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FIVE THINGS ABOUT THE BUSH ADMINSTRATION 2. The new Attorney General is a man who did not find it necessary to tell then-Texas Governor George Bush about mitigating factors that might lead him to pardon Death Row inmates, and who was the architect of position papers which claimed the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and outdated, urged that American forces be allowed to use torture, and created the legal foundation for the horrors of Abu Ghraib. 3. As has been apparent since the beginning and is apparent in the actions of his new CIA chief, George W. Bush respects loyalty over competence -- a disastrous outlook for someone attempting to run a country. 4. If the Bush administration is quietly abandoning its pursuit of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, it is because they are beginning to suspect that they will be able to stock the Supreme Court with ideologues who will not find gay marriage bans enacted by the individual states unconstitutional. 5. There is not a single member of the Bush administration that is not a millionaire. FIVE THINGS ABOUT IRAQ 2. Order 39 on the American-controlled Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority (enacted September 21, 2003) allows 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses, and unlimited capital gains export -- the repatriation of all domestic profits to foreign shareholders. No other country in the world, not even the United States, has such a system. 3. The most likely competition for this near-total corporate monopoly by American companies would probably come from western European countries like Germany, France, and Russia -- all of which have been locked out of bidding for supervision of contract work in Iraq thanks to their refusal to support the invasion. 4. Despite an unemployment rate of up to 75% amongst Iraqis, most American corporations in the country prefer to have basic labor done by southeast Asian workers, who are even cheaper than the locals. The fact that able-bodied Iraqi men can sit around with no income, unable to feed their families, and watch a Filipino or Malaysian worker do what was once their job, no doubt contributes to the ongoing insurgency. 5. Labor unions are illegal in Iraq under the current constitution, as are strikes; this is not likely to change after the upcoming elections. American corporations have been able to accomplish in Iraq what has frustrated them in the U.S.: a complete elimination of union activity, sanctioned and sustained by the government. FIVE THINGS ABOUT AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE 2. At a time when millions of manufacturing, technical and service jobs are being lost to overseas workers every year, a rapidly graying population faces a drastic cut in retirement benefits, and home ownership and college education are impossible dreams for millions of Americans, our leaders in Washington are choosing to focus on gay marriage and racy television as the weighty issues of the day. 3. Beltway insiders are speculating furiously that the next major policy initiative to come out of the White House will be a series of hearings on internet pornography. 4. Colin Powell, a principled if easily buffaloed political figure who at least attempted to take seriously his role as the nation's leading diplomat, has been unceremoniously fired; his son Michael Powell, an incompetent, toadying timeserver who got his job through nepotism and who distinguished himself in it through a series of embarrassing, incompetent and rubish decisions, will continue to serve a second term. 5. There are currently two pieces of legislation before Congress proposing a ban on gay marriage and four pieces of legislation proposing that foreign-born citizens be allowed to become president of the United States. There are zero pieces of legislation proposing universal access to health care or higher education. FIVE THINGS ABOUT THE ECONOMY 1. By almost every measure relevant to the average American over time -- real income, wage stability, job permanence, overall savings, domestic investment, retirement investment, generational mobility, and length of time unemployed -- the poor and the middle class have become demonstratively worse off since 1980, the beginning of the neoconservative "Reagan Revolution". 2. During the "new economy" boom of the 1990s, workers laid off from the industrial sector were told that high-tech retraining would allow them to preserve their lifestyles. Soon after, many of those high-tech jobs were themselves exported overseas, and the workers (those lucky enough to be retrained and those not so fortunate) were told that they would be retrained for service-sector jobs. Those same service-sector jobs are now beginning to disappear to India and southeast Asia; the management gurus now paint a world of "free agency", where every worker is a liberated freelancer acting on his or her own. This rosy picture will no doubt work out just as well as the previous angelic visions of the future, with the added bonus that these self-employed freelancers will receive no retirement plans, benefits or medical care. 3. The Bush administration is currently seeking to repeal the tax credit which grants tax incentives to corporations which offer benefit packages to their employees. This would save billions for the insurance industry, and take away one of the only reasons a non-union company has for offering health insurance to their staff. 4. The much-heralded immigration reform trumpeted by President Bush would do nothing to alleviate labor violations of immigrant workers by companies like Wal-Mart, who worked some of their maintenance crews seven days a week with no days off for up to ten months according to recent investigations. Wal-Mart was not fined or punished for this activity, blaming it all on "contractors", of whose policies they were apparently entirely ignorant. 5. The G.O.P. continues to tar Democrats as the "tax-and-spend" party, while they themselves ruthlessly pursue a "borrow-and-spend" policy. They have raised the federal debt ceiling three times (and are proposing a fourth round) to deal with the historically astronomical national debt, and so far they do not seem to have given much thought to who will eventually pay this debt or what will happen to the economy if lenders finally decide to stop giving us money in light of the fact that we are unable to even keep up payments on the interest. FIVE THINGS ABOUT THE WAR ON TERROR 2. Not a single person has ever been convicted of terrorism in a United States court of law since the War on Terror began; in fact, prosecutions of terror suspects, both in the United States and elsewhere, have been major embarrassments for the prosecution. 3. The Bush administration has fought intelligence reform and independent investigation of its prosecution of the terror war every step of the way, even against its own government and a 9/11 widows' organization. Though never hesitant to wrap itself in the martyr's mantle of the September 11th attacks, the administration seems oddly reluctant to take steps that would prevent such attacks from happening again -- largely because they would be very expensive, and might jeopardize their biggest priority: tax breaks for the wealthy. 4. For the first time in American history, U.S. citizens can be held indefinitely without access to an attorney or even information about the charges against them. Thanks to certain ambiguous language in the USA-PATRIOT Act, Maericans can now be obligated to obey laws of which they are not aware -- and, indeed, may not be made aware because of security issues. 5. Despite its tough talk about dealing with terror, very little has been said by the Bush administration about its alliance with military dictatorships in Uzbekistan and Pakistan, or about American corporations taking advantage of brutal state power in aid of its own ends in Nigeria (where police agents beat and kill labor and environmental activists to the benefit of Exxon), Indonesia (where army 'rape squads' instill terror in Mobil's workforce), and Burma (where Halliburton and its subsidiary Tamimi cleared out entire villages to use as slave labor building oil pipelines and helicopter pads, using Burmese Army troops to execute those who refused to work). |
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