| The Purpose of the Bush Administration |
I've lived through the administrations of nine presidents, a sequence beginning with John F. Kennedy. The history of the United States during my lifetime can best be described as a mad dash to Hell down the unguarded winding road of a steep mountain slope in a secondhand car with no brakes. It started off with the assassination of a popular president, possibly by George Bush Sr., and is now ending with the assassination of the Constitution by George W. Bush, the alleged assassin's son. Along the way we had corrupt Lyndon B. Johnson, paranoid Nixon, unelected Ford, well-intentioned but not successful Carter, corporatist puppet Reagan, Satan Himself Bush I, pharmaceutical factory bombing Clinton, and Son of Satan Bush II. The ride has sucked. I wish I had gotten off when I was young enough to consider immigrating, but I didn't, so here I am with the rest of you in the proverbial basket on the way to Hell.
Looking back over those years, it becomes clear that there has been a purpose to our collective journey. It isn't a purpose we chose for ourselves. When I was born, the American middle class was blooming. Nearly everyone owned a house. One person could support an entire family. The standard of living was the best in the world. It seemed really nice, at least if you were white. We had won World War II little more than a decade and half before my birth. That war had transformed the United States into an industrial dynamo like none before seen. We were cranking out most of the world's products. It was a time when “Made in Japan” meant “cheap and unreliable.” We were rocking the world and we knew it.
All of this success, high wages, and a high standard of living made us think we were equal to the ruling class. In fact, we thought we were pretty much a classless society. Had we been a socialist country at that time, this would have been a good sign. The fact was, however, that we were a capitalist country and any sense of equality we had was an illusion. What we perceived as equality was merely a form of politeness. It was a kind of gentleman's agreement, an agreement where the ruling class pretended to be humble and the middle class pretended to have rights. Now, its easy to pretend you have rights, especially when everyone around you tells you that you have rights. So long as you are too polite to actually use your rights, it is easy to believe that they are there, in the same way children believe there is a Santa Claus.
The first glimpse white people had that their rights were an illusion occurred during the Vietnam War when white students began protesting against the war. Yes, I realize that white students were not the only students protesting against the war, but non-white students already knew the score. It was the white student that had this lesson to learn, and learn they did. The uprisings and struggles during the 1960s made it clear to the ruling class that the gentleman's agreement wasn't working out in their best interest. The people were becoming uppity. The people actually believed that they lived in a classless society. The people were beginning to make demands. This just wouldn't do. It had become necessary to dismantle the illusion and make it clear who was in charge: the wealthy corporatists.
Now, you may think I am exaggerating, but I am not. When I was in high school, a teacher made reference to G. William Domhoff's book: Who Rules America. Students, such as myself, found the premise of the book impossible to accept. We had been programmed to believe that it was We The People that ruled the United States. The book told us it was corporations, banks, and agri-businesses. We couldn't see the connection. Domhoff seemed like a wacko. Today he seems quite sober.
If there was a turning point, it was the election of Ronald Reagan. Suddenly, being greedy was considered a good thing. Reagan rejected all notions of social equality. From his view, the best way to grow an economy was to hand everything over to the rich and powerful. He called this “tickle down economics,” but it should have been called “piss on the working class” economics.
Ronald Reagan wasn't revolutionary. The working class had been pissed upon in America ever since there was a working class. The difference with Reagan was that all pretenses of respect for the working class were completely and totally discarded. It was the capitalist version of “letting it all hang out.” Reagan pushed towards privatization. Reagan, despite his disdain for big government, borrowed excessively and created opportunities to spend tax revenues on corporate welfare. He ratcheted up the cold war, not because he actually wanted to end it, but because defense spending is one of the more efficient ways of transferring tax revenues over to the corporate class. Indeed, when the cold war came to an end, the corporate welfare economy suddenly was faced with life without an easy excuse for transferring the treasury into their own pockets.
With the end of the cold war, naked capitalism came face to face with its own success. It had succeeded in driving the more peaceful socialist countries into economic collapse while simultaneously erasing its own modus operandi for robbing the treasury. Without this excuse to rob the treasury blind, talk emerged of a “Peace Dividend.” After all, if we weren't spending all of this money on war, we could be spending it on social programs, on education, on health care, on helping the poor. Nothing terrifies the corporatist class more!
Clinton was the primary beneficiary of the “Peace Dividend”. He could have used it in all of the positive ways I've mentioned, but he didn't. Instead he used it on a silly “war on drugs” and also used it to pay down the deficit. The latter was a good use, but the former was a ruse to keep money flowing to the dying defense industry.
The defense industry, life blood of the corporatist class, was not content to receive an occasional bone for the War on Drugs. If they couldn't have a cold enemy to provide an excuse for massive transfers of wealth, they would need a hot enemy. The problem with conventional enemies is that conventional enemies can be defeated. When you go to war with another state, there comes a point where you either win or lose. The corporatist class needed a permanent excuse to bleed the country dry. That excuse was terrorism.
Terrorism is a neat trick governments play when they want to terrorize their own populations. Mysterious masked people can throw bombs and the government can pick whomever they wish to dehumanize as the alleged source of the attacks. Things can be made to blow up, no masked mystery people required, and those events can be attributed to whomever the government choses. A government willing to kill its own people can create whatever enemy it wants to. Such a government knows that people will clamor for protection from the bogeymen. It has always been this way.
George W. Bush, son of a possible assassin, was chosen as the reliable puppet of the corporatist class. His purpose was to create an illusionary enemy, one that would never be defeated. That illusionary enemy would be used as the permanent reason to suck the life out of The People and transfer their taxes over to the corporatist class. War after war would ensure that debt would pile so high that future generations, regardless of their politics, would be obliged to continue the bleeding in order to repay the debt.
When George W. Bush attacked the United States of America on September 11, 2001, the plan worked better than they ever imagined. The corporate media did what it does best, tow the government line while pretending to be objective and leading The People to their enslavement.
We were told, immediately after 9/11, that on no uncertain terms, things would never be the same again. How did they know this? They knew it because those who had decided that things would never be the same again told them to tell us that things would never be the same again. The corporatists knew this was a coup and they supported it. They knew it was a coup because they were behind the coup.
The Bush Administration is now reaching its final orgasm. Time is running out. The next puppets may not be as reliable as the current puppet. They are on their final months of uninhibited greed and inhumanity. Their purpose becomes more and more naked with each passing day. They are sucking our blood ever farther into the future by transferring unimaginable amounts of capital to banks and an insurance company AIG. They are provoking war with Pakistan. They are provoking war with Iran. They are provoking war with Russia. Never in our history have we had a president so determined to destroy, once and for all, everything that characterized the United States: the Constitution, a middle class, and world respect.
The Bush Administration's purpose has been to hand the United States Government, The People of the United States, and the future generations of the United States over to the corporatist class. They have fulfilled this purpose without ever asking us if we wanted it. We didn't vote on these things. We didn't consent to these things. We have no moral obligation to remain loyal. We have no moral obligation to pay these debts. I suggest we turn our backs on them and build anew.
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