Bush's Cheap Labor: California Leads The Way

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

I'm sorry, there's something I have to get off my chest first before I can talk about anything else - friend Jess, the bright girl with the inexplicable talk radio habit, has managed to be enamored with Sean, Bill, and many lesser players, without being exposed much to Rush. And so we had a bet to see if we could listen to a broadcast, or some portion thereof, and see if he was guilty of any of the things I said he was guilty of. And so we did. And it was just after the Pope died, and what Rush said was this: 'The problem the liberals have with the Pope is that he's like a Supreme Court justice that they don't have any control over.'

  Ignore for now the convoluted construct of whatever vague point he was attempting to make here, and let's simply state the obvious - it isn't necessarily 'liberals' that have this 'problem' with the Pope, whichever Pope; it's Protestants - all Protestants, by definition, supposedly, that's why they have this name - because they PROTEST the alleged supreme authority of the Pope over them! They don't accept it! They ain't having none! And the fact that Rush, and presumably much of his supposedly 'evangelical Protestant' audience weren't mindful of this fact, is maybe as much as needs be said about the fact-free state of debate in this country.

  Anyway, a housemate, a sometime Porsche racer, and I, were sitting and watching some GT road racing on Speed Channel, on the odd moment when they weren't featuring a bunch of Nascar goobers drooling down their chins. The class that allowed minimal modifications was being led by one of the new Mustang GT's, and man, this thing was hauling! It's so nice to see Ford finally make the Mustang look like a Mustang again, it's almost enough to make you have a little faith in America again. (And if GM could take a good look at a mid-60's Stingray, or even the easy grace of the first Camaro's, then maybe it'd be a trend.) This new Mustang was easily as fast out-of-the-box as the old heavily-modded Shelby's, and we're sitting there thinking: 'Ya know, we could be racing, competitively, and being making payments on the thing!' Presuming some sort of return to normal  personal economic circumstances.

  Which if we could have a return to the economy of the 60's, might happen. But that seems to be something that isn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon. With tax time recently past, I had a chance to consider the changes since the Telecom layoffs 4 years ago. My income now is a quarter of what it was - not a quarter less, a quarter period. And I was merely middle class before. Now I'm just this side of destitute.

  The cost of living here in California is a problem, but again with things Californian, it's probably just ahead of the curve.

  All my life I wanted to live in California, Southern California specifically. Growing up elsewhere in the 50's and 60's, California to me was America's America, the affordable middle-class utopia. California was where the democratic impulse was felt in every aspect of life, where the American promise of freedom would finally be lived. And in the new corporate age where worker bees toiled in vast windowless cell-blocks, California held the additional promise that at least in your off time life should be pleasant, with sun that felt like a smile on the skin and without the winters that were like a yearly death.

  And so, eventually I moved out here. And by then, in the fall of 1989, California was no longer the affordable middle-class utopia - people with jobs that would have been middle-class back in the mid-west, here held second and third jobs just to make ends meet. Unless you were a defense worker. And then in a couple of years, things got even worse.

  What I discovered upon moving to California was that the state had developed a two-tier economy - the vast middle-class of California was largely a creation of the military aerospace industry, which employed literally hundreds of thousands in high-paying jobs that were  the economic backbone of the state. Inflated defense contracts had paid inflated wages, which both inflated the cost of real estate, and made non-defense industries unable to compete with this middle-class labor force for wages.

  This population of defense workers had made a reliable voting block in favor of defense spending - which became a reliable voting block for the GOP, giving the country both Nixon and Reagan. But the end of the Cold War coincided with a change in the state itself - it had become too 'diverse' to return reliably GOP electoral votes - and so in the early 90's the powers that be moved the vast aerospace defense companies from Southern California to Texas and Georgia, where those defense salaries could still buy reliable GOP votes. And the hundreds of thousands of California defense workers sold their still steeply priced houses and moved to cheap Nevada and Arizona, where they sit in the eternal air conditioned chill.

  But the aspect of the Cold War economy that remains in California is this: remember the part where non-defense industries couldn't compete for wages with the (white) middle-class? Some provision had to be made, and so the second tier of the economy: the de-facto formalization of the Mexican illegal work force. The Mexicans don't just do gardening, maid and busboy work - every factory, repair shop, warehouse or enterprise of most any kind relies on them. And historically, they did so often for less than legal wages. When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, these legal limits were set for occupancy: 16 to a 2-bedroom apartment, 10 for a 1-bedroom. Because naturally illegal wages couldn't compete for housing, and so some provision had to be made. Just to show how long, and how thoroughly, the illegals have been incorporated into the California economy.

  Why do the Mexicans put up with this? In large part because they're illegal - which is to say, they have no rights here, no legal status. An employer can demand anything he wants of such an employee - and if the employee protests, he not only has to right of recourse, he has no right to not be sent on a bus back to Mexico. Which is a threat employers constantly use.

  It wasn't too many years before I discerned that this was one aspect of the Cold War economy that the Republican business establishment wanted to keep, and also use as a template for the rest of the country. And so enter George W. Bush, famous for his 'political capital', also famous for only using it for what he wants to do, not for what actually needs doing.

  (Notice how in the Terri Schiavo fiasco, Bush interrupted his vacation to come to Washington to sign that bill? Remember what Bush didn't do when he was warned 'Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.? He didn't interrupt his vacation! Why should he? What's to be gained, political capital-wise, from preventing a major terrorist attack against the nation? He would be merely doing his job, and who would be grateful for that? The occasion would be remembered no differently than when the Clinton administration prevented the Millennial attack on Los Angeles Airport. But let the attack happen, and whoa! Rally around the prez! Instant and seemingly infinite political capital! With Terri Schiavo, he thought he'd be getting another massive injection of political capital, that it didn't actually happen doesn't change the motive for why he did it.)

  Against the many things that actually need doing right now, George W. Bush says he's going to spend political capital on 'reforming' immigration in this country, specifically he's going to formalize the presence in our economy of millions of otherwise illegal Mexican workers. (This is not a rant against the Mexicans - they work hard, with more than a little dignity, and their women are often very hot. This is a rant against the business establishment employers who hire them in an explicit bid to depress wages in America.) Did you know of all the jobs being created in the United States, half are being filled by the Mexicans? Not in California, half in the whole country! Formerly union-dues paying middle-class wage paying jobs like meat packing and construction are now dominated by illegals being paid fractions of what the jobs used to pay.

  If you ever catch Lou Dobbs on CNN, he has a continuing series, 'War on the Middle Class', and that's exactly what it is. George W. Bush is fulfilling his vision for the world, a vision learned apparently as boy and man in the country clubs of Texas - a vision of disdain for those who merely work and don't enjoy the found wealth of oil, a vision of hatred and war against a world that would seem to own their own oil, and so deprive them of even more found wealth. It's not simply a war against the middle-class or Iraq, it's a war against America and the entire world. --posted 05.16.05

Brownshirts Train The Country

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

The suicide of Hunter S. Thompson has had many English Majors reflecting, myself included. As friend J., with a history of heavy drug use herself said in response to the news, 'It's not really surprising, is it?'  If the darkness and chaos of Thompson's life was a constant repulsive element in his writing, there was also the unvarnished honesty of his gaze when directed at our modern political moment, a few decades in developing as it is. Something I've been wondering about of late, is how so many of the very brightest and sensitive of the young in this country end up with serious drug usage. I'm developing the view that when these best of our generations get to the age of fully realizing what socialization really consists of in this country - the rigid corporate conformity in every venue of thought that so kills individuality and by extension individual, family and communal life, the general smallness of character demanded everywhere, and that our government only exists anymore to serve these corporate interests - these who are likely to highly value their individuality are repelled and appalled, and look to establish some separate existence. And drugs seem to offer this place apart, at least for a while. And for a time, they may continue to see the world with a child's clarity, as Hunter Thompson seemed to.

