The ugly Mr Cheney

Yup, our fearless Vice President Dick Cheney is consistent. He’s heartless, homophobic, belligerent and a shameless aristocratic stooge. But at least he’s consistent.

Recently it was reported that the Vice President has called out the democratic Congress for their efforts to bring about a designated end to the Iraq war. He says the Congress are “undermining” our troops with their “meddling” in the war. There are so many odious notes in the perfume of Cheney’s hawkery that I have difficulty deciding where to start. But let’s begin with the words themselves. “Undermining”? By his words Mr Cheney is defining the efforts to bring the soldiers home from being pointlessly slaughtered as an effort to cause harm to the soldiers…somehow. These are the words of a man whose political and family priviledge neatly allowed him to avoid any kind of soldierly risk. He vocally supported the Vietnam War, but applied for and successfully received five draft deferments. He was reported to have said, when asked point-blank In 1989 about his deliberate avoidance of service: “I had other priorities in the 1960’s than military service”.

Uh….okay. Now that I’m finished tearing my hair out…what about the hundreds of thousands of other Americans who were drawn or pressed into service, and lost their lives? What of their priorities? Were they less important than his own? Clearly in his opinion, yes. Like most of the Bush administration, he manipulated the law and used family connections to avoid the service which he now ‘supports’ with such vehemence.

This man has never raised a rifle in his life (unless you count a hunting rifle used to shoot a crony after three martinis) or suffered the inescapable terrors of combat that last for a lifetime and from which so many soldiers continue to suffer. Yet he is qualified to force our soldiers into a death trap for a pack of lies long since exposed as fabrications? Who is he to denounce the efforts of others to bring about the troops’ safety as quickly as can be contrived? How can his own efforts to not only keep the army in harm’s way but to abhor anyone else’s having a say in the matter be construed as anything but negligent at best, and criminal at worst. What, we might ask, are his actual motivations?

This leads to the last foul note of the Veep’s tone: morbid fear of invaded secrecy. This administration has from the very start fought to retain a cloak of mystery over everything it does, and has utterly discouraged anyone not in their chosen circle having acquaintance of the workings of the wars or any of the other pet projects (Energy Task Force, anyone?), much less any real say in their prosecution. The Republican Congress was for their part blissful with ignorance but this new Congress are rudely sticking their noses into matters over which Cheney and his puppet President have so far enjoyed near-complete hegemony.

Dick Cheney is a criminal, a liar, and a master manipulator. He supports nothing but his own agenda of subsidizing the oil industry and major campaign contributors. Why should any of us believe a word of his propaganda?

Money is Money

Money is Money

The current legal wrangling, executive name-calling and imminent trial against former media baron (another word for plutocratic free speech tyrant) Conrad Black brings once more into painful but necessary focus the grotesque excesses and unrestrained greed of our world’s wealthy ‘elite’. They’re all usually from the same mold, the same tiny circle of indescribable wealth in the usual enclaves of the Rhode Island Set, or the London-based Lords…maybe from a Chicago banker cabal or perhaps a continental European with a tired title dry-humped for decades and holdings that stretch out across the world like a venerable oak’s roots stretch beneath miles of forest in every direction. There are the newer Asian billionaires, too, and a handful of feudalist stooges in South America with their own death squads openly on the payroll. Even if you’re new, one of those rare stories that Forbes and Time magazine love to tell, the ‘man-who-came-from-nothing’ bootstrap beauty, you’ll soon be assimilated into the elite and your scions will follow the same ruinous path into arrogance and greed.

Because there is one thing that unites them all: the ingrained belief that they deserve it. Whether it’s from title, or inheritance or, gods forbid, even having done a few years of genuinely hard work, it’s there. Sometimes they possess a tad more guilt than usual and will give away scads of money in sudden pangs of regret, like wealthy Florentines in the fifteenth century desperately trying to buy their way into heaven. But of course this only begs the question, how did they get the money in the first place? Money, quite simply, is labor. It doesn’t come from anything else. If you are rich, it is because thousands or millions, or billions, of people have worked for it and by some route, circuitous or direct, a portion of their earnings came to you. That’s what being wealthy is; you don’t work for the money anymore. It works for you (old saying, but as true as ever). I’m not going to get into a communist rant here; I can’t say that I don't think people have a right to try to earn some money above and beyond the rent and bread. But that’s a far cry from being a millionaire.

