Here's a question for you:
| If just half
of the money that
the Bush regime has spent on overseas wars and 'homeland' security
since 9/11 had instead been spent on medical research,
anti-drunk-driver technology, and improving health, education and
infrastructure in the poorest areas of America, how many lives would
have
been saved, and, compared to that, how many more 'terrorism'-related
deaths would have occurred on American soil? |
If it helps, here's some data:
- There
have been no 'terrorism'-related deaths on American soil since 9/11 and
of course, for 'security reasons', and conveniently for Bush, we have
no idea whether any of his additional 'security' spending has prevented
even one death.
- Over 2,400 Americans have been killed in Bush's overseas wars and over 17,000 Americans injured.
- The average life span of black Americans is six years less
than that of white Americans, meaning that inferior health care and
living standards result in about 40,000 premature deaths of black
Americans per year.
- Deaths attributed to drunk driving in America are running at about 17,000 per year. Deaths attributed to tobacco use in America are running at about 440,000 per year.
- The direct cost of the Iraq war alone has been $250B.
- The cost of 'homeland' security is over $40B per year, more than twice what it was before Bush.
- The
series of Bush tax cuts for the rich will reduce government revenues
(and hence services for the poor) by an average of about $200B per year
over the next decade.
And if the US government spent money on
medical research that the private Big Pharma companies (which prefer to
spend money developing cures for illnesses of the wealthy, like
impotence) find unprofitable, like finding a cure for AIDS, or
influenza, the number of lives that could be saved, and ruined lives
made livable, is almost unimaginable.
The real brilliance of the
horrific attacks of 9/11 was not their high death toll or visual
spectacle, but their ability to provoke a knee-jerk reaction in
American conservatives that a recurrence of those attacks must be prevented at any cost.
That cost has so far included the bankrupting of the US treasury, a
widening of the disparity in quality of life between the rich and the
poor to a gulf, and the opportunity cost (what otherwise could have
been achieved by peacetime spending) of over a quarter trillion dollars
per year.
No amount of money, and no amount of security, can
prevent a recurrence of 9/11 whenever it suits the next rich psychopath
to launch it. Our society is simply too open and too global to defend
against such attacks -- there are just too many ways that anyone could
launch them, as the Oklahoma City bombers demonstrated long before
9/11. But this reality of openness, of defenselessness, of
powerlessness, is simply unfathomable and intolerable to the
conservative mindset of father-figure-as-protector. The alternative to
Bush's futile extravagant spending and foreign adventures would be to
do almost nothing, to admit that the liberals were right all along -- and that the
only way to prevent violence is to remove the causes of human misery
that lead the unhinged to extreme nothing-left-to-lose actions.
Bin Laden surely knew that Bush could not stomach that alternative, and
that his actions would cause Bush to bankrupt the US treasury in an
irrational attempt to defend against any conceivable future 'terrorist'
act, thus rendering the US unable to muster forces to block Bin Laden's
plan to create a single Islamic fundamentalist state from West Africa
to Indonesia.
The very fact that Bush has called it 'The War on
Terror' betrays his awareness that the 'enemies' in this war cannot be
identified, their location cannot be identified, their means of attack
cannot be guessed at, and when and where they will attack cannot be
determined. It is a 'war' that can never be won.
And the
futility of this endless War has another cost besides its astronomical
financial and human costs: It is turning the US into a police state:
("a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive
controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people,
especially by means of a secret police force, and considers itself
above the law"). And what characterizes a police state more than the
paranoia and fear that it indefinitely sustains is the loss of rights
and freedoms it brings about. This was a bonus even Bin Laden probably
never expected -- that the very rights and freedoms that distinguished
America from its 'enemies' would be curtailed and eliminated as
incompatible with national security. This is a slippery slope that
America has been sliding down since the Patriot Act and it is still
continuing -- we now know that Bush and Homeland Security consider the Internet a tool of 'the enemy'
and intend to obtain "maximum control of the entire electromagnetic
spectrum" and gain the ability at any time to "disrupt or destroy the
full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and
weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".
