Things to think about instead of war

As we have our focus pointed more and more towards the impending war that will be fought no matter what, we necessarily leave small issues like the economy’s shattered wasteland to disappear into our less-focussed peripheral vision. Paul Krugman, an economist of some repute with the NY Times snaps us back to attention in Is the Maestro a Hack?:

“…the fiscal deterioration has reached catastrophic proportions. [The] first budget … projected a 2004 surplus of $262 billion. [The] second budget … projected a $14 billion deficit … [n]ow it projects a deficit of $307 billion. That’s a deterioration of $570 billion, just for next year… Not my fault, says Mr. Bush. “A recession and a war we did not choose have led to a return of deficits,” he declared. Really? Will the recession and war cost $570 billion per year, every year? Besides, Mr. Bush knew all about the recession and Osama bin Laden (remember him?) a year ago, when his projections showed a return to surpluses by 2005. Now they show deficits forever — even though they don’t include the costs of an Iraq war.”

There are a couple of interesting things to note here. The first is $307 billion! Wow. Don’t let that number drift from your forebrain too quickly. That’s a lot of money. Almost as much money as will probably be spent on Iraq this year alone. Which brings us to the second, more subtle point to extract here: “…a war we did not choose…” If ever anyone chose a war, it was the Bush Administration in Iraq. This war has been planned for 12 years. It’s a sequel, not a war. The interim decade was just liberal wishy-washiness — typical of folk who can’t get the job done.

And why are the costs of actually making war not included in the budget? Why are there always separate items for the war budget? The Pentagon gets between $350 billion and $550 billion per year, depending on which way you count budgets, but you can be assured that at least that much money goes to making war and making sure conditions for wars get made. However, you can be just as sure that Homeland Security doesn’t count in that total, nor does the Iraq conflict (coming soon to a TV screen near you!), nor did the Afghanistan conflict. Those are all special cases and have special needs and you’d be a fool and a communist (ahem, terrorist) to think otherwise.

Back to the economy though, it seems everyone is just playing along in Washington. Even “the Office of Management and Budget has suddenly stopped talking about 10-year projections and now officially looks only five years ahead” because that’s deemed less embarrassing for the administration. Embarrassing in the way that having outright lying being exposed is embarrassing.

For those more visually oriented, there’s a nice graphic from The Unreliable Narrator (click on the image at right).

But it’s really hard to concentrate on the economy when there’s an orange alert on, eh? We’ve only had an orange alert once before, last 4th of July, remember? When nothing happened? At all? This one will prove to be much scarier because there’s all these pesky peace protesters pretending that they represent the will of the people or something. Well, thankfully, good old NYC, home to the beginning of the War on Terror is holding strong. Peace March Gets Restricted… on Plastic has a discussion about Courting Oppression, a Jimmy Breslin article in the New York Newsday.

Breslin was in court for the hearings which decided that no march will be allowed to pass the UN building, because, as “Assistant [Police] Chief Michael Esposito” put it, the biggest problem is unruly marches or “people not moving after the stops. ‘You can have them at a red light and it changes and they won’t move’”. Sounds horrible. And vaguely ‘terroristical’. Permission denied.

“The city says the march can’t be held because of security reasons since Sept. 11. The reason for the security is the security. … This is an act of Attempted Fascism and is going to be talked about, and harshly, for years. A thing this dreadful becomes part of your reputation. … I don’t know why the police have so much power over the right of citizens to express themselves. Who is some cop on a city payroll to try to stop you from speeches and congregating and marching to demonstrate against a war that could kill thousands and thousands? These are people who pass a Civil Service test or so and they want to control your comings and goings.”

The article is from the 9th of February. The decision came down on the 10th. Permission denied. Read about it in Judge Denies Antiwar Group a Permit to March in the New York Newsday. If people can rationalize that decision, well, then, the stupid white men have won. Perhaps it’s naive to think they hadn’t already.

Just as a quick aside, while I’m mentioning stupid white men, or, more accurately, sleazy white men… another thing you’ve probably forgotten about in the incessant barrage of which country we should stomp on next, is some unfinished business named Kenneth Lay, who has slithered off the public scene with nary a whimper. He’s probably back lining the pockets of Bush and Co., but he certainly isn’t in jail. Check the cartoon on the left for Jeff Danziger’s opinion.

As a further aside, speaking of sleazy rich white guys getting away with stuff, Millions For A BJ, But Nothing For Energy on Plastic notes that the GAO has dropped the “lawsuit against the White House to release the energy task force records.” Looks like Cheney managed to outlast them and we’ll never know the deals that were brokered among the elite to decide US energy needs and uses. They decided that “further pursuit of the … information would require investment of significant time and resources over several years.” Hence the title of the Plastic article.

It’s not the GAO’s fault though, since they are just in charge of ensuring that Congress gets the information it wants and needs in order to function. Since “only seven senators and congressmen had expressed support for the efforts to get the information”, it seems we’re just very poorly represented.

