The Joy of Greed, the Danger of Hubris: America Waking Up

You don't have to be a radical anti-capitalist to realize that when the nation's largest employer is Wal-Mart that something is dreadfully wrong. And when the behemoth retailer controls both the production and retail ends of consumer products, that it essentially has dictatorial power. Well, they may have overstepped their bounds at last and even the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil mass of the middle and lower consuming class addicted to Wal-Mart's alleged low prices (low because they make a public cost every obligation that does not enhance the bottom line). The Walton family is worth over $90 billion. Should we be afraid?

Here is at least one way people are becoming aware and fighting back.

Nancy McShane used to spend $600 to $700 a month at Wal-Mart on everything from groceries to oil changes. Then in March she abruptly switched to other discount stores, upset over what her turkey-farming relatives saw as undue price pressure from the world's largest retailer.
McShane, a Springfield, Mo., housewife with children aged 11 and 12, is among what organized critics claim is a growing number of Americans turning against Wal-Mart amid allegations from unions and others that the company is bad for workers, the environment and communities.

When regular folks like Ms. McShane come to the realization that their savings is coming out of someone else's hide, they can change really quickly in their opinions and habits.

But at Springfield, McShane said she changed stores after her relatives, who also raise produce, complained Wal-Mart exerts too much pressure on suppliers to cut their prices.

"That's too much power for one company to have," she said.

And this underlines a basic problem in our country today--the substitution of economic relations for social relations. When people care more about saving ten cents on a pair of tube socks than about maintaining the spirit of community, we're all sunk. Wal-Mart is just part of the problem, which links to sprawl, dependence on the automobile, shrinking workers' rights, etc. but it's a hugely powerful and visible manifestation of a way of thinking that's got to change.

And perhaps, in its grab to own the world, Wal-Mart may have overreached and at last alarmed a lot of Americans.

Textbook Definition of Religious Megalomania?

Too bad he's in the White House. From The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh gives the country some very scary confirmation of our worst fears:

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remain convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparage any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.
Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

At what point does this constitute a diagnosis of mental illness? Who voted for this fanatic with the messiah complex?

Whoever you all are, I hope your consciences are kicking your asses. Chimpie thinks he's bringing about the New Jerusalem from a smoking pile of ruins and broken lives. That's on your heads, you motherfuckers, every last one of you.

Rover Goin' Down

RawStory has some outstanding inside dope on Plamegate. Boy, talk about dishonor among thieves. Karl Rove is in the hot seat and may not pull the G. Gordon Liddy bit.

Two things are clear, the sources said: either Rove will agree to enter into a plea deal with Fitzgerald or he will be charged with a crime, but he will not be exonerated for the role he played in the leak.

If Rove does agree to a plea, Fitzgerald is not expected to discuss any aspect of his probe into the President’s senior adviser because Rove may be called to testify as a prosecution witness against I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was indicted last month on five counts of lying to investigators, perjury and obstruction of justice related to his role in the leak.

So will it be Liddy vs. Rove?

When You're Heading for the Precipice...Step on the Gas Daddy-O!

It's become perverted sport, watching the Bushits plunge toward the chasm of history. Every bit of bad news that doesn't also hurt someone innocent is cheering--or would be if these were just inmates in the war and social criminal prison in which they belong. The trouble is, people are hurt by these incompetent, corrupt idiots, these Neros and Caligulas of the 21st century. Still, it's good to read something like this in the New York Daily News:

Embattled White House aides have begun to believe President Bush must take the reins personally if his evaporating agenda and credibility are to be salvaged.
"We're just plodding along," admitted a senior Bush aide from deep within the West Wing bunker. "It's up to the President to turn things around now."

I don't want to bore you with a review of Chimpie's career whenever he took "the reins personally," but permit to label him one major and continuous fuck-up in life (think oil company, think Texas Air National Guard, think congressional campaign, etc.). So as bad as you might think it's gotten, or however enjoyable this sideshow of disaster is for you, it is only going to get worse, or more entertaining, however you care to view it.

A card-carrying member of the Washington GOP establishment with close ties to the White House recently encountered several senior presidential aides at a dinner and came away shaking his head at their "no problems here" mentality.

"There is just no introspection there at all," he said in exasperation. "It is everybody else's fault - the press, gutless Republicans on the Hill. They're still in denial."

So my earlier pronouncements of a version of Hitlerian bunker mentality, criticized as being "overstated" seems to be right on the money. And I hope someone will review the blog to revisit what the only outcome for such a mentality when reality finally breaks in. For the Nazi leadership, it was a tab of cyanide and/or a self-inflicted bullet in the brain. And pressing his foot all the way down on the accelerator, Chimpie is holding hands with the shithead who got him to this point in the first place--Karl Rove.

