Sunday, September 14, 2008

“It Only Gets Worse”

I should not be surprised by anything, but everyday seems to bring a new and more ominous revelation. However, in order to set the stage for the topic of this column, we need to go back to Kansas when Dorothy embarked on her journey to the Land of Oz.

Bill Clinton swept into the White House as the great champion of the average American, hell-bent on improving his lot in life. However, it did not take long for the label of “Slick Willy” to gain some traction among his skeptics, which only intensified with his tenure as President of the United States.

We soon learned that he was a great advocate of globalization and free trade. When he signed the NAFTA treaty, it should not have been difficult for any reasoned mind to conclude that, with the shipping of American jobs to cheap labor markets such as Mexico and China, there would be an immediate impact on the American working class. It hasn’t taken long for them to lose their good paying jobs and benefits, lose the safeguards of Taft-Hartley, shift to low-paying service jobs and accept a progressively lower standard of living as they move closer to their counterparts in third world countries.

As more and more of our industrial base was shipped overseas to pools of cheap labor and our working men and women joined the ranks of the working poor, the stock market soared. Fortunes were made by big corporations and those investing in their enterprises. But, those who were made to sacrifice their standards of living and job security had nothing to invest in this new found cornucopia of wealth. The new boom was beyond their grasp. Bottom line? They were snookered by the insatiable greed of big business and the politicians who facilitated their exploitation of those among us who have the least to sacrifice.

While Monica Lewinsky was demonstrating her undying love for Bill under the presidential desk in the Oval Office, he was demonstrating his ability to multi-task by taking phone calls during his romantic interludes. The world expressed its moral outrage but, nevertheless, was duly impressed by the prowess he demonstrated in a variety of ways.

Meanwhile, Phil Gramm was dismantling the safeguards by which our financial institutions were governed in order to ensure public confidence. For it to have become a fait accompli, the President had to have signed everything advocated by Gramm & Co. into law. At that point, it became open season on our financial health. The Secretary of the Treasury either chose to remain silent or he did not have a clue as to what was going on. The effects of all this would take some time to be felt by John Q. Public.

Billy Boy left office leaving the highest budget surplus in the history of the Republic. Everything was in place for the picking by his successor and his merry band of thieves. On his last day in office, Bill Clinton nullified his Executive Order forbidding members of his administration from serving as lobbyists for a period of five years. It was now open season on an unsuspecting American public. All of this may have provided us with some insights into why he and George H.W. Bush are such good golfing buddies. It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to put 2 and 2 together and come up with 4 on that one!

Georgy Porgie, Sinister Dick and their happy band of neocons soon set themselves to the task of fleecing the country of everything that wasn’t nailed down. They dismantled all they could of the safeguards that were in place to protect the consumer and working people. Our infrastructure took a hit that will require untold billions of tax dollars to recover. Big money and big business suddenly found themselves in the land of milk and honey. Executive compensation and severance packages ballooned. Seems no one could lose except, of course, the poor blokes at the bottom of the food chain. Huge tax cuts followed and every conceivable concession to big business and vast wealth was the order of the day.

Not only was the working class disenfranchised, the unholy alliance of business interests (most typified by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) and a bevy of naive, wide-eyed do-gooders, politicians and church leaders have joined forces to open our southern borders to hordes of illegals --- a further assault on the wages and benefits for working Americans. They have the whole-hearted support of our national representatives in both political parties. Who is looking out for those who have suffered the most by what Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have brought down on their heads? No one that I can see.

The Bush Administration soon gave us the infamous “War on Terror,” with a contrived war against a country that had done nothing to us. But the propaganda machine was turned up to full force and an unsuspecting nation was duped into believing that it would be a short-lived war, that we would be greeted as liberators and the cost of the folly would be chiefly borne by Iraqis from revenue generated by their vast oil reserves.

Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater are only a few of those who have raked in obscene amounts of money through no-bid contracts, supported by politicians who have had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with little or no accountability. I am, also, highly suspect of the military-industrial complex and the transparency of their business relationships. A budget appears to be nothing more than a petty annoyance and cost-overruns are little more than a minor inconvenience. We don’t even bother to question what the collective beneficiaries of this war are doing and what it is costing us. Who has been looking over their shoulders to make sure the interests of the taxpayers have been properly served?

And while the true believers looked up to our faux leaders in Washington with rapt adoration, knowing that they were “keeping us safe and protecting our freedoms,” our men and women in uniform were being sacrificed on the altar of their grand deception. The dead came home to Dover Air Force Base under a black-out on the news media, as if the fallen had somehow dishonored the nation. Thousands of others have been physically and emotionally maimed, and have received little recompense for all they have suffered. Let us not lose sight of the fact that a goodly number of those serving in our all-volunteer armed forces have served because they had no choice. After all, there were no longer any decent and respectable alternatives to go to in our decimated job market. A damned disgrace if you ask me!

So, where does all this leave us? Well, it sure doesn’t look promising.

1. There has been the largest mortgage meltdown in the history of the country.
2. Residential foreclosures are at an all-time high.
3. We are buried under a mountain of consumer and public debt.
4. Major financial institutions have failed, with countless others clinging to life. Were it not for
the taxpayers saddled with the brunt of the cost for their survival in order to protect
investors, the ripple effect would be disastrous. Taxpayers take all the risks and investors
claim all the profits.
5, Unemployment figures are climbing.
6. The cost of the Iraq war continues unabated, with no end in sight. The sink hole has no
bottom.
7. The cost of gasoline and other petroleum products have gone through the stratosphere, with
no significant relief in sight. Typical of Americans, we are clamoring for a quick-fix that isn’t
there and are poised to believe everything slick politicians promise as instant solutions.
8. We are a debtor nation going ever deeper into debt in order to finance the bottomless pit of
the Iraq war and growing demands for social and public works programs, exacerbated by
what is euphemistically referred to as a “recession.” A rose by any other name ……………..
9. We are borrowing money from other nations to finance “the war,” chief among them China. 10. Our infrastructure is in shambles with no funding available to fix it.
11. ………..and more and more, ad-nauseum.

Now, comes the latest revelation. The Iraqi government has recently announced that they are awarding a contract to develop the country’s oil industry to (guess who?) the China Oil Company! How about them apples? Bottom line: No matter how ill conceived the war in Iraq was, over 4,100 American lives have been sacrificed to try and bring them a better and kinder form of government than what was toppled. The gratitude of the Iraqi government for those lost lives is to shaft the United States by shunting their business to our biggest creditor. Isn‘t that just too cozy to contemplate?

We dance around the word recession, one re-definition after another, in an effort to deny the ultimate reality. Let’s face it, we stand on the threshold of a world-wide economic meltdown because of our individual and national folly, and a lot of misplaced trust.

The forthcoming national election is probably the most important since the Great Depression. Not one to be taken lightly. It is an absolute imperative that we cast our votes based on as much verifiable and objective information as we can possibly gather about the two presidential candidates. If we don’t, as so aptly stated from Macbeth, “It is a tale … full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.”

Cowboy Bob
September 12, 2008

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Woooooo - such a lot of truth you have written. SD