At home in the U.S. the Bush regime muscled through Congress its Medicare Reform Bill and firmly placed American healthcare in the hands of its cronies and lobbyist friends from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, spiking the costs of prescription medications and health insurance. At the same time, millions of working and middle class individuals who have no health insurance and who are being squeezed to death by the costs of mortgage payments, childcare, and simply putting food on the table in their households, find themselves decimated by medical bills, losing their jobs, or simply getting in over their heads financially with the credit cards they frantically use to “rob Peter and pay Paul.” But the Godfather Government saw this coming and found the “losses” incurred by Citibank, Chase, and other cronies of the banking industry intolerable, thereby making certain that the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 would sail through Congress with only a whisper of opposition.
The consequences of this legislation is now savaging the lives of countless middle and working class Americans. In fact, we must now ask a logical question: Will the grinding albatross of personal debt engender a massive pool of slave laborers in America who see no alternative to “working off their debt”? Economist Paul Krugman articulated a similar perspective in his New York Times 2005 article, "Debt Peonage". In any event, the gargantuan amounts of personal and collective debt in the United States will be a pivotal ingredient in the evisceration of the nation’s economy—a phenomenon impeccably documented by Kevin Phillips in American Theocracy: The Peril And Politics Of Radical Religion, Oil, And Borrowed Money In The Twenty-First Century. The progression of the demise is likely to be protracted rather than cataclysmic, with periodic crises, such as the housing bubble and a resultant credit bubble, heating up the subtle but yet very perceptible trial by fire.
In 2005, Business Week Online reported George W. Bush’s signature of the May 5 memo entitled “Assignment Of Function Relating To Granting Of Authority For Issuance Of Certain Directives: Memorandum For The Director Of National Intelligence.” In the document, Bush assigned intelligence czar, John Negroponte, the task of waiving Securities and Exchange Commission rules, established in 1934, pertaining to accounting disclosures by publicly-traded companies. As a result of no longer needing to reveal financial information in the name of national security, the cloning of Enron, having been in process for several years, was sealed. Instead of being required to disclose valid accounting ledgers, U.S. corporations have now been given carte blanche to maintain fiduciary legerdemain. Therefore, I must ask: How can any sane human being persist in believing that a legitimate government exists in the United States?
But we have a Congress, you may argue—and a Democratically-controlled one at that. Yes, and they have spent the past two months arguing about how to manage a war that the nation was lied into, rather than confronting the lies and turning off both the faucet of funding incessantly requested by the emperor and the deluge of profits flowing to military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the so-called progressive Democrats continue to perform as they have in the face of Bush’s most recent escalation of the war, they will confirm what any observer with two brain cells to rub together already knows: That the Democrats ARE the problem because of their insipid enabling of the fascist regime in the White House.
How many times has Congress cratered since September 11, 2001? Many more times than I have hours in the day to spend documenting them. In the past six years, we’ve all asked why. Post-9-11, we attributed Congressional loss of spine to the fear of the administration and political pressure to placate it. What is now being revealed almost daily, however, is the extent to which the tentacles of mobsters like Jack Abramoff and the K Street crowd reach into the halls of Congress. Kit Bond’s staffer was wrong only about one thing when he said that HUD was being run as a criminal enterprise: What is left of the entire former government of the United States is now more than ever being run as a criminal enterprise.
Perhaps even after all I have written here, you still believe you have a government. Whether you do or not, I’m fairly certain that when you read Catherine Austin Fitts’ exhaustive exposé on government-corporate corruption, you will no longer entertain the delusion that your so-called government is anything but institutionalized organized crime disguised as a government, or rather, empire, now teetering on the precipice of collapse.
In a shorter but succinct analysis of Godfather Government entitled "The American Tapeworm", Fitts provides a lucid but thorough explanation of the nuts and bolts of the criminal enterprise, not only within the United States, but how it is playing itself out globally, and specifically in Iraq.
