Diatribune

Here follows an imperfect but essentially accurate history, and a sad and frightening prognosis and prognostication that I desperately hope is wrong:

Americans are pretty much like anyone else in that almost all of us like to think we’re Good People. We care about the things and people we should, we do “our part” to contribute to society, and although if people let us be we’d prefer to go our own way, bothering no one, we’re no one to mess around with. Honestly, that’s how most people seem to feel. Well, it would be fairly accurate except for a few little problems:

First, there are the Evangelistic Radical Rightists who believe, like the Puritans did, that they and they alone have the Right Way and a mandate from God Himself to enforce “right behavior” on everyone around them, except the neocons, Dominionists and Christian Reconstructionists are a truly VIRULENT breed: they believe that WHATEVER they have to do to usher in the Kingdom of God (nevermind the statement of Jesus that, “My kingdom is not of this earth”), no matter what they have to do to whomever, it’s The Right Thing To Do. To them it really doesn’t matter how many of whom die to accomplish their goals – as long as it isn’t them. As for suffering and poverty, well, they believe God decides on that, and they have no business stealing money from rich people (they mean taxes), who are, as shown by their prosperity, the Chosen of God, in order to feed the lazy, sinful poor who did nothing to earn that money. Again, the fact that they themselves set it up that way makes no difference. If God wanted it to be different it WOULD be, so God must want them to be poor and to suffer as punishment for their sinfulness. They also honestly believe that they earned the money they were born to – by being good Christians. Even if they aren’t. If they ever decide to convert or ever did, that’s that: they are “forgiven from the beginning of time” no matter what they do.

If all this means that they have to lie, cheat, steal, murder, whatever, then it’s God’s will, and they are forgiven any errors they might make before they even occur. Pretty handy. Not that they tell regular Christians all this, though; only the REAL ones - theirs. Meanwhile, if the 'apostate Christians", meaning all those NOT their own, assume they mean "We're just like you other Christians", the error is not their fault; people hear what they want to hear.

Add to this the corporations, now become Mega-Corporations, almost stateless countries.

The original construction of our society was set up so that large monetary interests – special interests – couldn’t get much of a foothold on those in government, and so that things tended to take time to do, but came out with the best and most reasonable compromises. It wasn’t perfect, but it kept both Big Business and Churches out of government. The Founders knew quite well that if one religion, or one denomination of one religion was in charge, it would try to destroy all of the others, and freedom to choose any and every other part of our lives, as individuals, could never be tolerated under such regimes. They knew their history, and they had seen religious zealots like the Puritans, and the Catholics versus the Protestants, tearing the country apart in the name of God – as they saw God. They were, most of them, Deists, or what later came to be called Free Thinkers. This meant that even if they believed in God, they didn’t think they had a monopoly on His favor or a hardline into His Mind. They knew that if ALL religions weren’t protected, NONE were, and they had also seen the results – over fifteen hundred years of them – of people who Had the Only Answers being in charge of countries. They also knew that industry, given power to rule or even undue influence, would destroy – people, the commons, everything. They sought to spare us this.

Big Business was patient, though. It took them over a century, but they managed to have enacted laws that gave businesses person-hood; that gave them most of the rights of individuals, but because of their size and wealth, power over and above the rights of mere individuals. Stealthily, over time, they also got laws enacted that arranged it so that it took great sums of money in order for members of Congress to get elected, especially to the Senate. That was their open door. In time, it took so MUCH money to get elected, only donations and other support from Big Business could get someone a seat in Congress. Knowing that Congress and would-be Congress knew this as well as they, to a great extent, they OWNED the Congress. Congress obliged as well as they could by passing laws favorable to their contributors, who also found other ways to reward them. Lobbyists became the go-betweens, and could get our reps high-paying jobs after they left congress, or really expensive vacations and other things while they were there. And they did.

After many decades of this, a new factor entered the equation: religion. Always before, it had been what everyone did on Sundays, except for the few strange ones, who were, nonetheless (except in some VERY narrow-minded places) admitted to have the right to choose a synagogue, a temple, or nothing at all. This was always imperfectly enforced by the narrow-minded, but it was always there.

The Founders had separated the legislature into two houses that could have as many parties as the People wanted, had separated them from the judicial branch, and had separated both from the executive branch precisely in order that no single person or even group would ever wield total, unaccountable power. That way lay the tyranny they had just defeated. To help protect it, they added later Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press, so that the media could sound the alarm if something were amiss in Washington without fear of prosecution or persecution by exposed wrongdoers. Special powers could be granted during a declared (by Congress) war, yes, but they were temporary, and their use must be accounted for. They simply never counted on Old Money elitists, which they did their best to place limits on as well, to combine forces with fanatic religionists, who were willing to lie their asses off ro do whatever else it took to “return the country to it’s Christian roots”, which is of course another lie: America was NEVER a “Christian country”, nor was it intended to be one. The killer, though, was what President Eisenhower called “the Military-Industrial complex”: a grouping of almost unimaginably huge businesses who made and sold ways for people to kill other people. They got very large and powerful during WWII, and they didn’t want to break apart into the relatively small businesses they had been before. They want POWER, and they wanted to keep it.

