by

Allisone Heartsong

© 2004 In God We Trust

In his televised press conference on 13 April 2004, George Bush has emerged as a polished public relations performer. The smirk is gone, and stumbling is a thing of the past.

He appears to the world as a handsome, intelligent man who is capable of thinking on his feet and responding to the challenging questions of reporters with impressive skill, confidence, and sincerity.

What is more, he seems to have convinced himself that he is doing the right thing and is fully qualified to lead the American people as President of the United States.

There is just one problem: the stark contrast between what the Bush Administration has actually been doing and the carefully contrived cosmetic picture which he presents to the world is as different as night and day.

If it were not for the cold, hard facts, who would ever guess that the political agenda of this suave PR performer is rapidly undoing the United States of America while wreaking havoc throughout the world?

The PR formula that has been used to manufacture the emperor’s clothes is readily apparent and easy to discern for those who have eyes to see. And the naked truth which has now been concealed beneath the emperor’s clothing is equally obvious to all those who have ears to hear.

On 18 December 2000, shortly after being appointed President by the Supreme Court, George the Second confided to members of the press: "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator."

However, it was his father, George the First who really let the cat out of the bag when he confided to journalist Sarah McClendon in 1992: "If the American people ever knew what we have done, we would be chased down the street and lynched."

Suffice it to say that the Amerika of George Bush I and George Bush II is not to be confused with the America of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.

Simply stated, the essence of the PR formula on which the Bush Dynasty is based consists in the ruthless sacrifice and blatant desecration of truth for the sake of political power, the fundamental premise being that "might makes right," which translates into the amoral ethic that "the end justifies the means."

Viewed from this perspective, politics is simply the art of deception, and economics is nothing more than the science of deception.

The aim of this formula is to produce a political psychopath who is adept at lying for the purpose of taking control and maintaining control of the political high ground.

In other words, the goal is to always look good, to never look bad, to always be right, to never be wrong, and consequently to never admit a mistake or an error.

Although he may in fact be a puppet whose strings are pulled by invisible controllers operating from behind the scenes, such a political leader must pretend to be the ultimate decision-maker.

On the premise that a strong offense is the best defense, he must also play the role of the "good guy" who successfully challenges carefully selected "bad guys" who can be set up to play the role of villains on the public stage so that he can then emerge from the conflict as the victorious hero. And from this it follows that he must be perceived by the public as a fearless warrior engaged in perpetual war against evil-doers for the purpose of protecting the people, even if he has to enslave them in the process.

After four years of intensive training based on this PR formula, George Bush II has emerged as a seasoned word warrior who may appear to be nothing more than a jovial jousting champion but who is actually a master of verbal deception.

Masquerading as a "compassionate conservative" and supported by a Republican coalition of corporate executives and right-wing religious leaders, as well as by the international bankers who constitute the core of the global elite, George the Second is now seeking a second term of office which will enable him to complete the agenda for what his father, George the First, referred to as "the New World Order", namely the enslavement of humanity by a totalitarian world government such as was clearly foreseen by George Orwell in his book, 1984.

At this juncture, it appears that the political alternative will be John Kerry, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, who, like George Bush, went to Yale, where he was inducted into Skull and Bones, the secret society which serves as a primary training ground for the carefully selected and groomed insiders of the global elite.

It is now a well-established fact that the United States government was subverted in 1913 by passage of the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act and then declared bankrupt by passage of the unconstitutional Emergency Banking Act in 1933. It remains to be seen how much longer the American people will continue to give their sovereign power away by paying illegitimate income taxes to an illegitimate government that seeks to enslave them in the guise of protecting them.

ADDENDUM: 6 September 2004

BUSH ON THE COUCH, by Justin Frank, M.D., constitutes a red alert that we simply cannot afford to ignore.

Reading Dr. Frank’s professionally competent exposé of the psychopathic personality which clearly underlies the fraudulent words and oppressive deeds of George W. Bush is the urgent, top-priority responsibility of every American citizen who wishes to be informed.

ADDENDUM 2004

"Our enemies . . . never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

                    George W. Bush

ADDENDUM 2 February 2005:

The State of the Union message delivered by George W. Bush on 2 February 2005 is a masterpiece of disinformation and propaganda which demonstrates the extraordinary sophistication that the psychopathic global elite have now achieved in their use of brainwashing and mind-control techniques to deceive, mislead, and subjugate the American people.

The key purpose of Bush's State of the Union address on 2 February 2005 was to shift the rationale for his unconstitutional invasion of Iraq from "War on Terror" to "War on Tyranny."

In his inaugural speech on 20 January 2005, Bush prepared the way for this shift by declaring: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

ADDENDUM 30 April 2005

When asked in a recent interview how he thinks he will be viewed by history, George W. Bush answered: "It doesn't really matter.  There won't be any history.  The world will be over."

ADDENDUM 18 July 2005

Opinion: George W. Bush is a Victim of Mind Control
by HERMES
(Posted here by Wes Penre, July 17, 2005)

Having at one point had the unique opportunity of living with deprogramming a victim of US government mind control and Satanic Ritual Abuse, I can only come to one conclusion regarding our current President. George W. Bush is "suffering" from what the DSM-IV calls "Structured Dissociative Identity Disorder (SDID)", or mind control. This is not to be confused with regular Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder which is the minds natural reaction to severe childhood trauma.

Among other things, this would explain why no one in the administration or military will comment on what Bush was doing, or even where he was, during his missing months of service. In my opinion he was being programmed.

Most of the time, as everyone knows, Bush can barely complete a sentence without an "ummm - uh - er," or stammer. However, in all his major Speeches, ie. State of the Union, Post 9-11 and Pre War speeches I have only found ONE stutter and NONE of his usual "ummm's - uhh's and er's". In a rather unscientific experiment, using the software ACID, I have compared various speeches by several great speakers including: Churchill, Martin Luther King, and Bill Clinton, (ok, he was not THAT great but speeches were readily available on the internet), and none of them speak with the metronomic consistency (of 105 Beats Per Minute) of George W. Bush, when his "Great Speech Giving "GSG" personality has been activated. It is barely human, but very hypnotic. On the flip side when his "GSG" personality is NOT activated he cannot speak at a consistent pace for more than 10 or 20 seconds in a row.

I have seen exactly how these people are triggered and how personalities can be switched with nothing more complex than a handshake, gesture or phrase, (I believe Dick Cheney, who has been accused by several mind control victims of being a handler, rapist and cocaine addicted murderer among other things, triggers him either by a phrase or handshake right before taking the podium for speeches such as the State of the Union. If you closely watch his entrance to these speeches he's usually very relaxed but, as soon as he shakes Big Dicks hand you can see his expression become much more subdued and serious. I believe his wife is another one of his handlers. She whispers directly into his ear after many of his speeches and you can actually see his facial muscles relax and he begins to smile. It's very subtle but look for it next time you see her do this after a speech. Either she is saying, "Nice speech honey, when we get home we're gonna' have some FUN!" OR, she is bringing back his regular personality with a phrase such as, "There's no place like home, George, there's no place like home." (I have dubbed the original personality he was born with, the "Goofy Texan").

This theory would explain the almost total disconnect between his words and actions and it would also explain all of the lies and flip- flops. Here's a perfect example, he repeatedly stated, in "GSG" mode, "we will win the War on Terror!", and then, just once, he slipped and said "I don't think the war on terror can be won...". The next day it was right back to "we will win the war on terror!" Anyone with half a brain knows that you can't win a war on terror as violence simply causes more violence. The day he slipped up he honestly spoke what his "Goofy Texan" personality believes and anyone with an IQ of more than 70 knows (I do not think he is a total idiot, just a victim). One thing I have learned first hand about mind control victims is that MOST of their personalities will believe, and are totally incapable of disagreeing with, anything and everything that they are told by their handlers. If Dick Cheney told the "GSG"
personality that by blowing up the World Trade Center the world would be a better place and that it would save the lives of millions in the future, the "GSG" personality would not even know how to disagree with him. I, however, do not think Bush knew. On 9-11 after Andy Card told him what happened I think the look on his face is first an attempt to hide from the children the combination of shock, revulsion and confusion he must have felt at that moment but then you can almost see his face saying, "Oh my God! That's why they sent me to read to these school kids today!" I think at that moment I think HE realized that the attack what was most likely orchestrated by Cheney and Rumsfeld and he was asking himself "What the hell am I gonna' do?" (Side question to readers: Has anyone bothered to find out how many times in his political career G. W. Bush has read to school children? Does he do that a lot or was that the first time?)

