Cheney, Netanyahu, Permanent War, and Why

Column No. 224

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – June 7, 2009

As Dick Cheney makes the media rounds attempting to justifying both the War on Iraq and torture, since Bush has virtually gone into hiding he has revealed to the world just who was running the show. He has also revealed its true goals.

Of course the Iraq and torture policies were closely tied together, and not simply because the first reason for doing torture was to try to get some captive to falsely “confess” that Saddam and bin Laden were working together. Cheney wanted the War on Iraq and he also wanted the use of torture to become institutionalized in the United States. But why Iraq? Well, we know that it was not because “Saddam had WMD and was prepared to unleash them within 45 minutes” (courtesy of the lap-dog Tony Blair). We also know that it was not because of any link between Saddam and bin Laden. None existed. If that supposed “meeting in Prague” really did happen, it is overwhelmingly likely that, given Saddam’s well-known hatred for bin Laden, his envoy responded to bin Laden’s messenger asking for aid in two words: “F__k off!” 

It was not done to “bring Democracy to the Middle East” beginning with the country in the middle of it. No one has ever successfully established democracy at the barrel of a gun. Re-established, yes. Established, no. (Iraq, sharply riven along ethnic and geographic lines with continuing violence, can hardly be considered a democracy even though there is voting.) But there is a first time for everything. Suppose that the experiment were successful. Can you imagine Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, and etc. suddenly becoming true, Western-style democracies? So if it was none of the above, what was it?

Many of us on the left thought right from the start that it was about oil and bases. But as the war wore on it gradually became apparent that they weren’t it. At least they weren’t the primary reasons. Too much went wrong with the invasion from the beginning. Not nearly enough troops to bring order to the country. Allowing vandalism, from the national museum to the electric power system to the oil industry itself. Not having a comprehensive post-war reconstruction plan. (Remember? The State Department had prepared one. It was 2200 pages long. It was completely ignored by Rumsfeld et al who were running things there.) Bremer disbanding the Iraqi army. No notion about how to make peace between the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds. 

Accidental? I don’t think so. I have thought for some time now that the true objective was to create an Orwellian Permanent War: some level of US troops always there and always engaged in combat at some level. Remember McCain talking about a “100 year presence?” Indeed that objective was well on its way to being achieved by the Georgites during the latter stages of the Bush Administration when, even with a Democratic Congress, cowed into submissiveness however, they continued to get war funding and their Scream Machine continued to called for some totally undefined “victory” that would take forever to achieve. Only when even the US-installed Shiite-lead government demanded a time-line for American withdrawal did Bush suddenly do a complete volte-face and agree to one. And now with his fear-mongering, Cheney is still trying oh-so-very hard to achieve what would be the same objective: to keep the US on a war-footing even after a future withdrawal from Iraq.

What about the Israeli Right, then? In the 1980s, the right-wing, former Irgun terrorist, Yitzhak Shamir, said words to the effect of “sure, we’ll have negotiations with the Palestinians. We’ll just make sure they go on forever. In the meantime, we just continue taking their land and putting up settlements.” In 1991, outside the Madrid Conference which lead to the Oslo Agreement which was supposed to have lead to a settlement of the Israel/Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu was heard by an American journalist to say “this cannot happen.” When in 1996 under the leadership of the former hawk Yitzhak Rabin it looked like a settlement was actually going to be achieved, he was conveniently assassinated by a far-right “religious” type. 

When in the fall of 2000, it looked like Bill Clinton was going to be able to forge a peace agreement, Ariel Sharon arranged to march onto the holiest spot in the Islamic world outside of Mecca, the Temple Mount, surrounded by 800 troops conveniently provided by the Labour Prime Minister, Ehud Barak. When Sharon became Prime Minister the following year, and “peace talks” of sorts continued, somehow, every time it looked like there was going to be some sort of break-through even with the Neocons in charge in Washington as well as in Jerusalem, there was some sort of terrorist attack. Certain EU and UN staffers and even certain Israeli observers, including at least one MK, thought that there occurrence was somehow just too “coincidental.” False flag operations to avoid peace? Nah, impossible, right? Right. 

In the meantime, theft of Palestinian land and settlement construction continues unabated, the Gaza outrage occurs (and who knows exactly who was responsible for those short-range rocket attacks which, when described by the US media made one think that they were volleys of Nazi V-2s or Soviet Katyushas), and then comes Netanyahu. “Peace? Of course. Just don’t take notice when we once again move the goal-posts. Not only are we not talking about a Palestinian state. We are talking about Palestinian Bantustans. We are talking about Jerusalem being all ours. And oh yes, not only do we want recognition of the State of Israel (already granted by the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League but also, if one reads between the lines, by Hamas as part of a true two-state solution) we want recognition of Israel as a JEWISH state, thereby dis-enfranchising all of its non-Jewish citizens.”

A formula for peace? No. A formula for a continuation of the 60-year war, with no end in sight. Just like Cheney’s objective. So why do they want this state of affairs? The answer is a simple one that just stares us in the face. Because both in Israel and in the United States it is the only way that the Right can stay in power. In the US it has very quickly become obvious that the only card the GOP has to play is the fear card. Nothing else, not big deficits, not the threat of a national health insurance program that would both cover all Americans and bring down costs while improving quality, not the threat of an end of oil company domination and profiteering from the energy policy that has been in place ever since it was established by Reagan, not screaming “socialism,” is working for them. New ideas? Since it’s their ideas that got our nation into the fix it’s in, how could they possibly have new ones that could work? 

