Though it is only a few short months into the Bush administration, it is hard to imagine how he could have moved any more quickly to make the world a far more dangerous place than it already was. Let's start with the traditional bogeymen; large militarized nation states. Right out of the chute, Bush essentially restarted the cold war by loudly proclaiming his disdain for the nuclear test ban treaty. Never mind that the treaty is the linchpin holding together 30 years of US-Russian security agreements. Our formerly former adversaries were forced to reassess their commitment to 30 years of painstaking diplomacy and negotiations, along with it the resultant arms treaties. So much for the "peace dividend." No better is Bush's ill-conceived missile defense program. Even though the prototype systems have failed basically every test they have ever run, and thousands of our top physicists have loudly and repeatedly proclaimed the system will never work, Bush knows better. The Chinese response was entirely predictable; a massive increase in their defense budget.

Moving on to the lesser bogeymen, the small militarized nation states, Bush fared even worse. The Arab world has largely come to view the continued sanctions against Iraq, which kill thousands of poor Iraqi children a year, as unduly punitive and counterproductive. Bush's response? He hadn't been in office two months before he tossed a few smart bombs at Iraq. Bush's spokespeople called the attacks "routine." Is that the new paradigm? Bombing Iraq is just part of running the government; sort of like getting the social security checks out on time? Sort of makes you wonder how exactly Bush is planning on convincing his "friends" in OPEC to reverse their present course and increase oil production, like he promised us in his campaign. Of course, lower oil prices would hurt the folks who dropped a cool $100 million into his campaign, so that promise had about as much weight as his pledge to regulate CO2 emissions. But I digress. Bush went on to antagonize the North Koreans, blithely letting out this gem: "Part of the problem in dealing with North Korea," he said, "there's not very much transparency. We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements." Of course, the U.S. has only one agreement with North Korea -- the 1994 plutonium agreement. So what the hell was Bush talking about? White House spokesmen told reporters that Bush was speaking about "possible future agreements." Huh? The North Koreans promptly canceled diplomatic meetings with the South Korean government, meetings which had been strongly encouraged by Western powers worried about global security threats should tension continue between the two countries. Now, lets think about this for a minute. If Bush gets a rogue state like North Korea or Iraq mad enough at us, do you think they would attack us in a bold, Pearl Harbor type assault, thinking they could win an all out war with the United States? Or do you think they might try to hit us with a terrorist type attack, say detonating a nuclear bomb on a boat in San Francisco Bay or cracking open a vial of a biological weapon on international flight bound for Laguardia? How is Bush's inoperable star wars defense system going to stop that? No matter; Bush didn't carry California or New York. They can just suffer those indignities along with the rolling blackouts.

Well, how about our allies? Surely Bush has done a better job with them? Not quite. Bush's fat cat Republican donors killed a bunch of Japanese fishermen while joy riding in a nuclear submarine. Oops. How about Europe? No luck there, either. Practically every policy with international implications Bush has articulated has been received horribly. Western Europe has the most to lose if a remilitarized Russia tests Bush's non-functioning missile defense shield. They were much happier with the idea of Russia decreasing its nuclear stockpile, but Bush has stopped that cold in its tracks. Western Europe lacks a big oil industry to con fundamentalists with bogus research on global warming, so they worry about catastrophic climate change. That means they were more upset with Bush's reversal on CO2 emissions than your average Southern Baptist. A short two months into his term, friend and foe alike, Bush has pissed off everybody. About the only people on the planet who Bush hasn't given some reason to hate us are the members of the federalist society. They are too busy getting vetted for vacant federal judgeships. --The Daily Brew Guy, 3/20/01

Obviously you want to know what the idiotic acronym FBCRA is. Well it's simply a way of referring to the reality that was thrust upon us in the waning days of the year 2000 C.E. Well perhaps that's a bit strong. I suppose the reality wasn't so much thrust upon us as it was briefly exposed. Already the veil is descending again across the minds of the majority of the inhabitants of North America. At the same time peoples in the rest of the world are clear that events here in the FBCRA are rapidly creating a climate of opression, decline, and strife that can be expected to dominate well beyond the presumed tenure of the resident bush. The reality of governance in North America takes the form known as a faith-based corporate republic, hence FBCRA. The FBCRA is in turn a closely held subsidiary of the trans-global corporate interests of planet earth (TGCIPE). The FBCRA is comprised of some fifty semi-autonomous cost centers, a staff operation called the District of Columbia, and a few scattered subsidiaries.