I think normally the press and public only get to see and hear one or two of the PROGRAMMED personalities, but every so often we get to see the real him, the "Goofy Texan", and that is when the contradictions occur, when we hear what HE actually thinks rather than what he has been programmed to believe and say. If he is a victim he would not even be aware of contradicting himself which is why he is able to say, "I never said that," even after you repeatedly show him a video tape of him saying "that". (Many, if not all victims of Project Monarch for example are programmed to watch the "Wizard of Oz"
several times a year which reinforces their programming, this is one reason it is run over and over again on television during the month of October. They will watch the entire film front to back repeatedly that month but if you ask them how the movie ends they will tell you sadly, "Dorothy Dies." They never register the fact that in the end, Dorothy exposes Oz for the small, pathetic, insecure power hungry little twerp that he really is.)

Can someone come up with a better explanation for Bush's hypocrisy, other than that he simply is a liar? Why else would a Fundamentalist Christian sign the death warrants for thousands of Americans and more than a hundred thousand Iraqis without so much as an "I'm sorry..."? (One woman victim I know of had Christian, Wiccan, Jewish, Satanic and Atheistic personalities. The Christian and Jew greatly valued life and would do almost anything to save it, the Wiccan sacrificed animals but not people, the Satanist would sacrifice anything including newborn children and drink their blood and the Atheist would kill only if ordered to do so or in self defense, however they would NOT defend themselves if attacked by their handlers.)

Why else would a supposed closet homosexual want to ban gay marriage? Even if he's not a homosexual why would he say before he was "elected" in 2000 that he did not feel that it was necessary to create legislation banning same sex marriage. (One male victim know of had a gay, straight and even a lesbian personality that truly believed that he was a woman, despite the lack of female sex organs!)

There is one real dead give away to me that George Bush is a mind control victim, the eyes. It is said that "the eyes are the windows to the soul". Does anyone see anything more in Bush's eyes than a tiny sign saying "Vacant"? These are the eyes of victims of both mind control and Satanic Ritual Abuse. After more than a decade of research into these disturbing subjects and talking with therapists who specialize in treating mind control and SRA, I can maybe shed a little light on why this is. It is very simple. MOST humans, do have an immortal soul (a conscious energy), that joins with their body for their life here on Earth. Immortal souls don't like to be controlled, they generally will rebel against any attempts at mind control programming. Therefore before the majority of the programming can be implemented the soul must first either be banished from the body or imprisoned within it through rituals. (Yes I am talking here about Black Magic and yes the military used it for mind control purposes, at least until they had developed the technology to do "electronic rituals" using various forms of ELF and microwave technology). Think of solar energy as your soul, think of a solar cell as the ritual, and the battery connected to the cell as the prison for the soul.
 
The solar energy (soul) can be released at a later date if one simply knows how connect a light bulb to the battery and turn it on until the battery is drained (the soul is completely released). I once was allowed to witness a ritual to free an imprisoned soul (actually I have witnesses two but one did not work). Before the ritual this individual had the eyes of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney (D. Cheney is not a mind control victim but I do believe he was born without a soul). After the ritual they had the bright, sparkling, lively eyes of someone like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King or maybe Robin Williams or Sarah Jessica Parker.

In my opinion George W. Bush is one of two things. He is either one of the greatest liars to ever stand before a podium, or he is victim of US Government Mind Control with an imprisoned soul.

I could determine for sure which one he is given five minutes alone with him, however I doubt I will ever get that opportunity.

Either way until George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of these so called Neo-Cons are removed from office and until we as a race learn to identify the people who are capable of these crimes and STOP LETTING THEM ACHIEVE POSITIONS OF POWER, there will be NO PEACE ON EARTH...

Until then, spread as much love as you can and do not be scared, the "worst" thing that can happen is physical death and that, for most of us, will be the "best" most enlightening moment of our lives and our first true taste of spiritual freedom.

LOVE AND PEACE TO ALL
HERMES

ADDENDUM 2005 by Greg Szymanski

Cindy Sheehan has already had her heart ripped into a million pieces by the illegal Iraqi war, losing the son she loved more than life itself only five days after he arrived in Baghdad in April 2004...

So when Sheehan received an invitation to meet privately with President Bush at the White House two months after her son died, the least she could have expected was a bit of compassion or a kind word coming from the heart.

But what she encountered was an arrogant man with eyes lacking the slightest bit of compassion, a President totally detached from humanity and a man who didn’t even bother to remember her son’s name when they were first introduced.

Instead of a kind gesture or a warm handshake, Sheehan said she immediately got a taste of bush arrogance when he entered the room and in a condescending tone with a disgusting loud Texas accent said: “Who we’all honorin’ here today?”

“His mouth kept moving, but there was nothing in his eyes or anything else about him that showed me he really cared or had any real compassion at all. This is a human being totally disconnected from humanity and reality. His eyes were empty, hollow shells, and he was acting like I should be proud to just be in his presence, when it was my son who died in his illegal war! It was one of the most disgusting experiences I ever had.”

A Message from Cindy Sheehan Saturday 03 September 2005

LIMITED COPYRIGHT 2005
THIS ARTICLE MAY BE REPRINTED REPUBLISHED OR REPOSTED IN PARTIAL OR IN FULL BY ANYONE OR BY ANY ORGANIZATION ON THE STRICT CONDITION THAT SAID INDIVIDUAL OR ORGANIZATION IS NOT SUPPORTIVE OF ANY GOVERNMENT THAT IS ENGAGED IN ANY ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST ANYONE, ANYWHERE!

George Bush has been an incompetent failure his entire life. Fortunately for humanity, he was just partying his way through school, running companies into the ground, and being an alcoholic and cocaine abuser for most of that time - and his incompetence was limited to hurting the people who worked for him and his own family. The people in his life who were hurt by his incompetence probably have been able to "get on" with their lives. Now, though, his incompetence affects the world and is responsible for so many deaths and so much destruction. How many of us did not foresee the mess he would make of the world when he was selected the first time? We saw what he had done to Texas. How many of us marveled and were so discouraged and amazed when he was "re-elected" the second time? We saw what he had done to the world. Dangerous incompetence should never be rewarded, let alone be rewarded so handsomely as in George's case.

        There it is.

    I think we should finish the tour so we can talk about what an abject failure this administration is. The unnecessary tragedy in New Orleans is directly related to the unnecessary tragedy in Iraq: Unnecessary being the operative word.

      I really believe that George and his band of incompetent and dangerous thugs need to resign. It would be the only honorable and competent thing to do. But wait....

ADDENDUM December 2005

"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face.  It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"

                    George W. Bush

ADDENDUM 19 January 2006

 Are You Ready to Be Bugged and Tortured by George W. Bush?
    By Harvey Wasserman
    The Free Press

    Thursday 19 January 2006

    It's not really terrorists George W. Bush wants to bug and torture. It's YOU.

    It's not really terrorism he wants to fight. It's opposition from people he can't control.

    It's not really US security he wants to protect. It's the power of his regime.

    The Constitutional debate about whether these executive privileges are allowable in war is a smoke screen.

    This isn't about war: It's about dictatorship. It's about making power permanent by using private information against you, and by terrifying you with torture.

    Team Bush believes it rules by Divine right. It has already re-defined "terrorist" to mean anyone who questions its power. It will use "anti-terrorist" wiretapping as a tool against anyone who dares oppose it.

    All serious indicators show that "information" extracted by torture is virtually worthless in fighting terrorism. So is the information taken from wiretapping huge numbers of people, which Bush has been doing since before 9/11.

    So ask yourself: if granted the power to torture, do you trust the Bush Administration--or any regime- to refrain from torturing its political opponents? If granted the power to record private phone conversations, do you trust Karl Rove to not use this material against his political opponents?

    Who will Bush go after first? Al Queda or the Quakers? Bin Laden or Cindy Sheehan?

    If Bush gets away with this, then it's simple: if you are too outspoken in opposing this regime's destruction of social security, or the natural environment, or the economy, you will sooner or later be subject to torture.

    If Bush's phone buggers pick up information or statements taken out of context that can incriminate or make you look bad, Rove will not hesitate to leak them to FOX and use them for partisan purposes.

    The Constitution of the United States is absolutely clear about banning these abuses. The patriotic Americans who demanded the Bill of Rights knew these powers must be outlawed to retain any hope of preserving our freedom and democracy. That's why they did so, clearly and explicitly.

    Those who support giving Bush these powers are undoubtedly ready and willing to be tortured and bugged themselves.

    As for the rest of us, there can be no compromise with tyranny.

ADDENDUM January 20 2006

Global Eye

Chain of Fools

By Chris Floyd
Published: January 20, 2006

Things are looking a bit grim for the Bush faction these days. Their chief bagman, Jack Abramoff, is in the clink, naming names. Their top congressional enforcer, Tom DeLay, is in the dock, sinking fast. Their "war of choice" in Iraq has stalled in murderous quagmire. Their poll numbers are plummeting as scandal after scandal turn the American people against them. What, then, will be the fate of these brutal, bungling, bloodstained goons when they face the voters in the coming elections?

