Wolfgang von Skeptik

THE MANIFEST MESSAGE OF MINETA, PLUS TWO VITAL LINKS: INTEL REFORM, NECESSITY OF WAR

THE FACT PRESIDENT BUSH has approved a second term for Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta proves the absolute truth of what I have argued for months: that the anti-Second Amendment bias obstructing the armed pilots program is not an accident but rather an especially malicious expression of Bush League policy. The same can now be said conclusively of the brazenly pro-Islam (and clandestinely pro-illegal-immigrant) Bush/Mineta ban on profiling – not to mention the litany of air-travel outrages bravely reported by Annie Jacobsen (for which go here). In other words, Bush is lying on two counts: talking tough about transportation security while simultaneously obstructing everything necessary to achieve it, and – as I have noted before – pretending a support for the Second Amendment all his appointments belie. Which is yet another reason I think more and more of us who voted for him are waking up to the fact we made a terrible mistake.

For me the wake-up call was my discovery Bush's bogus Medicare drug ''reform'' will not only double my prescription costs in its first year, but increase them 10-20 percent every year thereafter. Moreover, this so-called “reform” is punitively compulsory, with a running fine (of 1 percent of your Social Security pension per month or 12 percent per annum) against any who try to opt out – all this not to help Americans on Medicare but to brazenly provide a guaranteed windfall for Bush's fat-cat contributors in the pharmaceutical industry. (See “The Serpent in the Medicare Bush,” Dec. 7, 2004.) And as I said in “Serpent,” Medicare “reform” is not the only Bush betrayal of working-class Americans. Bush has already stated he will exempt the employers of illegal immigrants or ''guest workers'' from enforcement of the minimum wage law, thereby further depressing American wages generally (by some reckonings as much as 22 percent per year) – this in a nation where newly created service-industry McJobs already pay only about half the wages of the outsourced jobs they are replacing. Never in U.S. history has the business/political aristocracy launched such a total and methodically scripted war against American workers.

Even so, how short are our collective memories – for in theory this is nothing new: Bush is merely at long last doing what President Ronald Reagan always desperately wanted to do but never could, for three reasons: Reagan was checkmated by a Democratic Congress, held at bay by more rational heads in the Republican Party, and restrained by the still-very-real threat of the Soviet Union. Reagan despised unionism in any and all forms; he wanted to nullify workers’ rights and neutralize workplace safety requirements, and his ultimate dream was to wipe the New Deal completely off the American socioeconomic map. Bush not only intends to do all the same things, he is already doing them: he has quietly declared open season on the American worker – and this time, with a rabidly Republican Congress and no Red Scare to humanize the oligarchy – there is absolutely nothing to soften the resultant blows. Clearly, Bush intends to reduce the American worker to the abject wage-slavery of the Herbert-Hoover era: sweatshop labor abetted by an official policy of robbing the poor (and working families in general) to fatten the plutocracy. In this context, Mineta's no-profiling mandate is just another aspect of the Bush campaign against working families: the no-profiling order clearly panders to illegal immigrants and “guest workers” as part of a top-to-bottom Bush Administration effort to make the entire nation more friendly to scab labor.

Where the administration’s appointment-enunciated anti-Second-Amendment stance fits into this picture I can only guess, but given Attorney General appointee Alberto Gonzales’ record of opposition to gun rights, I have no doubt these policies are an integral part of the Bush League’s long-range plan.

Yes a Kerry presidency would have been bad – but not this irremediably bad: just as Churchillian Britain recovered from Chamberlain’s cowardice, so would America have eventually awakened from Kerry’s politics of appeasement, and Kerry’s ignore-the-working class (and thus doomed) economic policies would have been nothing more than momentary fluctuations. Besides, we expected better from Bush – much better. But it turns out the only “compassion” in Bush’s conservatism is a compassionate commitment to oligarchic excess.

