You say the recession couldn't have happened in two months.. I say it had been building up prior to Bush's selection.
As for Iraq, read what 12 year Marine veteran Scott Riker has to say.
The real American emperor
By Carla Binion
Online Journal Contributing Editor
July 25, 2002—With today's avalanche of corporate scandals, I'm reminded of early warnings from wise journalists. In Who Will Tell The People (Simon & Schuster, 1992) Bill Greider warned that certain multinational corporations, companies largely unaccountable to U.S. law, were slowly eroding American democracy. Greider mentioned that German social critic Wolfgang Sachs had called those corporations and their global marketplace the world's new "closet dictator."
In The American Presidency (Common Courage Press, 1998) Gore Vidal said we are a people "conditioned from birth to believe that Americans possess neither an emperor nor a ruling class." However, today's emperor is not any individual politician, but is, among other entities, the unaccountable corporations referred to by Sachs and Greider.
Gore Vidal also points out that today the emperor and its supporting ruling class have rendered the office of the president "as powerless as it is expensive to gain, rather like elections to the Roman consulships, which were retained to the end of the empire while Caesars did the ruling. They kept the forms of an ancient and revered republic while depriving consuls and Senate of those powers to rule which were now the emperor's sole prerogative."
As an example, Vidal points out the effort to "get" President Bill Clinton was a warning strike from the ruling class to "any politician who might want to divert tax money back to the people in the form of, say, health care." When the Clintons proposed a national health care system that threatened insurance company profits, the insurance industry ("cash cow to the richest 1 percent of the population," according to Vidal) conducted a media blitz against the Clinton plans.
This look back at the get-Clinton effort is not a defense of the Clintons but a defense of the American people's right to select our own leaders. The point is to note that the U. S. ruling class and its right-wing allies have at times gone to great lengths to weaken democracy and oppose the will of the people.
In The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons say, "Hillary Clinton's remarks about a 'vast right-wing conspiracy to undermine my husband' were initially mocked by pundits as a feeble defense of her husband's bad character. Yet subsequent revelations about OIC's [Office of Independent Council's] behavior lent weight to her accusations."
By the time details emerged regarding "the secretive machinations of Lucianne Goldberg, Linda Tripp, Richard Porter, George Conway, Ann Coulter and Jerome Marcus to buttress the first lady's allegations . . . there was little argument about the existence of a 'conspiracy,' and still less about whether the plotters were 'right-wing,'" Conason and Lyons write.
Conason and Lyons also note that most Americans objected to the fact that during the get-Clinton frenzy, "the Washington press appeared to have joined forces with a partisan prosecutor to void the results of two presidential elections." They add that this effort to nullify the will of the people via the partisan-driven Clinton impeachment was "a ratings-driven coup d'etat."
Gore Vidal says the ruling class initially assumed Clinton would play by their axiom: "Do nothing at home unless the banks give the green light and the boardrooms sign on." Instead, Clinton acted independently to "rev up the economy and even do things that need doing for the people at large." In other words, Clinton was attacked by wealthy, right-wing interests in part because he believed he could in some instances go against the ruling class on behalf of the people.
According to Vidal, the get-Clinton effort was a message from the ruling class to all challengers: "Don't mess with us. It's our country, not yours. We're not selling. And forget about taxing us. Anyway, isn't it pretty exciting now we got just about the whole globe? Soon we'll get into China. Big market. Cheaper than going to war with them but maybe we'll have to go that route too, one of these days. The big one. Meanwhile, just keep government off our backs."
This might also be the message of the stolen election.
Around the time of the 2000 election, oil, insurance, pharmaceutical and other corporations expressed disdain for a Gore presidency, fearing Gore might favor industry regulation. An article, "America in the Grip of Bush's 'Iron Triangle," (The Observer, December 3, 2000) noted those corporations wanted to "take over the regulatory bodies of government and regulate themselves."