Why, victory, of course!

In fact, this year's congressional races and the presidential contest in 2008 are already over, and the Bushists have won. It's true that some of the candidates have not yet been chosen -- including whatever frontman the goon squad picks to replace the kill-crazy klutz from Crawford -- but the vast machinery of electoral malfeasance that propelled this extremist faction to power over the wishes of the electorate in both 2000 and, yes, 2004, is not only still in place, it's growing stronger all the time.
 

No one has laid bare the malodorous innards of this democracy-devouring monster better than Mark Crispin Miller, whose new book, "Fooled Again," takes us back to the dastardy of Election Day 2004 and the hydra-headed campaign of vote-rigging that preceded it. This second heist of the White House is one of the great untold stories of our time -- even though it was largely carried out in plain sight. Miller performs the simple but increasingly rare act of journalism and gathers a mountain of overwhelming evidence from publicly available material. This is no "conspiracy theory" stitched together from anonymous sources, strained inferences and dark innuendo, but a solid case based on official records, sworn testimony, eyewitness accounts, news reports and the Bushists' own words.

The game was actually given away long before the balloting, when one of the faction's congressional waterboys, Representative Peter King, was captured -- on film -- boasting that the fix was in. At a White House chow-down in summer 2003, King was asked who he thought would win in 2004. "It's already over," King said. "The election's over. We won. ... It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."

Indeed they did. As often noted here, tens of millions of votes are now counted using paperless, easily hackable electronic voting machines programmed -- and often administered -- by a handful of corporations whose officers are unabashed Bush backers. Two of these, the notorious Diebold and lesser-known but equally shadowy ES&S, were kickstarted by right-wing tycoon Harold Ahmanson, once the major backer of the Christian Reconstruction movement -- which advocates total theocratic rule of state and society by Christian mullahs, with death for homosexuals, disenfranchisement for unbelievers and slavery for debtors, among other delights.

With these corporations at the helm, the 2004 vote was the most shambolic in U.S. history, plagued by an epidemic of machine breakdowns and shortages (almost entirely in key Democratic precincts) and by a rash of "glitches" that "inexplicably" switched the voter's intended choice to a different candidate, or added hundreds or even thousands of "ghost" votes to a candidate's total. In every single recorded case of such "accidents," the beneficiary of these unearned votes was President George W. Bush. Meanwhile, as in 2000, strange voting patterns emerged in pockets across the country, where unknown fringe candidates unaccountably received thousands of votes -- at the expense of the Democratic candidate.

Of course, gaming the electronic voting grid was only part of the operation. Voter suppression techniques first unlig> Email this article
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George W. Bush, the out-of-control despot who thinks the Presidency of the United States is a license to lie at will, wage war on a whim and break the law without recrimination, put on his “I am in charge” face Thursday and, for all practical purposes, told anyone who thinks his powers should be subject to review or oversight to go screw themselves.

Bush told reporters that he will assert his “presidential prerogatives” any damn way he pleases and will do so without apology, without question and without concern for the law, the Constitution or the rights of Americans.

His press conference was a frightening study of a madman on a tear, an insane, power-mad tyrant who believes he is above the law and cannot be questioned. Sadly, it appears no one has the balls to questions his lunacy.

“I'm going to continue do everything within my authority to protect the American people,” Bush told reporters. That’s Bushspeak for “I’m in charge here you dumb pukes and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.”

“We'll continue our terrorist surveillance program against al Qaeda. Congress must reauthorize the Patriot Act so that our law enforcement and intelligence and homeland security officers have the tools they need to route the terrorists -- terrorists who could be planning and plotting within our borders,” he said. Translation: “I’ll spy on Americans, I’m use the Constitution to wipe my ass and I’ll declare marital law and run this country like the dictator I want so desperately to be.”

On his illegal actions authorizing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans, Bush said “If the attempt to write law …is likely to expose the nature of the program, I'll resist it.” What he is saying is “I’m above the law, goddamnit, and I’ll fight every attempt to make me obey the law.

On the Iraq war, Bush declared: “there is an act passed by Congress in 2001 which said that I must have the power to conduct this war using the incidents of war. In other words, we believe there's a constitutional power granted to Presidents, as well as, this case, a statutory power. And I'm intending to use that power -- Congress says, go ahead and conduct the war, we're not going to tell you how to do it.”

I worked on Capitol Hill for a number of years and wrote more than my share of legislation. I know a thing or two about how the government is designed to work and the checks and balances that are supposed to be built into the system. I’ve also read what Congress passed and nothing in that act or the Constitution gives Bush the authority he claims or the power he abuses.  He’s not just a liar. He’s a god-damned liar.

The arrogance surfaced often as he faced the press. His eyes darted from side to side, blinking rapidly – a textbook example of a maniac on the loose.  His temper threatened to erupt more than once because a couple of reporters actually had the gall to actually question his motives.

After too many years watching this man destroy what once was a great nation, I can only conclude that Bush is insane and his insanity is protected by a brain-dead populace and a power-mad political party that can’t possibly accept the sad fact that they helped put a madman in charge of our government and have kept him there.

I believe with all my soul that George W. Bush and the Republicans who rubber-stamp his actions represent a clear and present danger to the peace and security of the United States and all must be removed from office immediately if this nation is to survive.

And those are words I never, ever, thought I’d write about a President or other elected officials of this country. And I wish, with all my heart that I did not have to write them now.

But those who love this country and put patriotism above politics must act. America, if it wishes to remain America, must remove the cancer that threatens to destroy it.

ADDENDUM 9 March 2006

Bush: A Deaf Man Spouting
    By Sidney Blumenthal
    The Guardian UK

    Thursday 09 March 2006

A videotape of Bush's briefing before Hurricane Katrina exposes him as out of touch with reality.

    On the eve of George Bush's presidential campaign in 2000, the neoconservative Kenneth Adelman cast him as Prince Hal, who "puts the indiscretions of his youth behind him" and "redeems his father's reign." After September 11, Bush was wreathed with regal laurels as Henry V by a clerisy of pundits. From Ground Zero to the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln ("Mission Accomplished") the president struck bold poses, but his choreographed gestures have especially illuminated his hollow crown in the darkened breach of New Orleans.

    For the first time, last week, the public has seen the spontaneous Bush behind closed doors, in a leaked videotape that recorded his briefing the day before Hurricane Katrina struck. Teleconferenced in from his Crawford ranch, Texas, Bush listens to disaster officials inform him that the storm will be unprecedented in its severity and consequences. "This is, to put it mildly, the big one," says Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Centre, warns: "This hurricane is much larger than Hurricane Andrew ever was." Bush asks not a single question, says, "We are fully prepared," and departs.

    The Katrina videotape is defining for Bush's presidency. It exposes a deaf man spouting talking points. After the hurricane hit, he stayed on vacation, went to a birthday party, strummed a guitar with a country and western singer, and on September 1 said: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." On his flight back to Washington, four days after landfall, his aides gave him a DVD of television news reports of the hurricane's impact about which he had done nothing to learn on his own.

    As the catastrophe of the foreshadowed aftermath unfolded, he clapped Brown on the back: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." But soon the administration settled on Brownie as the scapegoat, prevented him from defending himself and forced him to resign. He was expected to fall on his sword.

    Suddenly, last week, the sacrificial Brown stormed back, the betrayed turning on his betrayers. He proclaimed on every media outlet that he would no longer play the fall guy, detailed the warnings he had given, and named malefactors running up the chain of command.

    In New Orleans, a sad Mardi Gras has come and gone, while crews from the morgue continue searching for bodies - still finding them. The city has lost more than half its population, most of the refugees are African-Americans, and their neighbourhoods remain scenes of devastation. Having rejected a plan for rebuilding, Bush travelled to New Orleans for another photo-opportunity this week to announce a programme that would supposedly give money to the homeless but absurdly will not permit destroyed housing to be replaced by new. Not one penny so far has been spent on new homes. Six months after the tempest, New Orleans, one of the glories of American life and culture, lies in ruins, and Bush visits to pose as visionary.

    In a recently published hagiography on the theme of Bush-as-Prince-Hal, Rebel-in-Chief, written by the rightwing pundit Fred Barnes, Bush explained to him that his job is to "stay out of minutiae, keep the big picture in mind." To illustrate his self-conception, he "called my attention to the rug" in the Oval Office. Bush said that he wanted the rug to express that an "optimistic person comes here." He delegated the task to his wife, Laura, who designed a rug featuring bright yellow rays of the sun. In his Oval Office, Prince Hal imagines himself grown into a Sun King.

Addendum 21 April 2006

ADDENDUM 24 October 2006

 Advertising Terrorism
    By Keith Olbermann
    MSNBC Countdown

    Monday 23 October 2006

The key to terrorism is not the act - but the fear of the act.