So. Promote fear. Promote torture. Promote continuing “low level conflicts” in Afghanistan, advocate broadening the guerilla War on Iran that according to Seymour Hersh Cheney was (perhaps still is) already running directly. Hope that North Korea does something really crazy. Hope for (or possibly create?) the next 9/11. Then you’ve got your only possible road back to power. 

As for the Israeli Right, Permanent War is the only way they can stay in power. With any kind of real peace do you think that the Israeli public would continue to advocate the continued slashing of the traditional Israeli social service economy and the continued flourishing of the Israel Defense Force and its ever-broadening military industrial base? 

Cheney and Netanyahu. Both run by the US/Israeli Neocon clique, some of whose members we know of and, most likely, some of its most-powerful members we don’t. Brothers under the skin.

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Please note: This column was previous published on The Planetary Movement (http://www.planetarymovement.org/) on May 29, 2009, and is re-published here with permission.

The Crisis of Finance Capitalism

Column No. 223

Among all of the others that we know of on Earth, the human species is unique in a number of ways. One is that while members of other species certainly can communicate with each other in a variety of ways, including sound, we are the only one (as far as we know, and outside of Pixar films) that has a complex language. We are unique in that we are the only one that for our survival needs to convert various elements found in our natural environment into more complex substances. And so foodstuffs, raw meat, vegetables, grains and etc., become food. Trees become wood, become shelter. Iron ore becomes iron, becomes at first various tools and other implements, and then more complex things, especially when we make it into steel. Thus the members of the other species can each take what they need for survival from the environment directly (assuming there is enough of it). If we are to survive, as individuals and as a species, ours needs to make the various elements that we find in the environment into a whole range of products made from those elements. 

One term for the various modes of conversion from environmental elements into usable substances, structures, and so forth is “means of production.” Because the existence of each of us is dependent on such means, without them, our species would quickly die out. Very early humans presumably did their own personal conversions, for themselves and/or their family units, of hunted and gathered foodstuffs into food, of trees into wood into shelter, of animal skins into clothing, and so on and so forth. As those early humans began to organize themselves into social units, it certainly would have been possible for them to organize the control of the means of production so that it was shared in one way or another among all of the members of each social unit. But that is not what happened.

We cannot be certain just when it occurred, but back in the mists of time by one means or another certain members of each social unit would take over control of the means of production, leaving all of the other members without such control. This may have happened at some point in the hunter-gatherer phase of the development of our species, but it certainly happened when, for example, food production started to switch over from hunting-gathering to agriculture and animal husbandry, and where possible, fishing. Some individuals were owners of various elements of the means of production the use of which could supply relatively large numbers of individuals with various products. The rest were either not-owners entirely, or owners of a limited set of means of production, like their own animals and small agricultural plots, and/or their own fishing boats, from which they could supply their own needs, at least for the basic elements of human survival: food, clothing, and shelter. 

But for most everything else, over a period of some millennia, to a greater or lesser extent depending upon their own particular circumstances, the not-owners became dependent upon the owners for their survival. The not-owners did have their labor-power, of course. Increasingly, they voluntarily or involuntarily put it in the service of the means of production owners. A combination of self-supporting and non-self-supporting peasantry, dependent and independent craftsmen, slaves, and means-of-production owners became the norm for the societal structure of that lengthy period. 

The modern system of economic organization that we call “capitalism” has been under development since the Middle Ages. It is based on the private ownership of the means of production, just as under the slavery/peasant/craftsman system, but it took on a different nature. Capitalists were able to take accumulated wealth of one sort or another and use it to employ others to work for them, and pay them for doing that work. The system evolved such that the owners were able to earn more from the work of others, using their original investment plus the raw worth of the workers’ labor power, than the simple sum of the two. So there was an excess of value produced, that, as the system developed on top of the by-then age-old formulation of the private ownership of the means of production, went to its owners.

The first form was mercantile capitalism, in which money was made by organized trading at a level much higher than anything previously seen.  Trade and the accumulation of surpluses from it had of course been going on for millennia. But in most cases the excesses, if any, earned, were earned by the persons doing the trading themselves. In mercantile capitalism, the capitalists invested their funds in the work of others and then proceeded to accumulate the profits earned, without actually doing any of the work themselves. Of course this wasn’t a totally “clean” break from the past forms. Certain mercantilists both worked in trading directly and also accumulated profits from the enterprises earned by others. The “capital” that they provided/paid for consisted of the land and sea-going vessels used for trading and the systems developed to keep track of everything.

The second form was industrial capitalism, still going strong in many countries around the world, especially those with cheap labor. In this form, profits are made by the owners of the means of production using the labor of others for which they pay (as little as possible in most cases), making and selling things in large numbers.   The “capital” is literally the means of production that they own: the factories, the mines, the refineries, the means of transportation, on which they employ others and then accumulate the excess value, profit, produced by those others in the course of their work.