Much to Bush's relief, political mastermind Karl Rove is said to be engaged in day-to-day strategy, even though he still could be indicted in the CIA leak case.

In my memory, at least, the image of Thelma and Louise yahooing as they drive their convertible over the North Rim of the Grand Canyon will be replaced with a whining pair of losers named Bush and Rove as they run their administration at full throttle over the rim of history and into the ignominious infamy they so rightly will earn.

Irrefutable: Chimpie and Cheney Are Liars (I'm Shocked! Shocked!)...and WORSE

The National Journal is a pretty sober journal of insider information in Washington D.C., about as nonpartisan as it can be, and rather expensive too. I have a relative by marriage who writes for them and I've become livid trying to get this person to explain to me how in the world the Bush administration ever achieved any level of credibility given what has been know for a very long time inside the Beltway and is now only trickling--and soon to be gushing--forth from the mainstream media outlets. But I'm not a moderate by any means and I have to accept that to gain traction in politics in this country, or to get read by those who have traction, people and publications have to be diplomatic, measured, and maddening (to me).

So consider what it means when The National Journal publishes this piece by Murray Waas, and its first paragraph says this:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

This isn't The Daily Worker or Michael Moore's website or International A.N.S.W.E.R. or a blog by some nutcase like me, this is a magazine that if it were a stew would send you scurrying for salt, Tabasco, Worcestershire, gunpowder, anything to make it more exciting to taste. It is as bland, and therefore neutral, as you can stand, the perfect gruel for political wonks, geeks, and nerds alike, but hardly grist for the radical freaks like me who need their tongues singed before they consider that something has taste, good or bad.

Then comes the zinger:

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

Got it? If there was any connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, it was as adversaries, and I have to wonder why, when not that long ago earlier Donald Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam's hand, we didn't enlist him in helping us to destroy Al Qaeda. After all, who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

Incompetence? Cover-up? Stupidity? After all those years of punishing sanctions against Iraq plus the UN weapons inspections, wouldn't you think that the mad dictator would have wanted to play ball to ease the pressure on his regime? Wouldn't native Iraqis have been ideal for infiltration of Al Qaeda?

Of course, that's a side issue at this point. What Mr. Waas's article points out with as near certainty as can be had in my lifetime is that Chimpie Bush, Dickfuck Cheney, and Donald "War Criminal" Rumsfeld are baldfaced liars, and worse. Much, much worse. For example, remember this?

Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

Now Chimpie claims that he was just acting on the intelligence he was given, which, if you can twist your mind into the pretzel logic of the neocons, you could almost pull off, because indeed there was information that supported these contentions:

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

And you'd expect, of course, that this unit would be staffed by intelligence professionals:

At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks.

Wait, wait. I'm not impugning someone just because he's a journalist or a neocon. Read on:

But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser.

It just makes you feel good all over, doesn't it? One reason we're in Iraq is because two ideological incompetents, one of whom was even a bad security risk under rules your humble blogger understands (his modest military career was in the intelligence arm), had the undivided attention of the highest policymakers in the land, to the exclusion of the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and all the military forign intelligence services.

But wait, as they say in the K-Tel commercial, there's more:

In January 2002, Maloof and Wurmser were succeeded at the intelligence unit by two Naval Reserve officers. Intelligence analysis from the covert unit later served as the basis for many of the erroneous public statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others regarding the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to former and current government officials. Intense debates still rage among longtime intelligence and foreign policy professionals as to whether those who cited the information believed it, or used it as propaganda. The unit has since been disbanded.

Dig? Having served the nefarious agenda of the criminal war profiteering empire of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, the office was disappeared, so to speak--poof! That seems odd, because if they'd done such a bang-up job, you'd want to keep them around. Especially when they were so wonderfully compliant, as this paragraph reveals:

On July 22, 2002, as the run-up to war with Iraq was underway, one of the Naval Reserve officers detailed to the unit sent Feith an e-mail saying that he had just heard that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz wanted "the Iraqi intelligence cell … to prepare an intel briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaida for the SecDef" and that he was not to tell anyone about it.

Now, is there anybody out there who doesn't think impeachment, indictment, trial, conviction, imprisonment and perhaps execution are in order for some fuckers involved in this fiasco, this catastrophe?

And yet there are still more than 30% who still approve this cabal. How fucking goddamned stupid can people get, even in America?