Editorial: Bush is a living legacy

US News President George Herbert Walker Bush, R.I.P.

The late-President George H.W. Bush is a living legacy. He may have passed away, but thanks to corporate personhood, he is likely to live on forever in the likeness of his heirs, and their vast holdings and connections around the globe.

In fact, one mandatory school child exercise up to adulthood ought to be the many ways in which the late President served as prime functionary for the New World Order, bringing down the level of autonomy for American citizens, their communities, and states. You can be an intelligent shopper and consumer, but you are increasingly discouraged from building your own home, raising a vegetable garden in your front lawn, rearing chickens in the back, and going off the grid by producing and storing your own electricity.

It ought to be an exercise because the number of essays can hardly cover the breadth of the topic and the number of voices will continue to be quashed for generations to come. Our concerns are routinely overlooked or minimized in favor of corporations and their minions. The society wonders why we have a new generation full of gutless obsequious workers. It’s because they think it’s your way or the highway—and they know the highways are filled with refugees and homeless people and ex-factory workers and down-sized workers and misfits.

Here is a short list of ways the late-President was not a winner (in the binary sense, not a winner makes a loser, but we will pretend we are not dealing with foreign powers here where thanks to the New World Order not a friend means an enemy).

1) He gave us permanent war in the Middle East. The first war in Kuwait (Operation Desert Storm) was just an opener for inhumanitarian sanctions and extended war in Iraq. Once war as a means for geopolitical control began, it spread to Yugoslavia and under President Clinton the region became “balkanized.” The reasons include the means to build oil pipelines, to access oil fields, to force freedom and dollarization by uprooting unfriendly sovereign nations. This is reported in alternative news sites such as Center for Research on Globalization, Internationalist Group, and authors at independent bookstores.

2) Corporate personhood over human rights from sovereign nations to communities, schools, and establishment media. A severe curtailment of all forms of free speech has taken place in many parts of the country. It’s unspoken code that you are not welcome to discuss politics, religion, ethics, or ideals of any kind in any public setting. This code is so ruthlessly enforced that we are conditioned to practice it at home.

What is acceptable American conversation would strike foreigners as stultifying as the Victorian Era. It resembles the art of endless streaming back and forth on minutea, the sort of “yes, but no not really, perhaps, but well maybe” empty society recorded in “Araby” by James Joyce.

“Can you please tell me the details of your dinner last night with your ex over again in greater and greater detail?”

“We need to remind ourselves to discuss the hours, pay scale, when you get your break, have you taken break yet, and how to call in sick.”

“But is that what she really texted you on your smart phone? Let’s have a look and check all the new messages we got from her on Facebook.”

Living robots would hardly do the term justice, but of course, we have not included the range of allowed sports conversations, mandatory wearing of the flag-pin by administrators, or the overt favoritism for military sons and daughters. In contrast, ostracizing nonconformists help spur the invisible leper population growth. If lepers become homeless and die, it is presumably because they are drug addicts, not because of anything else.

3) Growth of militarism and the deep state. GHWB wore multiple hats well. You would never think that a man who blinks and speaks so hypnotically had anything going on at all behind the scenes. However the CIA must have been the one that trained him to blink so often and speak in such a monotone. Whether one assignment took him to Texas on November 22, 1963; whether this includes orchestrating the architecture for post 9-11; we must be thankful whenever we see our President bowing and kissing the hand or holding hands with the Saudi King. It was all done so we could continue to drive our cars, drink coca-cola, and eat apple pie.

4) From the late President George H. W. Bush on down, each President increasingly became embroiled in carrying out the New World Order agenda such as enacting global trade agreements, serving as leader for various NWO alliances and at their summits (ASEAN, G5, G7, G20, EU). More importantly the work is being carried out on behalf of the military whose reach has extended around the globe whether directly under U.S. command or in joint command under NATO with names such as USAfricom, CENTCOM, EUCOM, USINDOPACOM, USNORTHCOM, USSOUTHCOM, and functional commands such as USStratcom, USSocom, USCybercom, USTranscom. These forces together pretty much ensure that the Bill of Rights can be suspended during under any kind of national duress whether Amendment III Quartering of Soldiers, where houses, roads, warehouses, you name it is effectively commandeered for the sake of the army or Amendment IV or Amendment I.

