle political loyalists with no personal code of honor, upend
the balanced counterweight of the separation of powers, terrify the
populace into submission to avoid any hue and cry, roll out the
grand distraction of war to get the flags waving and the newsrooms
into line, and never obey any law or regulation imposed by anyone,
ever.
This is what has been done to America, and it turned out to be a
frightfully simple task. Once the rule of law is gone, there is nothing
left to defend American rights and freedoms, nothing left to bring
justice to the unjust, nothing left to stop those powerful few who
aren't about to let quaint anachronisms like the Constitution, or
pesky ideas like the ones that became the United States, get in the
way of their work.
None of this information has ever been reported by the smart
people on the cable TV news shows. Much of it may not have even
occurred to most of them. Pundits don't get paid to think or be
smart, so much as they get paid to shout and have stupid hairstyles
and deliberately miss the point of every pressing issue they
address. This guarantees nobody accidentally provides real and
valuable information to the American people during any news
broadcasts, and that is what mostly keeps many Americans dumbly
frightened and easily managed.
The final product of this process is today's American body politic,
almost completely unaware of the gun at their head, a body politic
that is without the protection of law or basic rights and does not
know it, a body politic that is altogether lost and wandering and
afraid, for reasons they don't begin to understand. That is an
unbelievably dangerous state of affairs, a real threat to the very
survival of the United States. It is, simply, Beyond.
This barely scratches the surface of the situation as a whole, and
that fact alone is pretty much Beyond even Beyond all by itself. If
the national economy doesn't collapse before springtime now that
debt has again become a bad thing and the dollar is turning into
pudding, if Pakistan doesn't fall apart and lose control of its nuclear
weaponry, if Iraq and Afghanistan magically stop being lost causes,
and if George and Dick actually decide to obey the law and leave
office next year, there will only be fifty more disasters left sitting on
our national plate.
Only fifty? Boy, that would just be wild, almost like a vacation,
really. It's good to have something to look forward to. I guess.
AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S EFFORTS TO BRING
ABOUT THE END OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
Monday 26 November 2007
Fear is just another word for ignorance. - Hunter S. Thompson
Once upon a time there was Bad, and there was Worse, and there
was Worst, and that used to be it. Those were the only parameters
necessary when the time came to assess the severity of a given
situation and decide if the thing was merely wrong, actually
dangerous, or just plan ridiculous. Bad, for example, was Gerald
Ford's full pardon of Richard Nixon, which came in tandem with his
decision to let Nixon keep the tapes. That's pretty straightforward,
and the provided example should be clear enough: Bad means
something is pretty damned bad.
Worse, by comparison, was Oliver North's sale of missiles to the
same Iranian government that killed more than two hundred
Marines in Beirut back in '83, followed by his illegal funneling of
that sale's proceeds to fund a pack of kill-crazy fascists in Central
America who shot some nuns and other non-combatants down like
dogs using the good bullets they bought with thrice-laundered
American tax dollars.
All of which was taking place as Reagan slid further into the senility
that eventually left him capable only of pretending to be the
president. Rather than deal with the reality of the situation,
however, the decision was made to hand the entire hyper-
weaponized machinery of the federal government over to a bunch
of wild boys nobody ever voted for, whose abuse of that power
rapidly devolved into a mind-bending crime spree that almost got
their uncomprehending boss impeached.
As for Worst, well ... that's simple enough. Worst was a box in the
cargo hold of Air Force One that left Dallas with John Kennedy
inside of it, and was the blood pooling beneath Robert Kennedy's
head as he lay dying on a dirty kitchen floor in California, and was
Martin Luther King Jr. shot dead through the throat on some
inconsequential Memphis hotel balcony, and was Medgar Evers
shot dead in his driveway while his wife and children watched and
wailed, and was Malcom Little who became Malcolm X who
became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz before a dozen gunshots put him
down like Evers to die before the eyes of his wife and children.
That is a fair sampling of Worst, but only for openers, because this
file is the biggest of the three by orders of magnitude, fairly bursting
with names and events that sound in the reading of them like a roll-
call of doom and nightmare, for that is precisely what they are.
Worst was as terrible as it could get, or so it was believed, until
now, until the creation of a new fourth category became
unavoidably necessary. The bewildering and terrifying fact of the
matter is Worst has been fully and completely trumped by the
times, relegated to silver-medal status and the lower podium. The
grim reality of this brave new deranged world is that the nation is
now swarming with so many new and different horrors, which were
upon us in one brief and ravaging eyeblink of time. It went beyond
Worst just that fast.
As such, the new category is titled Beyond.
Beyond, for starters, is the fact nearly every American citizen
stands surrounded by a confluence of mortal perils that threaten to
completely unravel and eviscerate their country. Nearly every
American will be severely and painfully affected should these
dangers turn lethal ... and yet hardly anyone in America actually
knows this. Almost nobody understands or recognizes the cocked
and loaded gun pressed against their collective head, even as the
trigger is slowly yet steadily squeezed and there are live rounds
sitting in the chamber waiting for the hammer to drop.
