Glory be for Ben Bernanke and Quantitative Easing. If you are the Fed, you can buy up the
shortfall of Treasuries at auction that Japan and China don’t want some more
of, that is to say, you can print new dollars out of thin air to pay for the
dollars you first borrowed out of thin air to begin with, right? Everybody knows that. P.T. Barnum got it right on all counts about
human nature and suckers, and most times, the twain do seem to be the
same. Just look at how popular Grover
Norquist is with his “No New Taxes” mandate to Congress to get the members to
promise NEVER again to vote for a tax increase.
Why Norquist is a magician of the same mystic order of walnut shells who
thinks the government can continue to borrow and spend and never pay the piper
by raising taxes, don’t cha know? We
don’t have to pay for what we borrow and spend, right? It appears to be true. The process is as follows:
- You borrow the money out of thin air
- You print new money out of thin air (and borrow the money to buy the paper and ink, do you love it?)
- You buy up the excess issued Treasuries needed to run government with the dollars printed out of thin air.
- The National Debt will grow Trillions of dollars with each year that passes.
- Don’t worry about it, ‘cause we will print more dollars and live for today.
You can’t call it conservative. But hold on a minute. Maybe you can. And get away with it. Regan proved that television as a medium could sell anybody anything. Long before he became president. Nobody will look to see if you are stealing from the Treasury or putting all posterity in hock by borrowing and inflating the dollar to pay for it with cheaper dollars. Especially if your intonations are good and your winks and nods are prolific.
But if enybody messes with us, we’ll bully them, do no-fly zones and sanctions, and ifen that don’t work, we might just blow a few of them up at night with drones and smart Hell Fire Missiles.
But wait. Is this what we have become? A nation that rules with the Tomahawks, Drones, and superior weapons and software? Just because we can? Is this the country of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln? Joe Sixpack and Jane Winecooler suspect that greed, money, and power are what propel the human race to its doom, that’s a known. But heck, ya’ll let’s go shoot some rounds of golf and get pedicures and talk politics like we knew something, why not?
Maybe it is raw power and the ability to wield it as a new variation of brute force that titillates us and excites those in high positions of power to ecstasy. But probably not. George W. Bush just painted by the numbers, did what he was told, don’t you think? You know, to start wars so’s more trillions could line the pockets of the Military Industrial Complex, i.e., those top campaign contributors that Bush called the “Have Mores,” his base? The group that Ike warned us about and came close to using an adjective like “evil” to describe their mercenary asses, but held off. It certainly puts more money in the pockets of those at the top of the food chain. Ruling the masses becomes a less-encumbered exercise when you get almost all the money over to the other side of the room. The rich side. Dudes with the power (can I get a chest bump?).
I’m talking about the “Have More” Country Club set. Like the legendary Houston Realtor, Bob Perry who gave Bush over $4 million dollars back in 2004 to have Karl Rove stage a low rent, dirty ad campaign by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” That little parcel of money bought the 2004 presidential election by demonizing John Kerry who, unlike Bush, had volunteered for combat duty in Viet Nam. Purple Hearts, Silver Stars. To demonize and discredit those icons for Bush’s AWOL and no attendance records in the Texas Air Guard when the Viet Nam War raged is a real accomplishment for Bush and his Have More supporters and their money. Them Have Mores are danged powerful, no doubt about it. Bob Perry died last April, and to tell the truth, I was unaware of it. And hell, I’m a Texan. Money and power must not follow them to the grave or cause splendid eulogies to be written of them in the history books about such exalted low-life’s who buy Orwellian truths, Joseph Goebbels style, that topple reality. So an ignorant favored son of the Bush Dynasty, notorious for selling steel to Hitler, can position himself to serve as president who can start wars. With Iraq, the wrong goddamned country, no less.
And we all know why. We just don’t want to think about it. In the annals of U.S. History the fact that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with Iraq or Saddam Hussein becomes a blur. It is a matter of our selling out our National conscience because we were pissed off at terrorists and wanted to kill something at the time. And Bush was the means to that knee-jerk end. But does morality ever come into play? Do we care if we attack the right target when we start wars that cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings, or not? Our collective unconscious went to sleep on that one. We probably as a nation, do care to some lesser extent but we just want to get it all behind us, not think about it anymore, like, dude, it’s in the past, and we can’t change things, now can we? I hate slinking out of something due to the untimeliness of the issues at hand in the now. It’s copping out. Do we really believe our souls will ever heal when we say that is not my department, my business, and I will think about it tomorrow? Like in never?
