Dispossession is the Name of the Game

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
By Margie Burns

To sum up the past four years, we have an administration aggressively covering up 9-11 and preventing genuinely expert research into it, even when such research would rebut some nonsensical conspiracy theories. White House stonewalling on 9-11 investigation continues even while the White House milks those dreadful events for political benefit, simultaneously advancing an agenda of US colonialism in the Middle East, generating big contracts for friendly companies and their management, and even making money off the twin industries of "defense" and "security" for close relatives of George W. Bush.

By any rational standard, these are actions unlikely to proceed from any good motive, but they do comprise a strategy of sorts. The strategy is dispossession.

Move over, American middle class. Move over, 98% of the U.S. population, those of you (those of us) who grew up aiming for good health, an education, a house, the freedom and ability to bring up children according to the lights of the parents, and relatively secure elder years. You are being brought ever closer to that half of the global population with little expectation or hope of such blessings.

Had the acts and omissions of the years since 9/11 been even slightly different, the above statement would sound like exaggeration. But given the events, it is no exaggeration to say that middle-class dispossession is the name of the game.

Nineteen scantily armed hijackers have been treated as though they were the late Soviet Union. The Bush administration has invaded the Middle East wholesale, something it wanted to do not only before 9/11 but also before the 2000 election. Genuine security experts have been replaced by PR appointees with backgrounds in communications or in politics. Genuine diplomats and other personnel with experience abroad have been replaced by appointees who are an insult to world opinion. The invasion of Iraq has turned into a bloody pork barrel. U.S. military and security spending have turned into a giant slush fund, unhindered by a GOP Congress colluding with the White House.

All of this has one central effect. The destruction is by no means complete, but the U.S. peace dividend has been and is being swept off the table, and democracy is being turned into a harpies' banquet. A group of the greediest, most self-satisfied, least competent, and least inspiring gobblers at the public trough the world has ever seen in the United States has achieved their central aim. They have found something to replace their dream days of fantasy bloodshed and genuine avarice, bogus anti-Communism and actual self-aggrandizement in the Cold War with something equally good -- the "war on terror."

Actually, for their purposes, it's better than the Cold War. The Soviet Union was an actual power, with a findable, limited location. Guerrilla tactics by young males around the world are an imprecise, diffuse Enemy that you can project anywhere. And just in case the present supply runs short, the administration is moving aggressively to make as many new enemies as possible. Look at the destruction of educated, sane people in Iraq, including the assassination of Iraqi college professors under the CPA.

But the destruction is wrought here at home as well as halfway around the world. The trillion or so spent on the "war on terror" is subtracted from U.S. domestic stability. Move over, middle class. Your confident hope of health, education, housing and individual prosperity are -- not to put too fine a point upon it -- a threat to a small, grasping, ignorant caste of well-placed louts.

And they call that "conservatism."

Margie Burns

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION LINK