  When this Bush administration come to office after those weeks of the Florida debacle, I was moved to take Thompson's Generation of Swine, his collection of essays on life during the Reagan years, down off the shelf and re-read it. I guess it was the prominent image of James Baker in Florida that prompted the initial impulse, but as I visited my many underlined passages and notes in the margins, I came to recognize that the general feeling of a Brownshirt era of Fascism abroad in the land was an organic thing, long in development.

  One of Thompson's trenchant observations in that book were of the prevalence in conservative Republican circles of men he called 'Bullfruits.' Bullfruits, if any explanation is necessary, are those who seem to embrace a fetishism of all things butch, while not inhabiting any actual recognizable masculine role. How better to describe the life and times of 'Jeff Gannon'? Perhaps Jon Stewart and the Daily Show have taken up Thompson's mantle now, for it was this show that let all see what was really going on with this guy - all the 'real' news shows diluted the reality of the Gannon/Guckert story with all manner of 'alleged's,' 'possible connections to,' and 'said to be associated with's'; it was The Daily Show that showed the simple image, unadorned by any commentary, of Guckert's prostitution ad: naked, his head thrown back as if in a swoon, legs spread, and though artfully pixled, his little Marine at obvious full attention. There was the whole story right there - no diversion, spin, or dissembling was possible.

  I might be the only one to remember it, but during those weeks of the Florida interruption of democracy, when George W. Bush was ensconced at his Crawford, TX 'ranch,' there was set up at his house a replica of the Oval Office fire place, where White House photo ops are frequently staged. With Bush staging press conferences sitting in front of this setting, it could seem to the colossally unaware that Bush was in fact already the President. It was a foreshadowing (an English Major type of term) of the key concept of this administration's approach to the press and the public: that perhaps the majority of its core support group in the public existed in a space seemingly beyond intelligence and reality, and were of such an easy suggestibility that any fabrication or lie would be accepted by them.  They would seem to be the result of generations now of socialization in this country that mitigates against the individual and his/her consciousness. --posted 03.14.05

Bush And Ebay

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

Thank God for ebay, ya know, what ever did we do without it? Tired of shopping for your music and movies in big box stores surrounded by appliance salesmen? EBay's your best friend. Lately I've been accumulating the bits needed to do a virtually ground up rebuild of my virtually vintage Toyota 2-seater - waterpump, $25, NIB! Hi-compression block and pistons, $400, NIB! (New In Box) (I love NIB!) And so on. This particular car has its hard core devotees, and one of the myths we choose to believe about it is that it was designed by the famous race car maker Lotus. What isn't a myth is that the engine is a knock-off of the Cosworth BDA under-2 liter race engine, with the usual Japanese improvements of infinite lifespan and low maintenance. Properly tweaked, the car can be viewed as a once-upon-a-time contender in its class at LeMans, which to some of us that were of an impressionable age when Ford, Ferrari and Porsche contested that race, is important.

  A little while back, my daily ride was at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from this Toyota - a Ford F-350 truck, complete with 'semi' style running lights across the cab. I was doing telecom work, of a sort, for the most part carrying a dozen, or two or three, microwave tower back-up batteries for switching out, at 100-200 lbs a piece. (The other part of the work consisted mostly of banging around LA in the middle of the night in the company of a chain smoking passive-aggressive Afghani, who despite years of alleged employment in the field had yet to pick up even the most rudimentary of telecom skills. But I guess everyone in whatever field has stories like this.) Switching out these batteries was real back-busting, knee-popping, finger-smashing work. (No, yes, yes.) Driving this truck, with or without a heavy load, was never really pleasant either. On the freeway, it pitched and heaved, jittered and bounced; with a couple of tons of batteries in the back, braking became less a matter of known physics than of faith and urgent prayer. On whatever road, the ride quality was such to make your stomach think it was in a paint mixer.

  But all that was sort of ok, because ya know, it was a work truck. The tailgate was so banged up, it had to be held shut with a bungee cord. I'm sure all the truck manufacturers could build trucks that rode as smooth as satin sheets, and had excellent handling and brakes too, but the result would be a truck that probably cost twice as much - not so good for the rapid-depreciation nature of its existence as a business asset.

  All of which begs the question - how and why did these big pickups come to be the defining symbol of status and secure manhood for the suburban man? It's not as if too many of them are doing any actual work with them - they're all as pristine and blemish free as any once-a-month driven Ferrari. Friend Amanda was down from Redwood country for a visit: she lives back in the woods on an unpaved road and so drives a mid-size 4x p/u, and when she arrives, the truck looks the part. She snickered at all the shiny, empty, useless big trucks clogging the roads here.

  The first time I did a ten-year refurbishment of my Toyota, I levered in a low-miles Japanese market engine and transmission in a 3-day weekend, using only a $40 socket set from Sears; and used that experience to talk my into my real telecom building job. Funny thing though, once there it didn't get me much in the way of bragging rights - the almost universal reaction was identical to what I'd gotten in the more mainstream white guy world of the office culture - 'Um, I'd rather pay someone else to do it.' Even one of our main supervisors, a notorious old fud who spent his off hours riding a tractor around his acreage, said the same thing. The only exception to this really was little Danny L., who stood maybe 5'1" and was the best tech in Southern California. Danny had done the same engine switch in the beater Honda Civic he used to commute from the desert with. I also guess Danny was secure enough in his sexual identity to drive a Civic instead of a big truck, because weekends he drove a tube-frame, big-block Camaro on half-mile ovals. I was surprised by this uniform lack of respect for actual self-sufficiency and individualism, but I've come to recognize it as perhaps the defining characteristic of mainstream white-guy culture as practiced in our country today.

  What's preferred these days is of course the pretense of great masculine purpose, as embodied by the pristine monster truck, without the effort of actual work - work which could expose the poser as incompetent, careless, foolish, or in some other way worthless. I don't think it's insignificant that George W. Bush describes his efforts at his Crawford 'ranch' as 'windshield ranching,' which is to say he does little there but drive a big truck around. Bush is himself the embodiment of the pretense of great masculine purpose - because of the accident of his birth power has always followed the direct line of his will, regardless of the wisdom or appropriateness of its direction. His religion merely follows this line of action - he still gets to be right about everything.

  But, alas, Bush's persona was already the national style in the making even before his appearance on the national stage - the preference for the butched-up appearance over the harder substance. It's not hugely surprising that Bush won the election. It didn't matter that Kerry was the real combat veteran, because reality has no place in the pumped-up cartoonish poser world our country has become. How long this will last in a world of real invasions with real combat deaths, I guess is our next big question. --11.15.04

Reagan Redux: Dictator Bush And His Soft Society

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

A week or so ago, I came across a little item that was included in some coverage of the Jose Padilla case before the Supreme Court - the Bush administration was proclaiming its right to imprison U.S. citizens without recourse to legal representation or defense, and Justice Stevens I believe asked if this 'right' existed after this 'war' was over: 'Yes,' was the reply, 'the right was inherent in the president's powers.'

  Now, see, George W. Bush has declared himself dictator, or divinely anointed king, take your pick, and this declaration didn't even cause a pebble's ripple in the national media. It attracted as much attention as Antonin Scalia's declaration on the bench three and a half years ago that 'there's no such thing in the Constitution as the right to vote for president' a week before he acted on that belief.

  The great mystery of our moment is how we came to be lost in this turgid mental fog, this miasma that blinds so many to the most compelling facts and issues of dangerous urgency - and then this morning I heard so many clips of Ronald Reagan's speeches after his passing, with the distance of time sounding like any two pages from Louis L'Amour, and I realized, 'that's it.'

