November 7, 2006 : A Day of Renewal

Sweet is not the word I would choose to describe “Dubya’s” recent tactics in a Republican campaign message to dubious GOP supporters in Sugarland, Texas. In rhetoric that smacked of much more propaganda than fact, GWB made it appear that, by giving the Democrats a majority in both houses of Congress in the upcoming mid-term elections, American voters would undermine the security of the United States. How impudent it was for him to make that sort of statement, when it is a fact that a high-level CIA officer, during the Bush administration’s fourth month in office during 2001, met and talked with Osama Bin Laden while the Saudi terrorist was undergoing surgery at a French hospital. I wonder what they talked about during that meeting. It definitely didn’t concern an outstanding arrest warrant issued by President Clinton against Bin Laden in 2000. Or perhaps it was casually mentioned and disregarded as inapplicable. The fact that the high-ranking spook left Bin Laden resting comfortably and returned to Langley CIA Headquarters after an hour-or-so of dialogue is enough for me to presume that the six-foot-six Arab was allowed to finish his convalescence and leave the hospital untouched. Michael Moore factually detailed GWB’s close personal relationship with Bin Laden in his documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which made it seem very plausible that, if Bush gave twelve million dollars of American tax money to the Taliban a month before the 9/11 bombings, and since the Taliban supported Bin Laden and his alleged terrorist camps, the sitting President supported Bin Laden until the moment he accused him of attacking the United States. So, from profitable associate in foreign oil to arch-villain in a matter of a year, that’s the way the Bush-Bin Laden union devolved. But, of course, GWB will deny a close relationship with Bin Laden with the same flourish his daddy showed when he said, “read my lips” on assuring the American taxpayers of no new tax increases in 1989.

Dubya has a lot of people, especially dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, duped into believing that he and his executive intelligence agencies and paramilitary agencies-within-agencies, had nothing to do with the attacks on the WTC towers and the Pentagon. But, of course, he had the 9/11 Commission under his paradoxical thumb, saying, on the one hand, that he definitely wanted to get to the bottom of the crimes which killed over 4,000 Americans and foreign national, and, on the other, refusing to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission in giving testimony under oath, and turning over documents and records needed by the Commission in order to reach an informed conclusion.

Now, the sitting President wants to scare Americans into not voting for honest and upright Democratic candidates, who oppose the War in Iraq and the illegal deprivation of basic human freedoms, by making statements as outlandish and deceitful as those made by Joseph Goebbels about the Jews before and during the Second World War. If that doesn’t work, to turn around the current polls in the favor of the GOP, I’m pretty sure that Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Rice, and their CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA operatives will plan something pretty sinister in order to keep the elections from occurring. But is that possible under existing law? The Office of the U.S. President currently has power to do literally anything it wants with impunity, and without Congress knowing the truth. The U.S. representatives and senators have no way of knowing exactly what is going on in the White House and the Pentagon at all times. In fact, they only know what the President and his cronies want them to know. Senators and congressmen may be told one thing in official oversight committee hearings, and exactly the opposite can result. Consider Iran-Contra and Watergate. Congress had no knowledge about the illegal goings-on until whistle blowers leaked them to the press. Thank God for a free press!

During the last four decades, Democrats have controlled the White House and the Congress for only twelve of those forty years. And you can see the way the republic has suffered in the hands of elected and appointed men and women set upon maintaining the status quo of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Over time, the events leading to, and insuring, that 98% of the wealth in the U.S. remains in the hands of only 2% of the population will be through the incremental globalization of the American economy. And this globalization cannot occur without an imperialistic foreign policy designed to seize and control the natural resources of other nations for the benefit of a system of corporate capitalism, where governments will align themselves with multi-national corporations, so that the buying, selling, and trading will ultimately benefit the richest people who own and operate the corporations. Outsourcing is a good example of the way a multi-national corporation can influence the level of employment within a nation. If nations align and agree to outsource production of products and services in order to control the supply and demand of producible consumer items, (oil, coal, timber, vegetable produce, etc), the poor people of the respective nations will be dependent upon the multi-national system, and not their own basic economy, in order to survive.

A prime example of the foregoing, which utterly galls me, is the absurd fluctuation in gasoline prices within the United States during the last ten months. Prices skyrocketed from February 2006 to July 2006 to over $3.00 per gallon, and then twelve weeks before the mid-term elections they began to magically come down to under $2.00 per gallon. During the period of time that the prices were at their highest point, both American and foreign oil corporations were being enriched nearly 85% above their standard income through public purchase of oil products. They realized that most Americans would buy the product, regardless of the exorbitant price, to fill up their vehicles with gasoline even if the cost went over $4.00 per gallon. By analogy, it took nearly fifty years for the price of a 5 cent candy bar to inflate to 70 cents under ordinary free market forces. But the price of gas goes up nearly 50 percent in less than a year and then back down 50 percent to a targeted baseline price and federal government economists attribute it to normal market forces? Along with corporations manipulating product prices, the value of U.S. money is being regulated by a private corporation, the Federal Reserve Board, instead of Congress, as mandated by the U.S. Constitution. The Executive Branch wasn’t given any control over American money until authority was bestowed upon the President, by Congress, to appoint the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The system originally set in order by the Founding Fathers, and defined by the U.S. Constitution, has gone through a process not of refinement, but of perversion, which has produced an awful mutation of what was once a finely tuned republic.

Since GWB’s first inauguration, in 2001, the American nation has been governed by the forces of despotism cloaked in what may only be described as false patriotism. It was Count Montesquieu who, in the 18th Century, quipped that when the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government are vested in the hands of one person, a tyranny will be the sad result. God willing, the power of truth will prevail in the upcoming elections on November 7th, when the forces of the greater good, for the great majority of the American people, will prevail, and divest destructive Republican neo-conservatism from our government and replace it with the substance of justice and equity bequeathed to the American republic through the sacrifices tendered by the Framers.