Tuesday, January 03, 2006
The Right
As revealed yesterday by the Washington Post, ‘W” has spent 365 days, a full year, of his five years in office over at Neverland Ranch. No longer feasible to be measured in days, his vacation time now is more economically measured in ratio: for every four days he’s worked he’s spent one in Texas on his ranch.
The apologists will aver that these are “working” vacations, but phoning it in every fifth day is just disgraceful. This guy is supposed to be the President, not some son of privilege who inherited his company from his daddy…OK, maybe I’m wrong.
Each sign that this country is run by contemptuous imperialists is scoffed at by the denser half of this country, but every month brings the stink of a new scandal or the news of a new statistic that reveals the depths of duplicity this administration has engaged in.
The most recent arguments that the president’s wiretapping was implicitly authorized by congress’s authorization to use force against terrorists are the most recent example. Even though FISA statutes clearly make such wiretapping illegal, apparently the president has the authority to break the law. Even though his administration approached congress just before the bill was passed and attempted to introduce language that would have made the wiretapping legal and this overture was rejected, his administration went ahead and wiretapped anyway.
As I have written before, it is offensive to the point of being comical that the Preznit recently put Elliott Abrams in charge of Middle East policy for the National Security Council. Former Iran-Contra convict, winner of BitterHarvest’s Most Unfit Public Servant Ever to Hold Public Office Award, Elliott has evinced a contempt for the law and congress already in his ugly career: he called his prosecutors “filthy bastards” and the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee “pious clowns.” He plead guilty to repeatedly lying about the Reagan Administration’s involvement in Central America. He denied the existence of the atrocities committed by U.S.-backed forces. He is an unabashed imperialist who believes Israel has a divine mandate to drive the Arabs from the Holy Land.
That, of course, makes him perfect for working in the Bush Administration, and the fact that his involvement in this administration wasn’t universally condemned over and over again is one small example of the MSM’s abdication of their responsibilities.
Of course, he is in good company. John Negroponte, Reagan’s ambassador to the Honduras in the 1980s, was put in charge of America’s massive political delegation to Iraq, and now Negroponte heads the entire Directorate of Intelligence. In the Honduras Negroponte’s primary responsibility was overseeing the political coordination of the contras (who primarily operated out of the Honduras) with the local government, heavily co-opted by American political and economic pressure to allow a foreign military force to operate out of their country. As a man with rock-solid experience in suborning a government, I can see why the Bush Administration wanted him to work in Iraq and now the United States.
I have already written about Admiral Poindexter’s efforts on behalf of our government, an odious tale I shall not repeat.
From these moral degenerates, and the remnants of Reagan’s legal teams and deputy assistant attorney generals, our administration gets the justification that, by declaring war on terrorists, congress unwittingly gave the president the authority to break FISA statutes and wiretap anyone without a warrant.
I wonder what other powers congress unwittingly surrendered, and how the servile right-wing media machine would justify them. They could make the exact same arguments if the president starting arresting U.S. citizens or residents without charges and holding them indefinitely, as part of his “war powers.” Why not? Apparently congress’s authorization implicitly allows the president to break laws as long as he does them in the service of “national security.”
Judge Alito, prospective Supreme Court Justice, has written that the attorney general should be exempt from prosecution when using his power in the pursuit of “national security.” His agents could recklessly assault and kill a group of peaceful protestors they suspected of harboring “insurgents” and, if Alito’s will was law, they would be immune from prosecution.
This sick band of criminals is just a recycling of the same conservative junta that has ruled the Republican Party for a generation. From Dick Cheney to Don Rumsfeld, from Condi Rice (who was an NSA officer under Reagan) to Elliott Abrams, these thugs have been able, for the last five years, to tighten their grip on our government like never before, and the diseased fruit of their labor becomes more and more ripe with every passing day.
They still had to get elected, however, and to cobble together the necessary votes they have been working overtime since Nixon was impeached to build a political and public relations machine second to none. The culprits:
Paul Weyrich: He heads the list for a reason. Never let it be said that a college dropout with no morals can’t make a difference (hat tip to Karl Rove). In 1973, with funding from conservative overlords Joseph Coors and Richard Scaife, Weyrich launched the Heritage Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting conservative ideals by manufacturing studies and gathering statistics to brace feeble, intellectually vicious arguments. With the scabrous Jerry Falwell he formed the Moral Majority in 1979, its mission to “defend the free enterprise system, the family and Bible morality,” because God knows southern preachers are so good at uniting free enterprise with the Bible. The Moral Majority proceeded to bombard advertisers, politicians, and businesses with letters, petitions, and economic pressure to do everything from eliminate racy TV content to pass pro-life and anti-union legislation. Not satisfied with this, Weyrich helped create the Council for National Policy, a right-wing association of billionaires and religious extremists who regularly write the legislation they want and then hand it to the politicians who they influence. One such product of this group is the recently-passed legislation to limit civil lawsuits, which has the wonderful benefit of both shielding businesses from penalties when they break the law and weakening the power of the Association of Trial Lawyers, the biggest contributor to the Democratic Party.
