The Road To World War III: Bush’s Legacy

by Mickey Walker
www.thepoliticaljunkies.net
Apr 13, 2008
Part I

Before Bush (BB) democracy and freedom were alive and well in America. We Yanks regarded ourselves as champions of the underdog nations of the world and defenders of all that is good. Arrogantly, many Americans today still believe in our greatness, for all our pillage and killing and borrowing our future away with a 9 Trillion dollar Iraq War debt that only does Halliburton and Blackwater any good. Today, I have to wonder, “What do we think of ourselves as a people?” I think we should be ashamed of ourselves for allowing the last 7 years to happen.

To ratchet up the playing field on which the Chief Executive can better play Dictator, President Bush has taken countless measures to satiate his rabid hunger to pillage the Treasury and national resources that belong not to him, but to the American people. Illegal wiretapping with no regard for the law allowed Bush to get the goods on his opponents so that his illegal activities could go smoother, without challenge. Stuffing federal attorney rosters with Bush lapdogs such as the graduate goons from Pat Robertson Law School is one thing, but having Gonzales, former AG, stack the US Attorney rosters by firing those opposed to Bush policy is nothing short of police state tactics. Then there’s the Bush signing statements. I got to wonder, does any American really think long enough to care that Bush has rendered and blown up our very form of government by negating laws duly passed by Congress with statements like “I’m signing McCain’s No-Torture Bill, but if I think it necessary to torture in the interest of national security, I will.”? When we begin to watch the bludgeoning of our Constitution by the worst president in American history, do any of us pause to care? Do we really believe that these Bush-mangled separation of powers in our three branches of government will reset to where it was BB? Will the next president who sits in the White House rescind Bush’s success at setting up a Unitary Executive (Dictatorship) form of government? What will happen to us? What will happen to America, now that Bush has incinerated our rights of habeas corpus, to know why we are being imprisoned in jails faraway for indefinite periods of time?

I fear for us. Bush and his lapdog Republicanized Congress have borrowed and spent big bucks on the Iraq War (where corporations now have the license to steal) and we give Trillion-dollar IOU markers to the Chinese so they will lend us more money. What is the national debt, anyway? It is the money America keeps borrowing from the Chinese, the Arabs and other sovereign countries as they buy up our government, our land, and our corporations and smile like hungry wolves as they feed, bite by bite on our America already on life support. Those who would argue and wrap themselves in the flag and grunt, “America, Love it or Leave It.” might best take a good look at our dollar. It has tanked against most all major currencies steadily as the Bush War has drained our resources and our Treasury. When Bush took office, the National Debt was just over 5 Trillion dollars. Today, it sits at 9.45 Trillion, surprise, surprise. See what a little creative preemptive attack on Iraq who never harmed the United States can do? Heck, the GOP doesn’t talk much about the big-spending Democrats anymore. Think their wartime borrow-and-make-their-crony-corporations-rich policies might have something to do with their silence about Democrats and spending? I don’t hear Halliburton complaining. For a look at where the borrowed money is going and how fast it spews out of our Treasury, press Control and left click the following website: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ . It will astound you. We have been snookered, and the rest of the world knows it. Other nations watch like knowing vultures on a perch nearby as the US dollar plummets toward Monopoly Money status, and other sovereigns like the Saudis, the Japanese, and the Chinese quietly convert their dollars to Euros. It’s scary. We see the symptoms like the mortgage meltdown and Bear-Stearns going down the toilet as we the taxpayers guarantee losses above 30 billion! We witness the wildest band aid of all in the drastic Fed cuts of interest rates of hundreds of basis points in just a few short months. Good and well, but what do we do as the world economies heat up and inflation knocks on our door and all we got is wallowed-out dollars to try to buy food and gasoline and to pay the house note? Credit cards? Forget ‘em. Credit and debt is what got us into this mess in the first place, all led by the Decider. He and all his crony Have More buddies in mortgage lending knew what they were doing. They knew that homeowners could not pay down their loans, ever. But they sucked us in without fear.

