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Empire in Extremis
by Stephen Fleischman

“…they stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast…”
– the Eagles
Hotel California

How many Americans know the actual number of US military bases their tax dollars support around the world?
What would be your guess?
Would you believe 737, spread over 130 countries, according to the Defense Department’s annual “Base Structure Report”—and that’s not counting another 6000 bases in the United States and its territories?
Chalmers Johnson, in his latest book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic” cites the “worldwide total of U.S. military personnel in 2005, including those based domestically, to be 1,840,062 supported by an additional 473,306 Defense Department civil service employees and 203,328 local hires.”

Overseas bases, according to the Pentagon, contained 32,327 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and 16,527 more that it leases; and more than 29,819,492 acres of land worldwide, making the Pentagon one of the world’s largest landlords.

The Roman Empire at its height in the year 117 AD had only 37 bases to police its realm from All Gaul (which was divided into three parts) to Egypt.

Ike Eisenhower’s parting shot, when he left the presidency of the United States in 1961, was his warning about the military-industrial complex.

It was too little, too late. We had been a nation born in genocide, destroying the Native American tribes and taking possession of their land. We developed a major part of our economy through slavery, a plantation system and a three way slave trade broken only by the industrial revolution and the development of capitalism. The Civil War brought us into the modern imperialist era. The Monroe Doctrine. Manifest Destiny.

We allowed ourselves to become a militarized nation, a militarized economy. We needed to set an example for the world. Any defiance of our hegemony meant war. There was the Mexican War. The Spanish-American War. We took Cuba and the Philippines. It went on from there.

So now we have a war-like beast that cannot be restrained. Slick propaganda got us into World War I and Pearl Harbor into World War II (conveniently arranged, some say). The Korean War and the Vietnam War were set-ups. Dominoes just don’t fall that way. But we’ve managed to leave military bases in the lands of most of the vanquished, in South Korea and in Germany, to name a few, still there after fifty and sixty years.

US elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, has finally admitted, in his recently published memoir, that the Iraq War was primarily about oil (something the Bush administration has vehemently denied).

So our simple democracy has spawned a global empire.

What does this portend?

Must we start another war to keep the economy going? Bush would like to get someone to bomb Iran before he leaves office. Maybe he can get Israel to do it? They’ve been champing at the bit, just waiting for the nod from Bush. But even the Israelis must be struck by what a world-wide catastrophe the bombing of Iran would cause.

So what is a nation to do?

This nation must militate! Like Mussolini did in Italy. A little Fascism might be a helpful thing. Make the planes fly on time. It could also keep activists in their place. Inactive. They didn’t build Guantanamo for nothing. America’s first concentration camp? No, it’s second. There were the Japanese relocation centers during World War II.

And extraordinary rendition might also be a useful tool to keep the lid on. A little kidnapping. A little torture by proxy, off-shore.

Does it fit the Project for the Old American Century criterion for fascism, comparing the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet and the 14 characteristics common to those fascist regimes? Well, maybe not all—but enough.

You must glorify war in order to get the public to accept the fact that they’re going to send their sons and daughters to die. And don’t forget to wear your lapel flag pin.

There was a little juice in the anti-war movement before the onslaught on Iraq in 2003. But then it went blah. What happened?

In the mid-term election of 2006, the Democrats took both houses of Congress. Polls showed that a majority of Americans, some as high as 73%, wanted an end to the Iraq war and they counted on the Democrats to get it for them.

What they got was a continuation of the war with enough Democrats joining the Bush War Party to vote for funding. Among them were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama who, in the midst of their primary squabble over who was the most anti-war, both voted to fund the war. That’s the kind of steely knives they used!

We now have two presidential candidates representing different wings of the ruling oligarchy. You’re trapped in our two party-one party system.

“…you can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!”

by Stephen Fleischman

The American people want change!

They’re entitled to it. It’s written into their Constitution.

The two presumptive candidates for president, in the upcoming 2008 election, both believe in change.

John McCain, the Republican, believes in climate change. He’s said so many times. Barack Obama, the Democrat, believes in change we can believe in.