5) War on terror unending. We know that GHWB was very proud of his son, the President George W. Bush for taking on the war in Afghanistan and starting the new one with Iraq. Diplomacy is a waste of time when the matter could be solved if not quickly, then at least more terrifyingly with bombs. That the war took out many human lives, that it dragged on due to the tendency for weaponizing the population to cause more violence, and that additional ills from war such as opium and heroin drug-use, cancer, birth defects, hunger, malnutrition, untimely ends, and so on is merely regarded defended as collateral damage.

According to Veterans Today, in a “60 minutes” interview on May 12, 1996, in response to a question about that up to half a million Iraqis had died from sanctions during the first Iraq war, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated:

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—-we think the price is worth it.”

That sort of callousness is necessary among many of the governing class including their wives, officers aspiring to top administrator, etc. Here is what the former First Lady Barbara Bush told ABC‘s “Good Morning America” on March 18, 2003:

“Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

While it’s a well-known fact that the First Lady is relegated to ceremonious functions, her separation from reality might be a script for Stepford Wife. As a psyche-op on the grand stage, it’s become a fait accompli that the entire U.S. population is transfixed on micro- rather than macro- perspective. In order to survive, all workers are expected to be engrossed and compliant. The only way to ensure this is to over-burden students with homework, minimize any learning of history beyond what is needed for examination, and provide for that most workers are sent on a quest of self-improvement through completion of mandatory continuing education. Professionals and administrators are also trained to hyperfocus on stacks of reading materials and disputations on their area of specialty, thus ensuring they behave somewhat with limited spectra, a process called overspecialization.

6) Shrinking the middle class. While the process of neoliberalization began under late President Ronald Reagan, a process then referred to as “Reaganomics,” it accelerated under GWHB and extended beyond the sphere of Soviet glasnost and perestroika to include more satellite countries. At first the impacts of global trade agreements appeared to uplift the public with regard to consumer choice and movement. However in just under two decades, it became evident that outsourcing U.S. factories and even whole manufacturing industries forced many to retire or attend school to retrain. The growth of the rentier economy, based primarily on goods and services, has narrowed the bands of employment, restricted upward mobility, and kept employment wages low.

Even when there is the $15 minimum wage bill, the fact is that the unions have shrunken dramatically and many have conceded their rights. Workers have fewer choices when the company board views its American franchises as mostly window dressing. Moreover even when there is a lot of construction, the presence of heavy machinery, automation, and traveling work crews ensures that a lot less people are actually working than used to be.

7) Mass surveillance and the Patriot Act fell into place after 9-11. Amendment I, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right of people to peacably assemble, and the right to petition is under scrutiny because of the Patriot Act. And for the same reason Amendment IV, the right of persons to be secure in their selves, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures—-this is routinely violated when poor people are evicted or their effects are bull-dozed into a litter heap at a homeless camp being closed down. Thanks to the great National Security project people can basically be tried based on a national security or Homeland Security writ. They would not even need to be subpoenaed anymore since their records are all in the NSA database since they have been conducting massive amounts of civilian data-mining. Huge amounts of data are analyzed by private contractors. If labeled a certain radical stripe, the police or FBI might just show up at your door, no other cause needed. Finally Amendment X, the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are now reserved more likely for corporate boards and their members, rather than to the states or to the people.

8) Underfunding national infrastructure in exchange for growth in the military industrial complex. This is pretty self-evident when national societies such as the American Society of Civil Engineers has not issued any straight A report cards in its “Annual Report on Infrastructure” since gosh knows when. Another indicator is the stealthy undermining of middle-class sectors by other competing U.S. sectors. Technology and robots supplant more grocery and warehouse workers; smart-outsourcing startups hope to break the economic independence of one production site into multiple shopped parts; this can also be done with regard to in-house administrative software, payroll, communications, public relations, etc. While it appears to be about economics, it includes a political control element that is Orwellian because reducing services to manufacturing units often encourages supervisors to instill lock-step conformity in employee outlook and behavior for speed.