One of those bullets is named George, just like his father, and he is
an unimaginably dangerous fellow. People still don't know that the
man sitting in the Oval Office of the White House is actively
working to destroy all the American government he can get his
hands on, because doing so is literally the bedrock of what passes
for his political ideology. Many newsroom pundits saw him veto
legislation to provide twelve million children with health insurance,
but brushed it off as nothing more than the act of a standard-issue
fiscal conservative. A renegade few on other news shows believed
his veto was actually motivated by the need to snatch the cash set
aside by the bill, so he could keep feeding the financial beast his
disastrous Iraq war has become.
Both opinions were almost entirely wrong, but had just enough
gristle on the bone to pass muster. Of course, Bush dropped the
veto on two Democratic domestic spending packages; and, of
course, he needs more money so he can keep losing two wars at
the same time; and, of course, these trains of thought reinforce the
conventionally-accepted story line of American politics; and that's
nice for the TV people, but has nothing to do with the truth of the
deal.
Bush vetoed those bills for one reason and one reason only: They
were going to create government programs that worked. The very
idea is rank heresy for privatizers like Bush, whose ultimate goal is
to privatize everything from Social Security to health care to the
pigeons in the park, because that's where the money his friends
and constituents have been lusting after can be found.
A government program that actually and effectively serves the
people is an intolerable thing to George, because that is the single
best argument against privatization. If we know anything at all after
all these gruesome years, it is that Bush simply will not tolerate the
existence of any fact or idea that might disrupt the spinning,
clanking, gear-grinding clockwork inside that craven pretzel-dented
bone-sack that wobbles above his spindled, slumping shoulders. If
he doesn't already believe in something, or if something contradicts
the popsicle-stick infrastructure of his beliefs, whatever it is can
basically go to Hell, because it isn't going anywhere else.
He vetoed those bills because they were going to work, period, end
of file.
THE END OF AMERICA Greg Palast
There is a man in the Oval Office of the White House working an
agenda for the destruction of American government. His partner,
Mr. Cheney, has been just down the hall taking care of the rest of
the job. Subpoenas are ignored, documents are not delivered,
Americans are put under surveillance without warrants by the NSA
with assistance from nearly every phone company in the country,
deep-cover CIA spies are blown to silence critics and
whistleblowers, American citizens are imprisoned and denied rights
that have been around for a thousand years, direct orders to
fraudulently elevate terrorism threat levels are issued to provide
cover for uncomfortable news reports, like the report on how many
blunt warnings came in before 9/11 but were ignored got itself
bounced to the back pages after the White House began yowling
about the imminent destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the
Statue of Liberty.
That is not even close to the half of it all, and this basic truth cuts to
the heart of the matter: The quickest way to destroy the
functionality of American government is to destroy the rule of law
itself. Declare the Executive supreme and beholden to nothing,
flood the Department of Justice and the federal courts with
lickspittle political loyalists with no personal code of honor, upend
the balanced counterweight of the separation of powers, terrify the
populace into submission to avoid any hue and cry, roll out the
grand distraction of war to get the flags waving and the newsrooms
into line, and never obey any law or regulation imposed by anyone,
ever.
This is what has been done to America, and it turned out to be a
frightfully simple task. Once the rule of law is gone, there is nothing
left to defend American rights and freedoms, nothing left to bring
justice to the unjust, nothing left to stop those powerful few who
aren't about to let quaint anachronisms like the Constitution, or
pesky ideas like the ones that became the United States, get in the
way of their work.
None of this information has ever been reported by the smart
people on the cable TV news shows. Much of it may not have even
occurred to most of them. Pundits don't get paid to think or be
smart, so much as they get paid to shout and have stupid hairstyles
and deliberately miss the point of every pressing issue they
address. This guarantees nobody accidentally provides real and
valuable information to the American people during any news
broadcasts, and that is what mostly keeps many Americans dumbly
frightened and easily managed.
The final product of this process is today's American body politic,
almost completely unaware of the gun at their head, a body politic
that is without the protection of law or basic rights and does not
know it, a body politic that is altogether lost and wandering and
afraid, for reasons they don't begin to understand. That is an
unbelievably dangerous state of affairs, a real threat to the very
survival of the United States. It is, simply, Beyond.
This barely scratches the surface of the situation as a whole, and
that fact alone is pretty much Beyond even Beyond all by itself. If
the national economy doesn't collapse before springtime now that
debt has again become a bad thing and the dollar is turning into
pudding, if Pakistan doesn't fall apart and lose control of its nuclear
weaponry, if Iraq and Afghanistan magically stop being lost causes,
and if George and Dick actually decide to obey the law and leave
office next year, there will only be fifty more disasters left sitting on
our national plate.
Only fifty? Boy, that would just be wild, almost like a vacation,
really. It's good to have something to look forward to. I guess.
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