It looks like the Republican plan to sully the name of independent counsels during the Clinton administration (which were used almost constantly during his eight years in office — Whitewater, Monica, etc.) is working out really well. There are no calls for an independent counsel into any of the shady dealing of the administration, from Harken Energy to Halliburton (military and energy). It seems they can just get away with anything and the media is far to cowed to hold them accountable.

Back to repressing people’s right to be heard in NYC. The New York Sun, on the other hand, was beside itself with glee in Comfort and the Protesters:

“Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly are doing the people of New York and the people of Iraq a great service by delaying and obstructing the anti-war protest planned for February 15. The longer they delay in granting the protesters a permit, the less time the organizers have to get their turnout organized, and the smaller the crowd is likely to be. And we wouldn?t want to overstate the matter, but, at some level, the smaller the crowd, the more likely that President Bush will proceed with his plans to liberate Iraq. And the more likely, in that case, that the Iraqi people will be freed and the citizens of New York will be rescued from the threat of an Iraqi-aided terrorist attack.”

Follow the logic here: squashing American rights to protest meaningfully* is good because it lets an unjustified war take place that will, by U.N. estimates, wipe out 2-4 percent of Iraq’s population, so that they will be ‘liberated’ when a democracy is installed by the US government? Sounds like everybody’s a winner here; the Iraqi people are free, rich, healthy and beautiful; Americans are safe, cozened up to the teat of a benevolent government; Bush and Co. are rich beyond they wildest, feverish imaginings. Sign me up.

Count the democracies installed by the US in resource-rich countries. OK, any country. What are the odds the Iraqi people will have national control of their oil? What are the odds they will be recompensed for Halliburton and Carlyle’s plunder? I just saw a CNN commentator today tell me that we have to prevent that dastardly Saddam from burning down oil wells because otherwise the poor Iraqi people won’t have any resources left with which to rebuild their country. She said it with a straight face too.

The Sun deems Iraq an enemy of the US because, as “the only Arab-Muslim country that did not condemn the September 11 attacks”, they have failed to sympathize, instead claiming that the US “reap[ed] the fruits of [its] crimes against humanity”. Not exactly an insane opinion considering our recent history there, no? However, through somewhat convoluted logic involving “Article III of the Constitution” that says you need“the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act” of treason, they hope to gain ground here democratically by getting anti-war sentiments labelled as treason. Their recommendation is to send along two witnesses for each protester in order to protect the ability to prosecute peace-protesters for treason in the future. Once the laws are appropriately amended.

I’m not kidding, nor am I misinterpreting. This is the state of your news today. They are equating being against Bush’s war with treason. Not agreeing with the government is treason. They didn’t stop there. They went on to quote the estimable Thomas Friedman of the NY Times when he said “I believe we are one more 9/11 away from the end of the open society”, which is probably the smartest thing he’s ever said. The problem is that with Friedman and the Sun, you get the impression they’re almost looking forward to it. In that event, they say:

“the pressure to curb civil liberties and civil rights will be ‘enormous and unstoppable.’ What we took from that was that the more successful the protesters are in making their case in New York, the less chance they’ll have the precious constitutional freedom to protest here the next time around.”

Note the gleeful tone — that those peaceniks with different opinions will then be forced to stay at home and shut up or get the wrong end of a NYC police baton, a la Abner Louima. And deservedly so.

But that’s how the media works. It goes for the quick, easy, most supported, highest-polled ideas and opinions. That guarantees the biggest market share. Purple Cowboy Hats (a comment on Plastic gives a wonderful rundown of how media works when it’s corporate sponsored and state-subsidized**. The example proposes hypothetically that the “Bush administration started voicing support for the idea that wearing purple cowboy hats was the best way to fight terrorism”. He cites a bunch of examples of how this idea would be unquestioningly supported by the mainstream media (the funniest: “ Ann Coulter writes a book accusing people who don’t wear purple cowboy hats of being ‘objectively pro-terrorist.’”

“Now, there are still some people—liberals, mostly—who think this purple cowboy hat business is completely ridiculous, and they say so loudly and repeatedly. And some of these people get play in the media, which leads the right wing to start complaining about liberal bias.”

It sounds a little too familiar, no? Perhaps some of the boondoggles mentioned above start to feel uncomfortably like ‘Purple Cowboy Hats’ now?

But somehow, our opinions are so neatly managed by this shallow treatment. It’s the inundation, the repetitive monotony drowning out independent thoughts. When people justify the war in Iraq, they hope you don’t notice the hypocricy of Western treatment of Israel. Saddam is a monster. Acknowledged and accepted, but there has to be something more if Sharon is not also considered a monster. There is a double-standard here and we must know the reason why first. John Pilger writes in In its leaders supporting the war in Iraq… that we don’t hear anything about the crippling effects of US sanctions against Iraq (certainly not from the Sun, which seems so concerned about the people):

“Not a word [is] mentioned [of] the great crime committed by the British and American governments against the ordinary people of Iraq. Withholding more than $5bn worth of humanitarian supplies approved by the Security Council, Washington, with Blair’s backing, maintains a medieval blockade against Iraq. Cancer treatment equipment, water treatment equipment, painkillers, children’s vaccines, to name a few of the life-giving essentials that are maliciously withheld, have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of vulnerable people, mostly infants under the age of five.”