  But first let me backtrack a bit. Two years ago, I was perhaps the only person in the country to spend that Memorial Day Sunday watching the Indy 500 with the sound turned off, while listening on the radio to Gore Vidal talking about American Empire. The two weren't as unrelated as they might seem.

  I know many of a sensitive and enlightened nature are fairly sick of speed, especially dumb speed and the dumb noise that usually goes with it. We feel speed more as the knife point in the small of the back, whirling the world ever faster to no good end. Physical speed has lost much of the romance that was the attraction with car racing. And many of racing's fans are admittedly a, how say, dim lot, seeing in speed only an adrenaline high instead of the challenge.

  But to others, we see the challenge, and the possibility of becoming the master of at least this aspect of speed, instead of it ruling us. And racing is a real challenge - it requires powers of concentration I've not experienced anything like anywhere else. When I got back from my first race track experience the thing that impressed me most was how mentally lazy everyday life seemed, how little of our mental powers were being used. Traffic seemed so slow that it seemed you could get out and walk faster.

  When I was a kid growing up, Indy was an authentic expression of the industrial abundance that was America. As opposed to European racing which was dominated by factory teams, American Indy racing was the province of the master mechanic, the sportsman, the talented tinkerer. The Granatelli brothers, for instance, once had the idea that since Indy cars only turned left, they could build a car with weight distribution that could take advantage of that, and built a car with the engine on the left side of the car, next to the driver. It was a good idea for its time. The rules at Indy allowed that, and most anything else. Most guys just had a fine Offy engine in a stout tube-frame roadster, but they were beautiful things in their own right.

  In the 60's though, Indy had its own British Invasion to match the Beatle's - Lotus led the charge, run by Colin Chapman with his degree in aeronautical engineering - and all of a sudden everything became more modern, and then more professional. The Granatelli's tried innovation again with a car laid out as before, but with a jet turbine engine instead of a piston engine - it was ugly as sin but it almost won. The next year Andy Granatelli joined forces with Lotus which produced a 4-wheel drive turbine car that looked like something from NASA. Indy responded by banning turbines, then banning 4-wheel drive. A.J. Foyt was the last to continue in the old school I think, continuing to design and build his own cars until he retired; Dan Gurney's Eagles had a successful run of several years tapping into Southern California's aerospace design talent - but eventually the American response faded away. Apparently the Europeans don't have all their most talented engineers and designers sucked up into the defense establishment. (Even in Eisenhower's time, he is said to have remarked, 'Don't we make anything except military hardware anymore?)

  There followed many years where Roger Penske dominated by throwing huge amounts of money at whatever was best to be bought; until we've arrived at the current scene, where Indy has become a form of 'spec' racing, with no innovation allowed and only two European race cars to choose from.

  I offer this overview because it seems to me the history of Indy closely mirrors that of our country - from industrial abundance, to lack of civilian R&D thanks to the Defense Establishment taking all resources, to industrial abandonment and the 'financialization' of the economy. We don't do the 'hard' things anymore, we just buy them.

  At Indy this year, an American driver won, something that doesn't happen very much anymore either. There's a new book out 'Hard America, Soft America,' where its conservative writer lays out the thesis that much of America has become soft, in skills, intellect and character I guess. He says the thoughtless conformity of high school tends to produce people who find their place in the soft bureaucracies of corporations and so on. Sounds good to me. But then he goes on to blame this on 'school reforms of the 60's' etc. I think a more honest accounting might consider how public schools were set on a path of 'reform' a hundred years ago to best suit the interests of future corporate employers. Consideration is also due, I think, to the extremely 'soft' culture found in the country clubs of our nation's elites, producing such jello-spined princelings of the ruling class as our George W.

  My point being, it seems to me the general trend found in the Indy 500 is that as a culture we're not only too soft to compete in world class race car building (forget Nascar, stuck in amber taxicabs that they are), we have more drivers from Brazil, for God's sake, wining the Indy 500 recently than Americans.

  I first heard Gore Vidal when I first moved to California, where there's a Pacifica station that occasionally has him on. I knew of him as a writer of very thick books that I hadn't read, but hearing him speak captured my attention. First there was the matter of his syle of speaking voice - complete sentences and paragraphs of complex structure and rich color, he sounded like what I had always imagined the Founding Fathers to sound like. The FF's were children of the Enlightenment, education was of paramount importance, and eloquence was the path to truth. This eloquence and intelligence was a 'hard' thing, not a soft thing, not easily or glibly obtained by simple purchase. The FF's accomplishment of the nation's founding was a result of their culture of 'hard' intellect.

  And the content of what Gore Vidal had to say grabbed me too - that the corporations were running the country, that they'd destroyed education so the dumbed-down population wouldn't figure out what was going on, that a world empire was being built. Seemed to correspond with what I saw with my own two eyes.

  So there you have my weekend of two years ago. Lately, lacking a re-hiring of the few hundred thousands laid off from the Telecom industry, I seem to find myself at the old college job, donning black tie to serve food. (Which brings up a related issue - how increasingly if you had to work through college in the first place, you likely didn't have access to the prestigious internships that seem required to get the level of career-track where you won't find yourself permanently side-lined.) There was a 40th wedding anniversary of a famous race-engine builder I found myself working - and who should walk in but Al Unser Sr.! When I handed him his garlic mashed potatoes I said 'I was in the press room when you won Indy the 3rd time,' which was true. He probably doesn't get that from many waiters, but he recovered very nicely: 'That was a good day for me.' Vince Granatelli Jr. was there too, and I told him I saw Art Pollard drive the STP Lotus Turbine at Phoenix when it ran away from the field - 'I was the chief mechanic for that car.' I tell you, it was just too cool.

  But mostly, I work regular weddings. A couple of months back, I worked a wedding of two Marines, both drill sergeants if you can believe it. The bride had huge, as the Pythons would say, tracks of land, (as did most of the Marine wives, who knew?) and seemed a bit wild, maybe even Jenna wild. But there are worse things. But I only had eyes for her mom. She was working tirelessly and genuinely cheerfully to put on a wedding that didn't have big bucks behind it. I still like the girls I liked when we were young, and she was one of the majors. On the gift table, there was a picture of her and the bride's father in front of a Mustang, wearing a killer mini. 'That was our first car, a Mach I' she told me.

  Yeah, I knew the car, knew her too. Not literally perhaps, but that doesn't matter. Back in high school, at the school dances, she was one of those completely perfect 60's girls, spirited, generous, cheerful. The Doors would be playing, with Jim Morrison on vinyl with tube amps, all warm and deep and strong: 'Come on baby, light my fire!' And I was the hopeless geek a couple of years younger flailing away hoping she would see my inner Steve McQueen; which never happened, but she was never rude or contemptuous either, which was remarkable enough. And now all these years later she was still lovely, with a fabulous figure, and talking to me. Too cool.

  Remember middle class girls? Remember the middle class? Before our current 'winner take all society?' Before women were given the choice in 'mainstream' society of being either a pliant wife, blank-slate sex toy, or useful corporate butch? (Before so many sensitive and intelligent women decided that given these choices, the only companion that would respect them would be another like themselves?) (Or before men were divided quite so thoroughly into 'winners,' 'losers,' and useful corporate butches, with similar results?)

  There was an honor guard of fellow Marines, and one Sailor. The medics in the Marines are from the Navy, and he was one such. The bride had been to Iraq her mom said, and I imagine this was true of all these men. These Marines seemed to be fuller characters, and maybe even leading fuller lives than your typical corporate guy. The take on Drill Instructors, especially Marine D.I.'s is that 'they break you down so that you will conform to the military.' I got the strong sense that these guys would just be grateful if you got your head out of your ass.