The third form is finance capitalism, in which money is made from the business of buying, selling and trading various financial instruments, for example, home mortgages, and most recently, their "securitized" form. That is the form which more and more is taking over American capitalism. In the first decade of this century, the financial sector made 41% of the total profits accumulated in the United States (“The Quiet Coup,” Simon Johnson, The Atlantic, May, 2009). Some that profit was made the old-fashioned way, by collecting interest on loans made. 

But increasingly, in the financial sector, profits were made by trading pieces of paper, some of which were of such a complicated structure that very few people actually understood how they were pieced together, to say nothing of being to explain their structures to anyone else. The key to making profits with these instruments was to be able to convince a potential buyer that they would become evermore valuable. This was the case even though their intrinsic worth was based on other pieces of paper that had been sliced and diced into such small bits of supposed base value that no one could ever trace them to their source. We all know what happened when the belief-in-the-ever-increasing-value-of-financial-instruments-that-few-people-understood collapsed. 

And therein lies the rub for financial capitalism and its potential for recovery. The “capital” on which profits were made is/was these financial instruments. They, the “toxic assets,” have no intrinsic value and thus cannot produce anything, ever again. In previous recessions/depressions, the capital was always there, in the form of the ships and etc. under mercantile capitalism, the factories, mines, and etc. under industrial capitalism. Once the market for goods and services under either system revived or was caused to be revived in one way or another, the capital, the “stuff” of production was there. It simply had to be brought back to a reasonably efficient functioning state. Then the capitalist could employ the workers once again, accumulate the excess value they produced once again, and the capitalist cycle would start over again.

But if the “capital,” the means by which profits were made, is simply pieces of paper that now have no intrinsic value and unlike a closed factory cannot be simply started up again, where does capitalism go from here? This is the question that the Obama Administration, the US owners of the means of production and indeed their counterparts all around the world are struggling mightily to come up with a workable answer for. I certainly do not have the answer in this case. I must say that I hope that these “captains of industry (and finance)” can come up with one soon or we will all really be in for it, at a level of economic and political suffering that presently one can only imagine.

What Cheney is All About?

Column No. 222

George W. Bush apparently really believes in the "alternate realities" that he presented to our nation and the world over and over again during his Presidency. For example, he apparently really thought that: he was a uniter, not a divider; Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (until it was absolutely proven otherwise); cutting taxes for the rich would boost the economy; as President, he had all of those powers that Dick Cheney, Richard Addington, and John Yoo pretended to find for him in the Constitution; abolishing Social Security would benefit everyone whose social security was thereby abolished as well as the country as a whole; as President he had the authority under the Constitution to say "I'll follow this Act of Congress but not that one, at my own discretion;" he could, on his own authority, abrogate ratified treaties if his White House Legal Counsel thought they were "quaint;" Saddam really did buy "yellow cake" in Niger.

While George Bush really is an undereducated, ignorant, and dumb, person, he, in his alternate reality certainly never thought of himself in that light. No, he was not a secret voracious reader, as "Turdblossom," otherwise known as Karl Rove, was so fond of telling us. There were never any references to such readings except on the occasions that such were written into speeches for him. But he probably thought that he was, given that Rove told the world he that was. What a nice fit for Bush’s alternate reality.

Dick Cheney is cut from an entirely different cloth. He is very knowledgeable, very smart, and knows exactly what he is doing every minute. He had a very clear agenda when he was in office: to run both the presidency and the President to the extent that he could. He was very clear in his own mind, and even on occasion in public by indirection that his ultimate objective was to establish an authoritarian government in the United States., something he called "The Unitary Presidency." Most not otherwise prejudiced observers, under the brief definition (of mine) that follows, would call it "fascism:”

"Fascism is a politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy."

Dick Cheney does not make off-hand remarks. Dick Cheney knows the truth from falsehood. Dick Cheney does not live in an alternate reality. Dick Cheney does try very hard to conceal the reality that he lives in. That is why, during his vice presidency, he made very few public appearances where one or more members of the media could question him. However, he did make such an appearance on a Sunday back in March on CNN.

In that interview he uttered several palpable falsehoods. First he made the claim that Iraq was a "state sponsor of terrorism," by implication related to 9/11. There was absolutely no evidence to substantiate this claim. Bill Safire among others did like to cite a supposed meeting between a supposed al-Qaida operative with a supposed representative of the Hussein regime. The meeting supposedly took place in Prague, Czech Republic. There is no firm proof that such a meeting ever took place. But if it did, given the prior relationship between Hussein and bin Laden, the message delivered most likely to have been delivered by the Iraqi to the Saudi was one that could be summarized in two words: “F__k off!” It is a fact Saddam went out of his way to avoid associating with terrorists such as Osama bin Laden (who happened to hate Saddam as a secularist) if for no other reason than not to give the U.S. an excuse to attack him.

In that interview, Cheney stated that the Democrats are responsible for the current economic crisis and that his administration and the Republican-led Congress that controlled policy and monetary blank checks through 2006 had no responsibility for any of the mess, even though no one but the Republican Scream Machine holds to that view. Since Cheney, unlike Bush, clearly does not live in an alternate reality, he knows the truth. He just chose not to state it. 