Polls show that the #1 issue weighing on the minds of Americans today is the collapsing economy. How do you stop the free fall we’re experiencing now? If it lands it could make a hole in the ground that will make 1932 look like an apple sale on the street?

George W. Bush must have been chuckling to himself when he signed Congress’ economic stimulus package, sending out $300 to $1200 rebate checks. Maybe he thinks that’s the way to keep the flow of wealth upwards.

Americans need purchasing power worth a damn! They need jobs like those they had when there was a strong labor movement in this country and good, high paying wages in manufacturing won through blood and guts and strikes.

The Reagan revolution ended all that.

Reagan mercilessly broke the air traffic controllers when they went out on strike. That kicked off the onslaught.

The corporate oligarchy took their shot. They undercut the unions by off-shoring factories and out-sourcing jobs.

As Ross Perot described it when he was running for president in 1992, you could hear the “sucking sound” as jobs and plants went flying off to countries that paid the lowest wages. It was a race to the bottom and the beginning of what we now call “globalization.” They hollowed out the country for profits. They exported their plants and brought back their products as imports. That gave a strong manufacturing base to our foreign competitors and piddling wages at service jobs to American workers. “Yeah, I work at McDonalds, but I can buy cheap at Walmart’s”.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership, nationwide, was down to 12 percent in 2007. There was a time when things were different. In the mid 1950’s more than 35 percent of all employees on private payrolls were union members.

We had some great labor leaders in our time. There was the great Eugene Debs who organized the American Railway Union in 1893. He wanted to see change in the country, too. He ran for President of the United States four times on the Socialist Party ticket, the last time from prison in 1920 and received nearly one million votes.

And then there was the great John L. Lewis, head of the mine workers, who organized the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and created great change. He brought industrial unionism to this country for the first time.

In 1936, Lewis joined the Reuther brothers, Walter and Victor, in organizing
the United Auto Workers’ sit-in strikes against General Motors at their Flint, Michigan plants.

For 44 bitterly cold winter days the auto workers in Flint held out, eventually inspiring more than two-thirds of General Motors 145 thousand other production workers to strike.

Change came to Flint and the auto industry with a bang. The strikers seized, shut down and occupied one, then two, and then three of the key GM plants. Suddenly, workers everywhere were sitting-down. There were 477 sit-down strikes by the end of 1937, involving more than half a million workers. What hath change wrought!

Mighty GM had vowed publicly that it would never allow the UAW to represent its employees. But the General Motors Corporation ended up granting that crucial right—and more—to the union. It was a stunning victory for the United Auto Workers.

The two major union organizations united. The AFL-CIO was formed. Solidarity! It led the way—and swiftly—to the unionization of workers throughout heavy industry and, ultimately, to unionization in all fields. It brought higher wages, pensions and health care benefits to union members. It certainly was the high water mark of labor power in America. Finally, labor had a seat at the table!

Where has it all gone?

With growing corporate power, class conflict reached new heights. The assault on labor became overwhelming, continuous, inhuman and destructive.. No wonder unions are dysfunctional and chaotic. So are most of their leaders. If they’re not coerced, co-opted or corrupted, they’re framed, jailed or neutralized in some way.

Only when capitalism is in the throes of crisis, deep depression and near collapse can strong labor leaders emerge. Must we relive the 1930’s?

Maybe our two presidential candidates, believers in change, will come up with something better than Bush’s economic stimulus package to save our collapsing economy—like repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, the epitome of anti-labor legislation. Or enforcement of the Wagner Act (which is still on the books) that guarantees workers the right of collective bargaining, a product of Roosevelt’s New Deal that raised the standard of living of the middle and working classes.

Where do the candidates stand on these issues? I haven’t heard any meaningful discussion of how to save our economy. McCain seems to be set in concrete, but Obama seems to be changing the change we can believe in since he assumed his presumptive nomination in the Democratic Party. He seems to have adopted the Bill Clinton strategy of triangulation. Go after those shaky votes on the right! It worked for Bill; maybe it will work for him. There’s been a sea change, lately, in Barack’s change we can believe in.

