"We’re proud of our president. Americans love
having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s
physical, who’s not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like
Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy
who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The
women like this war."
- Chris Matthews, 'Hardball' on MSNBC, 05/01/03
The front page of the May 11 Sunday edition of the Boston Herald
carried the headline, "Prop. 2 Override Rampage." The
story described towns and cities all across Massachusetts gearing up to
watch the local aid they depend on for basic services get massacred.
The voters of these towns face a 'Proposition 2' vote; Proposition 2,
according to the Herald, "caps annual property-tax increases unless
voters agree to pay more either through an override, which permanently
raises taxes, or through a debt exclusion, which raises taxes for a set
period to fund a specific project." In layman's terms, this
means that Massachusetts property owners must vote for a massive hike in
property taxes. If they don't – and they may not, after having
absorbed many financial beatings from this economic downturn already -
thousands of teachers, police officers, firefighters and other municipal
employees will be out of work.
This kind of shortfall and crisis is happening in all 50 states.
Yet as the nation goes slowly broke, we can still enjoy our breads and
circuses. Entertaining the masses is a requirement of any empire
that would neglect its people in order to augment its military prowess.
The Roman Emperor Commodus battled gladiators in the Coliseum to provide a
spectacle that obscured, to a degree, the inevitable decline of the
empire. Our spectacle came last week when George W. Bush strutted
out of the cockpit of a combat jet adorned in the raiment of a
warrior/king. This was the culmination of months of propaganda work
– the WMD threat, the Osama link, the 'liberation' of the Iraqi people
– that has yet to produce a single thing it promised beyond the fact of
war itself. Over one hundred American soldiers, and untold thousands
of Iraqi civilians, are now dead. It seems for all the world that
the war in Iraq was fought not to free people, or to destroy terrorism, or
to annihilate dangerous weapons. It was done to provide George W.
Bush with footage for his 2004 "Runnin' on 9-11" Presidential
campaign commercials.
Senator Fritz Hollings summed up best the absurdity of it all at the
South Carolina Jefferson-Jackson Dinner: "I saw President Bush
on that aircraft carrier in the Pacific yesterday. Incidentally, that's
the closest he's ever got to the war in Vietnam."
Ouch.
Of course the hot pics of the Prez with his package pooched out weren't
the only reasons for the war. Look at the numbers.
Dick Cheney's Halliburton Corp. is pulling fistfuls of cash out of
Iraq, as is Halliburton subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root.
Halliburton still pays Dick Cheney $1 million a year in what they call
"deferred compensation." Where I come from, we call that a
salary, and a damned good one.
In February, a month before the Iraq war, former chairman of the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Richard Perle received a top-secret
government briefing about the coming conflict in that region, and about
rising tensions with North Korea. Three weeks later, Perle spoke at
an investment seminar for Goldman Sachs. His talk was entitled
“Implications of an Imminent War: Iraq Now. North Korea Next?”
In essence, he used classified information to help investors profit from
the conflict. Perle lost his chairmanship of the Board because he
was consulting, while holding his position at the Pentagon, a major
multinational telecommunications corporation that was seeking Pentagon
approval to sell their wares in Asia.
Then, of course, there is former CIA Director James Woolsey, fellow
member of the Defense Policy Board with Richard Perle. Woolsey spent
the last six months of his life scaring the cheese out of the American
public on national television with incredible warnings about the terror
capabilities of Iraq. One of his more ominous quips from CNN:
"I would be more worried over the mid to long term about biological
weapons…there have been stories that Saddam has been working on
genetically modifying some of these biological agents, making anthrax
resistant to vaccines or antibiotics."
Funny how they haven't been able to find even the dumb old plain
anthrax, and never mind Saddam's super-anthrax. Could it be that
Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, was grossly overstating the potential
terrorism threat represented by Iraq for purely personal gain? Mr.
Woolsey is a director at Paladin Capital, formed three months after
September 11 for one reason alone – to reap profit from the defense and
intelligence contracts that were blizzarding out of the Defense Department
as the War on Terror got vamped up. Paladin has amassed $300 million
from investors because it sees the US government spending some $60 billion
on the anti-terrorism programs it sells, and sees private corporations
spending twice that amount. Woolsey has been very busy frightening
the American people about the terrorist threat, and is now prepared to
profit wildly from those fears.
Woolsey is also a member of the Project for the New American Century.
The names Cheney and Perle are on the membership rolls next to his.
You can read all about the Project here.
It seems that while the states are going broke, a small cadre of White
House insiders are making more money than they could spend in ten
lifetimes. Fancy that. Did I mention that Bush's dad works for
the Carlyle Group? Did I mention that the Carlyle Group owns United
Defense, a weapons manufacturer that is making billions from selling arms
and fighting vehicles to the Defense Department?
Writing that took 884 words. How many scandals, catastrophes and
outright crimes were listed in that short span? I count 18, but that
may be a conservative number.
Chris Matthews has it right, to a point. Americans do love a
little swagger. They hate, however, being lied to. The lies
exist here on many levels. The primary, of course, being the actions
of the fellows currently in control. The only reason these boys have
been able to maintain control, though, is because of men like Matthews and
the others who share his 'profession.' The American television media
establishment has hauled more water in the last year than Gunga Din for
the Bush administration, and this shows no sign of abating. That is
the only thing holding this administration together. Cheney, Perle,
Woolsey and Bush don't have to worry about being wrong and crooked.
They know they won't get called on it in places where the public might
hear about it.
That's it. That's all of it.
William Rivers Pitt is a
New York Times best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq"
available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is
Silence," now available at http://www.silenceissedition.com
from Pluto Press. Scott Lowery contributed research to this report.
Thanks to writer Max Black for digging out that Matthews quote.
This article was originally published in truthout.org |