Not a falsehood, but a totally unsupportable position stated with total conviction, Cheney stated that President Obama's policy of closing Guantanamo would make the U.S. "unsafe," when only a handful of the persons held there are known terrorists or potential terrorists, when it was Bush/Cheney who ignored (or not, because they already knew that something was up and were determined NOT to stop it) that clear warning of an impending bin Laden-led attack on the US they received from the CIA on August 5, 2001. At the same time, it is now widely acknowledged that the Iraq War that Cheney largely ginned up has become, over the years, a major recruiting and training ground for potential terrorists. (I was pleased to note that after I originally penned these lines, the President too used this line of attack on Cheney.)

So why did he offer these falsehoods and misrepresentations? To score current political points? To indicate that he is now, post-position-of-power, falling into his political dotage and succumbing to the George W. Bush alternate reality disease? Certainly not. What Dick Cheney did was to make it very clear that his battle to establish an essentially fascist state in our country for the benefit of the primary power elements that he represents -- the extractive industries, the military/industrial complex, the prison/industrial complex, the agribusiness sector, and certain elements of the other major economic sectors -- is far from over. If the Cheney Wing of the Republican Party, now lead by Rush Limbaugh and his Republican Scream Machine clones, is ever to make it back to power, the first essential endeavour for them is to establish a mythology on which they can run. For they cannot possibly run on reality and hope to come close to winning.

The German Right in the 1920s did it with the "Stab in the Back" claim for the German loss of the World War I. Never mind that by 1918 Germany had been thoroughly bled of men, material, and money, that the U.S. with its relatively limitless supply of men and materiel was fully engaged on the British/French side, and that following the failure of the 1918 Summer Offensive under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, even the Kaiser was ready to quit. No. It was the "Socialists" and the "Communists" who "stabbed the German nation in the back." They (in the Limbaugh/Coulter sense) did it. So "we," the patriotic Germans, have to get them. For it is all their fault.

And here, now, Cheney is marching down the same track. He has the full collaboration of O'RHannibaugh and their clones, the Republican leadership in the Congress and outside of it (Gingrich) who see nowhere else to go, and their echo chambers, such as NewsMax (the voice of the American Conservative (sic) Union), the Fox "News" Channel, and the Heritage Foundation. Yes, the Rovian Privatized Ministry of Propaganda is very much in play. With them all, Cheney is laying the groundwork for their hoped-for GOP comeback. But this time it would be with a vengeance, both figurative and literal. It's "The Liberals," those traitors who, so Limbaugh and Coulter tell us, are responsible for everything that is wrong with the U.S., and "we" have to get "them," "squash them like cockroaches," so the self-parodying Mark Le-vin tells us.

One big difference now, as compared with the Clinton years, is that the Obama White House hits back. So much and with so much effectiveness, that Rove, et al feel impelled to go back after them, especially the sharp-tongued Vice-President. He in fact has been so effective that the mouthpiece NewsMax has to spread rumors of “White dis-satisfaction with the Vice-President” that have absolutely no basis in fact.

Stay tuned. Indeed we all better stay tuned, because Limbaugh out loud and Cheney to himself and privately to his friends are serious when they say that they want Obama to fail. For that failure, combined with the mythology they are quickly developing, would very easily lead them back to power. And were that to happen, the even GW Bush Presidency, moving down the road to fascism but not there yet by any stretch of the imagination, could become something that we would look back upon with longing.

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This column is based in part on a column of mine entitled “What Cheney is Really About” that appeared on BuzzFlash.com on March 19, 2009.

The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 4: The Bush Legacy

Column No. 221

Over the past several columns I have discussed the successes of George Bush in terms of substantive outcomes.  They would have been enough for the Georgites, I’m sure.  But some of them can be and are being reversed by the Obama Administration.

Thus many Bush policies, in the foreign and domestic arenas, from war and its threat as the primary instrument of foreign policy, to the deindustrialization of the US with the replacement of industrial capitalism by finance capitalism, to the total degradation of the environment for the sole purpose of enriching the extractive industries in the short-term, and so on and so forth as we have detailed in some detail in recent weeks, can be and to some extent are being moderated by President Obama.  What may be more important for the country in the long run is the political process “achievements” of George Bush and his minions.  For these apply to the GOP, which remains a major political force in our nation.  It is now licking its wounds.  Many analysts say that it is “searching for its identity.”  That is not true.  It has an identity. 

It has been developing this identity since Goldwater was its Presidential standard-bearer.  That developing identity underwent something of a detour under Nixon (who, for all his faults, liked diplomacy and thought that government had some level of social responsibility, for the environment and in health services, for example) but its modern pathway was established by Reagan and, in succession, Gingrich, DeLay, Bush, Cheney and Rove have cemented it in place.  As long as the party remains intact and remains one of the two principal US parties, if indeed Obama fails (and the GOP is doing everything it can to attempt to ensure that outcome) they could come roaring back to power.  So what is the nature of the GOP political processes that have been cemented in place by George Bush?

