Shorter Bush White House:

OK, the dirty hippies were right about everything.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

A Distinction Without a Difference

by shep

Reading Daily Kos this morning, a came across this peculiar claim by DHinMI in a long essay about Blackwater and the GOP:

“But the main reason why it’s wrong to refer to Bush authoritarianism as fascist is, simply, that it’s not fascist. Fascism exalted the state as the most powerful force, more powerful than any other institutions, including business.”

My reply is: you’re making a distinction where there is no difference, in both fascism and the Republican model of government.

The most perfect illustration of that is the current purchase of immunity for cooperating in illegal domestic spying for telecom companies by former political officials (in both parties) now employed by the telecoms and lobbying by current government officials, such as intelligence director Mike McConnell, who were formerly (directly) employed by the telecoms.



I’ll let Glenn Greenwald describe another dimension to the lack of distinction between “the state” and business:

”The top telecom officials are devoting substantial amounts of their energy to working on highly classified telecom projects with the Bush administration, including projects to develop whole new joint networks and ensure unfettered governmental access to those networks. Before joining the administration as its Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell spearheaded the efforts on behalf of telecoms to massively increase the cooperation between the Federal Government and the telecom industry.

The private/public distinction here has eroded almost completely. There is no governmental oversight or regulation of these companies. Quite the contrary, they work in secret and in tandem -- as one consortium -- with no oversight at all.”

Strangely, DHinMI’s thesis is based in large measure on Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine which contains no such denial of Republican fascism:

“A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.”

From Wikipedia on “corporatism”:

“Political scientists may also use the term corporatism to describe a practice whereby an authoritarian state, through the process of licensing and regulating officially-incorporated social, religious, economic, or popular organizations, effectively co-opts their leadership or circumscribes their ability to challenge state authority by establishing the state as the source of their legitimacy, as well as sometimes running them, either directly or indirectly through shill corporations.”

From Wikipedia on fascism:

”Fascism also operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote "superior" individuals and weed out the weak. In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class. Lawrence Britt suggests that protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism. Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."

And from the self-proclaimed “founder” of fascism himself:

”The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.” (p. 41).
—Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore.

Any way you slice it, fascism is about the alignment of all institutions of state power, especially corporate power, against the interests of democratic representation, populist policy and individual liberty, i.e., liberalism. It seeks not to enhance the state relative to business but to remove the barrier between corporate interests and the interests of state entirely. Meanwhile, fascism seeks to suppress or coerce any remaining conflicts with those interests as determined by its elites in both business and government, because they are the same people and the same interests.

From the corruption of the democratic process in the Supreme Court sanctioned Republican coup of 2000 and political prosecutions and voter suppression by Republican government officials, to restructuring the tax system to favor wealth rather than work, to outsourcing the writing of US law to corporations, to privatizing entire government functions like protecting US government officials overseas, to the militarization of society through fear mongering, to colluding between government and corporations to violate the law to spy on the lawful activities American citizens, this Republican government cannot be distinguished from US corporate interests and their combined interest in monopolizing the country’s wealth and power and undermining the liberty and self rule of average citizens. That is fascism by every meaning of the word.


[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Timing is Everything

by shep

It’s almost here. For everyone other than the 25% of authoritarian (Bush) followers who are just fine with a Republican criminal enterprise running out of the Oval Office and the beltway elites who can’t stomach looking at the blood on their own hands, the argument is over. There is only one question remaining:

"Where are the real confrontations needed to vindicate the rule of law and restore constitutional order? No reasonable person can dispute that in the absence of genuine compulsion (and perhaps even then), the administration will continue to treat "the law" as something optional, and their power as absolute. Their wrongdoing is extreme, and only equally extreme corrective measures will suffice."
--Glenn Greenwald

Or, really, when will enough true patriots rise up and insist upon it?

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Blunt

I cannot be said more bluntly. Thank you Mr. Uhler:

Your stupidity and incompetence, Mr. Bush, are becoming the stuff of legend. Like Willy Loman's, your sales pitches no longer persuade and are now viewed to be acts of desperation. And, as a self-proclaimed "born again" Christian, who supposedly receives guidance from God; you possess all the "moral clarity" of a guttersnipe.

Granted, you've yet to be removed from office, so attention must still be paid. But, mainly to record your crimes for posterity and more definitively demonstrate that you and your irredeemable Vice President were always lying, warmongering frauds.

Forget About Stopping The War, Chalabi Will

Because Congress isn't going to do a thing about it.