  Because that's essentially what's required in their line of work - if you've worked in a trade such as Telecom, you can recognize what's going on. Whereas your typical corporate guy's every action is twinned to the thought of 'what's in it for me?', a Marine is given a task, a responsibility, to accomplish as his duty - a completely different attitude to work from. To do this, you must be paying attention to this present moment, to your present responsibility; which typically means pulling your head out of your ass.

  The Marines' culture is a hard one, no question about it, but it's a hardness of some substance. I worked with a young woman once who had been in the Marines, a stunning beauty who did bikini calendars, and she had the most perfect understanding of authority I've ever come across. She was a very petite woman, with no possibility of exercising any physical intimidation, but there was no questioning her authority. She had mixed feelings about the Marines though, the sexual harassment had been fierce. But she took away the great lesson to be learned.

  At this wedding, paper plates were used, but the setting was beachside which couldn't be improved upon for any amount of money. This catering company served a killer Chili Verde, with home made tortilla chips and all the Marines came back for seconds and thirds, very politely asked for. The DJ played all the usual wedding tunes, including the rap one where the guy's going on about his 'anaconda' and the size of his beloved's backside and so on. I'm, you know by now, somewhat older, so I'm not real familiar with the song, but all the Marines and their women knew the words. Here on the ground, as it were, you couldn't help but wonder about all the 'culture wars' being waged so loudly by the Bush crowd. You also had to wonder what the Marines really thought when Paul Wolfowitz reviews the troops, as I've seen on TV. I mean, my god, he makes Woody Allen look butch.

  So I'd been thinking about how so much of the country was so immersed in and surrounded by 'soft culture' that everything 'hard' had been excised; and then listening to the Reagan clips it suddenly struck me - the accomplishment of Reagan was to provide a narrative of 'hardness,' a faux butchness, a false patriotism, for people to believe in whose lives and characters were actually very soft. The narrative has become their life itself, it seems to me, regardless of actual circumstance. Whether a big truck, small apartment guy, or cubicle-entombed passive-aggressive, identification with Reaganism now provided them with the pretense of great masculine purpose. Instant butch bonifides.

  Inherent in this act is the ignoring of the actual facts before you, which effect the Bush administration counts on for its continued existence. The facts are that the Reagan administration set the country on a course of destruction of its middle class in the name of 'labor flexibility,' covered by the happy-talk of 'Morning in America.' Our national news culture has now become all happy-talk all the time, while our political discourse has become all faux-butch all the time, and as a result we've invaded a Middle Eastern country that did nothing to threaten us, killing tens of thousands of its citizens. And soon to be a thousand Americans, many of them Marines.

  We need to wake the Hell up. --posted 06.07.04

Bush Didn't Know About Abu Ghraid? Get Real

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

Normally I wouldn't have been watching TV this early but I was up at 5 to watch the Spanish Grand Prix, and with the race over I flipped over to CNN to see if anything had blown up lately - and there was my old senior year high school classmate David Dreier shuckin' and jivin' on Abu Ghraib. Ol' David was performing his usual service for the GOP, as the very, very pleasant face-man who dissembles and mis-directs to certain up-market demographics in the most sincere voice imaginable. (As I responded to a dear friend who has fallen under the miasma of the right-wing media: she had noticed David and thought he was so nice and personable, and she couldn't understand why I would say he was using that persona to lie with - 'Because that's his job.' I said.)

  I suppose when you get to that level of congressman/pundit/hack, there must be something that's the equivalent of the school of Basic Infantry Tactics, where you learn the basic moves of deception and evasion in public discourse. This morning David was using nothing fancy, straight from lesson one - 'This is a horrible thing this Sgt. Schmuck has done, horrible, horrible, and he must be punished severely. And we do need to talk about this, but we don't need this partisan rancor against Rumsfeld and the Bush administration, and isn't the economy doing great and Kerry has nothing to run on.'

  (Funny how life works out - back in high school David was the student body president and I was captain of the debate team. All these years later and I'm still teasing out how issues are framed and the facts therein, and David is still face-man for the powers that be.)

  Sgt. Schmuck and associates certainly are guilty, but perhaps fundamentally these individuals fell afoul of the Two Most Important Tenets of Organizational Life: 1) Always trust the organization. 2) You're an idiot if you follow rule #1. Because shit always follows the laws of gravity.

  Judging from the faces of these Reservist MP's, in these pictures straight out of Goya, taken at what is obviously the most ecstatic moments in their entire lives, it's fairly easy to see where they may have been taken in by Rule #1 while remaining oblivious of Rule #2. These aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, ya know? In their smug and completely witless satisfaction, a whole mental landscape is revealed - the kind of mentality that equates eating at McDonald's with patriotism, say, and demands that empty calories be the standard for every aspect of their lives.

  Today's essential conservative, in other words. And so it was that their true God-head, Rush Limbaugh, rushed to their rescue last week to assure them the Abu Ghraib torture wasn't anything to feel guilty about, rather they were to share the joy of the torturers.

  If you've ever been to West Point (Dad was class of '48) then you've seen the statues of our Army's 3 great WW2 generals - Ike, MacArthur, Patton. MacArthur's is kind of noteworthy, in that the base is inscribed with many of his legendary quotes - the general was quite the word-man. Like many boomer kids, I memorized the names of all the generals and admirals that served us so well in WW2: Eaker, Spaatz, Doolittle, Nemitz, Halsey, etc. It really was an extraordinary group, and extraordinary that they were there in our time of need. And while all weren't as gifted with a turn of phrase as MacArthur, they all had, how say, intelligent faces. And when you hear them speak in the old film clips, they were uniformly well-spoken.

  Watching our current military leadership on TV, I don't see any of this. Wes Clark aside, they all seem to follow the model of Tommy Franks, who resembles nothing so much as an old time lifer Gunnery Sgt. with a severe drinking problem. And the extreme flat, atonal quality that is uniform in their voices I find just flat-out weird. Maybe it's just the types that are brought to the fore in a Republican administration, I dunno.

  (My opinion of Franks did rise on reading his feelings on Douglas Feith - 'The fucking stupidest person on the face of the planet.'  Not especially eloquent, but it nicely confirms that the neo-cons are as blind, pig-eyed stupid as they look.)

  But I do think intelligence, the respect for it or disrespect, is at the core of our current tribulations. A dozen years ago, I worked at an air freight company that was a recent start-up by one of the industry's heavyweights. This man had died and the business had passed to a son. The son had a manner of extreme confidence, a handshake that was crushing, to look you in the eye was to displace every thought in your head. He had a trophy house and wife, and a different custom hot rod for every day of the week. What he didn't have was any business sense, and he quickly drove the company into the ground.

  I had another one of these bosses briefly last fall - this man had inherited his father's forklift battery business, and by way of a sideline in cellphone site backup batteries, was trying to expand into actual cellphone site installation. And installation is what I used to do. Sounded great, except once in the company I found myself to be the only worker with the slightest idea of telecom industry practice - nobody had the most basic craft skills. A 'project manager' was using cable cutters to trim tywraps with, leaving at each binding a knife edge guaranteed to slice open the arms of the next tech to work in the area. This would have been grounds for a lifetime ban in my previous employment. When teleco equipment is installed on site, it's wired together by means of a 'wire-wrap gun' - each individual lead is terminated on an individual post in a bank of posts. The gun wraps the wire tight around the post, and it's industry practice to not just have a tight wrap, but also that the end of the wire wrap tight as well and not stick out in a 'pigtail.' Pigtails are important because they act as little RF (radio frequency) antennas, introducing noise into the signal. If you get a lot of static in your cell phone use, it's likely because of crappy work in the installation.