First of all, the GOP has become the only major political party in the non-Muslim world for which a principal plank is homophobia.  And it gets away with it.  The “anti-gay marriage” platform plank is just a symbol for homophobia.  It’s amazing to think that that is the case.  Part of the fault for this lies at the feet of the Democrats, who out of fear for being “labeled” (who knows what?) continue to let them do it unchallenged.   Part of it also lies at the feet of the gay and lesbian community which numbers among some its wealthiest members Republicans, who simply will not allow it to raise as an issue the fact that the GOP runs on homophobia.

Second of all, the GOP has become the party that runs on the denial of the freedom of religious belief as to when life begins.  And gets away with it.  Part of the fault likewise lies at the feet of the Democratic Party which continues to fall back on the half-measure of protecting Roe v. Wade.  But part of the fault also lies with the “pro-choice” movement, which a) was very late historically to make abortion-rights a political rather than a legalistic issue, b) continues to frame the issue in terms of a “woman’s right to choose,” nothing broader, c) has only half-heartedly and relatively lately made abortion the health issue that it truly is, and d) has never attacked the Republicans on the fact that a central platform plank of theirs is the criminalization of the belief that life beings at the time of viability, for everyone, regardless of sex. 

Third of all, the GOP has become, especially under Cheney, the party that holds that the Constitution can be destroyed if it is in power and says, on its own authority, that there are one or more reasons for doing so.  So, they still defend torture and warrantless wiretapping and Presidential “signing statements” that arrogate law-breaking power to the President (as long as he or she is one of theirs, of course) and unilateral abrogation of treaties.  This extremely dangerous GOP governmental-process plank may well come under direct attack from this Administration, once certain new high-level Department of Justice personnel are in place.  But that remains to be seen.  In the meantime, the GOP is allowed to get away with having such a process plank in its platform, generally unchallenged on the political level.

Fourth of all, still on political process, and a successful outcome of the Bush Presidency, the GOP has become the party of election theft, which of course is how they got hold of the Presidency to begin with.  Karl Rove was their master propaganda master, but he was also their master election thief.  There are indications that he may have been maneuvering even to attempt to steal this last election, until someone told him to cease and desist with an obvious “or else” thrown in, although we will likely never know who that might have been (?Jim Baker) and what that “or else” might have been.  Funny, isn’t it, how Rove’s point man for election computer manipulation was killed in a light plane crash while on his way to testify about certain matters in the Ohio election.  But you can bet your bottom dollar that they ain’t done on this one yet.

Fifth of all, they have developed their Privatized Ministry of Propaganda (PMoP) to a very high level.  It ranges from the Fox”News”Channel to the O’RHannibaugh Republican Scream Machine and everything in between.  This will forever be a clear and present danger to the Republic, regardless of whether the Fairness Doctrine is ever reinstated.  That the radio and television airwaves are the property of the general public, not the private networks that use them, is reason enough to restore it, but so far President Obama seems not to have the stomach for this one.

Sixth of all is of course the racism that has been at the center of the GOP since Nixon developed the Southern Strategy in 1968.  It is muted now and they even have an African-American national chairman (who knows for how long, but they’ve got one).  But for the time-being at least they have become a White/Southern regional party and they will continue to have to appeal to that constituency.

Seventh, the GOP is the party of the promotion of fear as a principal means of winning elections.  Cheney has famously been at it again, with a vengeance.  (They may also be the party of false-flag operations, but that is another story.)   Again, if, with their assistance, Obama indeed fulfills the spoken wish of the Limbaughites and the unspoken wish of almost every other Republican leader and fails, or can be made with the help of the PMoP and their willing servants on cable news to appear to have failed, the GOP will be rolling out fear as a major electoral tool, perhaps as soon as 2010, certainly by 2012.

Finally, on the process side of the ledger, the GOP is stuck in the process mode of politics: “cut taxes” and “shrink government” is what they are all about all the time.  That these are the policies that have directly to the economic disaster we now face is irrelevant to the GOP, viz. their recent “budget” proposal.  But, David Brooks’ and David Frum’s pleadings to the contrary notwithstanding, given the economic realities, there is no way they can come up with any alternatives to what President Obama is pursuing with vigor that has any substance to it.  Thus the constant “cuttaxesshrinkgovernment” noise, the constant of the Bush Administration, is all that we will hear.

The modern GOP is thus cemented into the Bush mold in terms of political process.  It has no prospects for change for the foreseeable future.  And that is the most important legacy that George Bush has left behind: a party that in any other developed capitalist country would be regard as far right-wing and which, if it ever does manage to regain power, will rule in such a way that we might even look back on the Bush Era with some longing.

The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 3: Goals and Successes

Column No. 220

At the end of my column on this subject two weeks ago, I restated my position that “success,” whether in a Presidency or on a Saturday morning errands trip, is to be measured against goals set and the degree to which they have been achieved.  Thus, when one looks at the BushCheney (or CheneyBush --- as I have said, your choice) record, is this a “failed Presidency?”  Hardly.  They set out to achieve what I have on more than one occasion termed a “coup d’etat in slow motion.”  BushCheney did not measure success in terms of polls nor subsequent Republican electoral victories (at least so far).  Forget them.  We must look at what they did with the control of the Executive Branch that they had.   