If religion is the 'opiate of the masses' as Marx would have it, then in the FBCRA the congress is 'crack for the masses.' The real power is with the unilateral actions of the resident and his minion. In any dispute with that august body the congress it is clear that the resident will be upheld by the supremes. The attention of the people in the FBCRA is drawn to fantastic media events in the house and senate where various votes will be taken and bills signed or not, vetoes over turned or not, and no likely net positive benefits will obtain. In the meantime entire echelons of appointees, most of whom will not face serious challenge, are dramatically shifting the psyche of the executive branch to a hardline viewpoint of the inherent benefits of a world economy dominated by the TGCIPE and governed by the FBCRA and in the role of protagonist the People's Republic of China - which certainly has enough non-virtuous characteristics to make the ploy by the FBCRA plausible if not acceptable to the majority.

Tax-cuts are actually irrelevant to the moneyed interests as is campaign finance reform and voting rights reform. In the latter two cases no serious loss of control occurs since you and I and the rest of the country can vote from now 'till the cows come in scrupulously accurately counted elections in which most candidates won't have any significant access to the media and the outcome won't matter a wit. We've seen the proof in the selection of the resident by the supremes. To understand the impotence of the congress consider that the resident has simply shifted to the use of executive memoranda rather than the troublesome executive order (which is subject to some control by congress) in order to ensure that no effective means of population control will be supported by the FBCRA in the labor centers of the planet. This helps to ensure that there is an ample supply of poverty and a paucity of entrepreneurial spirit in these areas. No longer do the corporate interests have to concern themselves with simply ghettoing the inner cities of the FBCRA, they can ensure that entire countries are ghettos.

In all cases the decision-making of the resident is based on maximizing free-market operation regardless of moral hazard, and faith-based is a euphemism for advancing a culture of intolerance. For example, the resident has been completely brazen in simply reversing his position regarding carbon dioxide emissions that was taken by his campaign and his appointee to the EPA. The resident has declared the science that was compelling in the Fall to now be questionable regarding global warming. So electric companies' margins will improve as will utility company shareholders' dividends. Krugman, op ed. NYT 3/25/01, has clearly explained the importance of critical thinking in governance with respect to the impacts of misguided de-regulation of electric power distribution in California and the inherent amorality of the free-market.

Given that this is the state of affairs, what response is possible? What is the objective of a response? There is really no complete solution short of rebuilding our understanding of how we as people relate to the world and the means of production and distribution within it. M.K. Ghandi demonstrated what can be accomplished when a people are sufficiently oppressed and a person of uncommon personal focus and compassion rises to capture the spirit of the people. These times are not yet sufficiently oppressive and the leaders that might promote a program of non-violent resistance are not evident. Rest assured that the resident is completely 'on message' and the time will come. --Christine, 3/26/01

"BUSH presented himself as a supporter of campaign finance reform last week, then issued a set of "principles" whose effect, if followed, would be to undercut and likely kill the leading reform bill in the Senate. The bill by Sens. John McCain and Russell Feingold, on which debate is scheduled to begin this week, is relatively modest legislation that would outlaw only the most egregious of current fundraising practices, the so-called soft-money system whereby the political parties are used as straws to raise and spend on behalf of candidates money the candidates are forbidden to raise and spend themselves. Mr. Bush would ban it only in part -- wealthy individuals could continue to give as they chose -- and would add two gratuitous provisions, one a restriction on union political activity all but certain to cause most Democrats to abandon the bill, the other a clause increasing the likelihood that the entire bill, not just a possible section here or there, would be struck down in court. The reform he supports is a sham; the likely effect, if his position prevails, would be to perpetuate the system by which he and members of Congress were elected, which is precisely the system of office-buying the reformers seek to dismantle.