Can you imagine Obama supporting Bush’s intelligence surveillance law?

Well, he says he will when the compromise FISA bill comes to the Senate, granting immunity to the telecommunications corporations for their participation in warrantless wiretapping programs. So far, there are 40 lawsuits against them alleging privacy invasion.

The latest Obama glitch—his adoption of the Bush faith-based initiatives. Is he going for the evangelical vote? One of the essential principles of this democracy, I always thought, was separation of church and state. Religious charities are well and good, but isn’t it the responsibility of the state to look after the welfare of its people?

End the war in Iraq? Obama says he is against the war. Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son, Casey, in the war, was hoping Barack would say “Troops out now!”

But we haven’t heard anything like that from him. Each year, since 2005, we’ve heard a different plan. Now, he says he “will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within sixteen months…” and, of course, some will have to remain to protect our embassy and diplomats and – er – man our “impermanent bases” in the country that we will occupy permanently.

We won’t go into Obama’s other flip-flops. It’s too painful. They are amply covered, even in the mainstream media.

So who are you going to vote for?

There are other candidates, you know, although you would never suspect it from reading or listening to the mainstream media.

There’s Cynthia McKinney, Congresswoman from Georgia’s 11th District, candidate for President on the Green Party ticket.

There’s Bob Barr, also from Georgia, a former Congressman from the 7th District, the Libertarian Party nominee for President.

There’s Chuck Baldwin, pastor and radio talk show host, nominated by the Constitution Party.

And, of course, there’s Ralph Nader, who chose to run, this year, as an Independent.

If you vote for any one of these, people will say you’re throwing away your vote.

Let them say it. They will be giving their votes to the corporate oligarchy.

Vote your conscience. Vote your hopes, not your fears.

You don’t want to walk out of that voting booth with a grimace on your face, after holding your nose and once again voting for the lesser of two evils.

You want to walk out of there feeling good about yourself, holding your head high knowing that you exercised your first amendment rights—freedom of speech, and of the press and your right to freely assemble.

Good luck and God Bless America!

by Stephen Fleischman

Is Barack Obama a social democrat or a capitalist tool?

Is John McCain a Glory Boy or a POW songbird?

If these are the choices we have in the upcoming presidential election, a faked out war hero, pushing the Bush agenda, and a corporate tool talking like a social democrat, you’ve got to know this country is up the creek or down the shaft.

If Barack Obama is a social democrat (read neoliberal), talking Universal Health Care but meaning Chicago School of Economics and going ga-ga over markets, you know there’ll be no singer payer health plan in his, or our, future.

Obama’s association with the Milton Friedman “gang of four” tells the story—receiving advice or campaign financing from Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist, billionaire Kevin Griffin, CEO of the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group, Robert Rubin, former Goldman-Sachs chief, and the Crown family of General Dynamics.

The tip-off, if any further confirmation is needed, was the speed with which Obama raced to the obligatory appearance before the Israel Lobby (AIPAC) and groveled as no candidate ever has before, even giving Jerusalem to Israel undivided, a thorn in the peace process that has kept the Palestinians at bay for 40 years. Moreover, Obama said he will do everything in his power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything! Did that include bombing Iran?

This is nothing new in American politics. There has always been more fiction than fact in the run-up to national elections.

This is a country born in genocide (the Native Americans), grew up in slavery (the Africans), and finally arrived into the capitalist era with the emancipation and the Civil War. I guess it’s a truism that war enhances corporate profits, the mother’s milk of capitalism, as it’s doing in Iraq, today.

To make it all work, capitalism has to have a tweedledum and a tweedledee—two faces, one smiling, one grim, and they can swing between one and the other, depending on the temper of the times.

We’ve just come through eight years of the grim face (the Bush administration and his war on terror) and now, with Bush’s popularity down in the muck (below 30%), the oligarchy is looking for a smiling face. It certainly can’t be McCain’s, joined at the hip with George Bush, as he is, with his love of the Iraq war and tax cuts for the rich.

With 70% or more of the American people against both, it is now time for the smiling face. So, they say, let’s create our ideal candidate. And so they did. They didn’t mind swinging to the Democratic Party, the party that traditionally plays the “chump” role.

