amahchewahwah

by Stephen Fleischman

We don’t have nightmares asleep any more—we wake up into them.

An endless war. An imminent crash. An election campaign in which the three contenders are corporate candidates. High crimes and misdemeanors that go unchallenged.

The perfect storm.

This is the United States where the America Dream, at one time, could become a reality. This is the America of Franklin Roosevelt who built a safety net under his people. This is the America of Watergate that forced accountability on its leaders.

No more. We’ve wakened from the dream into a nightmare.

The Iraq war must go on, says John McCain, Republican presidential candidate, who thinks it will take a hundred years to achieve victory. No one has yet come up with a definition of victory. Democratic candidates talk about ending the war with a variety of timetables that everybody knows will never happen. Big Oil calls the shots.

We’re all getting along just fine with the war as a background hum, so why rock the boat? The anti-war movement of 2003, that seemed so promising at the time, has evaporated into a feel-good miasma.

There is no draft. Your son or daughter will not be affected. They’ll probably go on to college. It’s only those invisibles down there, America’s new underclass that provides the cannon fodder. So why bother? The corporate owned mainstream media has joined the parade with colors and lies flying, eating out your brain. The hype of the “surge” has become a dirge. Better wear that lapel flag pin to prove you’re patriotic!

Everyone is waiting for that other shoe to drop. The Bush-Cheney gang is down to its last nine months. In January of 2009, something new happens.
It’s a long wait. The joisting has been going on for almost a year.

While Barack Obama is a favorite boy of Wall Street, Hillary not only does well on the “street”, but is also the darling of the defense (war) industry. Obama picked up a respectable $474,428 from Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs as well as anywhere from a quarter million or more from Time Warner, Citigroup, Inc, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase & Co among others.

Hillary did better with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics who gave Democratic candidates $103,900, Hillary getting the lion’s share of that.

According to the Federal Election Commission, Republican John McCain raked in a whopping $58,950,601 as of March 1st, $684,294 of it coming from PACs.

The oligarchy always hedges its bets. One way or the other, it gets the man (or woman) it wants.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush, whose rating are in the gutter, continues to decimate this country with impunity. While Dick Cheney is on a fishing trip to Iraq, baiting the waters for an attack on Iran, Bush continues to tweak Ahmadinejad. The two war criminals are trying to squeeze another war into their repertoire before they leave a desecrated stage of history in January of 2009. One war isn’t enough. Or is this just another “wag the dog” strategy; a political move to get Republican John McCain elected—your Commander-in-Chief for the hundred years war…?

Wars are usually started to pull the economy out of recession. With Iraq, we have a recession and a war going on at the same time. As Ike warned, beware the military-industrial complex. Now we have a military-industrial-contractor complex.

Notwithstanding the 160,000, or so, US military troops in Iraq, there are about 180,000 private contractors, including up to 50,000 employed in military functions. Blackwater, the leading mercenary contractor, has made deals with both the State and the Defense Departments. When top brass come to visit, it’s the Blackwater mercenaries that protect them. Apparently, they don’t trust our American troops; another good reason for them to go home pouting.

There is a world economic collapse in the making and the US is in the eye of the storm. The Fed inflates the money supply to stave off recession which drives prices up as wages fall due to the off-shoring of our manufacturing plants.

You can count on this government to do the wrong thing. The Bush administration gives tax cuts to the rich when they should be soaking them, as Roosevelt did to help the nation climb out of the last depression. What we need is a new New Deal, putting people to work rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, instead of a stimulus package handing out $600 checks. The money will mostly be used by debt-loaded Americans for paying off overdue credit cards. No shot in the arm for the economy there.

Our two-party system is broken. That will become evident at the Democrat’s Denver convention, in August, when a choice has to be made between their squabbling candidates, Billary and Obama. Early primaries were a disaster. Enmities have hardened after months of cloying, boring debates. If super-delegates have to be used to decide on a candidate, the Democratic Party might as well fold its big tent and disappear into the night.

The beginning of another bad dream?