It finally hit me: George W. Bush thinks he is the Chief Executive Officer of the United States of America. He sees the government as his "company" just as a corporation is a CEO's. This explains his otherwise inexplicable behavior and thought processes.
We can only imagine what the latter might be, so I imagine this: Bush feels entitled to the same all-powerful role in government that he sees played by men in the private sector earning ten to twenty times what he is earning and who will retire with a bundle that would make a president's pension seem, well, embarrassingly inadequate.
He may even feel more entitled to supreme rule above the law because, unlike a CEO, he got elected (well, once by Florida and once by Ohio).
Furthermore, if he had previously lacked a rationale to seek supreme power, September Eleventh gave it to him. It explains why he has a craze to privatize everything.
He sees his government as a private enterprise doing this country the service of running things in the absence of an actual government. What we see as incompetence, the Bush doctrine sees as cutting losses. Where was the profit in Katrina? Nothing for KBR and Halliburton there. Defense spending: Why spend all that money on our military when it could be contracted out to Blackwater? Contractors wouldn't be hindered by rules and laws applicable to American Forces.
The $64k question Will privatization ultimately take control of our nation so that Lincoln's words, of the people, by the people and for the people, ring hollow? What will it morph into, an oligarchy, a monarchy, anarchy? At its fullest manifestation, privatization would strip away everything public, everything shared by people and held in public trust, including our most sacred document, the Constitution.
If privatization is part of some greater economic and political plan, a necessary step in establishing a self-appointed oligarchy, that plan is fatally flawed.
Bush's bosses, whether the Neocons, the New World Order Bankers or other anonymous control freaks have an Achilles Heel. Common to these types throughout history, is that they overestimate themselves and underestimate the dumb peasants. They are not as superior as they think, and we are not as inferior as they think. In their hubris they will overreach; indeed they already have.
To continue their plan for a new American century, they need to keep their man in the White House, or one just like him, a functional illiterate who has delusions of his destiny that match their short and long term goals. They can't use spin or propaganda to deprive citizens of their right to vote and choose their leader; even our reactionary supreme court would not survive changing the constitution to allow Bush/Cheney to stay on for another term. That leaves suspending elections.
They must maintain control, one of their Straussian basic tenets, and they won't trust the democratic process to produce the next Bush, so they might use some kind of national emergency (if nothing presents itself as a crisis event, there's always the economic collapse) to suspend "normalcy," including elections, as this year's HUGE October Surprise!
The timing of this would need to be before the general election in November 2008, I would say, toward the end of the "Democracy in Action Dog and Pony Show" (2008 Campaign). Sometime in the next eleven months they would have to deny American voters the right to change government through democratic means (more bluntly, suspend elections), and people would notice.
The minute our political process is suspended by the current administration (for, say, economic emergency, homeland security emergency, whatever), the cat is out of the bag. At that moment, the Second American Revolution will begin. Ironically, the insurgents would be trying to restore Constitutional Rule of Law, and as a wise friend once told me,
The next revolution won't be against the government, it will be the people against Business (corporate power).
At the time I didn't get it, as that was five years ago. I had never heard of Blackwater, didn't know about Halliburton or a hundred thousand other private contractors. Bush hadn't yet tried to privatize Social Security or National Security or the U.S. Military. From today's perspective, my friend's prediction makes more sense.
George W. Bush can live with economic collapse and great suffering because he has privatized his compassionate conservatism and publicized his evangelical delusions. (Anonymous)
See A Short History of American Politiconomics