The efforts to depose Clinton and to steal the 2000 election also happened to subvert democracy and oppose the expressed will of the people, whether they originated primarily with "right-wing" or "ruling class/corporate" interests. Those interests are often the same.
Some of the following paragraphs appeared in an earlier article of mine. They exemplify corporate opposition to the Clinton health care plan.
In 1993, the Clinton administration tried to do something about the high price of prescription drugs, hinting at possible government-imposed price controls. The pharmaceutical industry then turned to the Beckel Cowan PR firm to oppose the administration's designs on lowering the cost of prescription drugs—although, of course, arguably the Clinton plan would have benefited the public.
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, (Toxic Sludge is Good for You, Common Courage Press, 1995) write that Beckel Cowan "created an AstroTurf [or, fake grassroots] organization called 'Rx Partners' and began deploying state and local organizers to, in the words of a company brochure, 'generate and secure high-quality personal letters from influential constituents to 35 targeted members of Congress.'"
Pharmaceutical companies weren't the only corporations to oppose the Clinton health care plan and target Congress. The insurance industry went to work to fight against the Clinton proposals, recruiting PR-man Robert Hoopes.
According to Stauber and Rampton, the 300,000 member Independent Insurance Agents of America (IIAA) hired Hoopes as their "grassroots coordinator/political education specialist."
Campaign & Elections magazine reported the IIAA activated "nearly 140,000 insurance agents during the health care debate, becoming what Hoopes describes as a new breed of Washington lobbyists," say Stauber and Rampton.
Hoopes said the lobbyists "have behind them an army of independent insurance agents from each state, and members of Congress understand what a lobbyist can do with the touch of a button to mobilize those people for or against them."
In Campaign & Elections magazine ("Killing Health Care Reform," October/November 1994) Thomas Scarlett wrote of the insurance companies PR moves, "Through a combination of skillfully targeted media and grassroots lobbying, these groups were able to change more minds than the president could, despite the White House 'bully pulpit.' . . . Never before have private interests spent so much money so publicly to defeat an initiative launched by a president."
Propagandist Rush Limbaugh also fueled the anti-health care debate on his radio show with frequent "calculated rants" aimed at his dittohead audience. The insurance industry's PR-man Blair Childs said his coalition ran paid ads on Limbaugh's show to encourage Rush's listeners to call members of Congress and urge them to kill health care reform.
Stauber and Rampton say congressional staffers often didn't know the callers were "primed, loaded, aimed and fired at them by radio ads on the Limbaugh show, paid by the insurance industry, with the goal of orchestrating the appearance of overwhelming grassroots opposition to
health reform."
By 1994, the insurance corporations' PR attacks had changed the political environment. Stauber and Rampton write that "Republicans who previously had signed on to various components of the Clinton plan backed away." Even Democratic Party Senate majority leader George Mitchell "announced a scaled-back plan that was almost pure symbolism . . . Republicans dismissed it
with fierce scorn."
In George W. Bush, the ruling class and closet dictator have their yes-man. Commentators for the corporate-owned media have no need to attempt to hound him out of office as they did Clinton for daring to try to "rev up the economy and even do things that need doing for the people at large." The insurance and oil industries have no need to battle this president for trying to tax or regulate them, as they might have found necessary if Gore had been allowed to keep his 2000 election win.
As we've seen with Bush's deregulation policies and lax handling of today's corporate scandals, those corporations have little to fear. Bush knows who the "real American emperor" is. He allows the closet dictator to rule while he plays its protector and serves as figurehead.
This may be the only kind of "president" we Americans are allowed to have from now on, unless we identify and challenge the real American emperor and come up with ways to prevent such things as trivially-based, politically motivated impeachment and stolen elections in the future.
Since the various forms of mainstream media are owned by the same ruling corporations Bush now protects, Bill Greider's question is still relevant. Bush and his corporate cronies may know the identity of the real American emperor, today's closet dictator. However, in the interest of keeping democracy alive, who will tell the people?