  These guys' work had pigtails you could hang clothes on. In my first five minutes of work ever, I never did work this bad. In my few weeks with them, co-workers were accidentally taking live equipment out of service at the rate of one a week. None of this mattered to the owner, these were trivial things that had no part of the 'business' picture. (As a matter of point, just before I was hired the company had been banned from central office work, the most exacting, by their primary client because of a monumental screwup. And it wasn't too long before there wasn't enough work for the newly hired, and, laid-off again.)

  He couldn't see the problem because these heirs, these life-long country club prince-lings who've never had to make an actual effort, whose every influence in their upbringing has told them they shouldn't make an effort lest they lose status, these men are all great theorists. They need theories to explain how their great fortune came to them and will continue to come to them, absent any effort on their part. They only know 'business' as an ideology, where the only thing that matters is how the 'numbers' add up. They seem incapable of understanding actual quality of product and service have to exist as the core of a business.

  George W. Bush is just such another country club prince-ling in middle age. His fortune and prominence are great, and so he is full of theories. I'd wondered for a long time if Bush was just an amiable dunce front man for this administration, but I've decided not. He's just like these former bosses of mine - an empty suit full of himself yes, but embracing a multitude of theories that seek to justify himself in the world. Lounging around the country clubs of Texas, he picked up the hatred of everything FDR and he's dedicated to taking the country back a century or two. He imagines himself chosen by God. And the theory of taking the God-given property rights of American corporations to the Middle East seems grand too.

  So Bush isn't without direction, he's just without ability. Or basic intelligence. Or morals. You think he's really sorry about Abu Ghraib, you think he didn't know? His new ambassador to Iraq was the liaison to the death squads in Central America in the 80's. Get real. --posted 05.13.04

Bush's Dead Parrot Sketch

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

I can be a little slow sometimes; I've finally been able to put a finger on the characteristic feeling of daily life these last three and a half years, of the particular surreal quality of life under the Bush administration -  it's as if every day, in each issue and in every way, is a never-ending replay of Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch. 'That parrot is dead!' is the daily protest, to which Bush steadfastly replies, 'No it's not!' A year ago before the Iraq invasion, the entire planet in unison said 'That parrot's dead!' And to this day, Bush says 'No it's not!'

  This obdurate disconnect from reality was at the center of most of the Python's humor (probably something to do with teasing out the absurdities and inequities of the English class system), and it's at the center of the Bush White House too. (Probably something to do with the absurdities and iniquities of the American class system.)

  These days it seems to fall to those of us with the reading habit to remain connected to reality. And so it was the other day when the Bush administration announced that after June 30, the new Iraqi government would enjoy a 'limited sovereignty,' which explicitly meant they could enact no new laws. (Or change existing ones.) I couldn't help but recall an article in the LA Times a few months back, which reported that Bremer and the provisional government had banned all labor unions. It was not a 'just in case someone considers it' proposition - several labor unions had already been formed and Bremer had ordered them broken up. For the authority for this action, the provisional government cited that this was an existing law of Saddam Hussein's, and that the Geneva Convention prohibited an occupying power from making fundamental changes in the economic system of the occupied country.

  I kid you not. Who says irony is dead? Or maybe this is beyond irony, I dunno. I do know I should have written a letter to the LAT editor about this, but I was just too worn down. Too worn down by the reality of what's really been going down. (I think the Cheney types count on exactly this effect.)

  The Geneva Convention, of course, has not stopped the US from seizing the Iraqi oil industry, has not prevented the wholesale fire sale of Iraq's assets and business infrastructure to the international business community - all of which were also forbidden by Saddam Hussein. Add to this the 'reconstruction,' which has by-passed existing and competent Iraqi businesses and labor that could do the job for a fraction of what the 'cost-plus' American contractors are getting; and you start getting the idea that Iraq is being set up for a 'jobless recovery.' Just like ours! Who can blame them if they've finally given up on us and picked up an AK-47?

  But it's been the revelation of the torture of the Iraqi prisoners that has revealed the awful completeness of the neo-con vision for Iraq - the contractors apparently responsible for this despicable abuse are apparently not subject to the UCMJ, the Universal Code of Military Justice. They are above International Law. Which is where the Bush administration has placed itself all along; but get where they're going with this - they're trying to create in Iraq a whole country free of the rule of law, a country without an actual government, where the only authority resides in the occupying American corporations.

  It's the vision they have for the U.S. too, of course. Cheney's 'shadow government' displaces the actual government, whether it be in energy or the environment, health care or transportation safety, the Pentagon or the State Department, replacing the actual experts and scientists with ideologues and industry lobbyists; effectively dissolving the government even as it seems to still exist. The Straussarian neo-cons despise democracy; Bush's choice for Chief Justice, Scalia believes 'democracy obscures the divine authority of government.'

  Have you heard of Presidential Directive 13303? It proclaims complete immunity for anything that the oil contractors might do in Iraq. Again you see the model - no rule of law, at least none that might touch a corporation.

  This prisoner abuse thing, though, this could presage the rest of our Boomer decades spent in great darkness, I fear. The Arab street is now likely permanently radicalized, meaning the House of Saud is toast, meaning the end of cheap oil. It's hard to imagine several shipping containers not blowing up with dirty bombs in our sea ports, and/or such bombs not blowing up in our major cities. And as shambling and dishonest as the Bush administration has shown itself, it's not likely that the American public will support the military draft that would be necessary to suppress and garrison an inflamed Middle East.

  We are just so screwed. --posted 05.05.04

Bush In Howdy Doody PJ's

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

Pretty much everything I needed to know about George W. Bush, I learned from this anecdote from the 2000 campaign: Bush and party were ensconced in a hotel, where room service had sent up Bush's favorite meal, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and as per Bush specification, with the crusts cut off. But before Bush could get to it, some oblivious aide ate it first. And the report concluded that upon this discovery, Bush sat and pouted.

  Kind of suggests someone still in Howdy Doody pajamas, doesn't it? For those with eyes to see, this infantile self-absorption and sense of impenetrable entitlement of George W. Bush has always been his overwhelmingly defining characteristic. In the demographic that Bush comes from, this is more common that not - the phrase 'born on third base, thinks he hit a triple' didn't come about without a reason.

  But with Bush, this phenomena had achieved an awful perfection usually not seen outside an insane asylum. His untouchable privilege resulted in a mind that's a stellar black hole of selfishness, sucking all around it down into its gravitational pull (which is why he gives everybody punitive nicknames, so no one is left with even the dignity of their own name). At the center of this lightless star, the self-absorption is so dense that no light, or intelligence, either escapes or penetrates.

  And, he has through his life used the diamond-hard, yet leaden quality of his mind as a shield against his father, his hugely powerful and worldly successful father. And apparently, he's used it as a jig on which to hang his crafted persona as a 'plain speaking Texan.' Notice none of his brothers raised in identical circumstances speak with anything like his twang. Convenient to eschew 'intellectualism' and 'fancy pants words' when you quite literally can't process such because your mind's locked solid with fear and self.

  So, how did we get here? I think back a couple years ago, when Bush tried to dodge questions about his Harken mis-deeds, and ABC News' on-line feature 'The Note' wrote that 'the mores and conventions of the media prevented them from saying Bush was evasive and dissembling.'

  Or as John Stewart replied to some network anchor who told John he wished they could say what John does - "You only have two 24-hr cable news networks. Why DON'T you?'

  Which is why, after Bush's prime-time press conference last week, we didn't get headlines like these: 'Bush as weak as a toy balloon in a wind storm', 'Bush apparently has less executive ability than any shift manager in the history of Jack-in-the-Box', 'Bush unable to recognize and speak the truth if it bit him on his shiny ass', or 'Bush Spun on Crank'. 

