The Eight-Year Bailout

[davidswanson]

Every time there's a new Cheney-Bush scandal, every time we discover that Dick Cheney lied to Dick Armey, or another top Iraqi informed the White House there were no weapons, or another missile kills another large family in Afghanistan, or the wars in Pakistan and Iran get out of control before we'd realized they'd begun, or we discover that Cheney's lawyer signed the Attorney General's name to an authorization to search Democrats' body cavities, or a chunk of the North Pole floats past the Republican convention, every single time this happens … there's a moment of thrilling fantasy in which we can imagine that the American people or their so-called representatives in Washington will snap out of their hypnosis and ship the whole damn kleptocracy to the Hague in wooden crates.

And the same goes for the latest proposal to steal a trillion dollars from our unborn grandchildren and give it to Wall Street. And here I thought the unborn were the only people these fascists did care about!

While I love the idea of clinging briefly to the notion that there really is something new here and that it will wake somebody from their slumber, I secretly have to wonder how exactly this differs from the past seven years and eight months. For that length of time, our government has enthusiastically gone out of its way to provide protection for (rather than from) predatory mortgage lenders, and to treat foreclosures as no more verifiably real than evolution or global warming. In March of this year Bush and his treasury secretary transferred a pile of public money to J.P. Morgan/Chase via the Federal Reserve to assume the liabilities and assets of Bear Stearns at a price not determined in the free market or via public bidding.

But borrowing money and throwing it at the people who least need it began before Cheney and Bush moved into their new public housing in 2001. Remember that Cheney had earlier served as secretary of "defense" and given Halliburton the contract to draw up a plan calling for giving more contracts to companies like Halliburton. Then Cheney had revolved out the revolving door to spend five years as the chief executive of Halliburton, during which period Halliburton had illegally done major oil and construction business with Iran, Iraq, and Indonesia, and had illegally sold nuclear technology to Libya. Cheney had then left his Halliburton job, along with a $33.7 million parting gift, to return to government as vice president, in which position he directed the Pentagon to grant no-bid contracts worth many billions of dollars to Halliburton. For at least two years as vice president, Cheney received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Halliburton in "deferred compensation." Of course, that was justifiable in terms of the public good: society might have collapsed had Cheney not piled up more riches.

But his riches and Halliburton's were a little crumb off the loaf of large-scale looting that has been the primary focus of our government all these years. While Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes called their book about Iraq "The Three Trillion Dollar War," they were being very conservative. If you read their book, you find that incredibly conservative calculations place the amount of money wasted at no less than five trillion dollars, and mounting, with no end in sight. And who gets that money? Well, certainly not "the troops" so cynically used to squeeze it out of those gelatinous masses of spineless goo that go by the name "House" and "Senate." And certainly not the Iraqi people. Nobody's been liberated, and nothing's been reconstructed. Over a million men, women, and children lie dead, but killing them didn't cost five trillion dollars. Most of that money has gone to war profiteering robber barons, the people who handle the financing of the debt, and China.

The as-yet-unsuccessful proposal to give our Social Security savings to Wall Street is part and parcel of this same scheme. The mission of our government simply is to transfer wealth from those who need it to those who do not, and the most absurd thing about this is the number of commentators who claim that George W. Bush is in some way a "failure." Most of us can just be grateful we have so little to lose, and give thanks to Nancy Pelosi for having taken impeachment off the table. She did so on May 7, 2006, and I would like to propose that the next Congress honor her wisdom by legislating a national holiday. Every May 7th from here on out let's celebrate by getting too drunk to stand up straight and going pheasant hunting with shotguns.

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. May 7th

I am ready!! :patriot:

[Obamanaut]

2. Is it too late for a change? In your first paragraph, you wrote

"...the American people or their so-called representatives in Washington..."

Some of those representatives have been misrepresenting constituents for decades, others for not as long. Perhaps this November the American people should consider swapping out the all the current residents of the House (called residents here due to their longevity) and the third of the Senate whose terms are expiring.

I don't think that will happen - it's just a dream I have.

[davidswanson]

3. pelosi has a challenger

who cannot be mentioned on this website but whose name rhymes with Pindy Peehan.

[glitch]

7. I wish Pindy Peehan were running for Peinstein's seat, then I could vote for her. :( nt

[DaveT]

4. Agreed in full.

For all these years, I have been posting stuff on the internet similar to this excellently written screed, amazed and disgusted at why "nobody" ever does anything about the naked gouge taking place in plain sight. Like many others, I have compared the Bush Administration to The Soprano's bust-out strategy of squeezing what Tony called "maximum value" out of the erstwhile United States of America.

A tiny handful of people respond on the internet, like I am now responding favorably to the OP. A few more people bother to argue with me, suggesting that I am overwrought and exaggerating. Although few people note this fact, it is true that the gouge is NOT unprecedented -- Mathew Josephson's "The Robber Barrons" relates how a similar regime of rapine held sway in the USA from the assassination of Lincoln until the Great Depression.

The memory of the Depression faded out of public consciousness as the Reagan Revolution started the Long March back to the 19th Century. Since then, the sane majority have watched in paralyzed stupefaction as the power of money has routed the power of people on every front.

My own theory of how this worked draws upon the thinking of Marshall McLuhan -- the Age of Television destroyed the concept of public life and public participation. The cool medium of TV has put us all to sleep, and now we all just "watch" and and hope for someone on TV to do something for us.

Look at DU as a whole -- how much of the posting here amounts essentially to nothing more than commentary and criticism of the television show of government?


The revolution was televised. Gil Scott Heron got it exactly backwards.

[davidswanson]

5. yes

turn off all televisions

or perhaps - do i dare suggest it? - we could actually ask Obama for one little thing before we vote for him (the wingnuts DEMANDED EVERYTHING from McCain and got Palin, look what we got by lying face-down in the Delaware dirt) -- we could ask that instead of giving ALL the digital TV channels to the same handful of oligarchs who have screwed up analog TV for years they give A FEW channels to us.

[Dystopian]

6. This needs to be on the front page!

Please keep the recommendations coming. We have gifted writers, journalists and activists right here on DU, and it's an honor to have David Swanson among us. Thank you, David. Another excellent piece.

edited to include the word 'activists'

peace~

[Dystopian]

8. kick.

peace~

[azul]

9. Behind the curtain of flailing clowns?

Do you ever get to thinking that these inept bozos like Bush and Cheney are just clowns stood up in front of the public eye to divide and enrage people? Take the heat for their corporate sponsor s's criminality and ward if off as partisan politics? The ugly faces of big business?

Just look at all the players that effected the coup in 2000 to ensure these losers were in place for this unfolding agenda. Too radical an idea, they really deserved to win, and what did we expect from empowering such corrupt losers, some kind of victory for average people?

Wouldn't the most direct method of regaining the people's control of the government and ending this corruption be to end corporate influence in government? Make it clear somehow that the 14th amendment did not confer "personhood" upon businesses?