    Tonight, a special comment on the advertising of terrorism - the commercial you have already seen.

    It is a distillation of everything this administration and the party in power have tried to do these last five years and six weeks.

    It is from the Republican National Committee;

    It shows images of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri;

    It offers quotes from them - all as a clock ticks ominously in the background.

    It concludes with what Zawahiri may or may not have said to a Pakistani journalist as long ago as 2001: His dubious claim that he had purchased "suitcase bombs."

    The quotation is followed (by sheer coincidence no doubt) by an image of a massive explosion.

    "These are the stakes," appears on the screen, quoting exactly from Lyndon Johnson's infamous nuclear scare commercial from 1964.

    "Vote - November 7th."

    There is a cheap "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" quality to the whole thing, and it also serves to immediately call to mind the occasions when President Bush dismissed Osama bin Laden as somebody he didn't think about - except, obviously, when elections were near.

    Frankly, a lot of people seeing that commercial for the first time, have laughed out loud.

    But - not everyone.

    And therein lies the true threat to this country.

    The dictionary definition of the word "terrorize" is simple and not open to misinterpretation:

    "To fill or overpower with terror; terrify. To coerce by intimidation or fear."

    Note please, that the words "violence" and "death" are missing from that definition.

    The key to terror, the key to terrorism, is not the act - but the fear of the act.

    That is why bin Laden and his deputies and his imitators are forever putting together videotaped statements and releasing virtual infomercials with dire threats and heart-stopping warnings.

    But why is the Republican Party imitating them?

    Bin Laden puts out what amounts to a commercial of fear; The Republicans put out what is unmistakable as a commercial of fear.

    The Republicans are paying to have the messages of bin Laden and the others broadcast into your home.

    Only the Republicans have a bigger bank roll.

    When, last week, the CNN network ran video of an insurgent in Iraq, evidently stalking and killing an American soldier, the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Mr. Hunter, Republican of California, branded that channel, quote, "the publicist for an enemy propaganda film" and that CNN used it "to sell commercials."

    Another California Republican, Rep. Brian Bilbray, called the video "nothing short of a terrorist snuff film."

    If so, Mr. Bilbray, then what in the hell is your Party's new advertisement?

    And Mr. Hunter, CNN using the video to "sell commercials"?

    Commercials!

    You have adopted bin Laden and Zawahiri as spokesmen for the Republican National Committee!

    "To fill or overpower with terror; terrify. To coerce by intimidation or fear."

    By this definition, the people who put these videos together - first the terrorists and then the administration - whose shared goal is to scare you into panicking instead of thinking - they are the ones terrorizing you.

    By this definition, the leading terrorist group in this world right now is al Qaida.

    But the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party.

    Eleven Presidents ago, a chief executive reassured us that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself."

    His distant successor has wasted his administration insisting that there is nothing we can have but fear itself.

    The vice president, as recently as this month, was caught campaigning with the phrase "mass death in the United States."

    Four years ago it was the now-Secretary of State, Dr. Rice, rationalizing Iraq with "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

    Days later Mr. Bush himself told an audience that "we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

    And now we have this cheesy commercial - complete with images of a faked mushroom cloud, and implications of "mass death in America."

    This administration has derived benefit and power from terrorizing the very people it claims to be protecting from terror.

    It may be the oldest trick in the political book: scare people into believing they are in danger and that only you can save them.

    Lyndon Johnson used it to bury Barry Goldwater.

    Joe McCarthy leaped from obscurity on its back.

    And now the legacy has come to President George Bush.

    Of course, the gruel of fear is getting thinner and thinner, is it not, Mr. President?

    And thus more and more of it needs to be made out of less and less actual terror.

    After last week's embarrassing Internet hoax about ‘dirty bombs' at football stadiums, the one your Department of Homeland Security immediately disseminated to the public, a self-described "former CIA operative" named Wayne Simmons, cited the fiasco as "the, and I mean the, perfect example of the President's Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program - how vital they are."

    Frank Gaffney, once a respected assistant secretary of defense and now the president of something called the Center for Security Policy, added, "one of the things that I hope Americans take away from this, is not only that they're gunning for us not just in a place like Iraq - but truly, worldwide."

    Of course, the "they" to which Mr. Gaffney referred, turned out to be a lone 20-year-old grocery bagger from Wisconsin named Jake - a kid, trying to one-up some other loser in an Internet game of chicken.

    His "threat," referenced seven football stadiums at which dirty bombs were to be exploded yesterday. It began with the one in New York City - even though there isn't one in New York City. And though the attacks were supposed to be simultaneous, four of the games were scheduled to start at 1 p.m. ET and the others at 4 p.m. ET.

    More over, the kid said he'd posted the identical message on 40 websites since September.

    We caught him in "merely" about six weeks, even though the only way he could have been less subtle, less stealthy, and less of a threat was if he'd bought an advertisement on the Super Bowl broadcast.

    Mr. Bush, this is the - what? - 100th plot your people have revealed, that turned out to be some nonsensical misunderstanding, or the fabrications of somebody hoping to talk his way off a water board in Eastern Europe?

    If, Mr. President, this is the kind of crack work that your new ad implies that only you and not the Democrats can do, you, sir, need to pull over and ask for directions.

    The real question of course, Mr. Bush, is why did your Department of Homeland Security even release this information in the first place?

    It was never a serious threat. Even the first news accounts quoted a Homeland spokesman as admitting "strong skepticism" - the kind of strong skepticism which most government agencies address before telling the public, not afterwards.

    So that leaves two options, Mr. President.

    The first option: you and your department of Homeland Security don't have the slightest idea what you're doing. Thus, contrary to your flip-flopping between saying "we're safe" and saying "but we're not safe enough," and contrary to the vice president's swaggering pronouncements about the lack of another attack since 9/11, the last five years has been just an accident.

    Or there's the second option: your political operatives leaked this nonsense for the same reason your political operatives put out that commercial - to scare the gullible.

    Obviously the correct answer, Mr. Bush, is all of the above.

    There are some of us who could forgive you for trying to run your candidates on the coattails of the Grim Reaper, for reducing your party's existence to "Death and Attacks Us."

    It's cynical and barbaric.

    But, after all, it may be merely the natural extension of the gutter politics to which you have subscribed since you sidled over from baseball, and the business world of other people's money.

    But to forgive you for terrorizing us, we would have to believe you somehow competent in keeping others from doing so.

    Yet, last week, construction workers repairing a subway line in New York City, were cleaning out an abandoned manhole on the edge of the World Trade Center site, when they stumbled on to the impossible: human remains from 9/11.

    Bones and fragments.

    Eighty of them.

    Some as much as a foot long.

    The victims had been lying, literally in the gutter, for five years and five weeks.

    The families and friends of each of the 2,749 dead - who had been grimly told in May of 2002 that there were no more remains to be found - were struck anew as if the terrorism of that day had just happened again.

    And over the weekend they've found still more remains.

    And now this week will be spent looking in places that should have already been looked at a thousand times five years ago.

    For all the victims in New York, Mr. Bush - the living and the dead - it's a touch of 9/11 all over again.

    And the mayor of this city, who called off the search four-and-a-half years ago is a Republican.

    The governor of this state with whom he conferred is a Republican.

    The House of Representatives, Republican.

    The Senate, Republican.

    The President, Republican.

    And yet you can actually claim that you and you alone can protect us from terrorism?

    You can't even recover our dead from the battlefield - the battlefield in an American city - when we've given you five years and unlimited funds to do so!

    While signing a Military Commissions Act so monstrous that it has been criticized by even the John Birch Society, you told us, Mr. Bush, "there is nothing we can do to bring back the men and women lost on September 11th, 2001. Yet we'll always honor their memory, and we will never forget the way they were taken from us."

    Except, of course, for the ones who've been lying under a manhole cover for five years.

    Setting aside the fact that your government has done nothing else for those five years but pat yourselves on the back about terror, while waging pointless war on the wrong enemy in Iraq, and waging war on the cherished freedoms in America;

    Just on this subject of counter-terrorism, sir, yours is the least competent government, in time of crisis, in this country's history!

    "These are the stakes," indeed, Mr. President.

    You do not know what you are doing.

    And the commercial - the one about which Zawahiri might say "hey, pretty good - we love your choice of font style"?

    All that need further be said is to add three words to Shakespeare.

    Mr. President, you, and that advertisement of terror, are full of sound and fury - signifying (and competent at) nothing.

Addendum 25 October 06

George W. Bush v. The US Constitution
    By Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.)
    In These Times

    Tuesday 24 October 2006

In July 2005, 122 members of Congress, along with more than 500,000 Americans, sent a letter to President George W. Bush, asking him to verify whether the assertions set forth in the so-called "Downing Street Minutes" were accurate. The president never responded.