  (For that matter, I'm increasingly convinced most Republicans in government and all the staff at Fox News must be on crystal meth. Seriously, look up the symptoms of this stuff - exaggerated sense of power and self-confidence, coupled with cycles of paranoia and aggression, and giving the mind the aptitude to endlessly repeat unintelligent activities. Is this the very definition of modern 'conservative Republicanism' or what?)

  Remember the good old days of the 'liberal media'? That was when the individuals on radio and television news were actually life-long working journalists. They knew a thing or two, they'd frequently witnessed history first-hand. Not so with the heavily shoulder-padded twits and blonde cupcakes on 'news' networks these days.

  How about a 'Network Anchor and Pundit Relief, Reform, and Term Limit Act of 2004'? No network anchors that don't have at least 20 years as a real journalist. No pundits that have never had a real job; most especially no pundits that have simply graduated from the College Republicans to the Scaiffe think-tanks. If you've never had a corporate employer fix your time card to short your hours; if you've never sat in an employee meeting and be told that no matter that profits are up 60%, you'll never get a raise because 'all profits have to go to increase shareholder value'; if you've never been laid off in an industry collapse; if you've never been laid-off mere months before retirement just so your employer won't have to pay you your pension - if you've never suffered any of these and a thousand similar slings and arrows, then you don't have the slightest idea what life is really like in this country, and you have no right to speak to it.

  I tuned into 'Tweety' Matthews the other night, seeing he was to have the 9-11 'Jersey Girls' on. In what I saw, he allowed Kristen Breitweiser to speak uninterrupted for maybe 12 seconds, and in that 12 seconds Kristen presented more uncomfortable facts, cogently organized, than in any 12 months of mainstream media or, Richard Clarke aside, the 9-11 hearings themselves. Matthews is a conundrum, occasionally interested in the truth, seemingly. But most often, he employs the verbal equivalent of a carnival side-show, hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye routine, wherein the speed of his rhetoric and constant change of direction of inquiry works to displace the mind and not allow any disclosed truth to settle in.

  Kristen's 12 seconds held a fairly heavy disclosure - that French intel had confirmed to the FBI and CIA before 9-11 that Zacarias Massaoui was Al Qaeda connected, and what had happened to this? (And if she had had more time, she no doubt would have added that FBI agent Colleen Rowley had had this information deleted by her superior at FBI headquarters from her FISA request on Massaoui, resulting in its refusal. And then this superior got a promotion.) Matthews tried a speedy and forceful comeback that someone on the commission said this wasn't true, but Kristen came right back, and then Matthews did an expert little thing where he managed to be dismissive and belittling without actually saying anything - he sucked all the oxygen out of the moment, so Kristen wouldn't have any.

  It seemed to me that Kristen started to crumble after that, if only physically, she looked like she was going to go into a fetal position while still sitting up. It is apparently due to the efforts of Kristen and the other Jersey Girls that we have the 9-11 hearings at all, even spending 20% of what was spent to determine the whereabouts of Clinton's penis as it is. Perhaps the awful realization was hitting her - the media wasn't there to tell the truth, it was there to suck the oxygen out of the nation's conversation, so that even what little truth gets told is starved for lack of attention.

  Which brings us to Sunday night, and one of the last bastions of the old 'liberal media,' 60 Minutes. Mike Wallace and Bob Woodward said, fairly explicitly: Bush is as weak as a toy balloon in a windstorm, a child wearing Howdy Doody pajamas in a man's body, a man born on third base who's spent his whole life thinking he hit a triple - who's now taken this to the next level and thinks he's taking orders from God. We here at Bushwatch have been saying this for, oh, at least 3 1/2 years now. But now it's mainstream.

  Or at least it's out there, with as much cred as exists anymore. How much the rest of the media deprives it of oxygen, I guess we'll see. --04.21.04

When Last Year's Conspiracy Theory Becomes This Year's Fact

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

Did you catch what John Dean said on C-Span? He said of Dick Cheney, 'he's very able, able enough to make George Bush think when he gets up in the morning that he's president.'

  Heh.   Don't you just love it when a 'conspiracy theory' comes together? The overriding impression taken from Condi Rice's appearance before the 9/11 Commission was of a curious and obdurate inertness at the center of the White House, that in fact within the hermetically sealed Bush administration there was nothing but a vacuum. Did anyone hear Rice say she ever took an action at all, anywhere at anytime? If so, I missed it. She didn't think she heard, she didn't recall, she assumed it was someone else's job, etc. And it sounded as if she and George W. Bush were a matched set: he never took an initiative, an action, or a follow through either.

  But maybe we mis-speak; for it's John Dean's (very) informed hypothesis that Dick Cheney is running a shadow government, so when we consider what the 'center' of the White House is, Bush ain't it.

  Condi Rice has always impressed me as the textbook example of the type of 'intellectual' that conservative Republicans take as proof-positive of the uselessness of all things intellectual. The gears are spinning like mad, but no power ever gets put down to the ground. She's a classical pianist, and though I've never heard her play, I would imagine her playing to be characterized by a certain brittle technical excellence while lacking an expressive core. A grad school prof of Rice's just wrote in Salon that in fact, Rice 'as a person lacked a core.'

  She would seem to be the perfect window dressing for such as Bush, who also seems to 'lack a core.' As a national security team, they are completely malleable and passive, unable to take appropriate action because they literally incapable of it.

  But the same apparently isn't true of Cheney. I keep thinking back to when Cheney was head of Bush's 2000 campaign committee to find a V-P candidate, and Cheney ended up picking himself. Heh, again. Another interesting news item I saw this past week was that fully 75% of the White House anti-terrorism task force has resigned since 9/11, because Bush has completely ignored them, taking all his direction from Cheney.

  So maybe we should not worry so much about what Bush knew and didn't know before 9/11 - let's instead ask what did the administration actually do that summer of intense warnings of terrorist attacks?

  It's not generally known that it was legal since the Kennedy administration for airline pilots to arm themselves - that summer the Bush administration rescinded that rule.

  Federal Air Marshals were pulled from airliners that summer.

  That summer, Donald Rumsfeld changed the long-standing procedure under which Air Force fighters would intercept hijacked airliners - several layers of notifications were added, with final authorization from Rumsfeld himself being required. Of 9/11, Rumsfeld said he wasn't aware of events until the plane crashed into the Pentagon. The Air Force base commander who sent two fighters up to try to intercept the second WTC plane, did it on his own initiative, saying he'd notify Rumsfeld later. Isn't it, in the least, highly improbable that the Secretary of Defense wasn't notified, by anyone, of the first, then the second, attacks at the WTC?

  John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial in July, due to a 'threat assessment;' Richard Clarke told everyone on his staff to avoid flying altogether if at all possible.

  So I'm sorry, call me a 'conspiracy nut' if you want, but I just find it just too strange that the administration would take so many careful steps to seemingly insure that a hijacking could succeed. While at the same time, important members were being warned off from flying on airliners.

  You know what I really believe? It's a matter of record that Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc., signed the mission statement of the Project for a New American Century envisioning a greatly expanded and aggressive military posture in the world, postulating that a 'new Pearl Harbor was required to galvanize public support' for such an undertaking. It's also a matter of fact that the degrees of separation between Osama bin Laden and anyone in the Bush administration is essentially one - the head of Saudi intelligence has all of them on his Rolodex. I can't imagine this man didn't get wind of Osama's big plans, and I also can't imagine he didn't make a call to the real decision makers in the White House.