Upon gaining the Office of the Presidency Bush man first embraced the powers truly vested in him by the Constitution.  Bush was then little challenged by a very weak opposition.  Further, he was strongly supported for most of the first six years by his lock-step Republican Congress, and ongoing, his in-the-pocket Privatized Ministry of Propaganda.  Together, he used them to create an Office of the Presidency with powers that no reading of the Constitution can possibly support.  That’s success, man.  Let’s review some of the policy specifics.  They are well-known to most readers of TPJ, but we shall review them briefly here anyway. 

On the foreign policy side, let’s begin with Iraq.  Is/was it a disaster?  Well, it is, if you measure it on the supposed WMD/al-Qaeda connections, or the “establishment of Democracy” (not an originally stated goal of the US invasion), and certainly on what has happened to that benighted country since.  Ohmigod.  First the Iraqi people suffer under Hussein for 20-plus years.  Then they get Bush and his pro-counsels.  What did they do to deserve that sequence?  But supposing when that pre-invasion intelligence analysis predicting chaos in Iraq following an American invasion (“Analysts’ Warning of Iraq Chaos Detailed,” Pincus and DeYoung, Washington Post, May 26, 2007) came through, you didn’t say “ohmigod, how could we possibly go in there?”  But rather you said “ohmigod, exactly what we are looking for: Permanent War here we come.”   It is becoming ever more clear that the latter was indeed the BushCheney response.  And even though in the end they did not achieve it (at least not yet), why would they want Permanent War?  There are three main reasons. 

First, it was the central part of their campaign to create the atmosphere of Permanent Fear at home, the only way they could have possibly legally kept the Executive Branch in Republican hands after Jan. 20, 2009.  Second, it was a means of keeping one of their two most important backers, the arms industry, in clover even after the end of the Cold War oh-so-many years ago.  Third, it could have created the basis for creating that "terrorist attack" and coup d’etat in Oct., 2008 which would have keep CheneyBush themselves in power after Jan. 20, 2009, about which I and many others viewed as a distinct possibility.  And so, even before his famous-in-advance “September [2007] Report” was issued, Bush’s hand-picked Gen. “Mouthpiece” Petraeus was saying (in statements that appeared to have been written for him by Rove’s staff) “we’ll be there for 10 more years, at least.”  If what you want is indeed Permanent War, that’s success, man.  As a side-car to this main foreign policy thrust, Bush tried as hard as he could to create a mini-Cold War with Russia with his “defensive missiles on your borders” and the “bases on your soft Central Asian underbelly” program.  This would have helped for both the Permanent War strategy and “let’s keep the arms industry going full blast” plans. 

Turning to domestic policy (not necessarily in order of importance), a major goal was to, as Grover Norquist put it in his famous mantra: “Shrink the Federal government to the size of a bathtub and then drown it in the bathtub.”  (That is, of course, drown those parts of the Federal that serve the National Domestic Interest, not those concerned with political oppression, domestic and foreign spying, defending the extractive industries from any interference, promoting the depredations of finance capitalism, domestic thought-control [e.g., on abortion rights and gay rights], and so on and so forth.) What happened after Katrina struck was only the most famous example of the Bush/Cheney/Norquist approach to government and governing. 

It was not incompetence, folks.  How the Georgite Federal government acted and continued to act in the aftermath of Katrina and in so many other venues is exactly how the Georgites want it to act, viz. the Norquist prescription.  They want to destroy all the functions of the Federal government, except those that have to do with the military, the prisons, other instruments of oppression and repression, and the use of tax revenues to line the pockets of themselves and their rich supporters.  It is happening exactly the way it was planned to.  The only big target Bush failed to hit was Social Security.  Chalk up another success for Bush. 

Further, Bush secured the dominance of the profit-makers, the drug companies, the insurance companies, and the health-technology companies, in the US health care delivery system.  And with the help of a group of reactionary Democrats, just as were organized against the Clinton Health Plan in 1994, these sectors are once again organizing to defeat the Obama Health Plan.  Bush may well have made sure that there will be no significant reform of the health care delivery system for the foreseeable future, for he has totally entrenched the aforementioned profit-makers.  As Bush made sure that there would be no Federal support for stem-cell research on his watch, the US fell behind in this arena of research as well as many others (e.g., alternative energy supply and how to combat global warming and climate change).  Bush made sure that homophobia would for the foreseeable future be at the centre of the Republican Party’s political attack apparatus (see the success of Prop. 8 in California. 

More successes?  Bush and Rove presided (indirectly to be sure) over the creation of the most powerful propaganda machine since the days of Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels, their Privatized Ministry of Propaganda.  Just see how it wheeled into action, with a common agenda, after the Libby Commutation: “there was no crime; everyone knew Valerie Plame was covert; Ambassador Wilson’s findings were false; Libby’s memory was simply faulty.”  All lies, of course, but all reflecting the White House message, and, since it sounded just like him, most likely coming straight from Karl Rove.  Currently the PMP is screaming the lie that THE cause of the major breakdown that has occurred in Third Stage Capitalism (that is Finance Capitalism, succeeding the Mercantile and Industrial Stages) was “Fannie Mae” and “Freddie Mac.”  They were of course supported (you know) by the “evil trio” of The Woman (Nancy Pelosi), the Gay (Barney Frank), and The Black (woman to boot) Maxine Waters.  Trick mortgages from companies required to have virtually no reserves, the “securitization” and “credit default swap” processes, interest-conflicted bond-rating, and market manipulation by totally unregulated “hedge funds,” among other factors, of course had nothing to do with it.