 

That lack of response prompted Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, to commission his staff to write a report examining the administration's manipulation and deception during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. When the New York Times reported in December 2005 that President Bush had approved widespread warrantless domestic surveillance of innocent Americans, (later corroborated in May 2006 by USA Today), Conyers asked his staff to document those abuses as well. The final report, "The Constitution In Crisis," released in August with little attention from the mainstream media, is a compelling indictment of the Bush administration.

 

Academy Chicago Publishers recently published the report as a book, titled George W. Bush versus the U.S. Constitution. Below, In These Times has excerpted the book's foreword by Rep. Conyers, who explains the dangers to the Constitution posed by the Bush administration's assertion of a "unitary executive."

    Scandals such as Watergate and Iran-Contra are widely considered to be constitutional crises, in the sense that the executive branch was acting in violation of the law and in tension with the majority party in the Congress. But the system of checks and balances put in place by the Founding Fathers worked, the abuses were investigated, and actions were taken-even if presidential pardons ultimately prevented a full measure of justice.

    The situation we find ourselves in today under the administration of George W. Bush is systemically different. The alleged acts of wrongdoing my staff has documented-which include making misleading statements about the decision to go to war; manipulating intelligence; facilitating and countenancing torture; using classified information to out a CIA agent; and violating federal surveillance and privacy laws-are quite serious. However, the current majority party has shown little inclination to engage in basic oversight, let alone question the administration directly. The media, though showing some signs of aggressiveness, is increasingly concentrated and all too often unwilling to risk the enmity or legal challenge from the party in charge. At the same time, unlike previous threats to civil liberties posed by the Civil War (suspension of habeas corpus and eviction of Jews from portions of the Southern States); World War I (anti-immigrant "Palmer Raids"); World War II (internment of Japanese-Americans); and the Vietnam War (COINTELPRO); the risks to our citizens' rights today are potentially more grave, as the war on terror has no specific end point.

    Although on occasion the courts are able to serve as a partial check on the unilateral overreaching of the executive branch-as they did in the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision invalidating the president's military tribunal rules-the unfortunate reality remains that we are a long way from being out of the constitutional woods under the dangerous combination of an imperial Bush presidency and a compliant GOP Congress. I say this for several reasons. The Hamdan decision itself was approved by only five justices (three justices dissented, and Chief Justice Roberts recused himself because he had previously ruled in favor of the administration) and was written by 86-year old Justice Stevens. In the event of his retirement in the next two years, the Court's balance would probably be tipped as he would undoubtedly be replaced by another justice in the Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito mode, favoring an all-powerful "unitary" executive. In the very first hearing held on the decision, the administration witness testified that "the president is always right," and severely criticized the Court's decision. The Republican majority also appears poised to use the decision to score political points rather than to reassert congressional prerogatives: that House Majority Leader Boehner disingenuously declared the case "offers a clear choice between Capitol Hill Democrats who celebrate offering special privileges to violent terrorists, and Republicans who want the president to have the necessary tools to prosecute and achieve victory in the Global War on Terror."

    Thus, notwithstanding the relevance of the Hamdan decision, I believe our Constitution remains in crisis. We cannot count on a single judicial decision to reclaim the rule of law or resurrect the system of checks and balances envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Rather, we need to restore a vigilant Congress, an independent judiciary, a law-abiding president, and a vigorous free press that has served our nation so well throughout our history.

    I believe it is essential that we come together as a nation to confront religious extremism and despicable regimes abroad as well as terrorist tactics at home. However, as a veteran, I recognize that we do no service to our brave armed forces by asking them to engage in military conflict under false pretenses and without adequate resources. Nor do we advance the cause of fighting terrorism if our government takes constitutionally dubious short cuts with little law enforcement value, that alienate the very groups in this country whose cooperation is central to fighting this seminal battle.

    Many of us remember a time when the powers of our government were horribly abused. Those of us who lived through the Vietnam conflict know the damage that can result when our government misleads its citizens about war. As one who was included on President Nixon's "enemies list," I am all too familiar with the specter of unlawful government intrusion. In the face of these lessons, I believe it is imperative that we never lose our voice of dissent, regardless of political pressure. As Martin Luther King said, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal." None of us should be bullied or intimidated when the executive branch charges that those who criticize their actions are "aiding the terrorists" and "giving ammunition to America's enemies," or when the executive warns that "Americans need to watch what they say," as this administration has done.

    It is tragic that our nation has invaded another sovereign nation because "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," and that millions of innocent Americans have been subject to government surveillance outside proper legal process. It is unforgivable that Congress has been unwilling to examine these matters or take actions to prevent these circumstances from occurring again. Since the majority party is unwilling to fulfill their oversight responsibilities, it is incumbent on individual members of Congress, as well as the American public, to act to protect our constitutional form of government.

    It should be noted that without the assistance of the "blogosphere" and other Internet-based media, it would have been impossible for my staff to assemble all of the information, sources and other materials that they did, and I would like to offer them my heartfelt thanks. Whereas the so-called "mainstream media" have frequently been willing to look past the abuses of the Bush administration, the blogosophere has proven to be a new and important bulwark of our nation's First Amendment freedoms.

Addendum  19 November 2006

Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush
    By Peter Baker
    The Washington Post

    Sunday 19 November 2006

    The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.

    Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling- out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."

    Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.

    A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years. By this point in Bill Clinton's tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. But Bush's strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq venture.

    "There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic situation... . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful."

    The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N. Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the war.

    Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the president.

    "People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.

    "If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee."

    And so, in what some saw as a rebuke, Senate Republicans restored Trent Lott (Miss.) to their leadership four years after the White House helped orchestrate his ouster, with some saying they could no longer place their faith entirely in Bush.

    Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this was a White House that held itself up as holy."

    Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq - all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said, "so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction."

    The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington, according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his administration.

    The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W. Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L. Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government, culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.

    On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.

    Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle, Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that could be turned into an opportunity.

    In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."

    Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."

    White House officials tend to brush off each criticism by claiming it was over-interpreted or misguided. "I just fundamentally disagree," Cheney said of the comments by Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives before the midterm elections. Others close to the White House said the neoconservatives are dealing with their own sense of guilt over how events have turned out and are eager to blame Bush to avoid their own culpability.

    Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute, said he is distressed "to see neocons turning on Bush" but said he believes they should admit mistakes and openly discuss what went wrong. "All of us who supported the war have to share some of the blame for that," he said. "There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons should not get too angry at Bush about that."

    It may also be, he said, that the mistake was the idea itself - that Iraq could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. "That part of our plan is down the drain," Muravchik said, "and we have to think about what we can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy."

    Few of the original promoters of the war have grown as disenchanted as Adelman. The chief of Reagan's arms control agency, Adelman has been close to Cheney and Rumsfeld for decades and even worked for Rumsfeld at one point. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he wrote in The Washington Post before the Iraq war that it would be "a cakewalk."

    But in interviews with Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and The Post, Adelman said he became unhappy about the conduct of the war soon after his ebullient night at Cheney's residence in 2003. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction disturbed him. He said he was disgusted by the failure to stop the looting that followed Hussein's fall and by Rumsfeld's casual dismissal of it with the phrase "stuff happens." The breaking point, he said, was Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to occupation chief L. Paul Bremer, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.

    "The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the president can give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq," Adelman said. All told, he said, the Bush national security team has proved to be "the most incompetent" of the past half- century. But, he added, "Obviously, the president is ultimately responsible."

    Adelman said he remained silent for so long out of loyalty. "I didn't want to bad-mouth the administration," he said. In private, though, he spoke out, resulting in a furious confrontation with Rumsfeld, who summoned him to the Pentagon in September and demanded his resignation from the defense board.

    "It seemed like nobody was getting it," Adelman said. "It seemed like everything was locked in. It seemed like everything was stuck." He agrees he bears blame as well. "I think that's fair. When you advocate a policy that turns bad, you do have some responsibility."

    Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals: "The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."

Addendum 21 November 2006

Speaking the Unvarnished Truth to Psychopathic Liars

Olbermann: Lessons from the Vietnam War
Keith Olbermann responds to Bush's comparison between Vietnam and Iraq
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Updated: 7:55 p.m. CT Nov 20, 2006

[Zeppnote: the day after Olbermann delivered this, Kissinger unequivocably stated that the "war" in Iraq cannot be won.]

It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again.

And it is pathetic to listen to a man talk unrealistically about Vietnam, who permitted the “Swift-Boating” of not one but two American heroes of that war, in consecutive presidential campaigns.

But most importantly — important beyond measure — his avoidance of reality is going to wind up killing more Americans.

And that is indefensible and fatal.

Asked if there were lessons about Iraq to be found in our experience in Vietnam, Mr. Bush said that there were, and he immediately proved he had no clue what they were.