  You know what else I believe? I think Cheney, et.al., don't take the proper steps to prevent terrorism now for the same reason they didn't the summer of 2001 - with an occasional successful terrorist attack, they can claim the justification for their ongoing 'war,' and most likely the suspension of the Constitution in order to 'preserve order.' Tommy Franks has already predicted this, and the Fox-class pundits have also offered some version of it. And so an eternal war, and an eternal tyranny - the dictatorship of the moneyed elites first envisioned for this country by Alexander Hamilton and his Federalists over 200 years ago. (Which is where Scalia, et. al.'s, Federalist Society gets its name and guiding tenets.)

  If I'm wrong, tell me how. If not, wake up and smell the coffee. --posted 04.11.04

BIBLIOGRAPHY

John W. Dean, "Worse Than Watergate," 2004
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27672
http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/timeline/main/essayairdefense.html
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4778460
http://southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2003/07/4297.php
http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/timeline/main/essayairdefense.html
http://www.11alive.com/news/usnews_article.aspx?storyid=42069
http://www.questionsquestions.net/topics/archive/911archive.html

Mash Notes And "Creative Destruction"

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

Ok, I confess; I might as well since our Echelon and Carnivore equipped imperial masters already know anyway - I've been sending mash notes to Karen Kawaitowski (Lt. Col. USAF ret.) You know Karen, she manned the 'Libya desk' in Pentagon intelligence all during the time the 'Iraq desk' became the 'Office of Special Plans.' The 'Neo-cons' and their manipulation of intelligence to support their pre-existing agenda is not a matter of mere speculation with Karen, it's her recent personal history. And she has been writing about it with a keen wit and a brave joy in her heart. Did you catch her on the History Channel? For the discerning male with a taste for something beyond the young and dumb, she was a babe. I mean, there was a flash of some amazing eyes. The pic that accompanies her web writing doesn't begin to do her justice - it must have been taken after a long winter inside the Pentagon under life-draining fluorescent lights.

  In my last missive, I thanked her for bringing our attention to the latest and possibly final Neo-con justification for the invasion of Iraq: that it was an example of 'Creative Destruction.' The simple and benign definition of 'creative destruction' basically says 'you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.' It starts with the self-evident observation that any change in history involves some destruction of the previous status quo. And in recent years, the term has acquired a good deal of currency in corporate circles as a justification for what may look to the rest of us as simple destruction.

  I first heard the term used in earnest not quite four years ago. My very major telecom employer called an all-hands meeting for the entire state. We had just finished the build-out of 'phase one' of what was supposed to be a nationwide network of DSL for business. The installation had been marked by a near complete lack of needed equipment, training, tools or organization. We weren't even provided floor plans to show us how this new stuff was supposed to go together. At the all-hands meeting, we were told what we had just experienced was an example of 'creative destruction,' and we had better get used to it.

  What we had actually experienced, of course, was the thinnest upper edge of the top-most soap bubble of the Internet/telecom stock market bubble. Within weeks of that meeting, the group of Wall Street money guys who were our 'telecom startup' client started having major cash-flow problems. Our warehouses were bulging with the equipment for the 'phase two' build; for several months, we sat at home waiting for the orders to go install it. (And there was to be a 'phase three' too.)

  But the orders never came. My employer had apparently had several such clients, startups with seeming access to real money, and the spirit of the times apparently required my employer to lend them the money to buy our equipment, so as to create market dominance I guess.

  And all these clients basically went bankrupt at once. And so a little over three years ago, maybe 6 months after that meeting, my employer, who had never had a layoff in its century of existence, laid off 2/3rd's of the company. Its stock, which had hit a high of $88 a share, went down to around a buck.

  And so it seems to me that when some suit starts talking about 'creative destruction,' what it really means is that their greed is now sustained only by self-will and self-justification, outstripping any actual ability and even reality, itself.

  And this certainly seems true of Iraq, the Neo-cons, and the whole Bush administration in general, doesn't it? Another of Karen's charms is that she isn't shy about using words like 'imperial' and even 'fascist.' She uses them quite a bit actually. Which, ya know, is gratifying to those of us mere citizens without any insider access who nevertheless have been adding two plus two.

  I've been feeling this Imperial Moment building for at least 20 years now - I think I first could put a name to it with the Ralph Lauren Polo ads of the Reagan years, how quality was being re-introduced to the middle class not just as a luxury item, but full of connotations of the leisure class, the idle rich. There seemed to be a re-definition going on of what was the acceptable mindset of the middle/upper-middle class: we were no longer the self-reliant and responsible citizen, respectful of the rights of others as we expected respect for our own. An American. We were to become each an Emperor, with entitlements instead of rights, gathering all selfishness unto ourselves, respect given to none. One of those Polo ads will never leave my mind, one thin and long face foremost among his little crowd and looking directly into the camera. There was a smirk and a joyless mirth, and if there'd been a thought balloon, it would have said, 'I just screwed your sister, and you're next.'

  And so it is that all during these years of George W. Bush, my mind has been dumbstruck and amazed at how this man, this complete and perfect embodiment of the thoughtless, the self-absorbed, the cruel and petty, the tyrannical, the utterly and willfully useless, came to create, culminate and embody our Imperial Moment. How perfectly cast! What a improbable and tragic wonder!

  Another great thing about Karen is that besides being a great writer, she's not, you know, full of shit. I swear if I ever see, hear, or read one of these passive-aggressive, college Republican boy wonder pundits again, I'm going to go effin' postal on him. Each thin-shouldered, sunken chest example is stranger in appearance than the last - I finally got a look at David Frum, and cripes, his whole head has the swollen and misshapen aspect of a bee sting. Before Richard Clarke's testimony and interviews, Karen was one of the higher profile targets to kick around, and Max Boot in the LA Times was calling her 'flaky.' Was this your real birth name, Max? I mean it's just too crypto-fascist to be real. Even if it was, a real American would have changed it.

  But now Richard Clarke has let rather more cats out of the bag than can be tidily rounded up. Condi Rice tried to use Clarke's 60 Minutes platform to counter-attack: 'There was nothing more the administration could have done to prevent the 9-11 attacks.' Well, I can think of something you might have done Condi. As head of the NSC, you might have put a priority on the translation of Al Qaida transmissions, especially as you all admit that George Tenet was briefing Bush every single day about an imminent attack. But no, you didn't. And so the Al Qaida transmission on 9-10 announcing the attack sat untranslated until two days after 9-11. That's one thing. And when you testify under oath, someone might just ask you about this.

  (And never mind Bush's taking all of August off for vacation during the time of most intense threat; as Clarke testified, he couldn't get a briefing with Bush until Bush's vacation was over, when it was essentially too late. In the real world, this is generally known as 'not really being interested in the job.' Perhaps this is due to Bush's never really having the kind of job he could get fired from, and so isn't familiar with the usual demands of responsibility.)

  But it's not as if the administration did nothing - John Ashcroft was kept off commercial airliners from the end of July, and so he had the USA Patriot Act just about ready to go by 9-11. Curious, isn't it, that the Bush administration put its efforts into what their response to attack would be, and not into preventing it?

There is a natural human response to violent events. Violence displaces the mind very effectively, and in that displacement, before the facts and meaning of the event can be established, confusion reigns. So it was with the Bush administration and 9-11. The attacks of 9-11 quite effectively blew the mind of the country, and the Bush administration then stepped in and supplied the meaning we were supposed to take from it: we were now in a 'war on terror' of infinite duration, which would entail foreign wars without end and curtailment of freedom and perhaps democracy itself here at home. And anyone who challenged this was 'un-American.'

  If you're reading this, you're no doubt aware of the PNAC, and how every significant member of the Bush administration saving George himself (substituted by brother Jeb), signed to a policy in 1998 that advocated a world empire for the United States, and explicitly mentioned that a 'new Pearl Harbor' would galvanize American public opinion in support of this.