James Dobson: Christian theocrat James Dobson is the High Preist of Focus on the Family, an organization dedicated to “Christian” values like the criminilization of homosexuality and abortion and the installation of a theocratic government in Washington. Dobson’s network reaches 200 million slaves worldwide, and his influence in the Terry Schiavo case was most apparent. Their influence also convinced Bush to cut off aid to UN programs that distributed condoms in AIDS-stricken nations, because those demonic little latex sheathes encourage fornication and shield sinners from the righteous wrath of the Sky God Who is incensed at their promiscuity. Along with other wealthy profits of the lord like Tim LaHaye, Dobson seeks to make the ten commandments the law of the land, reduce the role of government to the defense of property rights, require taxes to be funneled through Christian charities to provide social services, institute laws against Biblical crimes like sodomy, fornication, and witchcraft, close public schools and replace them with Christian schools, reduce women’s rights to create male-dominated families, and subjugate science to Biblical doctrine to eliminate concepts like evolution. Sounds like Dubya’s agenda, doesn’t it?
Grover Norquist: Lord of the Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist’s eventual goal is to weaken government to where “we can drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist envisions a United States free from the depredations of the FDA, the EPA, and the SEC, a land where private citizens with private property won’t have to worry about troublesome things like taxes, especially if they’re incredibly wealthy. Norquist is so radical that no corollary exists on the left side of the spectrum aside from some Anarcho-Communists who have never had anywhere near the influence he does: He regularly writes for all the biggest conservative magazines and holds weekly Wednesday meetings in Washington DC with the most powerful business leaders and politicians in the nation.
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and Michael Ledeen: These neocons hold dreams of empire that would make Julius Caesar blush. They regularly write for publications and meet with the highest officials in conservative administrations. Richard Perle was the genius who brought Ahmad Chalabi, escaped felon from Jordan (where he was convicted in absentia for massive embezzlement) and serial liar, to the attention of the Dubya Administration as the guy who had the information on Iraq’s evil ways. Thus Judith Miller got her muse and Bush’s neocons got some lies to spin. Perle has served in the Defense Department and the National Security Council for decades under Reagan and now Bush, and his ties to lobbyists and corporations that have profited by the articles he was written and the positions he has advanced from within the Pentagon are as massive, tangled, and corrupt as anything Jack Abramoff was in on.
George H.W. Bush: I just had to give an honorable mention to the Father of Evil in Our Day. You would think Bush was lucky enough: he never suffered the political and legal fallout that was his due for overseeing the Iran-Contra Affair, pardoning the convicts as the investigation approached him, and cheating on his wife and then trumpeting family values. But to add insult to injury he fathered three worthless sons who, somehow, all have a knack for piratical business practices. W ran a series of businesses into the ground but was continually bailed out by dad’s wealthy friends, then he dumped Harken stock weeks before it became worthless but, somehow, was never charged with insider trading. Jeb and his partners defaulted on a 4.5 million dollar loan in Florida, but the Feds, somehow, absolved them of their debt and the taxpayers ate the loss. Jeb has deep and deeply ugly ties to the Cuban community in southern Florida, and has successfully pushed for presidential pardons for convicted Cuban criminals. Neil was the agent for getting his financiers $200 million in loans in a Denver Banking Scandal which they defaulted on, leading to, you guessed it, taxpayers eating the tab when the bank that gave the loan collapsed. Neil’s political fortunes, sadly enough, were clouded after his messy divorce and the public disclosure of his use of Asian prostitutes paid for by his Asian business partners.
As a last kiss-off, George H.W. Bush pardoned the Iran-Contra felons who, with the help of the tax-exempt donations of the Saudi Arabian Royal Family, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and Pat Robertson, were able to illegally fund the contras. George W. Bush then blocked the declassification of 60,000 pages of documents from the Reagan Administration at their declassification due date in 2001. I guess that’s just a little “got cher back, Dad,” from Junior.
Project for the New American Century (PNAC): This organization, though it has taken control of this country, was more of an outgrowth of the metastasis of the right than a cause. I had to include it because, more than any other organization, PNAC describes how the neoconservative branch of the right thinks and how they plan to destroy this country through massive and unnecessary military spending and pre-emptive war.