"Mr. Bush is like all the others in both parties who oppose reform. He doesn't want to be blamed for the result he seeks; no fingerprints. The White House was thus busily putting it out last week that, while opposed to McCain-Feingold, he looked with favor on a rival proposal by Sen. Chuck Hagel, which presidential aides described as "interesting," balanced, having "a lot of positive components," etc. But it too is a sham, at least in its present form; its main effect would be to entrench the soft money system and in return, in the name of balance, weaken other aspects of existing law. Mr. Hagel, rather than ban soft money, would merely generously limit the amount that could be raised at the national level, while leaving unlimited the amounts that could be funneled through state parties. That means there would be no limit at all. In return for the supposed constraint, the bill would meanwhile raise the limits on hard or regulated money that can be given directly to candidates and parties.

"The net result would be a clear step backward. The hard money rules would be eased and the soft money system enshrined in law. Mr. Hagel says McCain-Feingold would not reduce the flow of soft money, either, just move it farther from public view. But one could argue -- we do -- that the greater the distance between the candidates and the contributions, the better. The senator also argues that it's unhealthy to reduce the role of the parties, as McCain-Feingold might do. The president likewise wraps himself in the mantle of the parties. But the role of the parties that McCain-Feingold would mainly reduce is their current, massive use as conduits to circumvent the law. Is that what ought to be sustained?" --Washington Post Editorial, 3/18/01

"One can argue that for a Republican President to speak warmly of public spending for education, the environment, and health care signals a moral advance of sorts, even if the driving force is political calculation. One can argue that lip service is better than no service. But these lips are thin and pursed. Trumpeting "a new prescription-drug benefit for low-income seniors," Bush declared, "No senior in America should have to choose between buying food and buying prescriptions." That applause line brought even Edward Kennedy lumbering to his feet. Understandably, the President omitted the details--for example, this one: under the benefit he has proposed, a widow living on as little as fifteen thousand dollars a year would get no help until she had already spent six thousand dollars on prescription drugs. That is, she would have to have already left more than a third of her meagre income at the pharmacy. To put it still another way, her "deductible" would be a hundred and fifteen dollars--per week, not per year. When you strip away the homilies that everybody agrees on (or has agreed to agree on)--education good, racial profiling bad, environment good--you are left with the tax plan. And when you strip away those aspects of the tax plan that everybody agrees on (or has agreed to agree on)--a bigger child credit, a lesser "marriage penalty," a modest break for "working families," some provision for keeping family farms intact--you are left with an incomprehensibly huge gift to the well-off.

"The Administration has dismissed, but has not been able to refute, independent analyses showing that forty per cent of the benefits of the Bush tax cut will accrue to the richest one per cent of taxpayers; that the bottom eighty per cent will get less than a third of the benefits and the bottom twenty per cent less than one per cent; that all the benefits of the proposed abolition of the estate tax will go to the heirs of the richest two per cent; and that the richest six per cent of that two per cent will rake in half the estate-tax pot. The shape of the Bush tax program represents a seismic shift in the overall tax burden toward the bottom of the economic scale. And its size represents a massive diversion of actual and potential resources away from public activities that benefit the whole of society--activities like education, public health, and environmental protection, the very ones Bush endorsed at the outset of his speech--and toward the single purpose of augmenting the net incomes of the comfortable. That goal, by the way, is superfluous. From 1992, the year before a supposedly onerous new marginal tax rate kicked in, through 1998, the most recent year for which Internal Revenue figures are available, the average after-tax income of the richest one per cent rose from about four hundred thousand dollars to just under six hundred thousand, and from 12.2 per cent of the national net income to 15.7 per cent. (Disparities of wealth, as opposed to income, are, of course, much higher.) Really, now--how urgently do these good people require a new subsidy from the other ninety-nine per cent?