If it sounds impossible that the US government could own and control (and destroy) the Internet, it isn't. As Doc Searls has explained,
the US telecom oligopoly is now attempting, using a corporate-friendly
Congress, to get control of the Internet and put tolls on it. It's a
small step from there for the government to nationalize it 'in the
interests of security' and do what they want with it. Welcome Big
Brother. They recently demanded
that Google provide them with logs of every
search done by everyone on the planet in a two-month 'test period'
using the Google search engine. The other major search engines complied
with similar demands.
This
lunacy is evidence of deep paranoia, a form of mental illness that sees
menace behind every door and in every (illegally tapped) personal
telephone conversation or e-mail. I would argue that this lunacy is the
inevitable consequence of the confrontation between socially
conservative thinking and the realities of our 'global village' world.
Social conservatives believe that we are inherently weak, susceptible
to the 'temptations of evil', and that it is the responsibility of
paternalistic leaders to impose moral authority on us, and to teach us
the values of 'good' behaviour and to make us fear the consequences of
'evil' behaviour. Such intimidation may work well enough in closed
societies, but in the modern world there are many, highly conflicting
views of what, and who, are 'good' and 'evil'. When all social
conservatives (including Bush and Bin Laden) are trying simultaneously
to impose their values on their families, their citizens, their
'consumers', their congregations, while there is a constant
intermingling of families, citizens, 'consumers' and congregations, and
a simultaneous globalization of societies and cultures, the only
possible consequence is perpetual war and ubiquitous paranoia. Social conservativism is simply incompatible with the modern world,
an evolutionary throwback (it is no coincidence that social
conservatives deny the theory of evolution) to a time when cultures
were isolated and there were new frontiers for non-conformists to be
exiled to, and its recent resurgence, both in America and in the
Mideast, is a serious threat to the peace and perhaps even the survival
of our civilization.
The irony is that economic
conservatism, which is different from social conservatism, and which
supports a laissez-faire, unregulated approach to economic management
("let the 'market' decide"), is the force most responsible for the
globalization that has led to homogenization of our cultures and hence created the violent paranoia of social conservatives.
In
the born-again Bush we have both social and economic conservatism. A
socially conservative leader should be an isolationist, not an
imperialist, and should be averse to free trade and other vehicles of
globalization, since these inevitably weaken cultures and the ability
of paternalistic leaders to command obedience and conformity to their definition of 'good' behaviour. In fact before 9/11 there was some evidence that Bush was an isolationist and not enamoured of 'free' trade.
But the neocons pulling his strings are extreme economic
conservatives, and they have persuaded him (to advance their own
personal economic interests) that globalization can be consistent with
social conservatism provided that his, evangelical Christian values model prevails all over the globe.
While the intermixing of cultures, and the spread of knowledge of other
ways of living, are a great threat to the social conservative, the
total homogenization of world culture based on evangelical Christian
values could, after the inevitable horrific wars to the death of other
cultures, produce a peaceful, undifferentiated, servile world
population. Heaven on Earth for the winner, and the losers, as with all
the cultural genocides in human history, are exterminated to the point
their voice is no longer heard.
This was the objective of the
original Crusades, and of the missionaries sent to 'convert' the
'heathen', violently or mortally if necessary, throughout our history.
No cultural diversity means no more wars. The citizen is reduced
socially to an obedient sheep, and reduced economically to a 'consumer'
who, as Jerry Michalski famously put it "is nothing more than a gullet
whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash". It was
not an accident that Bush used the word 'crusade' in describing his
invasion of Iraq, and predicted his war would be a very long one.
Such
a vision fills me with sadness, and the thought of the bloodshed its
realization would require horrifies me. But I understand it. It is the
apocalyptic conservative's nirvana, a realization of 'right makes
might'. I don't think I could live in such a dreary, controlled world.
But maybe, if I was born into one, and if it were the only life I knew,
I might think differently.
In the meantime, enjoy America
while it is solvent, and your Internet before it is taken away. And get
ready for the next volley, the War in Iran -- a neocon explains why, in social conservative thinking, it's imminent and inevitable.
Thanks to Dale Asberry for the Internet and War in Iran links. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