Whether or not it has become clear to economists looking through rose-colored glasses, it is painfully obvious to the American consumer that the nation has entered a recession that promises to be long, deep, and most likely, global. While images of 1929 may haunt us, the gathering economic storm clouds are not likely to result in a sudden cataclysm, but rather a long, protracted, painful impoverishment on myriad levels. "This state of affairs," says Fitts, "can go on as long as it can be financed. Hence, as long as America can continue to export dollars, export Treasury bills and mortgage backed and other federally supported credit, and lead in global organized crime and warfare, a negative return economy can continue."
If you think your “government” is going to do anything to protect and support its citizens in the wake of endless imperial conquest, a housing market that is now toast, worsening global warming, global pandemics, natural disasters, massive food shortages, unprecedented outbreaks of violence and unrest, rates of unemployment that will dwarf those of the Great Depression, debt peonage, rapidly diminishing water supplies and a rotting infrastructure, as well as trainloads of worthless U.S. dollars, then the price you will pay for your gullibility and denial will be horrific. If you want to see what your “government” thinks of you and will do for you, think Katrina. Think the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s in this country when tens of thousands of human beings died while your government stood by and did nothing—and still is.
The only thing the members of your government care about is the colossal transfer of wealth—the financial coup d’ état that is in progress that will devastate you and your family economically and produce unparalleled profits for the gangsters you vote for. Absurdly, mainstream and even progressive media refer to eruptions of pervasive criminality in the federal government as ”scandals” revealing their inability to grasp the systemic disintegration of the rule of law in America and the reality that names like Abramoff, Libby, Gonzales, Walter Reed Hospital, are not scandals but symptoms of a disintegrating, rotting empire . Like AIDS victims suffering from incessant episodes of pneumonia, anemia, skin lesions, and other horrible ailments, none of which are their diagnosis but rather symptoms of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, epidemic criminality in high places is systemic and inherent in a fascist empire in the throes of collapse. To address the symptom as the disease merely facilitates the disease's progression and exacerbates the resultant suffering.
The driving force of fascism, and indeed all empires, is amoral sociopathy about which I wrote in my recent article "The Science Of Evil And Its Use For Political Purposes". Like AIDS or any other virulent syndrome, its symptoms manifest relentlessly but are systemic and therefore cannot effectively be addressed on the level of the symptom--the principal reason why political action, itself contaminated by the syndrome, provides bandaids and chicken soup, but is incapable of extricating itself from the syndrome.
To understand this is to stop referring to the criminal syndicate posing as the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches as “government” at all. To grasp this is to stop responding with naive, jaw-dropping surprise in the face of systemic corruption and to relinquish all hope that some other party or some more innovative politician will make it all better. There IS no government of the United States, but only corporations and centralized financial systems.
Therefore, it is now time to ponder how you will take care of yourself and your loved ones in the face of deepening, brutal, merciless, collapse (whether sudden or protracted), in an economy hollowed out and stripped bare, attended as corroding empires always are, by totalitarian management of the unruly and impoverished masses.
In 1937 Robert Brady called the corporate world view “organized piracy” and asked:
Is there any fundamental difference in appreciation of human values or in general outlook on life between a stockbroker and a pirate?…What on the open seas is thought of as an outlaw and ‘piratical’ raid of group on group is in another setting played as a legitimate game in which each man is pitted against every other man for all he can ‘get by with’ short of a snarl with criminal law.
This is fascism, and your “government” is already there. The wildly popular “Sopranos” HBO series has gone the way of all mini-series, now appearing several times a week in re-run status. Its greatest contribution to the culture, in my opinion, was its mirror image of the chicanery of empire, reminding us that the "Sopranos" of government have never gone away; in fact, they’re just getting warmed up. Tony, Silvio Dante, Johnny Sack, Uncle Junior, Christopher Moltisanti, Paulie Walnuts, and Dr. Melfi—a cast of thugs and enablers such as these, is the only government you have now or ever will have in the United States of America.
Or as Don Henley might say, "Offer up your best defense, this is the end of the innocence."
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