You see, there’s this ideology that fuels the entire system of money. Everywhere in the world, in every language, in every stock exchange and even behind the counter of the meanest, tiniest kiosk selling bananas. It crosses cultures, it knows no race or gender, has been favored no less and no more at any point in time and is practiced at every level of business. It’s just that at the highest levels, it kills a lot more people: Money is money. It doesn’t matter where it comes from, there is no morality to money, and if you ‘poison’ your mind with such worries as morals and fairness, you will not succeed as a businessperson (or so the thought process goes). This is actually taught in business school, though it’s one of those things that if you’re interested in going into the world of finance or ‘big business’, you should already understand it as well as the crustiest old banker or most cut-throat real estate developer.

There will always be apologists for the super-wealthy (usually the plutocrats themselves), and if you listen, you’ll find they use the same rationalizations and anti-morality bullshit every time. The only bit that changes, like any good propaganda, is the wording. From clichés like “it’s a dog eat dog world out there”, as if that should be acceptable behavior, to long-winded diatribes about a person’s god-given right to earn as much money as they possibly can. Somehow that’s just A-Okay with us Americans. Let’s squeeze every last dollar out of life and everyone else be damned. That’s competition, and competition is healthy, right? I disagree. Competition is healthy when good-natured people are tossing a ball around on an afternoon in the park and play hard but walk away both the better for it. Monstrous corporations befouling the world, deforesting entire regions, robbing millions of people and trampling the futures of millions more who have no say in the matter, while simultaneously stomping any dissent and honest competition from another company into the mire and using a complicit government to do so…is not healthy. Some of the elite's more vehement supporters will even try to inject some morality of their own in there, along the lines of “keeping the economy going” and other vomit-inducing rehashes of trickle-down economics and “providing jobs”. Because of course that’s why they’re in business, right? To “provide jobs”? Just because something might have a beneficial by-product does not make it a moral or beneficial enterprise. If I go burn down one tall building, the people in the tall building next to it will suddenly have a much better view. So, I guess that makes it all worthwhile, eh?

Is it an accident that nearly all of the Neocons, ultraconservatives, powerful religious leaders and incumbent politicians are all either part of this set or at least nibbling at the edges? Look at Bill O’Reilly, just to name one. Is he in the same financial stratosphere as, say, the Rothschilds? Hell no, but the difference between he and they isn't comparable to the difference between him and me. Have you ever seen a picture of his coastal home? It’s a friggin’ palace. The reason these people are often conservatives is because conservatives, for all their trumpeting the values of church and family, are mostly concerned with keeping their investments safe and profitable. Because the last time I checked it ain't very 'Christian' to go burning down villages and slaughtering people wholesale so that Exxon's profits in, for instance, Indonesia, can continue to grow (I'm not making this up). So yea, it's about keeping the money flowing in. And how do you do that? Well, there are two ways which are strangely opposite and yet, like a yin-yang, also bound together. You see, the best way to ensure “stability” in global finance is to ensure “stability” in the countries that are begin robbed of their resources for foreign profit. Sometimes, however, to bring this about, war is called for. So an enemy is properly vilified (The Japanese, bin Laden, the Arabs, the Jews, the Chinese…this race or that country, or that religion, whomever's convenient) and war is visited upon them, which once again brings back the “stability”, better known when it’s at home as oppression, slavery, fear. Of course, it doesn’t hurt if you’re simultaneously invested in heavy construction & building contraction companies as well as munitions and military contractors (aircraft carriers and bombs aren't cheap), so you can benefit from the holy trinity of investment:

*War

*The enormous cost of rebuilding the land you’ve just devastated (not that much actual rebuilding is accomplished, a few roads are built, and few Stalinist apartment blocks are raised and the lion’s share of the money is re-directed through any number of complicated and pre-arranged financial jungles until later it re-appears in the pockets of the same people. Plus interest.)

*Then the long-term benefits of a “stable” region where there is little to fear regarding “protecting your interests”.

Now, I am not insinuating that ONLY right-wing politicians, etc., form this coterie of wealth and privilege, heavens no. The problem is that they ALL come from the same silver spoon set. It’s just that the so-called liberals are often the ones with a smidge more guilt (Warren Buffett is an excellent example...who gave away billions but is still, in fact, a billionaire. I mean, how many people had to die to amass his fortune? It’s not a melodramatic question, that’s actually something which could be measured), so over the course of time they do less damage and since their propaganda is based on environmental consideration and a modicum of personal freedoms, they occasionally have to back it up with some token legislation to this effect. So, at the end of the circuit, they do less damage to the world. But not by much. Theirs is a slow poison, as opposed to the slash-and-burn tactics of the other.