Bush converted (if I may use that term) the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department into the “Promotion of Republican Rightist Religion Division” (N.A. Lewis, “Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission, New York Times, June 14, 2007).  Bush placed in the Federal Judiciary at every level an extensive cadre of the most reactionary jurists he could find.  He created a private army of “security contractors” totally beholden to him, and used them both overseas (Iraq) and at home (Katrina and now near the Mexican border, south of San Diego).  Some of them already wear black uniforms.  Since Blackwater has been kicked out of Iraq by the Iraqis, I wonder what their next mission might be.

At Guantanamo and elsewhere  Bush trained a huge cadre of torturers and brutal prison guards for purposes that can only be guessed at (except to say that they went way beyond dealing with a group of unfortunate Muslims caught up in a web that had no purpose except torture-systems development).  Then there was all the environmental stuff, no-to-global warming, and etc. And oh yes, I almost forgot, with his planned fantastical deficits and debt, and tax cuts for his rich friends and backers, even before the crisis of finance Capitalism, Bush tried as hard as he could to cripple fiscally any future Democratic government that would try to do anything positive for the country, along the lines of carrying out the governmental functions as spelled out in the Preamble to the Constitution.  So far, Obama and his people seem to be outsmarting him on this one, but the story is far from over.

It has now become clear that Bush, without, then with, and now again without full control of Congress, accomplished many of his objectives, some probably beyond the Georgites’ wildest dreams of success.  He did this primarily because he and Cheney and Rove and their minions had a very well thought-out plan for doing so.  This man is not impotent.  He was highly competent, that is to do what he clearly set out to do.  In terms of his own terms, he was not a failure by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, when you compare what he achieved of the goals that he set out to achieve with what any other US President achieved in terms of his goals, Bush is indeed the most successful President of the United Sates, ever. 

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This column is based in part on my The Political Junkies.net Column No. 157, “The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 3: Goals and Successes”      

The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 2: The Constitution

Column No. 219

Continuing this series, this column focuses on what was the centerpiece of the Bush/Cheney (or Presidency: the destruction of our treasured Constitutional Democracy that (for the most part) has served our nation so well for the 218 years of its existence. 

To start, let’s review the seeming conundrum between this worst, while at the same time most successful, President ever.  An item on AOL News for June 13, 2007 was headlined: “Bush: Does He Have Any Clout Left?" Gosh.  His poll numbers were in the tank and going lower.  The Congress was Democratic (by the thickness of the hair on Joe Lieberman’s head which was not much, and no one could figure out what was going on inside Joe Lieberman’s head anyway until the McCain campaign, but the Democrats had majorities in both Houses).  By a fairly large margin the public disapproved of his major foreign policy initiative, the War on Iraq.  Republican candidates, for the Presidency, the Senate, and the House were beginning to desert him personally, while not so much on policy, except, for some, on the distractive issue of immigration. 

So did have any clout left?  You bet your sweet pitootie he did.  George Bush (and Cheney and Rove), better than any American President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, understood the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution.  And Bush, unlike any other American President ever, understood how to expand his powers way beyond those specified by the relatively limiting Article II of the Constitution, given that there was little real opposition with both the will and the power to challenge him in his campaign.  This campaign was as well planned as it was implemented.  It was obviously in the Bush Administration’s plans since the beginning of his Presidency.  For example, Cheney had been expounding on the theory of the “Unitary Executive,” (a polite term for dictatorship) since well before the Vice-Presidency was a gleam even in his eye. 

The Patriot Act, which clearly gave the President unconstitutional powers to over-ride the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution on his own authority, is 342 pages of complex legislation.  It was introduced to the Congress on Oct. 24, 2001, just 43 days after the 9/11 tragedy.  It is highly unlikely that this text could have been written in that period of time, especially given that first someone has to decide to ask the Dept. of Justice to prepare such a bill, that decision has to be reviewed, the concepts have to be developed, it has to be presented to Justice, writing assignments have to be made, drafts prepared and reviewed, everything has to collated, and so on and so forth, and in those days Bush had not by that time had the opportunity to litter the career ranks of the DOJ with his political appointees.  In fact, that bill had to have been months in the planning, preparation, and writing, with the Georgites just waiting for the right time to send it to Congress.  Then, forgetting all about Committee hearings in both Houses (and in the face of the “terrorist threat,” bipartisanship, anyone?), Congress was then given three days to pass it. 

Once upon a time, Karl Rove was uncharacteristically open and blunt about what he and Bush et al were all about.  As I noted in a TPJ column of mine published on Dec. 2, 2004, in The Guardian (UK) of November 25, 2004 the US political analyst Sidney Blumenthal had a column about the opening ceremonies for the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, AK.  The article was entitled "One gulp and Bush was gone.”  Mr. Blumenthal made a number of fascinating observations.  One of them was most chilling.  In reference to Karl Rove, Blumenthal noted that "offstage, beforehand, Rove and Bush had had their library tours.  According to two eyewitnesses, Rove had shown keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs, obviously thinking about a future George W. Bush library and legacy.  'You're not such a scary guy,' joked his guide.  'Yes, I am,' Rove replied.  Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly: 'I change constitutions, I put churches in schools ...' “On the first, indeed they did.  On the second, they tried their damnedest.

