amahchewahwah

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.”