  There really can't be any doubt that this is what happened in the summer of 2001. There are no doubt strong reasons to find justification for an invasion of Iraq, etc. Hussein was by accounts just a couple years away from collapsing; and if the Shiite's of Iraq then joined with Iran, while the radical Wahabi's of Osama bin Laden overthrew the House of Saud, all of which is the way things are trending, then you've got most of the world's oil controlled by possibly competing, possibly cooperating radical Islamist governments.

  If there ever was a situation that required the UN, for supreme international cooperation, this is it. But it's not what the Bushies have done. They've taken this as a justification for world empire. And they're not even very good at it. This administration cannot be allowed to see another spring. --posted 04.01.04

AWOL Bush: A Quick Tutorial

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

  For those who don't understand the context of Michael Moore's and other's characterization of George W. Bush as a military deserter, a quick tutorial:   My term of enlistment in the (Mo) Air National Guard overlapped with Bush's, and I have a clear memory of the announcement that the Air Guard would start testing for drugs. The available records show that it was at this time that Bush refused to take his annual flight physical, which would have included this test. Bush was subsequently demoted from flight status. (On these same orders demoting Bush, James Bath was demoted also for the same reason - refusing to take the flight physical. Bath was soon to become the American agent for Bin Laden family business interests, and providing the funding for Bush's oil ventures.) Bush then requested transfer to a Guard postal unit in Alabama. There are no records available showing his service there, and that unit's commanders are on record as saying they have no memory of him. The lack of records for Bush's service apparently show an absence of around two years. I can attest the pressure on Guard members at the time that any pattern of missed drills would be rewarded with activation to active duty. And the military code states any absence up to 30 days is AWOL, anything over is desertion.   This episode is important because it is illustrative of Bush's essential nature. Bush owed his Air Guard enlistment in the first place to his family name, and his pilot training too (how many pilots are accepted with an 'official' score of 25% on the pilot aptitude test?) And whatever the truth of any drug use, it's beyond argument that Bush simply turned his back on his commitment when it was inconvenient for him. As a man of life-long immense privilege, he has always done so, without ever being held accountable. If Bush and his administration seem increasingly to inhabit the same plane of unreality as Michael Jackson, there's a reason. One dances outside a court hearing on child molestation, the other says 'WMD or not, what's the difference?' --posted 02.02.04

Grocery Strikes, Corporate Models, And Bush's Global Agenda

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

If ever get around to it, my first play will cover my summer of '91. I had just completed half a year of taking care of my father at his home in Richmond, Va; his life-long habit of uppers and downers, begun as a long-range bomber pilot in the early days of the Strategic Air Command, had resulted in a physical collapse and it seemed my duty to help out. After this half year without income my credit union asked for my car back, and so I found myself at my step-dad's in St. Louis without so much as a bicycle.

  Family connections can often help in life - George W. Bush got a baseball team, among other things, out of his; I got a job as a cook at a summer camp in Colorado, which would get me half-way to where my belongings sat in a storage unit in L.A. It was the religiously-affiliated summer camp I'd attended a quarter-century previous - beautifully situated in what I feel is our country's most beautiful state. $5.50/hr, but lots of scenery, and peace and quiet.

  The kitchen crew consisted of myself, a Berkeley student who was the son of a federal judge in L.A., a local kid with a passion for muscle cars, and a coed much involved with an aspiring bicycle racer training in the area. Nice little group to build a play around, don't you think? Lot's of opportunity in a long day of chopping vegetables and making sausage gravy for long conversations covering anything and everything. The local kid had recently spent a year's wages - $10,000 - building up a Chevy II SS, with supercharger, huge slicks, etc. After two months it had blown up, but for those two months, he'd had the fastest car in the state. We all agreed that was worth the $10 grand.

  A couple of points I'd like to make in this play are these - when I attended this camp, the cook was a local black woman who'd done this for years. It was her kitchen (the work table was built on shorter legs for her benefit, giving our backs a major pain) and between her and the camp director, that was all the 'management' the kitchen needed. But now, we were all employees, not of the camp, but of a 'camp food services management company.' (Get out! you say. Yes, I'd never heard of such a thing either.)

  Presumably, this made fewer demands on the camp director's time, and no doubt was sold with the added promise of 'significant cost savings.' Because that's what corporate America always promises. But let's just think for a minute - how much do you think the camp was paying that black woman previously? $100,000 a year? No, if we may recall, we typically found black women in jobs where the work was too hard and the wages too low to be attractive to us white folk. Consider also - this 'management' company maintains 'supervisor's,' a camp supervisor or two, an area supervisor, with company vehicles. And back at company headquarters, well, there's company headquarters; with an office suite consisting of executive offices and accounting back-office, all of which supports the executive life-styles of the half-dozen white guys in those executive offices, with their Mercedes and gated communities and trophy wives and private schools.

  I ask you this - no matter what the economies of scale, how do you support all this out of a budget that previously supported a poor black woman and meals for a couple hundred kids, no matter what the multiple number of camps? If you guessed that the quality of the meals might suffer, you'd be absolutely right. Lack of equipment, lack of cookbooks, lack of seasonings - rotting produce, cheap ingredients, cheap menus, lot's of pasta, not much protein, etc. etc. The kids complained, parents complained, and so naturally for parents' weekend there were steaks.

  In the next town over a WalMart had opened, and so a road trip was organized to assuage our consumer cravings, such as could be done with our meager earnings. I craved music, so I bought a Sony Walkman at full retail of over $80. When I got back to Southern California, the same player was available everywhere for around $55.

  So I learned a couple of lessons that summer about our current corporate model - there are situations where it's just completely inappropriate, serving no useful purpose and actually destroying quality of service. And companies such as WalMart, no matter what their staggering economies of scale, do not necessarily pass on these savings - if they own the local market, they're no longer required to.

  I got to thinking about this again in light of the grocery workers' strike here in Southern California. Thanks to their union, grocery workers are about the only ones left around here making something of a middle class living from a non-professional job. And management wants to end that. According to the L.A. Times, the man at the center of the standoff is Safeway CEO Steven Burd. Burd came to Safeway with no previous grocery industry experience - his previous career was as a Wall Street leveraged-buyout guy. Safeway did well with him in the 90's, when times were good. But Burd bought up a number of regional grocery chains, California's Vons included, and these deals have been turning sour.

  After these acquisitions, Safeway started replacing local regional favorite food items with their own generic branded items, and customers have rebelled. Sales are stalled, Safeway's stock price has fallen 50%. The solution? It's obvious! Cut wages, cut health benefits drastically - the news account I saw said management wants to eliminate hospitalization entirely. (What, you thought the solution might be to reverse course and again give customers what they want? What are you, a communist?) Management's argument is that their cost structure has to be brought in line with such as WalMart's to be competitive. But a lot of us don't do WalMart - in my experience it's never offered either selection, service, or price.

  But that does seem to be the point, doesn't it? Those who see the 'free market' as revealed religion tell us that if left alone, free enterprise, aka our current corporate model, will give us the highest quality goods tailored to our individual tastes, and all at the lowest possible price. But in actual practice, our current corporate model seems to want to reduce our choices, lower the product quality, charge whatever the market will bear, while paying its workers as little as legally possible. And any company that does things differently - such as a local grocery chain that gives its customers what they actually want - will be destroyed. For the last half-century, we've been known as a consumer nation; but increasingly it seems we're actually here for the convenience of the corporations, rather than vice-versa.

  Again, we need to understand that this is the crux of our historical moment - that our corporate model is on a campaign of dispossession, for every thing of value it sees that we may possess - whether it be our quality of product or quality of life - it perceives as something it doesn't possess. And the Bush administration, this administration of the PNAC, is merely pursuing this agenda on a global scale. --10.22.03