Real Change

On Tuesday America will elect Barrack Obama as its next president. The corporate media continues to talk of “tight races” in “key states” but I can’t imagine that anyone who knows anything about what is going on in America really believes them. By now it should be obvious even to the most die-hard neocons that John McCain and his born-again sidekick Sarah Palin are about to be wiped off the political map of the United States.

The Republican Party is in serious trouble and the Democrats, under Obama’s leadership, could do much to rectify the obscenities of Bush’s eight years in office. With absolute, filibuster proof majorities in the both the House and the Senate they could change whatever they felt like changing, literally. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal from the start and crimes against humanity, you say? Well, they could end them in one day, simply by voting to cut off the funding to continue W’s massacres. Of course, they could have done that back in 2006 when they defeated the Republicans the first time around, but they didn’t.

Come to think of it, in 2006 they could have also impeached Bush for any one of a number of his crimes against the US constitution, but that too was undoable. “Impeachment is off the table”, said the newly elected House majority leader, Nancy Pelosi (the same woman who later on would so whole-heartedly push for the tax-payer funded bailout of the Wall Street Banksters).

Gordon Gekko from Wall Street "Greed is good"

And speaking of Wall Street and the class of thieves that continues to run America, the Democratic controlled Congress and Senate could have passed laws two years ago to re-regulate the investment banks that were selling the toxic “sub-prime” securities that are now wrecking financial havoc across the globe. But they didn’t. They had better things to do, even though many of them, I’m sure, had a very good idea of what was going on and a realistic vision of where the housing bubble and the billions being spent on the Iraq war would lead us. They knew and could have done a lot when there was still time to prevent the disaster, but chose not to.

Instead, when the meltdown began and the stock market was losing an average of five to seven hundred points a day, the Democrats were the most enthusiastic supporters of the initial 700 billion dollar give-away (to the same criminals who had caused the disaster in the first place). The entire Democratic leadership stood behind the most massive wealth transfer from the poor to the filthy rich in the country’s history. “We must save the banks and the bankers to save the people”, they told us. A bit like the US soldiers who used to torch South Vietnamese hamlets with their Zippo lighters to “save” them from the Viet Cong.

In 2007 the US Census reported that roughly 40% of the nation’s wealth was controlled by the richest 1% of the country and that the top 10% owned almost two-thirds of America’s wealth. These are figures that were published last year before the crisis and the bailout and the daily stock market slides, and yet they remind me more of the kind of income disparity you’d expect to find in a Sub-Saharan nation or a Latin-American dictatorship à la Pinochet, not in the United States. And yet that is what we’ve become. An oligarchy where a miniscule minority of the population sets domestic and foreign policy and every four years holds elections so that the rest of us can participate in electing their representative, who will run their property (the United States) for their exclusive use and benefit.

I, however, am sick and tired of this system of lies and terror and hope that sooner or later the people of America will finally rise up against their autocratic rulers and take back what is rightfully theirs. Change is not just necessary, as Obama tells us, it also has to be real.

Red pumps for Palin

You've got to hand it to America's mass media. No one but no one is as expert as they are in dumbing down the population. With the country's economy teetering on the brink of a financial disaster that will probably make the Great Depression of the 1930s seem like a cake walk, do the New York Times, the Washington Post or any of the other elite news filters ever try to get at the root of this mess and explain to their readers that they have been taken for suckers once again? No, they don’t.

Nor do they ever write about the economic and moral black hole of our wars of conquest in the Middle East. This is a taboo subject in America and it’s a shame because the estimated 1 trillion dollars that is spent every year on the Military/Industrial complex in the United States could easily pay for all the state deficits ballooning out of control from California to Maine, or the mortgages that millions of Americans can no longer afford to pay on their homes, or the public health-care programs that only government employees have ever had. There is, in fact, an enormous and ever-growing list of homegrown emergencies in America that need to be dealt with and fast, but don’t expect anybody in the next administration to get around to it. That money has already been spoken for (by Wall Street and the Pentagon) and no one in the media is writing about this. It just isn’t newsworthy in the USA.

Sarah Palin's "Naughty Monkey Double Dare Pumps" available for $89.95

Instead, they talk about "Joe the plumber", the average guy who is worried about Obama raising his taxes, or about Obama's "radical ex-preacher", Reverend Wright and his “racist views” (he was the one who made the unpardonable mistake of shouting out in one of his sermons, and letting his anger be captured on video, “Goddamn America for what it’s done!” On the other hand, they don’t talk much about McCain’s advanced case of skin cancer or that many melanoma specialists are giving less than a 25% chance of living to the end of his first term should he be elected.

Yet, perhaps the most bizarre news item from last week is the $150,000 that the Republican Party spent on Sarah Palin's campaign wardrobe. She is not, we now discover, the working class, Hockey Mom that we thought she was because she wears designer clothes from Neiman Marcus, and ruby red pumps from Saks Fifth Avenue. No doubt, we’re all supposed to be shocked by this and given the incredible gullibility of Americans many people will in fact see this routine image make-over as a kind of betrayal. In other countries voters tend to understand that politicians are professional liars and that just about everything regarding their media image is contrived, but not in the USA. Subterfuge will not be tolerated in American presidential elections, because a man, or a woman, has to be what he or she was marketed as being. The important thing is “staying on message”, never deviating from the script.