Then there is constant ranting about ‘weapons of mass destruction’…oh, wait, nothing was found, so now it’s ranting about ‘bio- or chemical weapons’. But not much of that was found either, though just now, a news flash on CNN announced that one of the missiles found in Iraq has too long a range and does, technically, count as a violation of the UN resolution. You have to stretch that far for a technicality — and the Bush administration thinks this is justification for war? Who cares? So they found it, right? They have it, right? Just destroy the missile then — or, more likely, give it to Israel.

So remind me again; what is the war for? In other, completely unrelated news, gas prices are up $.15 on average across the US.

“While Blair damns Iraq for the chemical weapons that a swarm of inspectors cannot find (emphasis added), he has quietly approved the sale of chemical weapons to Israel, a terrorist and rogue state by any dictionary meaning of those words. While he accuses Iraq of defying the United Nations, he is silent about the 64 UN resolutions Israel has ignored − a world record.”

Pilger covers these issues, which are reasonable questions. But it only emphasizes how emphatically the supposedly horribly liberal media doesn’t cover these issues. If mainstream media ignores these kinds of crimes, I’d hate to see the rightist slant on things. The liberal side looks fascist enough already. Speaking of fascism (isn’t this fun?), we have, also from the New York Newsday, Now Police Can Spy On Everybody. A recent decision by a federal judge, “has eliminated virtually all the restrictions of the Police Department’s Handschu commission, a body that limited the department in conducting investigations into lawful political activity.” You read that correctly, you can now be investigated (legally) for your political activity. McCarthy, how we’ve missed you!

The ruling “expands the department’s investigatory powers, allowing all branches to investigate suspected political activity”. What does that mean, ‘suspected political activity’? I though political activity was good, no? Get involved. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, etc. etc.? It seems the watchman is asleep at the gate. All this was decided for us, mostly on the strength of “Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen[‘s arguments], a former CIA official who joined the department last year”. He argued that the “the guidelines prevent the NYPD from investigating seemingly neutral leads which may provide links to planned actions.” ‘Planned actions’? Again, very murky here. It seems the Sun won’t have to wait very long before protesters are found guilty of treason after all.

If you want to hear about more rights you’re going to lose, check out this excellent rundown of the Patriot Act II (The Reckoning) on Alternet, Son of the Patriot Act. You’ve got your “Prohibition of Disclosure of Terrorism Investigation Detainee Information” (not saying whose in jail where), your “Terrorist Identification Database” (presumably containing information on anyone engaged in dastardly political activity) and your “Expatriation of Terrorists” (in which, believe it or not, expatriation will now be “inferred from conduct.” Might as well just toss the passport now just for writing this article, eh?) I just can’t wait until every web page hosted in America gives me a similar message to the one on the left that I got from Showtime.

All of this is happily ignored by the liberal (*cough*) media. One network that is decidedly not liberal (but a struggling small voice in a sea of liberal views) is FOX News. 9/11 Victims’ Families Now Victims Of FOX News? tells of an interview by Bill O’Reilly, of the son of a World Trade Center victim. He started to “rip him a new one” for having signed the Not In Our Name Petition and “once off-camera threatened to ‘tear (Glick) to fucking pieces.” This isn’t surprising. O’Reilly is famous for not wanting his message to get muddled by facts or opposing opinions. In fact, he said “the signers of the Statement are “anti-American” and has said they should be “held accountable” for the expression of their dissenting opinion.” At least he’s in line with current political thinking as it’s being enacted throughout this country, as seen in the numerous cases above. For a partial transcript, check out Bill O’Reilly vs Jeremy Glick on O’Reilly Sucks.

The scary thing is that this guy’s market share just increases. The FOX News channel market just keeps increasing. Your parents are probably watching it. I know mine are. People have been watching it, and other news, for so long, they don’t even realize how vitriolic or fascist it is. Comments, like those above, just slip right by and groove into the brainstem, forming opinions for you while you watch. You’re not even aware of your mindset being altered. It’s brainwashing. Check out these folks on the Free Republic who had comments in response to the Glick interview.

I’m not even going to quote any of it, it’s so insipid and hateful. Check it out for yourselves. Just remember, those people all go to a site called ‘free republic’ and want to clamp down on everything. Humans are capable of the most phenomenal acts of self-delusion. This commentor on Plastic noted, in response to reading the page of comments:

“I try to remember when I get frustrated with my country that the people in the Government and Media do not necessarily represent Americans. However, when they continue to elect people with this mindset and to tune into “journalists” with this mindset I start to wonder if Americans should get half the credit I give them.”

Sad, but true.