The next big theft came in '03 when a decorated US Marine and the entire United Nations stood on international TV to tell a bellicose Bushco there were no weapons of mass destruction. Over 25-million people protested in cities around world on the same day at the same time, to send a message that everyone on the planet heard, everyone but we Americans. Bush said there were WMDs ... 945 times, in fact, in media statements in that two-year period that included the run-up and first year of the Iraq War, according to FAIR. They lied, the press gobbled it up, we followed like good little soldiers and, even though we had clearly been told it was unnecessary, even though we insisted we just were there to be a friend to Iraq and we were just after the one man, Hussein. But we murdered millions anyway, squirreled billions away, decimated nations in a matter of days, and desecrated whole cultures several ways. Without so much as an "Oops sorry," we ran roughshod over others' economies and civil rights world round, then wondered why they hate us for our freedom.
And so, we let another lie go by, and it brought us further down. And the momentum started to grow.
In 2006, the Dems took a break from their otherwise consistent ineptitude and somehow successfully campaigned that they would save the world from the evil Bush and, upon election, immediately took impeachment off the table. Then they continued to cooperate with his agenda, while wondering why Americans don't trust them. Then once again when he was out of office and totally prosecutable there was no accounting for the mayhem Bush's mischief created, neither by his fellow GOPers, if there had happened to be any of them left with any sort of principle, nor by the Dems, who never claimed to burden themselves with such things anyway. So, we let them get away with it again. But in 2008 when Obama claimed to be "Change in a Bucket," we leaped after that pie in the sky and he spit in our eye and he turned out to continue to be more of the same status quo.
And the lies just kept coming. when Bush first said we have to give banks trillions, America screamed no. It was amazing; it seemed like we still cared enough to care. But the next day the banksters and their Congressmen friends went on with their business anyway, and passed their own law for their own selves, took our trillions, and again we let them get away with it.
Then in 2009, they ramped up the fraudulent eviction machine, using our taxpayer money to do it and to award themselves more bonuses because of all the business they were doing. We still could have complained about it then. But by that point we didn't know how. By that point Americans were a little sickened and a little weakened from fighting the machine. They say, and on pretty good authority, that crime continues to go down. Not wanting to be one who champions criminality, but I'd say that trend correlates with our crumbling will to live.
They are already working on crushing or controlling what sparks of life that may be left in us. In Missouri they're eliminating child labor laws. In Minnesota, they're making it illegal for poor people to have cash. In Nebraska, they're making it legal to kill a doctor if you even suspect he might do an abortion on a member of your family. And in New York, known IRA collaborator Peter King is trying to declare a certain religion an Un-American Activity. Some schools are proposing cutting history, the GOP is cutting PBS and NPR because they call them on their BS BS. The public does not need health or education; the public doesn't need art or intelligence nearly as much as the rich need their tax cuts. Meanwhile Democrats are now such surrender-monkeys the French make jokes about them.
Here in Arizona, at a time when Dems need to be as cunning and united as ever, turns out Andrei Cherny is conspiring to destroy his own party from within by cutting the funding and central office support for county offices -- the offices that most need party support because they're fighting the longest odds. Cherny may be running on a Democratic name, but his GOP style -- top-down organization and slashing of budgets, makes one wonder. Sucking dry funding for the 15-county plan he campaigned on to fill the coffers of the "Kingdom of Maricopa," Cherny's plan to hold back this year's funds for next year's election cycle will probably atrophy the party to the point there won't be a county level apparatus left to spend the money later.
Is this America? Is this what we're left with?
Do understand, I'm not saying that, long ago and far away, there actually was once some bright shining believe-in-able America. Actually I expect that all along the term has simply served as a red-meat label slapped on a can of churning worms. I don't know what actually was, or if that kind of America ever was, but if it once was, it's not now. We do not live in that America anymore.
So, if we are no longer "America," which emblem are we now?
Not Japan. Yes, the world is shifting under our feet with a force we've never known, and the blowback of our domestic and foreign disasters is washing us away. America's facing grave disasters (even Time Magazine has a cover story on our coming collapse), but we are no Japan, even though their radiation is now lighting up our west coast in this latest incident of private industrial pollution imperiling the lives of billions and endangering whole oceans of ecosystems. Massey Coalmine disaster, BP, now this; we're like a junkie getting messy with his drugs.
As we brace ourselves for our own impending of disasters, we only wish we were as well off a society as Japan was. They had a government that has built its infrastructure, and a belief that society exists to be respectful to each other -- to act civilly, respectfully in times of crisis. But they were also somewhat like America, their society and its marketing machine gleamed with the latest consumer trifle; repeatedly their top political officials went down in scandal and, as an economy, their engagement in capitalist questing has led to some imperiling behaviors. Also, you can't trust the corporate-directed media or the corporate-owned politicians who refuse to deliver facts without airbrushing or mislaying them first.
Perhaps we are about to become Yugoslavia -- hyper-inflated, balkanized, with the prospect of ethnic cleansing as the Tea Party platform of the GOP returns our republic to a Confederacy of Dunces. Remember that right up there with the whole "no taxes" thing, another top Tea Party slogan goes, "Buy your bullets now." Are we to be Burma, Nigeria, Congo, Russia? Oh wait, we are already run by gangsters. In that same Time article we learned once more as a nation we have dropped from 1st in 2006 to 10th in 2010, and that's just on the prosperity chart. On life expectancy, education and medical care we are farther down the scale, devolving into a futile set of states as feudal as they get, where 400 families control more than 158-million of the rest of us combined. We've had a trade deficit for over a decade and our number one export is weapons and number three is our garbage. No matter what our leaders say about exporting democracy, if the rights to it can't be purchased by multinationals, America's not buying it. Perhaps Yugoslavia, perhaps the Weimar Republic.
Are we more like Egypt where the kleptocrats abscond with billions as the state-run media mischaracterize the situation to the point of laughability? Where they blame Muslim extremists and outside agitators for the fact that the government's own corruption is bringing it down. Where right-wing thugs beat protestors. But where in the end, the dictator falls. Bush and Obama aren't the same dictator, but they work for the same people -- the billionaires who make it by taking pennies a piece for the miseries they make. Are we to resist? Is there still room for that? If hundreds of thousands of us gathered in protest, if we swelled like a sea around our leaders, would we have our "Arab Spring" -- or body bags?
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