I know, I know, so much negativism, like, who needs it? Who wants to hear it? Am I guilty of just playing the game of “Ain’t It Awful” instead of proposing real solutions to correct real problems? But take a quick assessment of where we are, thanks to Bush and his lapdog Neocon Congress, and tell me what we can do to correct it? What (with the help of God Almighty) can the incoming president do with the Bush mess? What can he or she possibly do about the National Debt of 9.4 Trillion dollars that (thanks to Dubya) has almost doubled during his 7 years as preemptive, borrow-and-spend-us-down-the-toilet madness? Just consider the numbers, the arithmetic for a minute. Just for a moment, forget all the other issues (abortion, gay marriage, the immoral war, deaths and dismemberments due to lies about weapons of mass destruction), and let us be rational about the pure numbers. How can we address the 9.4 Trillion dollar debt Bush created in his war on terror? Congress, on both sides, is responsible, too, but Bush lied to get us into war, anyway, and McCain puppets Bush on staying the course in Iraq. Fine. So how are we going to pay for it? Where will the United States get the resources to continue to keep spending the many billions a week to keep the US occupation going in Iraq where civil war, not terrorists, overshadows and redefines the gravity of the great mistake America made by attacking Iraq. Dude.

So how do you liquidate a debt? How can the next president and Congress undo the financial disaster brought upon us all by the Bushites and his corrupt Neocon Congress for so many years? The Chinese, the Japanese, Great Britain, and the Saudis hold most of our IOUs for the 9.4 Trillion. So how we going to pay them back? And if we don’t get free and clear of them and the money we owe them, how we going to keep them from cutting out pieces of a fully-awake Uncle Sam by buying into our corporations, real estate, and government? We owe them an enormous amount of interest on the National Debt (real money payable upfront) too. How much? Oh, I don’t know, do the math. It’s got to be around 4% of 9.4 Trillion. $376,000,000,000.00 per year should handle the interest. But we get nothin’, not a damned thing for that huge sum of money, bleeding out of the US Treasury. Where are the true Conservatives of yesteryear? Whatever happened to Senator Dirksen? We get nothing for the interest paid out on our giant debt to fund building roads, Medicare, Social Security, Education, money to finance our mad military buildup, NOTHING! The Japanese, the Chinese, the Brits, and the Saudis get that money to help their own agendas, be it capitalism, enhancing more oil revenue, or war. We don’t get it, get it? The cost of having to scrape almost $400,000,000,000.00 a year off our collective national plates and flush the cash down the toilet is reprehensible. With us, it’s a yearly masochistic ritual. We should not have allowed it to happen to us in the name of privatization, this illegal war in Iraq, so that Halliburton and Blackwater, not to mention other crony war corporations could laugh, take the money, and run.

How do you liquidate a debt? Only two ways seem possible: 1. You pay it. 2. You disavow it. So out of the two possible choices, what has Bush left his successor as president number 44 of the United States of America, to do about the debt that keeps on going and going, like the Energizer Bunny? Choice number one is impossible. With production jobs going overseas and Americans losing their homes, it’s not likely that a new surge of manufacturing jobs here at home at say, $25.00 per hour. In fact the opposite is likely to occur as US corporations continue to outsource overseas labor and to build new factories on foreign shores. You see, cheap labor became an instant Holy Grail to all corporations who understand modern capitalism in the world market. Disavowing our 9 Trillion dollar debt might ruffle a few feathers in all world economies. It would destroy some countries, perhaps. Maybe that’s why sovereign nations flush with cash subtly continue to exchange American dollars for other world currencies, e.g., Euro Dollars. Think the global smart money knows something we don’t know? Think the Saudis and the Chinese give more thought to symptoms like our sub-prime mortgage meltdown and the fall of Bear Stearns, than we do? Disavowing our debt would be a world catastrophe. So the next president, as the American financial house of cards teeters, creaks, and leans, might have to continue to do a Reagan soft shoe, sailor straw in hand, singing “Deficits Don’t Matter” to the tune of “Me and My Shadow.”

Others have speculated that the United States might have to be even more aggressive in stealing the resources of the world, presently in the hands of other nations, such as the oil-rich Saudis (we already got a head start on Iraq) and the third domino to topple in the name of oil, Iran. This way, the United States can reset the debt meter, own and control the world’s oil, and former owners like the Saudis, well, they would be sh– out of luck. Such skullduggery might liquidate our debt. But it might also bring the likelihood of World War III and the liquidation of our planet as well. Stay tuned for Part II in a week or two.

TPJ is not subject to copyright. Anyone is welcome to freely quote and use material from TPJ. In reproducing or using material from the TPJ proper attribution is appreciated.