But what of the $ 4 Trillion tab Bush ran up and added to the National Debt to start the wrong war against the wrong foe? It stinks, you say? The taxpayers like us (the Have Lesses) have to pick up the tab, don’t you know? Just ain’t fair. So how did we get to this place? No matter. Never mind. Try a new flowers-painted-on-your-toes pedicure with the girls. Buy some new Nike clubs or a new CC membership in the new exclusive Geronimo Foothills Golf Club. Landscape your new digs with tons of expensive petrified logs to stun guests and keep up with the Joneses. It is the life of the rich and powerful, the Have Mores. It is about what is.
We humans have witnessed the irony and unexplained absurdities like borrowing and spending to defeat an Evil Empire (so Reagan stamped the Russians), Terror (not a defined country) and the Axis of Evil without a protest, not the slightest outrage from any of us about our future, or what darkness might befall our species, moreover our world as a huge consequence. We allowed the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, to come into our living rooms to squint lovingly at us on the tube, and tandem block all voters with Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority to defeat Democrats and rational thought that was of Jefferson, Voltaire, and the other great people in history who loved our species more than prayer in the school. I doubt that Reagan ever loved a Muslim. And I know damned well Falwell never did.
Without a pause, without a sound, we allowed MIC predators and the politicians to sell our children, their futures and generations to come, down the river of false wars and conscious acts of immorality so that the Military Industrial Complex corporations could become the new dominators of the planet earth. There’s good money in $500 hammers you know, $1.2 million dollar Tomahawk Missiles, and war planes and ships at a few billion dollars a copy. The profits, of course, go to buy more power in government favors like no-bid contracts to keep riff-raff common businesses from bidding and joining the government country club already established. Say goodbye to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Goodbye, Jimmy Stewart, farewell all our ideals and heart pulses about freedom and fair-dealing. Bid adieu to equality and a government by the people, of the people and for the people forever. Goodbye Old Paint.
Bush II declared a National Emergency in order to use and abuse National Guard troops to send them to combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, over and over for several retours. Forget that Bush lied to get us into these wars. Forget that Americans bought it because Bush told us Iraq had nukes pointed at American cities. Forget that dummy Rummy said he knew where weapons of mass destruction were here and there, just outside of Bagdad, Tikrit, and other places he said they were but they weren’t. Forget Colin Powell and his silly-assed “artist’s drawings” as concrete proof in his address to the United Nations so we could attack Iraq. Forget that even the lowest paid janitor in Iraq could have become an instant millionaire if he could have shown us just one bunker that held WMDs. Or even a simple bottle of Ricin. An envelope of anthrax. Anything, really. Just tell the U.S. and show them where “X” marks the spot and collect the millions offered in rewards. Didn’t happen. And all the Bushites knew it never would. But in time the reality of the heinous lie fell on us like a mountain. Forget that it was all a big lie. To shift the wealth of the planet to the richest side of the room all over the world. And screw Tiny Tim, your neighbor and Charles Dickens, who portrayed the good side of our species, silly man.
The hidden Bush/Cheney agenda was the why of the “Permanence of Permanent War” which Dr. Jonas described so well. You, the great and powerful Military Industrial Complex, the string-pullers, the rulers know full well that you have a perpetual lock; a fox’s run of the government hen house, the U.S. Treasury. As long as you keep the wars going. Think of it, small arms, missiles, hammers, tanks, armies to equip, ships, planes, my God, American Capitalism is based upon war, killing, blood, and death. And just think of the markups! If a major NO-BID government contractor can sell Uncle Sam $500 hammers without objection the air in Washington must be perpetually laced with the aroma of Lotus Blossoms. If Uncle Sam contracts to buy Tomahawk Missiles for $1.2 million per copy and Obama shoots several hundreds of them at Libya just think of the cash registers ringing. I hear Verdi’s “The Anvil Chorus” a Washington favorite. You know, what with the ringing and all.
Take the MIC out of it and the propensity to keep the fires of war burning big, America would most probably go belly-up in a heartbeat. Think not? Just remember the $16 Trillion dollar National Debt that keeps us borrowing and spending more and more (not including the interest on the money borrowed). We still owe more debt than all the rest of the nations on earth combined, and if you think Greece has problems, just imagine if and when America becomes the ugly sister at the dance by going sincerely broke without means to conduct our affairs of state any longer. What if China falls on hard economic times to sell their goods in a bankrupt world? Think they will continue to have the means to buy our Treasuries to save our fiscal asses? Shhhhhhhhh.
Ever heard of the expression, “Whistle while walking through the graveyard?” My father was a young boy in the 1920s, and he lived on a farm in Milam County, Texas about 200 yards from the quaint little country graveyard that was the depository for many of the rural families who pioneered and descended from families seeking a living and happiness. The notion was that if you whistled no malevolent spirits there would do you harm. Maybe it’s high time we whistled through the graveyard of what used to be America, the fair-dealing. Before it was taken over by the Have Mores. Anybody got a better idea?