One of Bush’s primary goals upon taking power was to establish this new concept of American government, the “Unitary Executive.”  The lawyer John Yoo, who did much of the leg-work on the “torture-is-more-than-OK” policy before he left the Department of Justice, has trumpeted his work on it in two books.  Cheney talked about it on numerous occasions, and still is, except, of course it doesn’t apply to Pres. Obama: wrong party, wrong color.  Their flacks in the Privatized Ministry of Propaganda, like Bill Kristol, late of The New York Times, but always of Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, spoke admiringly and approvingly of Bush’s “near dictatorial powers.”  And one does have to observe, although many just do not want to face facts, that he did pretty well established a Unitary Executive. 

It was created both by legislation passed by the rubber-stamp Republican Congress Bush had for six years, and other steps he took simply by declaring, unchallenged, his own supposed authority, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.  Just read its Article II, the bulk of which is concerned with the method of electing the President, the power to make treaties and appointments, and the State of the Union Address.  There ain’t nothin’ to be found in it like anything they did.  And oh yes, it does specify that the President shall “take care that the laws shall be faithfully executed.”  So let’s see what all this that is nowhere to be found in Article II has lead to, not necessarily in order of importance. 

There was Bush’s conceit that the Constitution gave him the power to issue “Signing Statements” that in turn gave him the power to ignore statutes passed by the Congress.  His claim to this power was under some imaginary authority of the office that if he thinks that something in an Act of Congress is unconstitutional, by saying so at the time of signing he can just ignore or even break the law.  (It was subsequently revealed by a Government Accountability Office [GAO] study of his “Signing Statements,” that he and a variety of Federal departments did just that.)  In his claim of authority to disobey the law because he “thinks,” late in the game, that it is unconstitutional, he failed to note that he already has the power to reject a bill passed by Congress on any grounds he wishes (like, hey, I just don’t like the idea of stem cell research so to the extent that I can, I am going to prevent its benefits from being of use to those who do), before signing it into law.  That power is called the veto.  He did use that one too with increasing frequency once control of the Congress passed into Democratic hands.  But under the Constitution itself, the veto is the only power of challenge to congressionally passed legislation he has.  No matter.  He changed the Constitution on his own authority. 

There were the aforementioned powers of permanent imprisonment without trial of anyone, foreign or US citizen, that he labeled a “terrorist” or “aider and abettor of terrorism.”  I have written on numerous occasions of these claimed powers and how they violate the Fourth (search and seizure, probable cause), Fifth (due process) and Sixth (fair trial) Amendments to the Constitution.  As I have also noted periodically he “amended” the Constitution’s Article Six on several occasions.  The Geneva Conventions are signed and ratified treaties of the United States.  Under Article VI they are thus classified as part of the “Supreme Law of the Land.” 

No matter.  The then Counsel to the President, Alberto Gonzales, later Attorney General, on the prompting of John Yoo, labeled the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and thus totally ignorable by the President when it came to the matter of torture (which of course they never authorized).  Ignoring provisions of the Geneva Conventions on the grounds of a determination by one of the signatories that they at some point in time will be considered “quaint” is nowhere to be found in the language of the treaties.  Thus the Georgites simply ignored our treaty obligations rather than either abrogating them or attempting to renegotiate them.  So much simpler, you know.  Thus they violated the Constitution, again.  While we are on Article VI, the UN Charter, under its Article 51, prohibits preemptive war.  As a ratified treaty obligation of the United States, it too is part of the Supreme Law of the land.  And so, the War on Iraq, which Bush himself described as a “preventive war,” otherwise known around the world as “pre-emptive war,” among many other things was unconstitutional.  But who cares, as long as the Georgites had their so-called “Unitary Presidency.”

Then there are the unchallenged Executive Orders of a type not provided for by the Constitution.  Two of major importance were National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Directive/HSPH-20.  In them Bush established for himself the power to run all three branches of the Federal government in case of a “national emergency,” as defined and declared by, you guessed it, GW Bush (and/or Dick Cheney?).  Thus the President unilaterally placed himself not only above but also in control of the other two branches of government in a situation, “national emergency,” that he gave himself the power to define and declare. 

A “failed Presidency?”  Hardly.  As I noted last two weeks ago, success is measured against goals set and the degree to which they have been achieved.  Bush set out to achieve what I have on more than one occasion termed a “coup d’etat in slow motion.”  Forget the polls.  This man first embraced the powers truly vested in him by the Constitution.  Then, he was little challenged by the weak opposition, and strongly supported for the first six years by his lock-step Republican Congress, and ongoing, his in-the-pocket Privatized Ministry of Propaganda.  He proceeded to use them, step-by-step and piece-by-piece, to create an Office of the Presidency with powers that no reading of the Constitution could possibly support.  That’s success, man. 

In future columns we shall review policy specifics.

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This column is based in part on my The Political Junkies.net Column No. 156, “The Most Successful American President: George W. Bush, Part 2: The Constitution”