After the end of the Cold War and the ascension of Bill Clinton into office neocons had a problem: there was no longer a big red monster to scare the peasants with anymore. PNAC was thus born, a group of Cold War-era warmed-over wannabe generals who desired to continue crippling defense spending and ruinous war in perpetuity to both finance their friends and keep the sheeple in a constant state of fear (to elect republicans) and war (to empower the imperial presidency, the abridgment of protest, and massive debts that would justify cutting social programs). PNAC not only advocated the invasion of Iraq long before September 11th, they outlined a plan to “control space,” “develop and deploy global missile defenses,” develop high-tech renovation of conventional forces, and in short “Increase defense spending…to $20 billion to total defense spending annually.”
Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Jeb Bush were all members, and now they run our country.
Big Business: Big business votes red, and you don’t need to look at the lists of the biggest fundraisers for John Kerry and George Bush in 2004 to know that. Big Pharma, for example, led by Pfizer, the largest drug company on Earth, donates massively to conservatives. Pfizer’s CEO was one of Dubya’s Rangers in 2004, the largest fundraisers for the current president, and Pfizer is #4 on the biggest Republican donors of the last 30 years list. With donations like that, Big Pharma gets what it wants: conservatives defeated efforts to have Medicare negotiate prices with drug companies in bulk, have the government regulate drug prices in 2004, and give US consumers access to cheaper Canadian drugs. Bill Tauzin, the author of the 2004 Medicare Prescription Drug Bill that prohibits government from tampering with drug prices and the former head of the House committee that oversees the drug industry recently left his governmental post and was rewarded with the post of CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, Big Pharma’s lobbying and trade organization. The FDA has been gutted and left propped up by Big Pharma, who has successfully pressured for changes in laws to allow the FDA one third as much time as ten years ago to approve drugs and the percentage of approved drugs has grown by twenty percent over the past ten years due to enforced changes, even as the number of drugs recalled rises. The advertising expenditures of drug companies have exploded as they now market prescription drugs directly to the public, even as the profitably of the companies, handsomely protected by their political pawns, remains two to three times that of most other industries.
Cargill, whose CEO is another Ranger, is the largest privately-held company in the United States and the largest grain hauler in the world. It controls almost half of the domestic corn market and is among the top three meat processors and feed producers on Earth. If it didn’t run the government it would have been broken up by the justice department years ago as it dominates the agricultural business of this nation.
Financial Institutions (Banks) are all conservative, and they donate that way, too. Especially blatant are financial institutions that offer credit cards. If you guessed the CEO of MBNA is a Ranger, you guessed right. He’s not alone. Credit Card Companies were rewarded recently with congressional legislation that makes filing for bankruptcy harder, decreasing the amount of money they have to write off as losses every year. There are 1.3 billion credit cards in this country, four for every man, woman, and child. Credit card debt is exploding in this country, as the average credit card debt of Americans rose by 53% in the nineties. MBNA is making a killing, and investing that money back in the politicians that make it possible.
This pattern is repeated over and over again in every industry in America. I have outlined several on this post before. Money equals power. Every child knows this, but successive conservative presidents have appointed conservative judges who have ruled that money is somehow “speech” that must be allowed in politics, and thus damning the people and leaders of this country to thralldom at the feet of big business.
Rupert Murdoch: Even in the world of CEOs few are as cynically cold blooded as Murdoch. The beneficiary of inherited wealth, he parlayed his newspaper in Australia into a transnational empire. His personal wealth is about $7 billion. His News Corporation is the second-largest media empire in the world, trailing only Time Warner, but his news has a decidedly conservative slant. He broke into the massive Chinese market by pandering to Communist dictators, helping them censor the news he broadcasts in their country and financing a glowing biography of Deng Xiaoping by his daughter while simultaneously canceling the book contract of Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten that was critical of the government in Beijing. Murdoch frequently uses “news” stories to plug his other businesses and criticize governments who enact laws that impinge on his own endeavors. He created the FOX network, whose news program is a blatant conservative propaganda outlet that has blazed trails in skewed reporting never before seen in American culture. He recruited Roger Ailes, the man behind the Reagan Administration’s public relations, to run FOX.
Right-Wing Think Tanks: The Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, RAND Corporation, and the American Enterprise Institute head up the list of conservative-controlled organizations that serve as a festering breeding ground for supply-side economists and megalomaniacal plotters. These groups regularly churn out tendentious studies laden with deceptive statistics to support their dangerous positions. The Heritage Foundation birthed the hideous idea of “Star Wars” that Reagan famously trumpeted and despite the fact that scientists and congress beat down the idea the imperialists at the Heritage Foundation continued to push it and, with the reinstallment of the rat-shit crazy republican junta in the Bush Administraton, the idea has risen from the dead again as the National Missile Defense Program. Despite the fact that the plan would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, not protect America from suitcase bombs or cruise-missile-delivered weapons, and probably not work, it lurches ahead nevertheless like one of the undead. The system repeatedly failed tests in recent years carefully rigged to succeed and Canada publicly pulled out of the program.