“One lesson is,” he said, “that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while.”

“We’ll succeed,” the president concluded, “unless we quit.”

If that’s the lesson about Iraq that Mr. Bush sees in Vietnam, then he needs a tutor.

Or we need somebody else making the decisions about Iraq.

Mr. Bush, there are a dozen central, essential lessons to be derived from our nightmare in Vietnam, but “we’ll succeed unless we quit,” is not one of them.

The primary one — which should be as obvious to you as the latest opinion poll showing that only 31 percent of this country agrees with your tragic Iraq policy — is that if you try to pursue a war for which the nation has lost its stomach, you and it are finished. Ask Lyndon Johnson.

The second most important lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If you don’t have a stable local government to work with, you can keep sending in Americans until hell freezes over and it will not matter. Ask Vietnamese Presidents Diem or Thieu.

The third vital lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: Don’t pretend it’s something it’s not. For decades we were warned that if we didn’t stop “communist aggression” in Vietnam, communist agitators would infiltrate and devour the small nations of the world, and make their insidious way, stealthily, to our doorstep.

The war machine of 1968 had this “domino theory.”

Your war machine of 2006 has this nonsense about Iraq as “the central front in the war on terror.”

The fourth pivotal lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If the same idiots who told Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to stay there for the sake of “peace With honor” are now telling you to stay in Iraq, they’re probably just as wrong now, as they were then ... Dr. Kissinger.

And the fifth crucial lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush — which somebody should’ve told you about long before you plunged this country into Iraq — is that if you lie your country into a war, your war, your presidency will be consigned to the scrap heap of history.

Consider your fellow Texan, sir.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson held the country together after a national tragedy, not unlike you did. He had lofty goals and tried to reshape society for the better. And he is remembered for Vietnam, and for the lies he and his government told to get us there and keep us there, and for the Americans who needlessly died there.

As you will be remembered for Iraq, and for the lies you and your government told to get us there and keep us there, and for the Americans who have needlessly died there and who will needlessly die there tomorrow.

This president has his fictitious Iraqi WMD, and his lies — disguised as subtle hints — linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and his reason-of-the-week for keeping us there when all the evidence for at least three years has told us we need to get as many of our kids out as quickly as possible.

That president had his fictitious attacks on Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, and the next thing any of us knew, the Senate had voted 88-2 to approve the blank check with which Lyndon Johnson paid for our trip into hell.

And yet President Bush just saw the grim reminders of that trip into hell: the 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese killed; the 10,000 civilians who’ve been blown up by landmines since we pulled out; the genocide in the neighboring country of Cambodia, which we triggered.

Yet these parallels — and these lessons — eluded President Bush entirely.

And, in particular, the one over-arching lesson about Iraq that should’ve been written everywhere he looked in Vietnam went unseen.

“We’ll succeed unless we quit”?

Mr. Bush, we did quit in Vietnam!

A decade later than we should have, 58,000 dead later than we should have, but we finally came to our senses.

The stable, burgeoning, vivid country you just saw there, is there because we finally had the good sense to declare victory and get out!

The domino theory was nonsense, sir.

Our departure from Vietnam emboldened no one.

Communism did not spread like a contagion around the world.

And most importantly — as President Reagan’s assistant secretary of state, Lawrence Korb, said on this newscast Friday — we were only in a position to win the Cold War because we quit in Vietnam.

We went home. And instead it was the Russians who learned nothing from Vietnam, and who repeated every one of our mistakes when they went into Afghanistan. And alienated their own people, and killed their own children, and bankrupted their own economy and allowed us to win the Cold War.

We awakened so late, but we did awaken.

Finally, in Vietnam, we learned the lesson. We stopped endlessly squandering lives and treasure and the focus of a nation on an impossible and irrelevant dream, but you are still doing exactly that, tonight, in Iraq.

And these lessons from Vietnam, Mr. Bush, these priceless, transparent lessons, writ large as if across the very sky, are still a mystery to you.

“We’ll succeed unless we quit.”

No, sir.

We will succeed against terrorism, for our country’s needs, toward binding up the nation’s wounds when you quit, quit the monumental lie that is our presence in Iraq.

And in the interim, Mr. Bush, an American kid will be killed there, probably tonight or tomorrow.

And here, sir, endeth the lesson.

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15821138/page/2/

Addendum 30 November 2006
 

Is President Bush Sane?
by Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Krugman: The Great Wealth Transfer
 
--It's the biggest untold economic story of our time: more of the 
nation's bounty held in fewer and fewer hands. And Bush's tax cuts are 
only making the problem worse
 
Paul Krugman, Rolling Stone, November 30, 2006
 
http://roziusunbound.blogspot.com/2006/12/paul-krugman-great-wealth-transfer.html
 
Why doesn't Bush get credit for the strong economy?" That question has 
been asked over and over again in recent months by political pundits. 
After all, they point out, the gross domestic product is up; 
unemployment, at least according to official figures, is low by 
historical standards; and stocks have recovered much of the ground they 
lost in the early years of the decade, with the Dow surpassing 12,000 
for the first time. Yet the public remains deeply unhappy with the state 
of the economy. In a recent poll, only a minority of Americans rated the 
economy as "excellent" or "good," while most consider it no better than 
"fair" or "poor."
 
Are people just ungrateful? Is the administration failing to get its 
message out? Are the news media, as conservatives darkly suggest, 
deliberately failing to report the good news?
 
None of the above. The reason most Americans think the economy is fair 
to poor is simple: For most Americans, it really is fair to poor. Wages 
have failed to keep up with rising prices. Even in 2005, a year in which 
the economy grew quite fast, the income of most non-elderly families 
lagged behind inflation. The number of Americans in poverty has risen 
even in the face of an official economic recovery, as has the number of 
Americans without health insurance. Most Americans are little, if any, 
better off than they were last year and definitely worse off than they 
were in 2000.
 
But how is this possible? The economic pie is getting bigger -- how can 
it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices? The answer, 
of course, is that a few people are getting much, much bigger slices. 
Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits 
have doubled. The gap between the nation's CEOs and average workers is 
now ten times greater than it was a generation ago. And while Bush's tax 
cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most 
Americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on 
average. In fact, once all of Bush's tax cuts take effect, it is 
estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year -- the 
richest five percent of the population -- will pocket almost half of the 
money. Those who make less than $75,000 a year -- eighty percent of 
America -- will receive barely a quarter of the cuts. In the Bush era, 
economic inequality is on the rise.
 
Rising inequality isn't new. The gap between rich and poor started 
growing before Ronald Reagan took office, and it continued to widen 
through the Clinton years. But what is happening under Bush is something 
entirely unprecedented: For the first time in our history, so much 
growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most 
Americans are failing to gain ground even during a time of economic 
growth -- and they know it.
 
A merica has never been an egalitarian society, but during the New Deal 
and the Second World War, government policies and organized labor 
combined to create a broad and solid middle class. The economic 
historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo call what happened between 
1933 and 1945 the Great Compression: The rich got dramatically poorer 
while workers got considerably richer. Americans found themselves 
sharing broadly similar lifestyles in a way not seen since before the 
Civil War.
 
But in the 1970s, inequality began increasing again -- slowly at first, 
then more and more rapidly. You can see how much things have changed by 
comparing the state of affairs at America's largest employer, then and 
now. In 1969, General Motors was the country's largest corporation aside 
from AT&T, which enjoyed a government-guaranteed monopoly on phone 
service. GM paid its chief executive, James M. Roche, a salary of 
$795,000 -- the equivalent of $4.2 million today, adjusting for 
inflation. At the time, that was considered very high. But nobody denied 
that ordinary GM workers were paid pretty well. The average paycheck for 
production workers in the auto industry was almost $8,000 -- more than 
$45,000 today. GM workers, who also received excellent health and 
retirement benefits, were considered solidly in the middle class.
 
Today, Wal-Mart is America's largest corporation, with 1.3 million 
employees. H. Lee Scott, its chairman, is paid almost $23 million -- 
more than five times Roche's inflation-adjusted salary. Yet Scott's 
compensation excites relatively little comment, since it's not 
exceptional for the CEO of a large corporation these days. The wages 
paid to Wal-Mart's workers, on the other hand, do attract attention, 
because they are low even by current standards. On average, Wal-Mart's 
non-supervisory employees are paid $18,000 a year, far less than half 
what GM workers were paid thirty-five years ago, adjusted for inflation. 
And Wal-Mart is notorious both for how few of its workers receive health 
benefits and for the stinginess of those scarce benefits.
 
The broader picture is equally dismal. According to the federal Bureau 
of Labor Statistics, the hourly wage of the average American 
non-supervisory worker is actually lower, adjusted for inflation, than 
it was in 1970. Meanwhile, CEO pay has soared -- from less than thirty 
times the average wage to almost 300 times the typical worker's pay.
 