They chose Obama, the perfect black sheep, in looks, demeanor and intelligence, to lead the liberal elite down the garden path. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin he also got lots of the kids behind him.

Well educated, with degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama went into politics and in short order became junior United States Senator from Illinois after a stint in the Illinois Senate. He grabbed the oligarchy’s attention when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He was their man!

Is it all as calculated and crafted as that? Yes, it is. Just look at the facts. Isn’t it as clear as the fable of John McCain’s war heroism?

It’s astounding how this man, John Sidney McCain III, could become a US Senator and a presidential candidate with the amount of credible evidence proving him to be, at best, a collaborator, at worst, a traitor, while he was a POW in North Vietnam during that ill-fated war.

Where was the Pentagon? Where was the government? Where was the media? Who has investigated the allegations?

McCain was routinely bombing Hanoi from an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. On October 26, 1967, a surface-to-air missile knocked a wing off his jet. His plane splashed into Truc Bach Lake. A compassionate Vietnamese dragged him out of the water and saved McCain’s life. He was taken to a POW camp.

What actually happened to McCain in his POW camp? Was it abuse, as he claims, or was it, in fact, that he collaborated and had to cover up?

Fellow prisoners of war, Ted Guy and Gordon “Swede” Larson, have provided eye-witness accounts of McCain’s treatment by his captors.

“My only contention with the McCain deal,” Larson told the Phoenix New Times, “is that while he was at “The Plantation” (POW camp), to the best of my knowledge and Ted’s knowledge, he was not physically abused in any way.”

Another source is John McCain himself who has confessed that after three or four days after his capture, he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.”

His captors soon realized that McCain came from a high-level naval family, his father and grandfather, admirals in the US Navy. While John III was being held captive, his father, Admiral John McCain, Jr. was in charge of all US forces in the Pacific, including those fighting in Vietnam. Any wonder then that John III was taken to a hospital reserved for Vietnamese officers, and received care from a Soviet doctor?

McCain was released in 1973, and claims to having been tortured by his North Vietnamese captors, and so the myth of the McCain war heroism began.

Now, we have those two, Obama, McCain, as our only choices for President of the United States. Which of the lesser of the two evils will you vote for?

Where is Ralph Nader now that we really need him?

Something worth posting.

Two things, really.

Favorite lines:

Manicurist: “Did you want a manicure?”
Groucho: “No, come on in!”

And this is just amazing. Another lesson in humility.

Enjoy!

And Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads, especially mine.

Is there a famine in our future?

When we start putting food in our gas tanks, we know Americans would rather drive than live.

“We’re having a world-wide food crisis,” murmured the New York Times. The rest of the media took their cue, as they usually do, and headlined the new event.

The Los Angeles Times put it this way, “Vegetable oil isn’t a crime—is it? Diesel owners who switch to cooking grease can run afoul of the law. Just ask the governor.” The state wants its tax on alternative fuels just as they get it from the sale of gasoline.

Drivers, in all the esoteric places, are converting their cars to run on used cooking and frying oil. Some restaurants that once found it a burden to dis-pose of used fry-oil are now thinking of charging for it.

But, of course, the 800 lb gorilla in the world is Ethanol.

The fear of oil peaking has caused a stampede of biofuel production across the world in the frantic search for a substitute.

As Wikipedia defines it, ”Biofuel is a solid, liquid or gas fuel derived from recently dead biological material, most commonly plants…distinguishing it from fossil fuel, derived from long dead biological material.”

Brazil is currently the world’s leader in ethanol production. The chippie is sugarcane. It grows like topsy in that part of the world. Imperial systems were founded on it. Sugar and rum were the chief exports from the Caribbean and South America to Europe during the colonial period. Every sailor on the slave ships that plied the Atlantic to the Americas has his ration of rum.

In the United States, ethanol is made principally from corn. Its development has been a bonanza for the American corn conglomerates. The largest producer of ethanol in the U.S. is the Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) that touted itself, for years, as “Supermarket to the World” in TV ads.

