What's Our Line?

America's business was business when Calvin Coolidge first uttered his famous phrase.  Now, however, America's business is war.

Although Barack Obama campaigned on a theme of change, he has done nothing to change that fundamental fact about the United States.

Why, in a nation that can work itself into a frenzy over a celebrity's breast popping out of her costume at halftime of a football game, is there not a tsunami of anger at this fundamental fact? 

Why can a blathering ignoramus on a TV show rally thousands to protest -- protest! -- our government providing health care to its citizens, whereas few voices are raised in alarm, let alone anger, at the squandering of our human and monetary resources on preemptive wars we cannot win?

Born in the violence of armed revolution, ours is a national history steeped in violence. We love it. We love our guns. We love our gory movies and the tough guys  portrayed in them.  We love our war slogans and our flag-waving notions of patriotism.  We love the idea that we are the best, bravest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth -- and if you don't believe that we mean well, we'll drop a few bombs on you and force peace down your throats.

Chris Hedges put it well in a piece entitled, "Quit Begging Obama to Be Obama and Get Mad."

"Violence," he wrote, "is spreading outward from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan to slowly tear apart individuals, families and communities. There is no immunity. The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape. The slide into chaos and a police state will become inevitable.

"The soldiers and Marines who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are often traumatized and then shipped back a few months later to be traumatized again. This was less frequent in Vietnam. Veterans, when they get out, search for the usual escape routes of alienation, addictions and medication. But there is also the escape route of violence. We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism.

"The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have unloaded hundreds of thousands of combat troops, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, back into society. According to a joint Veterans Affairs Department-University of San Francisco study published in July, 418,000 of the roughly 1.9 million service members who have fought in or supported the wars suffer from PTSD. As of August 2008, the latest data available, about a quarter-million military veterans were imprisoned on any given day-about 9.4 percent of the total daily imprisoned population. . .There are 223,000 veterans in jail or prison cells on an average day, and an unknown number among the 4 million Americans on probation. They don't have much to look forward to upon release. And if any of these incarcerated vets do not have PTSD when they are arrested, our corrections system will probably rectify the deficiency. Throw in the cocktail of unemployment, powerlessness, depression, alienation, anger, alcohol and drugs and you create thousands, if not tens of thousands, who will seek out violence the way an addict seeks out a bag of heroin."

As a people, we choose to ignore such grim truths.  Too many of us live in communities where the local economy is dependent upon the nearby military base or DoD installation.  Too many of our colleges and universities have become part of the Military Industrial Complex, dependent upon government defense contracts for too much of their budgets.  Too many of us believe that the wars we wage -- whether openly in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait or Afghaqnistan -- or clandestinely, virtually all around the world, somehow are necessary to preserve our freedoms.  Yet we willingly forfeit our most basic freedoms in the oxymoronic belief that doing so makes us safer. The president who campaigned for change has done nothing to restore those freedoms, either; has, in fact, fought to continue the very policies of his predecessor that took them away from us.

Hedges again:

"There is a yawning indifference at home about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hollow language of heroism and glory, used by the war makers and often aped by those in the media, allows the nation to feel good about war, about 'service.' But it is also a way of muzzling the voices that attempt to tell us the truth about war. And when these men and women do find the moral courage to speak, they often find that many fellow Americans turn away in disgust or attack them for shattering the myth. The myth of war is too enjoyable, and too profitable, to be punctured by reality."

It is profitbale only for those who are in the business of war, and whose wealth is so powerful that even those in the highest offices of the land do their bidding.  Never mind that we have exported most of our manufacturing jobs to other countries where workers are paid less; we dare not dismantle our enormous war machine because we'd lose too many jobs. We ignore the studies that demonstrate that a billion dollars invested in health, mass transit, home construction, education or tax cuts for personal consumption produce up to two and one-third times the number of jobs as the same billion spent on defense.

We justify unjustifiable wars by asserting that they will end our dependence on foreign oil, even as our military exponentially increases the petroleum consumption that already is greater than the consumption of the entire Chinese nation.

None of this makes us mad. After all, war is just business as usual.

