Sunday, April 13, 2003

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the 75-year cost of the Bush tax cuts, if the 2001 ones are made permanent and his new ones are passed, will be three times greater than the deficit in Social Security over that time, and larger than the 75 year deficits in Social Security and Medicare combined. Seriously. Has Bush committed an actual impeachable offense yet? I don't mean anything even near as stupid as lying about a blowjob - I'm talking Nixon level. There's no way that he's perpetrated this astounding sequence of frauds on the American public and atrocities on the world without having committed a single felony, right?

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In response to Raven's comment on my pissed-off-at-capitalism post a few days back... he said: Yes, the rich have power - because they've succeeded. The danger in your viewpoint here is that it vaguely suggests that unless all are leveled out on a plain of mediocrity that there's a "problem" that needs to be "fixed." He went on, in a second comment, to say that income disparity is a result of some people being more valuable to society than others - pardon my paraphrasing. It wasn't actually anywhere near that nasty-sounding. But here I go... Yeah, there will always be those who are smarter than those who aren't. I definitely deserve to make more money than a guy who can't even manage to flip burgers properly. BUT I don't deserve to make 500 times what he makes, and he doesn't deserve to not make enough to live on. And the rich often don't have power because they've succeeded - they have power 'cos Daddy succeeded. I know I wouldn't be in my swank apartment (ok, it's not actually swank, but the point stands...) with my high-paying job if my dad hadn't made enough money for us to be able to live in a town with good public education and then send me to a very good private college. The problem is not that a doctor makes more than a janitor - the problem is that a doctor's kid has a far, far better chance to be a doctor than a janitor's kid does. I don't say any crap like "...to each according to their needs..." I am NOT a Marxist. As much as I like the idea of Dave Pollard's non-commercial economy, I don't think it'd work either. Any system that is predicated on those with the ability to take advantage of the system NOT doing so is in deep, deep trouble: see the Soviet Union, Enron, etc... Greed is real. It ain't goin' away. And Raven's argument (which I've heard many a-time before) that anyone could be doing alright if they just spend wisely and in an organized way, etc... it don't work neither. What's the answer, then? I'm not sure, but it starts with making sense of our tax code, both for individuals and corporations, and then using it for constructive purposes. I'll talk more about that soon - but I'll give you two quiz questions as a teaser now: which decade saw the heaviest tax burden on the rich (i.e., highest tax rate on the top tax bracket) in American history? And which decade saw the largest middle class in industrial American history?

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By now, you have surely heard about the horrendous damage to humanity's heritage going on in Iraq right now - if not, check the NY Times, the Washington Post, and Salon. Nowhere on earth is as important in terms of our history as Mesopotamia - this is where it all started, writing, religion, farming, civilization itself. At the National Museum of Antiquities, where priceless artifacts had been wrapped in foam and secured in windowless storage rooms to protect them against U.S. bombs, an army of looters perpetrated what war did not: They smashed hundreds of irreplaceable treasures, including Sumerian clay pots, Assyrian marble carvings, Babylonian statues and a massive stone tablet with intricate cuneiform writing. As employees returned today to survey the damage at one of the world's greatest repositories of artifacts, they encountered devastation that defied their worst expectations. The floor was covered with shards of broken pottery. An extensive card catalog of every item the museum owns, some of which date back 5,000 years, was destroyed. A cavernous storeroom housing thousands of unclassified pieces was ransacked so badly that an archaeologist predicted it would be impossible to repair many of the items. "Our heritage is finished," lamented Nabhal Amin, the museum's deputy director, as she surveyed a Sumerian tablet that had been cracked in two. "Why did they do this? Why? Why?" (from the Post story) I can't even tell you how this makes me feel. I feel nauseous just thinking about it. This is beyond a tragedy - this is the destruction of history. Think about that - these are artifacts of daily life from three, four, five thousand years ago, either destroyed for no reason or looted to be sold on eBay. And that's exactly what'll happen - small cuneiform pieces have been showing up on eBay for years, and they're almost all looted, either from museums or archaeological sites. Now...it's just unbelieveable that the Bush people didn't think about this. On the BBC this afternoon, a reporter in Iraq commented that the Americans seem to be "making it up as they go along" in terms of the future government of Iraq - what the hell is that? We're told that the original expectations were that this would be a cakewalk, right? So surely they had to be planning for what to do to re-institute order after they blasted it to pieces, right? Well, obviously not, and obviously it's not worth wasting the breath asking questions like that - of course the Bushies haven't thought things through...or else there wouldn't be Kurds in Kirkuk, for example. And now, according to the Observer (why don't we have a paper like this in the States, by the way?), we're preparing to go after Hezbollah in Lebanon - which reads to me as a combination of helping our nasty little friends in Likud (supposedly, this is part of a deal to get Sharon to consider the road map to peace...) and trying to provoke Syria. From the moment we stopped seeing live pictures of Saddam, Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, et al have been going after Syria, and attacking Hezbollah - who we can at least claim to have just cause against, since they ARE a terrorist organization - is a great way to get an excuse to go into Syria. Is this real? How can this be real? Aren't we all suffering some kind of group hallucination? The Bush administration makes Churchill and the other late British imperialists look like pansies by comparison - every other major leader in modern world history but the total maniacs (Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin) has understood that you need some level of international consensus to go off on foreign adventurism. But here we are, giving up on even the fig leaves. How far do they really plan to go? Is there anything we can do to stop them? Can we call for UN intervention in the US, to overthrow this unelected regime that's armed itself with weapons of mass destruction? One last quote, from the Salon article above, said from among a crowd in Mosul watching their city get torn down and looted. "This isn't freedom, this is bullshit," a kid said to me. It was like the report of a rifle. Things are very, very wrong in the world right now. And Bush is at the center of it all.

5:13:32 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Just after returning from Camp David today, Bush said to reporters, and I quote, "And, you know, it will take time to restore chaos and order -- order out of chaos. But we will." No, seriously - check the White House site. I know, it's just another Bushism - but quite the apropos malapropism, n'est pas?
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