David Sirota: "Democrats are not serious about ending the war, or even trying to slow it down."

"Democrats are considering cutting President Bush's $142 billion budget request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year by $20 billion, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad said Thursday." - AP, morning of 3/1/07

VERSUS

"Just hours after floating the idea of cutting $20 billion from President Bush's $142 billion request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad was overruled by fellow Democrats Thursday. 'Our caucus feels strongly that we should go with the president's numbers' on 2008 war costs, Conrad said." - AP, afternoon of 3/1/07

Nope, they'd rather pass a pork-filled defense spending bill than use the power of the purse.

This is the first time, ever, in the long history of the Internet Toobz, that Mark Noonan was right. (Gawd, it sickens me to actually type those words.)

But never fear, our savior will soon be here and all will be roses and liberators.

(No, not Al Gore, geez, calm down already.)

Soon, very soon indeed, Ahmed Chalabi will be able to declare victory and send us home. He's "fixing" Baghdad just like he fixed the intel that got us in there to begin with. Already he's managed to get Sadr's militia to go to ground.

As I mentioned before, Iraqi oil minister Chalabi, the man conveniently in the middle mediating the Baghdad crack down, is now ready to dictate terms to everyone in the region, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and of course us (or rather the American based multinational corporate energy cartel).

Finally we're getting a diplomatic surge thanks to the Iraqis passing the Neo-Con Pinata known as the oil "law," -- which is designed to open up those fields Cheney's Energy Task Force was carving up on the map of Iraq instead of convening the Anti-Terrorism Fask Force before 9/11.

Funny how that worked out. They pass "our oil law," and now we're willing to break bread with Syria and Iran.

Confused? Don't worry, so is Condi. You can name an oil tanker after her, but you can't explain that this is all a feature, not a bug of your Neo-Con Utopia.

Via Iraq Today, through a convoluted chain of links to a Counterpunch article, we glean this fairly coherent assessment of the British withdrawal.

"...But long before then almost all the remaining British forces will be located at Basra air base and act in support of Iraqi military and police units..." the articles continues "...As a result, southern Iraq has, in effect, long been under the control of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the so-called "Sadrist" factions...The Iraqi forces that Britain helped create in the area were little more than an extension of Shia Islamist control by other means."

What is left unsaid, but interpreted nicely by An Arab Woman Blues is that the man she calls "crook, embezzler, CIA/Mossad Iranian agent, Chalabi," and his allies in the Maliki Government -- along with their associated Iranian-backed militias who acted as his body guards when he made his MacArtur-esque return to Basra -- have effectively consolodated their control of the southern Iraq and will have Chalabi's back as he takes the dealer's chair at the greatest poker game of the century.

Chalabi holds all the cards and he's ready to deal. The table stakes are in the hundreds of billions, and the pot includes franchise rights to the most valuable natural resource sell-off in generations.

And you thought Dick Cheney and his merry little band of conspirators didn't know what they were doing. The continued chaos is no longer useful as leverage to get the factionalized Iraqi Parliament to approve privatization of Iraq's greatest treasure -- so just watch as it magically ends once the folks in the Carlyle Group get their piece of the pie.

UPDATE:

"The Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar has obtained a copy of the proposed oil law and has just translated it into English. He discusses the new law with Antonia Juhasz, author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time."

democracynow.org

Oh. Well, If You Strenuously Object...

... then I should take some time to reconsider. -- A Few Good Men

Majority "Strongly Objects" To Bush Troop Buildup (via HuffPost)

Washington Post: Opposition to Bush's plan to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq remained strong. Two in three Americans registered their disapproval, with 56 percent saying they strongly object. The House recently passed a nonbinding resolution opposing the new deployments, but Republicans have blocked consideration of such a measure in the Senate.

These kind of numbers cannot be ignored. The breakdown among Democrats is in the 90%'s opposing the war and the Administration's handling of it.

The response from the Office of Vice President was refreshingly honest and blunt...

(more)

Here's Dicky...


I'M GONNA RIP OFF YOUR HEAD AND SHIT DOWN YOUR NECK!!

(Breaking -- Afghan rebels in dire need of more target practice.)

Oh Mark , they're gonna be pissed at you now.

Juan Cole on Brits Leaving: A Rout

Nobody is really buying Vice-Decider Cheney's spin, trying to turn the sour news that Great Britain was was removing troops from Southern Iraq into lemonade -- that this was some kind of indication of how well things were going.

Orwell's finest student wants us to believe yet another corner was turned with Lithuania and Denmark's announcement that their folks were going to bug out too. Purple Fingers For Everyone!