9) When the system begins to break down and feed on itself, the number of reporters and accurate accountability necessarily dies off. More well-informed Americans read about this happening in third-world or second-world regimes. Here there have been reports that with an annual 4 trillion dollar budget, the Internal Revenue Service no longer has the budget to adequately conduct audits on tax absconders. According to Pro Publica‘s report “After Budget Cuts, the IRS’ Work Against Tax Cheats is Facing ‘Collapse‘” the IRS has lost it’s bite.

“Starting in 2011, the budget cuts have slashed the IRS’s enforcement staff by a third, and the audit rate has fallen even more…the rate at the agency audits tax returns has plummeted by 42 percent since the budget cuts started.”

Of course slashing government accountability offices such as the IRS is a type of false economy, but it was also accompanied by growth in electronic tax filing, work-force attrition, the mass hiring of temporaries, and consolidation of facilities. (Note that the audit rate is already only 0.5%). Clearly, however, the report indicates the endangerment to organizational functioning played by an overworked staff that lacks the time, training, and most importantly grit to crack tough cases and nail them down. Corporate tax evaders save for themselves millions of dollars by under-reporting and tax-evasion, just like the country’s leaders might.

10) Supra-governance. Call it the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or financial markets, the world of finance has evolved into a global supragovernment. Writer Andrew Gavin Marshall’s report “The Global Supra-Government and the Free Market” describes how a “super-entity” of 147 tightly-knit companies, which all own each other and collectively own 40% of the total wealth, controls the global economy. Marshall describes a network that, according to Roger Altman, former Deputy Secretary of Treasury under the Clinton administration, holds immense power:

“They [financial markets] oust entrenched regimes where normal political processes could not do so. They force austerity, banking bail-outs and other major policy changes. Their influence dwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Indeed, leaving aside unusable nuclear weapons, they have become the most powerful force on earth.”

If the financial markets wield the power of global police, then giving corporations authority in the name of global “free markets” trumps statehood and small business. If nothing else, movements such as Occupy help expose the current system of underprosecution of big banks that encourage any kind of mechanism for the ultimate bail-out including drug money, risky commodities, speculation, criminal activity such as human trafficking, and even working with various agents to conduct extortion and bribery to bust up city or county pension funds.

An example of the supragovernment organization that poses a threat for public citizens is the Bilderberg group first exposed by Alex Jones of Infowars.com. Their misdeeds might include merging political interests with financial ones, enabling hostile takeovers of smaller companies, and exerting control by enlisting the support of military operatives to protect their explorations whether from discovery or to scare off authorities.

Over the past decade, reactionary authoritarianism has ascended to a new level of extremism seen in America, Brazil, Ecuador, Spain, and Israel. In Brazil, where small pockets of indigenous natives have their lives threatened by bounty hunters, President-elect Bolsonero nevertheless vows to hasten the demise of the Amazon rainforest for the sake of economic development. The imperative to understand the dynamics of climate change and biological survival is neglected by the New World Order or more accurately the global plutocracy because their perspective is prioritizing domination and control.

As citizen watchdog groups such as Reclaim Democracy make clear, the only way citizens can regain control of a government friendly for authentic community cooperatives and natural investment banks is to shake the stranglehold on power of the corporate citizens, meaning those persons who are not human, yet have the right to live on forever because of the corporate charter. Unlike collapse pundits who promote survivalism, the only way to really get past this period of challenges is not to stow away our goods in a bomb-proof cave, but to courageously band together to resist the corporate monster in all its guises: commercial, secret society, shadow government or deep state, royalty, toxic sociopaths, narcissists, etc. We must try to heroically take back the Supreme Court while we are at it as well, for the Court has become filled with permanent office-holders who are under no pressure whatsoever to connect with the common citizens.

Understand the late-President George H.W. Bush is living on today through his charity and corporations, and charted path through dark societies, but there is no doubt that the dichotomy between his public and private lives have finally somehow merged, entwined, emerged, and will continue to erupt.

 

Image Source: U.S. News “The Week in Cartoons: Dec. 3-7