The system may be rotten to the core, corrupt beyond anyone's wildest imagination, full of distorted images and unrealistic expectations, but the farce that is these elections has to be believed. The lies and crimes at the root of our precipitous decline have to be ignored, at least until power can be successfully transferred from one faction of the nation's business party to the other.

It is the American way.

Seven Days That Shook The World

Much has happened in the last week. In seven days I’ve seen the beginning of the end, the mother of all deflationary spirals and the shape of things to come. On Monday, the US Congress at first rejected a 700 billion dollar bailout for Wall Street only to pass that very same bill (with an additional 100 billion in pork to sooth the nerves of some rebellious Republicans representatives) four days later. Then on Thursday there was the surreal debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. Surreal as only a debate between two politicians can be, when both are pledging their support for the working class (the hockey moms and the six-pack Joes) while their respective bosses, John McCain and Barack Obama, are doing everything they can to get the bailout (a bill which gives everything to the mega rich and nothing to the common man) passed.

US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's new hairdo after the Wall Street bailout

Over the weekend the “Sub-prime” tsunami picked up steam and in Europe leaders of the major economies were meeting to see if they couldn’t forestall the inevitable with a coordinated bailout of some of the continents major financial players. Sarkozy, Brown, Berlusconi and Merkel met in Paris and essentially agreed in a quintessentially European way not to agree on anything. It’s every man for himself in the crash of 2008 and bank nationalizations (the Fortis Bank in the Netherlands) and failures (the colossal Hypo Real Estate company of Germany) are the order of the day. Iceland is on the brink of bankruptcy and has seen its once strong currency plummet against the dollar and the Euro. In Ireland rumors of a run on the nation’s banking system forced the government to declare that it would cover all personal deposits, which it probably wouldn’t have the money to do if everyone did try to get their money out, but something had to be said.

Finally, in an effort to calm the markets before they re-open on Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced with her finance minister that the government would, like Ireland, cover all personal accounts in German banks. In doing this she pledged to insure about 500 billion euros, more or less the amount that the US Congress had refused to hand over to Wall Street on Monday. With Merkel having to make that kind of guarantee it’s no wonder that the objective of the Paris meeting (a coordinated, pan-European bailout plan) came to nothing. The Germans know that the worst is yet to come and have decided to first take care of their own. If the banks in Greece, or Italy, or Spain start to fall, it will be up to their governments to save them if they can.

I could be wrong but I can’t help thinking that the world is about to enter a period of prolonged economic depression. The Banksters have bitten off a bit more than they can chew this time. The high priests of “turbo capitalism” have led us all, willingly or not, to the edge of the cliff and over the precipice. And as any truthful economist will tell you, once all the bubbles have been burst there’s really nothing you can do to stop a system from de-leveraging. No bailout will ever hold and the house of cards built with deceit and the purest strains of capitalist greed must fall.

The world as we know it is about to change and whether we are all eventually governed by corporate dictatorships or finally decide to throw off our chains and live as free men has yet to be seen. The choice is ours.

The Magic Kingdom

When I was a boy in Miami my teachers used to say that anyone could grow up to be President of the United States. Ours, they would tell us, was a democracy where all men were created equal and where even the poorest boy or girl could some day aspire to the nation’s highest office. That was the official propaganda and from time to time this message has been renewed with candidates chosen to make us all believe that it’s still true.

The latest reincarnations of this “rags to riches” myth are Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Obama is the mixed-race son of an African immigrant, while Palin is the “hockey mom” with barely 19 months experience as governor of Alaska. Both are tangible proof that with just a little luck and determination you can do anything. America, like Disneyland, is sill the place “where dreams come true.”

Disney's Magic Kingdom

The road to the palace in the “Magic Kingdom”, however, is fraught with peril. The campaign is long, sometimes lasting two years or more and the vetting process is severe. The corporate media asks probing and sometimes difficult questions regarding a candidate’s views on abortion and terrorism and taxes, and then there are also the religious questions. A presidential candidate in the US must believe in God and not just any god will do. As a nation at war with Muslim infidels an aspiring President or Vice-President has to show that his god has what it takes to protect America and defeat the forces that would do us harm.

Obama and Wright

Senator Obama’s god almost failed us on this last point. His one time friend and close confident, his minister for over twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, preached an ecumenical Christianity that was not afraid of delving into the darkest chapters of America’s history in race relations. An ex-Marine, Wright showed how America’s enslavement of Africans and near extermination of its native tribes was not the exception but the rule when it came to defining the country’s murderous soul. Like the old Romans our policy has always been divide et impera, and Wright feels that only by facing this fact and understanding it can we really change as a nation. This, of course, is sacrilege to the elite who run America. Seeing the truth of our history stridently conflicts with the disneyesque fantasy of the US as a peace-loving, multi-racial melting pot where everyone is a winner. Obama would clearly have to atone for his sins of his pastor, and a campaign was mounted in the corporate media to denounce Wright and demand that the senator from Illinois disassociate himself from his old friend. Which of course he did to keep his quest for the White House alive.