Like It is, As It Were

When did it become de rigueur to apologize for saying, "I told you so" -- if, in fact, one did tell you so?  My parents said it to me often and they never apologized, always nursing the usually futile hope that one fine day I would wake up and heed their warnings about wrong and ill-advised ventures.

The time has come for many of us -- pre-eminently Dennis J. Kucinich, the most qualified person never to be seriously considered for the Presidency -- to say, unapologetically, "I told you so."

It was the oil, stupid.  Yes, Mr. and Mrs. America, your sons and daughters bled and died in Iraq for oil.

Every week, when we gathered for Peace and marched silently around the federal building, one or more someones in the group carried a sign saying, "No war for oil."  You spat on us, mooned us and flashed middle fingers at us.  When the war for oil actually began you pasted little flags and "Support Our Troops" ribbons on your SUVs and called us traitors.

You had to believe that your sons and daughters were being sent abroad to  protect us from terrorists, to bring democracy to the poor, stupid people of the Middle East, where Saddam Hussein had a great store of WMDs ready to rain upon us.  "If we don't fight 'em there," you told us, "we'll have to fight 'em here."  You would not, could not, believe that your kids were fighting and dying over there so that a handful of Americans stakeholders in megacorporations could become filthy rich on Iraqi oil.

Now the truth is seeping out.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador and son of the respected economist John Kenneth Galbraith, brought his clout and his membership in the Democratic party to an alliance with the Bush administration hawks to promote the war with Iraq. "It is time to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power," he prattled in the influential op-ed opages of the New York Times. "Regime change is not an end in itself but a means to an end."

When we had occupied the country, fetched Hussein from his hole in the ground and Mr. Bush had declared fatuously, "Mission Accomplished," Mr. Galbraith became a key member of the commission that crafted our puppet government in Iraq and drafted its constitution.  He took good care of the Kurds, with whom he had a long history of profitable relationships.

Now the Times tells us, in another of its sorry sequence of "oopses"  about its own sorry role in promoting this sorriest of American war initiatives, Mr. Galbraith did all these things while quietly building a major stake in a Norwegian oil company whose Kurdish oil rights will net Mr. Galbraith a profit of more than 100 million dollars.

But that's peanuts in the Iraq oil takeover game.

Remember the "leadership" of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in forming the "coalition of the willing" to invade Iraq?  His own intelligence people warned him that U.S. intelligence was being "cooked to fit the policy"  of going to war under whatever justification could be made to fly.  But Blair risked scathing rebuke in Commons to take Britain into that war.   Blair is now a fat cat in the Carlyle Group, the shadowy super-investment cartel with staggering oil interests all over the globe.  British Petroleum, which owned him as PM, won the first of the enormous contracts to exploit Iraqi oil that are being awarded by our puppet government there.

Then there's our own Exxon-Mobil, whose  profits during the economic meltdown that sent millions of Americans into poverty and homelessness were greater than any ever made by a United States corporation.  Exxon  and Royal Dutch Shell recently won the right to develop one of Iraq's most prized oil fields, the West Qurna Stage 1 field.  How many Americans died to liberate that piece of the Middle East?

There are many more lucrative oil contracts to be awarded in Iraq.  Virtually every key member of the two Bush Administrations has large personal holdings in Carlyle, Haliburton, big oil companies or their major suppliers.

Timmy  Russert, who played the role of "journalist" on a TV entertainment called "Meet the Press," was a favorite in the Bush White House.  Whenever the administration wanted to plant a particularly smelly piece of bullshit, a toady would call Timmy Titmouse and arrange for someone in the administration to appear on "Meet the Press" to answer planted softball questions.

As evidence of his good conscience, Timmy occasionally brought a Democrat onto his TV show.  He invited Kucinich in February of 2003.

Quoting from the transcript of that show:

MR. RUSSERT: Congressman, you made a very strong charge against the administration and let me show you what you said on January 19. "Why is the Administration targeting Iraq? Oil." What do you base that on?


REP. KUCINICH: I base that on the fact that there is $5 trillion worth of oil above and in the ground in Iraq, that individuals involved in the administration have been involved in the oil industry, that the oil industry certainly would benefit from having the administration control Iraq, and that the fact is that, since no other case has been made to go to war against Iraq, for this nation to go to war against Iraq, oil represents the strongest incentive."

He told you so.