The widening gulf between workers and executives is part of a stunning 
increase in inequality throughout the U.S. economy during the past 
thirty years. To get a sense of just how dramatic that shift has been, 
imagine a line of 1,000 people who represent the entire population of 
America. They are standing in ascending order of income, with the 
poorest person on the left and the richest person on the right. And 
their height is proportional to their income -- the richer they are, the 
taller they are.
 
Start with 1973. If you assume that a height of six feet represents the 
average income in that year, the person on the far left side of the line 
-- representing those Americans living in extreme poverty -- is only 
sixteen inches tall. By the time you get to the guy at the extreme 
right, he towers over the line at more than 113 feet.
 
Now take 2005. The average height has grown from six feet to eight feet, 
reflecting the modest growth in average incomes over the past 
generation. And the poorest people on the left side of the line have 
grown at about the same rate as those near the middle -- the gap between 
the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn't changed. But 
people to the right must have been taking some kind of extreme steroids: 
The guy at the end of the line is now 560 feet tall, almost five times 
taller than his 1973 counterpart.
 
What's useful about this image is that it explodes several comforting 
myths we like to tell ourselves about what is happening to our society.
 
MYTH #1: INEQUALITY IS MAINLY A PROBLEM OF POVERTY.
According to this view, most Americans are sharing in the economy's 
growth, with only a small minority at the bottom left behind. That 
places the onus for change on middle-class Americans who -- so the story 
goes -- will have to sacrifice some of their prosperity if they want to 
see poverty alleviated.
 
But as our line illustrates, that's just plain wrong. It's not only the 
poor who have fallen behind -- the normal-size people in the middle of 
the line haven't grown much, either. The real divergence in fortunes is 
between the great majority of Americans and a very small, extremely 
wealthy minority at the far right of the line.
 
MYTH #2: INEQUALITY IS MAINLY A PROBLEM OF EDUCATION.
This view -- which I think of as the eighty-twenty fallacy -- is 
expressed by none other than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the 
Federal Reserve. Last year, Greenspan testified that wage gains were 
going primarily to skilled professionals with college educations -- 
"essentially," he said, "the top twenty percent." The other eighty 
percent -- those with less education -- are stuck in routine jobs being 
replaced by computers or lost to imports. Inequality, Greenspan 
concluded, is ultimately "an education problem."
 
It's a good story with a comforting conclusion: Education is the answer. 
But it's all wrong. A closer look at our line of Americans reveals why. 
The richest twenty percent are those standing between 800 and 1,000. But 
even those standing between 800 and 950 -- Americans who earn between 
$80,000 and $120,000 a year -- have done only slightly better than 
everyone to their left. Almost all of the gains over the past thirty 
years have gone to the fifty people at the very end of the line. Being 
highly educated won't make you into a winner in today's U.S. economy. At 
best, it makes you somewhat less of a loser.
 
MYTH #3: INEQUALITY DOESN'T REALLY MATTER.
In this view, America is the land of opportunity, where a poor young man 
or woman can vault into the upper class. In fact, while modest moves up 
and down the economic ladder are common, true Horatio Alger stories are 
very rare. America actually has less social mobility than other advanced 
countries: These days, Horatio Alger has moved to Canada or Finland. 
It's easier for a poor child to make it into the upper-middle class in 
just about every other advanced country -- including famously 
class-conscious Britain -- than it is in the United States.
 
Not only can few Americans hope to join the ranks of the rich, no matter 
how well educated or hardworking they may be -- their opportunities to 
do so are actually shrinking. As best we can tell, pretax incomes are 
now as unequally distributed as they were in the 1920s -- wiping out 
virtually all of the gains made by the middle class during the Great 
Compression.
 
There's a famous scene in the 1987 movie Wall Street in which Gordon 
Gekko, the corporate predator played by Michael Douglas, tells a meeting 
of stunned shareholders that greed is good, that the unbridled pursuit 
of individual wealth serves the interests of the company and the nation. 
In the movie, Gekko gets his comeuppance; in real life, the Gordon 
Gekkos took over both corporate America and, eventually, our political 
system.
 
Oliver Stone didn't conjure Gekko's "greed" line out of thin air. It was 
based on a real speech given by corporate raider Ivan Boesky -- and it 
reflected what many corporate executives, conservative intellectuals and 
right-wing politicians were saying at the time.
 
It's no coincidence that ringing endorsements of greed began to be heard 
at the same time that the actual incomes of America's rich began to 
soar. In part, the new pro-greed ideology was a way of rationalizing 
what was already happening. But it was also, to an important extent, a 
cause of the phenomenon. In the past thirty years, right-wing 
foundations have devoted enormous resources to promoting this agenda, 
building a far-reaching network of think tanks, media outlets and 
conservative scholars to legitimize higher levels of inequality. "On 
average, corporate America pays its most important leaders like 
bureaucrats," the Harvard Business Review lamented in 1990, calling for 
higher pay for top executives. "Is it any wonder then that so many CEOs 
act like bureaucrats?"
 
Although corporate executives have always had the power to pay 
themselves lavishly, their self-enrichment was limited by what Lucian 
Bebchuk, Jesse Fried and David Walker -- the leading experts on 
exploding executive paychecks -- call the "outrage constraint." What 
they mean is that a conspicuously self-dealing CEO would be forced to 
moderate his greed by unions, the press and politicians: The social 
climate itself condemned executive salaries that seem immodest.
 
Lately, however, we have experienced a death of outrage. Thanks to the 
right's well-funded and organized effort, corporate executives now feel 
no shame in lining their pockets with huge bonuses and gigantic stock 
options. Such self-dealing is justified, they say: Greed is what made 
America great, and greedy executives are exactly what corporate America 
needs.
 
At the same time, there has been a concerted attack on the institutions 
that have helped moderate inequality -- in particular, unions. During 
the Great Compression, the rate of unionization nearly tripled; by 1945, 
more than one in three American workers belonged to a union. A lot of 
what made General Motors the relatively egalitarian institution it was 
in the 1960s had to do with its powerful union, which was able to demand 
high wages for its members. Those wages, in turn, set a standard that 
elevated the income of workers who didn't belong to unions. But today, 
in the era of Wal-Mart, fewer than one in eleven workers in the private 
sector is organized -- effectively preventing hundreds of thousands of 
working Americans from joining the middle class.
 
Why isn't Wal-Mart unionized? The answer is simple and brutal: Business 
interests went on the offensive against unions. And we're not talking 
about gentle persuasion; we're talking about hardball tactics. During 
the late 1970s and early 1980s, at least one in every twenty workers who 
voted for a union was illegally fired; some estimates put the number as 
high as one in eight. And once Ronald Reagan took office, the anti-union 
campaign was aided and abetted by political support at the highest levels.
 
Unions weren't the only institution that fostered income equality during 
the generation that followed the Great Compression. The creation of a 
national minimum wage also set a benchmark for the entire economy, 
boosting the bargaining position of workers. But under Reagan, Congress 
failed to raise the minimum wage, allowing its value to be eroded by 
inflation. Between 1981 and 1989, the minimum wage remained the same in 
dollar terms -- but inflation shrank its purchasing power by twenty-five 
percent, reducing it to the lowest level since the 1950s.
 
After Reagan left office, there was a partial reversal of his anti-labor 
policies. The minimum wage was increased under the elder Bush and again 
under Clinton, restoring about half the ground it lost under Reagan. But 
then came Bush the Second -- and the balance of power shifted against 
workers and the middle class to a degree not seen since the Gilded Age.
 
During the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush joked that his base 
consisted of the "haves and the have mores." But it wasn't much of a 
joke. Not only has the Bush administration favored the interests of the 
wealthiest few Americans over those of the middle class, it has 
consistently shown a preference for people who get their income from 
dividends and capital gains, rather than those who work for a living.
 
Under Bush, the economy has been growing at a reasonable pace for the 
past three years. But most Americans have failed to benefit from that 
growth. All indicators of the economic status of ordinary Americans -- 
poverty rates, family incomes, the number of people without health 
insurance -- show that most of us were worse off in 2005 than we were in 
2000, and there's little reason to think that 2006 was much better.
 
So where did all the economic growth go? It went to a relative handful 
of people at the top. The earnings of the typical full-time worker, 
adjusted for inflation, have actually fallen since Bush took office. Pay 
for CEOs, meanwhile, has soared -- from 185 times that of average 
workers in 2003 to 279 times in 2005. And after-tax corporate profits 
have also skyrocketed, more than doubling since Bush took office. Those 
profits will eventually be reflected in dividends and capital gains, 
which accrue mainly to the very well-off: More than three-quarters of 
all stocks are owned by the richest ten percent of the population.
 