Professor Cole's assessment was unexpectantly blunt: "This is a rout, there should be no mistake."

Blair to Draw Down British Troops

Tony Blair is taking 1600 troops out of Basra in the next few months and will aim to be down to only 3,000 or so (from 7,100 now) by the end of the year. Denmark is also going home.

This is a rout, there should be no mistake. The fractious Shiite militias and tribes of Iraq's South have made it impossible for the British to stay. They already left Dhi Qar province, as well as sleepy Muthanna. They moved the British consulate to the airport because they couldn't protect it in Basra. They are taking mortar and rocket fire at their bases every night. Raiding militia HQs has not resulted in any permanent change in the situation. Basra is dominated by 4 paramilitaries, who are fighting turf wars with one another and with the Iraqi government over oil smuggling rights.

Cole was also quoted in USA Today explaining that the region is, "really dangerous" and "not under control" despite Cheney's reports from friends who like to joy-ride through the militia infested area, hardly noting the oil we've been trying to "secure" since Kuwait was invaded is getting stolen and sold on the black market.

"This idea that the British could leave because the local authorities have things under control is just completely false." (Cole, HT: Carpetbagger)

If Dick would squirm out of his bunker long enough to sniff the stench of unholy hell his neo-con nightmare unleashed, he'd learn about how adept the insurgents were becoming at shooting down our helicopters and that they've got a new toy -- deadly chlorine gas bombs.

Even a rat has the common sense to run out of a burning house.

Welcome To Your Neo-Con Utopia

Iraq Today - The Siege Of Baghdad by Resistance Tightening..

Civil war. Organized armies of thugs. Bigger mercenary armies. Billions of dollars vanishing. Dysfunctional Government protecting rapists, murderers and thieves. Al Qaeda growning. Allies bailing out. Children dying.

As we "surge" into the house-by-house insanity of Baghdad, the unpatrolled countryside hosts more and more fighters who've left the urban center -- increasing and coordinating their attacks, cutting supply-lines, and shooting down more helicopters.

This is what happens when you use another country to try out your pet ideological theories. Every crank conservative they could find got to test out their idea for the New World Order in Iraq.

In the best traditions of Grover Norquist (still a White House Favorite, who is now tutoring Romney and Rudi), Paul Bremer left the Iraqis with a constitution that gave the government no power to tax, and privatized the oil industry, cutting the government off from it's only other source of appreciable revenue.

I knew the neocons plan envisioned a loosely centralized government with little power. In trying to verify that and give you some links, I can across this perfectly fitting article from 2004, Harpers: Baghdad Year Zero (Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia)

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.

The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.

Now let's compare, shall we? The neo-con dream has become a true nightmare, four years into the occupation. That's how long the Marshall Plan lasted -- the fastest period of growth in European history.
You can make the argument that the Marshall Plan was not all that legend might have us believe. But is sure didn't hurt, and must be given considerable credit for the successful reconstruction of Europe after WWII.

Let's not forget the Marshal Plan was implemented along with a comprehensive foreign and domestic policy directed by that notorious buster of war profiteers, Harry Truman -- just another "Big Government" liberal Democrat New Dealer.

Japan's post-war recovery was even more impressive than Europe's, termed a miracle by some. Far from the laissez faire economic policy preferred by neo-con doctrine, the Japanese government was highly involved in coordinating the nation's industries.

MacArthur enlisted Professor Carl Shoup to impose a modern, efficient tax system on Japan in 1949 -- including (gasp) a corporate income tax and a value added tax on top of a more efficient income tax. That kind of thing is sacrilege to a conservative.

Forty years from now, I don't think the Iraqi version of Toyota will be erecting any statues of Paul Bremer -- but Toyota honored Carl Shoup -- twice decorated by Emperor Hirohito -- with a $2 million endowment to Columbia.

Okay, maybe Haliburton will build a monument to Dick Cheney -- just so the shareholders can have another tax write-off -- but not in tribute to the prosperity he brought to Iraq.

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Boomerang, Waas on Cheney's Karma

(UPDATE: Also check out Sidney Blumenthal's detailed analysis of the "fog of war" defense Libby has attempted -- instead of just cutting the deal to finger Cheney. Salon's Day-Pass is worth Libby's Cynical Defense.)

Murray Waas is writing THE history of Dick Cheney and intelligence leaks, and how the VP's strident attempts to make the Executive Branch impervious to interference by Congress or the press has come back to bite the Decider-of-Vice© on the ass.

