Failed Policies, Failing Nation

By Stephen Fleischman

Brother, can you spare a dime?

The illegitimate Bush Administration (product of a stolen election in the year 2000) has instituted a series of failed policies, foreign and domestic, since it took power.

As a result, the nation, today, is failing. We are heading into an economic no-man’s-land on the home front and into a perilous situation in the world, the chaos spreading out from the disaster our military has created in Iraq.

Starting a war in Iraq, in March of 2003, turned into the most catastrophic foreign policy decision this country has ever made. It was based on the lie that there were weapons of mass destruction in that country that were a threat to us. Four and a half years later, we’re still spending American lives and billions of taxpayer dollars as a result of that lie.

The 911 “events”, George Bush’s “Reichstag Fire”, gave him the foothold to climb aboard the fright engine that propels the “war on terror”. The phrase is a gimmick for maintaining an endless war. The pattern is clear. Scare the devil into people and you’ll get away with murder, mass murder.

And so he has. Two trillion dollars later, our troops in Iraq are running around in circles chasing and killing Iraqi civilian insurgents (freedom fighters?) and our soldiers are being killed for no purpose. The word victory is meaningless. A Bush speechwriter came up with a fetching slogan, “When the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down”. Sheer, meaningless nonsense. Bush and the Pentagon neocons have no intention of pulling out of Iraq by anyone’s time-table. Former DOD Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his neocon coterie in the Pentagon made that quite clear by approving the tensile report of the William Kristol-Robert Kagan so-called educational organization, “Project for a New American Century”, a bare-faced exposition of their hegemonic head trip through the Middle East, if not the world.

Supplemental funding bills, voted on by the sheeply Democrats in Congress, provide for the construction of up to 14 permanent US bases in Iraq. The idea is to use these bases to project US power throughout the Middle East and to control sources of oil as far east as the Caspian region.

We’ve seen the result of it thus far; the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq and the exacerbation of a civil war in Iraq.

Failed Foreign Policy #2: Bush’s unfettered support for the cagey president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, to the tune of ten billion dollars.

Musharraf was supposed to use that money to help fight the “war on terror” — defeat Al Qaeda, eliminate the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden, who reputedly has been hanging out in the tribal areas on the Afghan border. Musharraf has done none of these things.

A rational policy analyst might figure out that Musharraf has been playing a double game; using the ten billion to entrench himself in power while making token efforts to fight Al Qaeda and chase bin Laden around. Meanwhile, Islamic fundamentalists are gaining strength and are poised to take over the country, including its stockpile of nuclear weapons. With the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, who might have made a difference, the viability of Musharraf is even shakier. Nice going, George W. Bush! What do we do now?

Domestic policies haven’t fared much better. Tax cuts for the rich haven’t helped. The destruction of the labor movement is almost complete. With the off-shoring of manufacturing and the outsourcing of jobs, purchasing power is kicking into the dirt. The rise in the number of billionaires may be what’s dragging the economy around. But without a viable middle class and with a destitute underclass, the economy won’t get very far.

Economists are predicting a recession in the near future, if, in fact, it hasn’t already come through the rabbit hole. This one may have a bottomless pit, and we may be staring deep depression right in the face.

Depression stares right back at you with two faces — hyperinflation and deflation. You don’t know which will be the one that gets you. Hyperinflation is inflation that is out of control (Germany after World War I). Prices increase rapidly as the currency loses its value. Deflation is the opposite — a decrease in the general price level and in the money supply. There’s not much around (US after the Stock Market crash of 1929).

These days we have something new. We have the Euro to fight, the currency of united Europe. With oil now at $100 a barrel, if we have to start paying for it in Euros, we’ll be well on our way to hell in a hand-basket. We have China and Japan bankrolling our debt. If they should call in their paper, we will have arrived in Hades without a paddle.

Has Bush come up with any ameliorating economic policies that might stop the plunge? Not that anyone can see, hear or smell. Within the next year, the lame duck will be quacking off the stage of history, leaving young American soldiers still dying in Iraq.

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum …
Say, don’t you remember, I’m your pal?
Buddy, can you spare a dime?

(Originally posted on Smirking Chimp)