Richard Mellon Scaife: Like Coors and Murdoch, Scaife is a billionaire who knows which side his bread is buttered on. Like them he inherited his money and regularly funds right-wing organizations like a demented Carnegie, shoveling $2.3 million at the American Spectator to dig up dirt on Bill Clinton. He sunk $1 million into Nixon’s election using front donors and has given $200 million to conservative causes since.
The “Reverend” Sun Myung Moon: You would think doing time for tax evasion and being publicly excoriated for running a cult would slow a guy down. Not the indomitable Sun Myung Moon. Now worth billions, Moon owns a thousand front organizations including the Washington Times, which he uses to advance conservative agendas. He funneled money to the contras in the 1980s. He fits in well on the right with the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. He paid former Pres. Bush a reported $100,000 a pop for a series of speaking engagements and was ceremonially crowned by Senator Danny Davis in front of 80 congresspeople in the Dirksen Office Building as part of his Ambassadors for Peace Program in 2004. It wouldn’t have been so creepy if the Reverend hadn’t been wearing royal furs. Or if he hadn’t proclaimed himself the Messiah. Or if his desire to make himself the theocrat of the world wasn’t stated so publicly by him, over and over.
The MSM: Five corporations dominate US media in a loose cartel: GE, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, and News Corp. All of these corporate giants have vested interests in conservative goals like lower corporate taxes and less government regulation of their increasingly uncompetitive market. Their product, flaccid reporting on the excesses of conservative presidents and congresspeople and craven obsequiousness to the powers that be, does a disservice to themselves and this country and contributes to the degradation of our democracy. From Chris Matthews’ barely-concealed man-love for the president to Wolf Blitzer’s permissive interviews with blatantly lying politicians, these corporate shills continue to lie to the American people and enable kleptocrats to destroy the constitution right in front of our eyes.
Defense Contractors: You know their names. Halliburton. Bechtel. Lockheed Martin. They pay well for lobbyists and politicians to advance military spending (and thus, their own sales). Because each one of these giants commonly rakes in $10 to $50 billion a year, collectively they have more clout than almost any industry on Earth. When they score, they score big: Halliburton racked up $9 billion in no-bid contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, a sum that, even in inflation-adjusted dollars, makes the Teapot Dome scandal and the scandals of the Grant Administration look like a joke.
One you might not have heard of is the Carlyle Group, the world’s third-largest equity firm. Carlyle is a meeting ground for former and future conservative government leaders and oil-rich Saudi Princes and Kuwaiti royals. Carlyle has controlling interest in a dozen defense companies that have picked up $10 billion in government contracts over the past five years. Republican leaders like Frank Carlucci, James Baker, George Bush Sr., Colin Powell, Arthur Leavitt, and Richard Darman have all been a part of the Carlyle machine. Like any company so intimately involved in domestic and foreign government contracts, Carlyle offers lucrative jobs for government officials who pass Carlyle-friendly legislation.
Oil: Oil dominates the world economy. Exxon, judged by market capitalization, is the biggest company on Earth. Several of the other companies in the top ten are also oil companies. Oil is BIG.
Oil also donates big, and gets big dividends. It is fair to say that the Republican Party is essentially owned by Oil. Big Oil got plenty in return for its campaign donations: Bush reneged on the Kyoto Protocol, which would have forced fossil fuel users to reduce emissions; conservatives continue to push for drilling in ANWR; Bush has dropped sanctions on Libya, allowing for oil companies to develop Libya’s oil resources; and, of course, Iraq is now in US hands.
Although global oil sources have already reached peak production and the demand for it continues to expand, the development of alternative energy sources has been limited to token programs that are the equivalent of building a Cessna when you need to reach the moon. Big Oil is not interested in the United States developing resources that would reduce our consumption of its product.
Oil companies continue to explore new fields in third-world countries, pressuring the local governments to give them tax breaks and clean up after them as they dump massive amounts of pollutants and by-products into the environment and then leave when the wells run dry.
Whew! That was intense! I’d also like to give an honorable mention to the princes of Saudi Arabia, the most depraved, morally corrupt human beings on the planet. They preside over a nation that is a bubbling, feculent pit of Wahabi extremism, where decapitation is the preferred method of criminal rehabilitation for for drugs, alcohol, or sorcery, and where women are stoned to death for adultery. Although they usually spend their time drinking, snorting coke, banging prostitutes, and building $4 billion palaces for themselves (as Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahd bin Abdul Aziz recently did), they take enough time to do useful things for America like pump money into the Carlyle Group and FOX News. Thanks, assholes.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 12:50 AM 