"All this was thoroughly aired before the election and its aftermath, which hovered invisibly over the House chamber last week. The question is not one of Bush's legitimacy. The new President--so the highest authorities assure us--holds office by virtue of a process that was legal and constitutional. But not even the Supreme Court could decree that the electorate endorsed his policies, the most conspicuous of which was the tax program he presented the other night. More people voted for Vice-President Gore than for Governor Bush, and they didn't do so because Gore had the more pleasing personality. If you factor in the millions who opted for outriders--Ralph Nader to Gore's left; Patrick Buchanan, Harry Browne, and Howard Phillips to Bush's right--then the electorate's expressed preference for a budgetary and tax regime more liberal than Bush's goes from a mere plurality of half a million to an outright majority of two and a half million. Our ramshackle eighteenth-century institutional and constitutional arrangements enabled Bush to become President despite being defeated in the vote of the people. Those arrangements, fortuitously, also give the Democratic half of the Senate the power to obstruct a tax proposal which, in its disputed parts, comes down to greed." -- Hendrik Hertzberg, 3/6/01

"In the initial stages of the Bush administration, there were attempts to put a good face on the president's less than strenuous activity level, suggesting that Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney would team up in the style of a corporate CEO and Chief Operating Officer—one setting policy, the other supervising its day-to-day execution. Another interpretation was that Bush would act as ceremonial head of state, with Cheney serving as de facto prime minister. Such musings ignore a fundamental fact of the US constitutional structure: there is not a separation, as in other capitalist democracies, between the head of state and head of government. While in many countries a constitutional monarch or president carries out ceremonial functions, while the prime minister actually directs policy-making and the daily operations of government, in the United States these roles are combined in a single office. The US president is ultimately answerable to the ruling corporate and financial oligarchy, but his office is not that of a mere figurehead. The presidency is at the center of a vortex of conflicting social and political forces. The occupant of the White House holds the highest office in a massive, highly complex and volatile society. Recent events—the impeachment of Clinton, the election crisis of 2000—have revealed an enormous sharpening of tensions, both between the major social classes, and within the ruling economic and political strata. There are many signs of deep divisions and the growth of centrifugal tendencies within the political establishment. Especially under such conditions, the political, emotional and intellectual demands on the president are considerable.

"The divisions that exist within the US ruling elite as a whole are reflected within the Bush administration. Overseas commentators have raised concerns over the apparent lack of cohesion within the Bush administration, especially in foreign policy matters. It is well known, for example, that there are divisions within Bush's foreign affairs team over US policy toward Iraq, with Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld skeptical, at best, over the proposal of Secretary of State Colin Powell to scale back the sanctions regime against Baghdad. But with the installation of Bush—in a manner that has compromised his legitimacy from the outset—the American ruling elite has elevated a man wholly unqualified and unequipped to meet the demands of his office. There exists a gaping vacuum of leadership at the center of the American government, a vacuum that, like the tax cut plan, expresses both disorientation and recklessness on the part of decisive sections of the US ruling elite. They are consumed by the most short-term considerations, above all, by the state of their stock portfolios. All other issues are subordinated to the overriding question of how to enrich those who are already wealthy beyond belief.

"Not since the waning days of the Reagan administration has a US president been so visibly out of his depth and politically disengaged. The consequences then were the Iran-contra affair and the emergence of a secret "government within the government"—a network of military and intelligence operatives that carried out its own foreign policy, with the tacit approval of the president." --Patrick Martin, 3/13/01

by Jerry Politex

I drove my silver Audi down Mesa Drive, the spine of Cat Mountain, hung a left at the cat's tail, drove quickly up the hilly, winding 2222 in low gear, took a right onto Balcones Drive, and came to a stop in the rear parking lot of Chez Zee.

Another sunny, warm early spring day in Northwest Austin, Texas. The lunch crowd was pretty much thinned out by now, so I had choices of parking spaces. I got out of the car, the turbines winding down, and stood by the rear entrance to the restaurant, a pretty-good place for not very expensive Southwestern food. I didn't have long to wait.

...click here to continue the novel.

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