ADM is an agricultural giant. It has made profits of $10.98 billion in 2006, and operates in North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Pacific Rim. The company has a transportation network that circles the world capable of delivering ethanol just about anywhere.

Included in the agribusiness cabal is Monsanto reporting a net income this year that more than doubled the earnings in 2007, from $543 million to $1.12 billion.

The earnings of Cargill, another cabal member, soared by 86 % from $553 million to $1.03 billion in one year.

Any wonder, the cost of food, everywhere, is going through the roof?

Staples like wheat, rice, corn and beans, what most of the people of the third world (and other world’s, too) live on, are out of reach for many. As of March this year, wheat and maize prices were 130 and 30 percent higher, re-spectively, than a year earlier. Rice prices have more than doubled since late January

The food price index of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization rose by 9 percent in 2006 and 23 percent in 2007. While millions are being driven toward starvation, giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits.

In typical corporate style, with no concern for the lives of people, specula-tors have turned the growing worldwide food shortages into a bonanza.

“The corn-to-alcohol scheme may well be the largest single financial crime of all time,” says Global Research, an educational think-tank, “Its cost to consumers in higher food prices will exceed the total cost of the so-called war in Iraq, plus the cost of escalated oil prices. There cannot be a bigger is-sue than food. No problem in America comes close to it in importance, because no one can escape depending on food for survival — and we are talking about doubling or tripling the cost of basic grain commodities on which the non-rich survive.”

Cars should be powered by energy from the sun or hydrogen—not food grains. The elegant process of plant creation by photosynthesis should be re-served for humanity and the other animals that walk the earth.

We can go back to the theories of Thomas Malthus, 19th Century English demographer and political economist. He opined that the number of people the earth can sustain depends on the amount of food that can be grown. Sooner or later, it will simply be impossible to feed all the people and there will be mass starvation. Malthusians continue to warn that the disaster is al-most upon us.

Is there an answer for this? Sure there is. Tax the agribusiness giants instead of subsidizing them.

Subsidies began with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, in the depth of the Great Depression. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt, through the New Deal, to save the family farm by paying poor farmers not to raise crops thereby stabilizing food prices that were falling through the floor.

Through the decades, the small farmers were pushed out and the specter of corporate farming haunted America. Today, the family farm is all but gone, corporate agribusiness is aggressively robust and the subsidies are still there!
Every year, when the Farm Bill, now reaching into $300 billion, comes up for debate, the members of Congress make a Faustian deal. Those from non-farm states will vote for the subsidies if the farm state members vote for food stamps and other benefits for the poor thrown into the bill. The Presi-dent usually vetoes it and we wind up with a pot pourri.

Meanwhile, food riots are breaking out across the globe from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso, from China to Cameroon, and from Uzbekistan to the United Arab Emirates.

“What we are seeing is unprecedented,” says Catholic Relief Services food aid expert Lisa Kuennen-Asfaw. “If immediate needs are not met, and if resources and policies supporting increased agricultural production are not put in place soon, we are heading for a cascade of hunger the world over.”

Have a good day.

Be sure to put on your cans because this is just so, so sweet.

The Rosenberg Trio. Gypsy Jazz. Think Django Reinhart.

Stochelo Rosenberg is playing a beautiful Selmer Maccaferri Petit Bouche on lead, and don’t stop before the end because his ending is breathtaking. Stochelo’s cousin Nous’che is playing the Grand Bouche D-hole Sel/Mac and he’s like a swinging clock. And Nous’che’s brother Nonnie rounds everything out on a beautiful acoustic bass.

Three gifted musicians, three gorgeous instruments, and they look like they’re just having the best time, too.

Django is smiling, wherever he is.

I’ve finished up the Youssou N’dour documentary that I’ve been working on recently and last night the whole crew was invited to see Youssou and his band perform at Joe’s Pub to benefit the Roll Back Malaria Partnership. It’s a very intimate setting, the place holds maybe 200 people tops. He performed this song along with the one I posted the other night and a host of others.

A beautiful show for a very worthy cause. The film is beautiful. The music is beautiful. I am still dancing.