Sarah Palin’s god, on the other hand, is much more in tune with the times, and as a result has received scant coverage by the corporate media. She has spent more than twenty-five years of her life as a member of church in Wasilla Alaska, which is part of a fanatical Christian cult that is sweeping across America. The Governor, in fact, hails from the most radical stream of US Born-Again Evangelism known as “Joel’s Army,” an offshoot of “Dominionism” or what is sometimes also referred to as the “Latter Rain” cult or the “Manifest Sons of God”. These committed soldiers of Joel’s Army (including Sarah Palin) have pledged their lives to Jesus and to the fight against evil in what they call the “end times” (the period before Judgment Day when the Lord will slug it out with the Devil to see who wins). As Joel's Army's Canadian leader, Todd Bentley, explains, “An end-time army has one common purpose -- to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion…The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel's Army. ... Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God's kingdom on earth.”

Joel's Army "General", right-wing evangelist Todd Bently

An army of mobilized religious fanatics, exactly what’s needed if your country’s end goal is the total domination of the world’s dwindling natural resources. Think of all the oil rich nations that have yet to be subdued! Indeed, America’s corporate rulers couldn’t have asked for a better representative than Sarah Palin, and none of them will ever ask her the difficult questions that were put to Obama or his pastor. It’s best to keep that kind of information under wraps, lest anyone discover the truth before its too late.

President Palin

Recent polls say that Obama and McCain are neck and neck and that who will win in November is anyone’s guess. Still I find it hard to believe that any intelligent American, after eight years of the Bush administration’s “slash and burn” approach to politics, could find it in themselves to vote for another four with John McCain.

Fundamentally there isn’t that much difference between the two. Both support the War on Terror (Obama even praises Bush’s surge in Iraq, saying that it "has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams"). Both are beholden to the major corporations and banks that brought on the current economic crisis in the States. Neither is in favor of a “single-payer” national health insurance plan, similar to the Canadian and European models. Of course, being successful politicians, they long ago learned that you don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and that means the Health Management Organizations and all the defense contractors who will continue to rack in their obscene profits no matter who ends up in the White House.

The real difference lies in their choice of vice-presidential running mates. Obama picked Joe Biden, who is about as “insider” as you can get in Washington. He is also connected by the umbilical to the country’s largest credit card companies. He spearheaded S-256, the “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005”. It is a law which essentially strips people of the kind of protection they used to have, leaving at the mercy of their creditors, almost always the credit card companies. He is a man who has been bought and paid for by these corporations and America being America there is nothing exceptional in this. It’s just the way things are done.

McCain’s choice, however, is a reminder, should anyone need one, of how nasty the elite of America can be when the chips are down. When the Democrats finished their convention in Denver with Obama’s nomination in a stadium filled with 80,000 spectators from all over the country and the world, the Republicans were in trouble. Their candidate was trailing in some polls by almost ten percentage points and all you had to do was look at Obama’s bombastic speaking style and compare it to the mousy McCain whenever he spoke and know that the jig was up. McCain was old (and full of cancer) while Obama was young and in his prime. The choice was clear, but that’s when McCain decided to throw the Democrats a screwball and he unveiled Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska.

Govenor Sarah Palin

Palin is a Jacobin. A radical fundamentalist Christian who believes that the US invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq is “God’s war” and who thinks that all young Americans should be over there fighting Islam, just as one of her sons is. She also thinks that homosexuals should be jailed (and perhaps even burned at the stake) and that “creationism” (a pseudo-science that preaches the world was created in just seven days) should be taught in all public schools. So convinced is she of the satanic properties of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” that she tried to have the book banned from the library of the small town where she was mayor, and when that didn’t work she tried to fire the librarian.

She is, as everyone knows, against abortion and proudly announced before the republican convention began that her pregnant seventeen year old daughter was going to keep her baby and that the “father” had been convinced to marry his girlfriend, even though he was quoted in one interview as saying that he didn’t “want to have anything to do with children”.

Palin is in favor of unlimited oil drilling in her state (even in nature preserves) and says that she is an avid hunter and eater of moose meat. What many people don’t know is that she is also in favor of aerial hunting of apex predators such as bears and wolves and has signed laws in Alaska making this unsportsmanlike and cowardly killing easier.

So why would McCain choose such an anti-environment, gay-bashing imperialist like Palin when over 70% of Americans are against the war in Iraq and are worried about the effects of global warming? Simple, because the Republican Party is not longer a democratic organization but a theocracy whose members for the most part believe, as the Bible teaches, in the Second Coming, the reign of the Beast and the number 666. They are Dominionists one and all and are preparing the world for that day when Christianity will triumph over evil.

A hardcore Christian Fascist just a heartbeat away from the presidency. What a comforting thought.