What’s at the heart of such rottenness and suffering, and what I began writing this rant about, is the notion that there are no rules when it comes to money. In fact, rules are the antithesis of money. Where rules are applied profit shrinks and that must NEVER be tolerated, in the minds of anyone who wants to make a buck, and then another…and then another. That’s the most insidious part. This mentality has seeped into every level of society. It’s not just the plutocrats: It’s every businessperson everywhere. But the problem compounds when manifested in the larger companies, because these entities are guided by stockholders. Investors. People who couldn’t give a damn about anything but profit and growth. Growth, mind you, of a more leprous variety, not of a controlled and balanced, healthy variety. Comparing such persons to sharks is actually quite apt; those most of these people would take more compliment from that than I would ever give. They are utterly hostile, mindless eating machines driven by one thing and one thing only: more feeding. When one feeding is done no thought is wasted or spent but that which is focused on the next feeding. Moving, always moving, never still. This is celebrated rhetoric in the business world, usually cloaked under words like adaptation, and evolving to meet the needs of a changing business climate…which is kind of like two people painting opposite walls of the same rooms a different color, each racing against the other to finish and start painting a new color over the old and deliberately working in discord: a thing that feeds on itself. Businesspeople love to hold high the concept of American competitive business. But competition is the last thing any true profiteer wants. I mean, look at it simply: As a cell phone company, would you rather be competing against eight other companies, always spending more money and effort to convince people that your product was the best, and having to spend just enough to maintain than illusion once the sale was made? Or would you rather be the only show in town…forcing a crummy product on a customer base that needs what you have and has no other choice? What they call in the business “premium pricing”, just in case you were reading my last rant.

Money is money. What a sad, pathetic idea.

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Soldiers vs. Stockbrokers...

I have no love for the military as an institution, but one cannot ignore the titanic injustice suffered by soldiers and their families. This is a gross unfairness that has existed since states arose millennia ago and began making war on each other.

There is no one, no one who pays a higher price than soldiers. There is no profession that has a greater potential sacrifice. How many other careers are there in existence where death is a potentiality of the job that must be accepted? In death’s place sometimes comes the kind of privation, suffering and ennui that is suffered in no other employment in the world. Shattered bodies, long-lasting and occasionally permanent psychological illnesses, these are just some of the prices soldiers are routinely expected to pay. They can literally be ordered to go die, all that’s required is any handy plausible excuse for the sacrifice from their commanding officer.

So why are they paid so little, why are their bereaved families left with scraps? Even the most progressive government support programs are little more than patchwork welfare. Some might argue that death or severe physical injury is something that’s understood when you enter into the army, but so what? That’s hardly the point. The fact is that whether the kids understand or not, if you’re going to employ people to sacrifice their bodies and sometimes their lives for your policy, how can you not pay them or their families enormous amounts? Why does a stockbroker or a pharmacist make so much more than a soldier? Is their service more valuable? Not according to the glory-trumpeting propaganda used to recruit the soldiers and support the politicians’ use of them. But that’s where the political and governmental support for the soldiers ends. Once you’re in uniform, you’re cannon fodder.

Imagine a parts factory where a guy slips and falls into the machinery and gets ground into hamburger…the company might pay a large or perhaps massive sum to his family, even though it was an accident. It shouldn’t have happened. Now, the Army is a job where death is, in fact, part of the job. There’s no way around that. So, this is some kind of reasoning for paying less?? A soldier’s death in combat can hardly be characterized as an accident. I mean, otherwise why do they give them guns? You don’t send a bunch of guys with guns up against a bunch of other guys with guns and then say ‘Oh my, what terrible accidents! How did that happen?’ when the corpses start rolling in. Yet there is nothing like the same amount of restitution for the bereaved. There should be, but there is not. Probably one month’s car payment and rent, maybe…and a little felt box with his picture, a meaningless posthumous medal and a rubber-stamp signature from the President.

Here’s another good reason to pay soldiers top dollar: There’d be a lot fewer wars, if any. The Army would be extremely difficult to transform into a juggernaut abused by power-hungry politicians. The military would have to be much more careful with its soldiers, because of the tremendous extra investment that had been made in them. On the bright side, they certainly wouldn’t have as much of a recruitment problem, they’d be turning most of the applicants away! Hell, if they were paying $85,000 a year to be in the military I might even sign up for a spell! Go kill me some folks. See foreign lands. Burn some stuff.

But when all the strategy and statistics and political arguments are pushed aside, the glaring injustice still squats there for any who care to look at it: How can you ask people to enlist and perform in such a potentially disastrous and deadly profession, and not place them among the highest-paid professionals in your economy? When a young man is blown to pieces in the desert, supposedly making the “ultimate sacrifice to protect and honor his country”, how can you not set up his family essentially for life? Their father and husband just DIED willingly for your policies! How is that not worthy of a massive paycheck? You can’t put a price on human life, but you can at least repay the family for the loss they've endured as fairly as can be managed. The sort of amount that makes the government think twice about sending people off to die for no good reason.