Waas interviewed former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham (D-FL) for the National Journal, and explored how Cheney's obsession with intelligence leaks regarding NSA intercepts the day before 9/11 (that were not translated until 9/12), and the VP's demand that Congress be fully investigated, set in motion events that led to the Scooter Libby trial.  That trial has elicited evidence confirming prior speculation that Cheney's Chief of Staff was not some rogue actor, but he and others in the White House were following orders from the VP himself:

"They [the administration] would have had a certain exposure to hypocrisy if they hid behind executive privilege" when the Plame investigation began, or if they had fought the appointment of a special prosecutor, Graham said. "It made it politically untenable to avoid having a strong investigation, because they had demanded it of us. With us, they said we should call out the meanest, leanest dogs. The example that they set with us became the boomerang that came around and hit them."

Waas documents Cheney's obsession with clamping down on leaks back to his days in the Ford administration when he wanted to jail Seymour Hersh, while working for the NY Times, for exposing a spy program against the USSR.  Even then, Cheney was not above using an intelligence leak to thwart Congressional oversight -- then in the form of the Church Committee's investigation of the CIA's coups, assassinations and domestic spying.

When the Justice Department balked at prosecuting anyone, Cheney adroitly tried to exploit the news report for other ends. He wrote under the heading "Broader ramifications": "Can we take advantage of it to bolster our position on the Church committee investigation? To point out the need for limits on the scope of the investigation?"

Dick Cheney is the epitome of the mindset that places the whims of the White House above anything else -- a law unto itself.  This is a theory of executive omnipotence that has given us some 1,100 Presidential Signing Statements directly thwarting any legal checks on the administration's absolute authority, not to mention every major White House scandal other than the Monica Lewinsky saga.



We begin seeing this in the CIA's involvement in Watergate, and the Pentagon Papers exposing our secret, illegal actions in Cambodia and throughout SE Asia.  The Church Committee's investigation of these incidents and exposure of others led to more oversight of our clandestine services.  I submit that those checks on executive authority coming out of those investigations served us well, even at the height of the cold war during the Reagan/Bush(41)'s era -- a time no less dangerous, more so, than we live in today.

But even with stringent oversight, we saw the hidden black-box that is the intelligence services (How many agencies again? 16? 19? I've lost track.) resulting in negotiating with terrorist enemies -- giving them weapons in exchange for hostages, and the funding of full-scale wars in South America.

Based on this history, I have little doubt that the restructuring of our intelligence services by the current administration, and the concentration of so much of it under the Department of Defense, is merely a continuation of an effort to concentrate the real power in this nation, the unquestionable, unseen, unknown, very well funded, secret power in this nation in the hands of a powerful and ideologically "pure" group.

I know this smacks of the worst of conspiracy theorist thinking, but you cannot have lived the span of years I have, you cannot have been born the very day that the Vietnam War began in earnest under a "surge" ordered by JFK, lived through his and his brother's and MLK's assassinations, the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon, Oliver North, and the grandson and great grandson of a Nazi collaborator rising to the highest office in the land, one via detour through the CIA's directorship while Cheney was White House Chief of Staff -- and not detect an unmistakable smell.

Now let me be clear here.  Cheney's is an extreme, absolutist view.  There is a balancing act, and the security of the American people is more important than the protection of our intelligence assets -- that's just the way it is.  They are volunteering to protect us, and just as importantly, our way of life.  But their lives, and more importantly, their mission trumps any "need to know" by the public at large.

What is all too apparent in the revelations of the Libby trial is that the VP's priority is protection of the power structure that he represents, and is largely in control of.  To him, that is more more importantthen the lives and mission of our clandestine security forces.

Cheney never hestitated to use an intelligence leak to usurp the legitimate power of a co-equal branch of government in 2002, or 30 years ago.  Likewise he was unconcerned about the consequences of exposing an agent or her operation -- an operation tasked with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons -- an operation whose mission this administration has cynically championed to whip up public support for unnecessary wars against Iraq, and now Iran -- yet deliberately undermined to cover-up their misuses of intelligence for their own agenda.

Make no mistake, there is only one logical conclusion about Vice-Decider Cheney's true loyalties.  It is not the protection of our form of government.  It certainly is not the people risking their lives to protect that way of life -- nor is it the American people.  Dick Cheney is only interested in the consolidation of power in his and his personally selected fellow travelers' hands.

If he has deluded himself otherwise, if he thinks he is merely a dedicated public servant working only for the good of his fellow citizens, he truly is mad.

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