Enjoy!

Guitar Boogie

Another lesson in humility.

I’ve been blessed with the opportunity over the past couple of weeks to work on an exquisite film about this extraordinary artist. I’ve been rocking out to beautiful tunes like this one day after day.

One of the most popular singers in the world, and few here in America have ever heard his name.

Enjoy!

by Stephen Fleischman

(with apologies to Barry McGuire)

“The eastern world it tis explodin’,
violence flarin’, bullets loadin’ …”

The surge in Iraq is working, says George W. Bush through his military mouthpiece, General David H. Petraeus, at recent Congressional hearings. The war goes on and Iraqis (and US GIs) are being killed daily although polls show the American people never wanted this war and want their troops out now.

The presidential candidates for both parties in the 2008 election—McCain, Clinton, Obama—are proposing timetables for troop withdrawal, anywhere from six months to one hundred years. No one has yet come up with a reason why we’re there, or a definition of victory, for that matter. To prevent chaos and bring democracy to the Middle East just doesn’t cut it.

In any war of occupation, if the occupied nation has strong leaders who are willing to unite and lead their people into a fight, they will eventually win.

You can safely wager that long before the 100 years are up, if we don’t willingly withdraw, the remnants of US forces in Iraq are likely to be evacuated from the roof of the American embassy building in Baghdad’s green zone by helicopter. When the Sunnis and the Kurds and the various Shia factions and militias get together, that will be the end of the little al-Maliki puppet government in Baghdad and the destruction of US power in Iraq; as happened in Vietnam when the Viet Cong and the Viet Minh came together in the Tet offensive and as happened to the French in Algeria when the resistance poured out of the Casbah in a great human wave…

“…but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction…”

Economists, across the board, are telling us we’re heading into a recession, if we aren’t already in one; and some say we’ll be going deeper, into a depression. Well, what do you know? A war and a depression at the same time! In capitalist societies, war is frequently the antidote to depression; the cure worse than the malady. These days, economies are linked worldwide. Is there a world economic collapse in our future? Does anyone really know?

We know about the sub-prime mortgage disaster, the credit card crunch, the bail-out of Bear Stearns with taxpayer money and others yet to come (socialism for the capitalists) and things of that sort. And we’ve been hearing of mass layoffs of workers in manufacturing and service industries. Who needs a working class? The good paying jobs are mostly gone with the off-shoring and outsourcing of the hardware (factories) and the software (workers).

A free market system cannot exist without the purchasing power of the working class. But we’ve done away with all that; smashed the union movement that once gave trade unionists a living wage. We have to import the very commodities we used to make and pay more for them—unless you can shop at Walmart that has an inside track to cheap.

The government has been cooking the books for years. It’s been standard procedure. One administration after another has been addicted to “la vie en rose”.

We have three fundamental measurements on which we determine the state of our economy—the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI), an indicator of inflation—the quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which tracks the economy’s overall growth—and the monthly unemployment figure, an indicator of economic health. These statistics are vital to obtain a true picture of the economy. Important decisions for government and business depend on their accuracy.

Kevin Phillips, a noted commentator on economic issues and a former Republican Party strategist, charges, in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine (May ’08), that the economy is worse than we know, and he is able to make those charges stick.

“Since the 1960s,” he says, “Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured.”

“How much angrier would the electorate be,” Phillips asks. “if the media, over the past five years, had been citing 8 percent unemployment (instead of 5 percent), 5 percent inflation (instead of 2 percent) and average annual growth in the 1 percent range (instead of the 3-4 percent range) … the corruption has tainted the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy.”

How much longer can this system survive playing those games, plunging its head in the sand and letting the lies roll over. We’ve built a world of distraction in the media, in academia, in arts and entertainment; in the gross distortions we call “news” to hide it all.

The ice caps are melting, the honey bees are dying, the oil is depleting, and food is being raised to go into your gas tank. And for the Bush Administration, life is just a bowl of cherries…

“…the pounding of the drums, the pride and disgrace,
you can bury your dead, but don’t leave a trace,
hate your next-door-neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace.
and you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.”