Bush wasn't directly responsible for the stagnation of wages and the 
surge in profits and executive compensation: The White House doesn't set 
wage rates or give CEOs stock options. But the government can tilt the 
balance of power between workers and bosses in many ways -- and at every 
juncture, this government has favored the bosses. There are four ways, 
in particular, that the Bush administration has helped make the poor 
poorer and the rich richer.
 
First, like Reagan, Bush has stood firmly against any increase in the 
minimum wage, even as inflation erodes the value of a dollar. The 
minimum wage was last raised in 1997; since then, inflation has cut the 
purchasing power of a minimum-wage worker's paycheck by twenty percent.
 
Second, again like Reagan, Bush has used the government's power to make 
it harder for workers to organize. The National Labor Relations Board, 
founded to protect the ability of workers to organize, has become for 
all practical purposes an agent of employers trying to prevent 
unionization. A spectacular example of this anti-union bias came just a 
few months ago. Under U.S. labor law, legal protections for union 
organizing do not extend to supervisors. But the Republican majority on 
the NLRB ruled that otherwise ordinary line workers who occasionally 
tell others what to do -- such as charge nurses, who primarily care for 
patients but also give instructions to other nurses on the same shift -- 
will now be considered supervisors. In a single administrative stroke, 
the Bush administration stripped as many as 8 million workers of their 
right to unionize.
 
Third, the administration effectively blocked what might have been a 
post-Enron backlash against self-dealing corporate insiders. Corporate 
scandals dominated the news in the first half of 2002 -- but then the 
subject was changed to the urgent need to invade Iraq, and the drive for 
reform was squelched. With Americans focused on the war, CEOs are once 
again rewarding themselves at impressive -- and unprecedented -- levels.
 
Finally, there's the government's most direct method of affecting 
incomes: taxes. In this arena, Bush has made sure that the rich pay 
lower taxes than they have in decades. According to the latest 
estimates, once the Bush tax cuts have taken full effect, more than a 
third of the cash will go to people making more than $500,000 a year -- 
a mere 0.8 percent of the population.
 
It's easy to get confused about the Bush tax cuts. For one thing, they 
are designed to confuse. The core of the Bush policy involves cutting 
taxes on high incomes, especially on the income wealthy Americans 
receive from capital gains and dividends. You might say that the Bush 
administration favors people who live off their wealth over people who 
have a job. But there are some middle-class "sweeteners" thrown in, so 
the administration can point to a few ordinary American families who 
have received significant tax cuts.
 
Furthermore, the administration has engaged in a systematic campaign of 
disinformation about whose taxes have been cut. Indeed, one of Bush's 
first actions after taking office was to tell the Treasury Department to 
stop producing estimates of how tax cuts are distributed by income class 
-- that is, information on who gained how much. Instead, official 
reports on taxes under Bush are textbook examples of how to mislead with 
statistics, presenting a welter of confusing numbers that convey the 
false impression that the tax cuts favor middle-class families, not the 
wealthy.
 
In reality, only a few middle-class families received a significant tax 
cut under Bush. But every wealthy American -- especially those who live 
off of stock earnings or their inheritance -- got a big tax cut. To 
picture who gained the most, imagine the son of a very wealthy man, who 
expects to inherit $50 million in stock and live off the dividends. 
Before the Bush tax cuts, our lucky heir-to-be would have paid about $27 
million in estate taxes and contributed 39.6 percent of his dividend 
income in taxes. Once Bush's cuts go into effect, he could inherit the 
whole estate tax-free and pay a tax rate of only fifteen percent on his 
stock earnings. Truly, this is a very good time to be one of the have mores.
 
It's worth noting that Bush doesn't simply favor the upper class: It's 
the upper-upper class he cares about. That became clear last fall, when 
the House and Senate passed rival tax-cutting bills. (What were they 
doing cutting taxes yet again in the face of a huge budget deficit and 
an expensive war? Never mind.) The Senate bill was devoted to providing 
relief to middle-class wage earners: According to the Tax Policy Center, 
two-thirds of the Senate tax cut would have gone to people with incomes 
of between $100,000 and $500,000 a year. Those making more than $1 
million a year would have received only eight percent of the cut.
 
The House bill, by contrast, focused on extending tax cuts on capital 
gains and dividends. More than forty percent of the House cuts would 
have flowed to the $1 million-plus group; only thirty percent to the 
100K to 500K taxpayers.
 
The White House favored the House bill -- and the final, reconciled 
measure wound up awarding a quarter of the benefits to America's 
millionaires. That, in a nutshell, is the politics of income inequality 
under Bush.
 
Oh, one last thing: What about the claim that the Bush tax cuts did 
wonders for economic growth? In fact, job creation has been much slower 
under Bush than under Clinton, and overall growth since 2003 is largely 
the result of the huge housing boom, which has more to do with low 
interest rates than with taxes. But the biggest irony of all is that the 
real boom -- the one in the 1990s -- followed tax changes that were the 
reverse of Bush's policies. Clinton raised taxes on the rich, and the 
economy prospered.
 
A generation ago the distribution of income in the United States didn't 
look all that different from that of other advanced countries. We had 
more poverty, largely because of the unresolved legacy of slavery. But 
the gap between the economic elite and the middle class was no larger in 
America than it was in Europe.
 
Today, we're completely out of line with other advanced countries. The 
share of income received by the top 0.1 percent of Americans is twice 
the share received by the corresponding group in Britain, and three 
times the share in France. These days, to find societies as unequal as 
the United States you have to look beyond the advanced world, to Latin 
America. And if that comparison doesn't frighten you, it should.
 
The social and economic failure of Latin America is one of history's 
great tragedies. Our southern neighbors started out with natural and 
human resources at least as favorable for economic development as those 
in the United States. Yet over the course of the past two centuries, 
they fell steadily behind. Economic historians such as Kenneth Sokoloff 
of UCLA think they know why: Latin America got caught in an inequality 
trap. For historical reasons -- the kind of crops they grew, the elitist 
policies of colonial Spain -- Latin American societies started out with 
much more inequality than the societies of North America. But this 
inequality persisted, Sokoloff writes, because elites were able to 
"institutionalize an unequal distribution of political power" and to 
"use that greater influence to establish rules, laws and other 
government policies that advantaged members of the elite relative to 
non-members." Rather than making land available to small farmers, as the 
United States did with the Homestead Act, Latin American governments 
tended to give large blocks of public lands to people with the right 
connections. They also shortchanged basic education -- condemning 
millions to illiteracy. The result, Sokoloff notes, was "persistence 
over time of the high degree of inequality." This sharp inequality, in 
turn, doomed the economies of Latin America: Many talented people never 
got a chance to rise to their full potential, simply because they were 
born into the wrong class.
 
In addition, the statistical evidence shows, unequal societies tend to 
be corrupt societies. When there are huge disparities in wealth, the 
rich have both the motive and the means to corrupt the system on their 
behalf. In The New Industrial State, published in 1967, John Kenneth 
Galbraith dismissed any concern that corporate executives might exploit 
their position for personal gain, insisting that group decision-making 
would enforce "a high standard of personal honesty." But in recent 
years, the sheer amount of money paid to executives who are perceived as 
successful has overridden the restraints that Galbraith believed would 
control executive greed. Today, a top executive who pumps up his 
company's stock price by faking high profits can walk away with vast 
wealth even if the company later collapses, and the small chance he 
faces of going to jail isn't an effective deterrent. What's more, the 
group decision-making that Galbraith thought would prevent personal 
corruption doesn't work if everyone in the group can be bought off with 
a piece of the spoils -- which is more or less what happened at Enron. 
It is also what happens in Congress, when corporations share the spoils 
with our elected representatives in the form of generous campaign 
contributions and lucrative lobbying jobs.
 
As the past six years demonstrate, such political corruption only 
worsens as economic inequality rises. Indeed, the gap between rich and 
poor doesn't just mean that few Americans share in the benefits of 
economic growth -- it also undermines the sense of shared experience 
that binds us together as a nation. "Trust is based upon the belief that 
we are all in this together, part of a 'moral community,' " writes Eric 
Uslaner, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who has 
studied the effects of inequality on trust. "It is tough to convince 
people in a highly stratified society that the rich and the poor share 
common values, much less a common fate."
 
In the end, the effects of our growing economic inequality go far beyond 
dollars and cents. This, ultimately, is the most pressing question we 
face as a society today: Will the United States go down the path that 
Latin America followed -- one that leads to ever-growing disparity in 
political power as well as in income? The United States doesn't have 
Third World levels of economic inequality -- yet. But it is not hard to 
foresee, in the current state of our political and economic scene, the 
outline of a transformation into a permanently unequal society -- one 
that locks in and perpetuates the drastic economic polarization that is 
already dangerously far advanced.

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