With all three of these, it was easy to take over, by mergers, hostile takeovers, buyouts and other little business tricks, and in time six or seven families who were in agreement with the Old Money neocons/theocons who were busy taking over the government ran virtually ALL of the means by which We the People stayed informed enough to decide what we wanted (and didn’t want) for our country and ourselves. Of course, once in power in the person of George W. Bush, a talentless, almost brainless, alcoholic-saved-by-God (who apparently became a personal friend afterwards) scion of money whose grandfather had made the family’s fortune banking for (selling arms to) the Nazi’s even as America was fighting them. A measure of how powerful they had become was that they weren’t indicted for anything; they were simply made to stop – take their money and go home.

George Bush’s backers are Big Business – ALL Big Businesses, from arms to pharmaceuticals to you-name-it, especially if they were contributors), and Big Religion; George owes them all, and he has been paying his debts. He has done so by cutting or removing taxes from businesses and the wealthy in general, by as much as possible giving away the commons and gutting environmental laws and labor laws that get in the way, then by encouraging the influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico who will live fifteen to a room and work for what seems to them a fortune: a few dollars a day sometimes. Skilled workers are paid minimum wage at best. Then his administration encouraged what had been illegal: offshoring. Accounts were sent out of reach of the IRS, jobs were sent to third world countries, from factories that could now pollute and poison the land, air and water as they pleased while paying a fraction of the wages an American would need, and no benefits to worry about either. Usually these companies go to countries run by dictators, so there are no unions to worry about. Their union-busting practices are very effective: life in prison or execution, often public.

George had gathered around himself people of no conscience, no (good) principles, and boundless greed, power-hunger and vindictiveness, people like Karl “Turd Blossom” Rove, who admires Machiavelli tremendously and follows his directions to the letter for stealing/taking over and running a country; “Uncle” Donald Rumsfeld, who never met a right he liked unless it belonged to just him; Dick Cheney, also called “Darth” Cheney, as he would clearly not hesitate to annihilate an inhabited planet – he does seem to be trying to – as an object lesson. I suppose it would be more accurate to call him “Grand Moff”, but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Anyway, the appointments came thick and fast, all demagogues or Bush loyalists, all in cabinet positions, on federal courts, in and usually heading regulatory agencies, and everyplace else Bush and Company could think of where they might be useful. In five and a half years, they have, together, obviated every “right” recognized by the Constitution of the United States so that it is essentially “just a piece of paper”, as Bush wanted. They have broken or removed us, unilaterally, from every treaty we’ve signed or helped write since WWII. They’ve stolen elections and blocked subsequent investigations for that and many other illegal activities. They almost have, as Elliott demanded, “…absolute power”.

There are internment camps all over the country built by a crony company, KBR, subsidiary of Halliburton (which our VP still gets money from) that almost no one knows about, and made dissent, protest, contributing to the wrong (as designated by Bush) charities a crime worthy of lifelong imprisonment without representation, trial or any other rights, torture, or simply “extrajudicial execution” (murder). They have lied to Congress repeatedly, blocked them with their bought-and-paid-for judges and others, so that even with a bit of a majority, the Democrats are all but powerless, those few who aren’t themselves corporate property. It’s gotten so that the Congress looks like an unfortunate eight year old saying, “Pretty please…” to an eight-foot werewolf in a bad movie when they want something. This was announced when a ringer became Speaker of the House, the woman to hold the position (likely for a very limited time), when almost the first words out of her mouth were, “Impeachment is off the table!” She might as well have said, “I’ve decided I’m actually a neocon, but thanks for electing me and making me Speaker – I’ll put it to good use.”

By himself, George Bush is a coward who would, oh, pull a Corporal Klinger and wave pom-poms in front of thousands of people before he’d risk himself actually SERVING his country. Oh, wait a sec… Well, you get the idea. With Daddy’s money backing him and protecting him, he hid where it was safest: in the military learning to fly in the knowledge he would never be called on to fly and fight. Just to make sure though, he went AWOL for a year. Daddy’s money bought him out of that, too. Now he has the entire power of the U.S. government to protect him, or almost all of it. Almost all who are left to feel or do otherwise is the citizenry, and perhaps, if enough generals and admirals and such realize that that their country has actually, literally, been INVADED AND TAKEN OVER by people who are as UN-American as it gets, a fed-up military, which would then have to disband into state militias, as the Founders intended anyway. Unless there IS a citizen’s or a military revolt, well, the President’s friends and family are behind the hardware and software of the voting machines that helped to give him two elections, with crony judges in place, but I suspect they won’t be needed in ’08. One bad problem, one emergency, one false-flag operation (perhaps I should have said, “…one more…”, and Mr. Bush can determine the problem to be a National Emergency, and declare martial law. And he’s already made it clear that he considers any threat to him personally or to his/Rove’s/Cheney’s plans a matter of National Security. So I figure late September or so. Waiting much longer would make it look too suspicious.

Then he will be King. Period.

Then it’s the American Revolution Part II, or Taliban America.

I see no in between, and Bush hasn’t the sense, much less the decency, to avoid it.

Ian MacLeod
Oregon
May 20th, 2007

Also posted at Daily Kos:http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/20/224420/778
Also Posted at TPM Cafe:http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/ian_macleod/2007/may/20/american_revolution_part_ii_or_taliban_america

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