Admittedly I am no economist, but you don’t need to be an economist to read a pink slip or understand an overdraft notice. The obvious hidden agenda of the Bush Administration’s economic strategy is to accelerate all the negative forces of downsizing and outsourcing – and to destroy the social safety-net as well. One example: abolishing Social Security by privatizing it as a huge payoff to Wall Street – a fine idea until the next market-crash (or Enron-type ripoff) robs America of all its retirement pensions. Which will leave millions hopelessly destitute and reduce our economy, once and for all, to the banana-republic reality of a vast starving peonage savagely overseen by a tiny, superbly well armed, viciously oppressive aristocracy: welcome to the newest extension of the Third World. (No wonder Bush is appointing anti-Second Amendment officials.) And the deficit will be so ruinously huge that no restorative social programs will be possible – not ever again – even if our country produces a dozen new Franklin Delano Roosevelts.

These kinds of take-backs and expressions of anti-worker malice were the cornerstone intentions of Reaganomics, too. But in this realm – as I have already noted – Reagan failed totally: not (as some Democrats would have us believe) because of the alleged economic brilliance of President Bill Clinton – a “brilliance” wholly the creation of propaganda intended to obscure the Monica-perjury and thus utterly imaginary – but because of an astonishingly fortunate accidental convergence of factors that will probably not be seen again together in a thousand years. As to another FDR, I seriously question whether this country with its deliberately dumbed-down education system can ever produce another figure of such intellectual greatness, whether in politics or any other field of endeavor. But even if such a brilliant leader were to emerge, he would be rendered powerless by the Bush League deficit. In other words, Bush has already stuck us with a Herbert Hoover economy for the rest of this century at least – and probably forever. Which I believe is exactly his intent: to produce what management consultants like to call a “disciplined” workforce – a workforce so abjectly terrified it will endure sweatshop conditions without complaint. Hence the administration’s need to abolish the safety net entirely, and to so monkeywrench the economy it can never again be restored to even the faintest semblance of humanitarian normalcy. (And yes, I'm absolutely aware of the historical irony of my use of the term “normalcy” in this context.)

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Below for your more contemplative weekend reading are a pair of compelling links – sources of hope to balance out the economic gloom. The first link is to an Asia Times piece that details the history of the Central Intelligence Agency’s collapse into ineffectuality and concludes with the promise of new reforms under the agency’s new leadership. A key paragraph:

Many intelligence officers...ignored the fact that Rumsfeld's and Cheney's irritation with their CIA briefers was not - in the first instance - aimed at their considered opinions, but at the fact that the briefers offered no considered opinions at all and time and again proved unprepared and unable to answer pointed and difficult questions effectively . That the CIA had no answers rather than unpalatable ones was the issue. Years of abject failure to develop any humint sources in Iraq or in al-Qaeda rather than coming up with well-sourced but divergent information was the problem. And when CIA facts and analyses that differed from the Pentagon or White House view were presented, Tenet and his chief officers apparently lacked the intestinal fortitude and integrity to insist that only CIA-sanctioned intelligence be used in assessments. In a crisis, under the weight of a dozen years of political maneuvering, inattention, or non-existent leadership, the CIA caved in.

The full text of this report is available here.

Next is a lengthy essay by a Jesuit scholar discussing the moral necessity of war, a piece the mere existence of which suggests that mainstream Christianity – under pressure of Islam’s malevolent assault on Judaism, Christianity and the entire Judaeo-Christian heritage of American liberty and Western Civilization – is finally beginning to step back from its irrational and mistaken pacifist absolutism. Entitled “When War Must Be the Answer,” this vitally thought-provoking work by Fr. James B. Schall S.J., is available here. Given that Jesuits are often the theological cutting edge of Christianity both Catholic and Protestant, the essay’s significance may well be profound – and pivotal. (Thanks to Jihad Watch for the original link.)

Have a good weekend – and have it in good conscience!

Posted by Loren at December 10, 2004 10:59 AM