Hichens: Hawks in the dovecote

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sun Aug 25 13:37:53 PDT 2002


``..as should be clear at this point, the hawks are able to mobilize when they have consensus, while the lack of forthright moral analysis by the Left just undermines its one key asset, its moral authority...'' Nathan Newman

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If there were ever a laundry list of issues where moral indignation and analysis should have achieved mass recognition and lead to threatening levels of public discontent with government---it has been in the last two years.

I keep asking myself what is wrong with people? Can't they see what insane shit is going on?

Here's a list:

1) a completely fraudulent election for President in which the loser was install by a politically corrupt Supreme Court,

2) an entirely fraudulent natural gas and electricity crisis in which energy suppliers bulked billions out of state budgets and the public's utility bills---with the full complicity of the White House and federal agencies charged with regulation,

3) complete failure of national security and policing agencies to routinely handle obvious terrorist threats prior to 9/11,

4) despicable cowardice of elected federal officials in the face of the 9/11 attacks (in case you forgot, Congress ran out the doors, the President flew to Nebraska, the Vice President hid in the WH basement, effectively leaving the mayor of New York City in charge),

5) meanwhile, completely inadequate and laughable compensation schemes for families and victims of 9/11 crafted specifically to limit corporate and government liability, while handing out massive cash supports for corporations, particularly the airlines which are now going bankrupt anyway,

6) gross over-reaction of the White House and Congress to punish the US public with the Patriot Act and other police state measures that effective abolish the Bill of Rights and routine legal protections,

7) manufacturing a hoax war in Afghanistan to slaughter the innocent, while ignoring obvious supporting regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan,

8) un-ending support for an Israeli regime run by militaristic thugs who routinely commit war atrocities with US weapons and money,

9) the unravelling of massive corporate frauds and failures in energy utilities, telecommunications, stocks, banking, and accounting, with no government regulatory response and wrist slapping criminal investigations,

10) yet another proposed bogus war on Iraq which has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, since it is a thoroughly secular and militaristic dictatorship,

11) and just three days ago, the announced WH policy for catastrophic forest fires in the western states was logging. No trees, no fires, get it?

12) And of course all of the above sits on top of the racist thugs and para military fanatics running police departments all over the country, the continuing collapse of public education, the murderous health care system, the on-going development of commercial real estate while millions go homeless or eke out life in grossly substandard housing for shit wages, toxic food, sick and twisted children, amid the usual crumbling urban squalor, and where all else ends up in the prison industrial complex, etc, etc.

``Turn up the tv honey, some asshole is outside with a loudspeaker..''

It seems the only public officials who have noticed that something is wrong with the US government are to be found among the judges in the secret court in the basement of the Justice Department--and their technical qualms are under appeal to another secret court in the same basement---so I guess we'll never know how that turned out.

Chuck Grimes



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