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The Shame of the Nation: A Collective Perversion - by Stephen LendmanThe daily headlines about a single congressman's online pedophiliac behavior obscure the greater issue of a nation off its moorings and afflicted by the collective perversion of defiling the foundational equity and justice-for-all letter and spirit of what the nation long-claimed to stand for but no longer does if it ever did. Nearly everyone in the administration, Congress and courts share the collective guilt and shame and by their actions destroyed Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address "resolve....that this nation....shall have a new birth of freedom (in a) "government of the people, by the people, for the people (that) shall not perish from the earth."
They conspiratorially participated in the crimes of a nation that go against Lincoln's hope that the dead he spoke of hadn't "died in vain" on "the great battle-field" where he stood and all the other civil war ones he referred to. They also defiled what the Founders stood for and gave us in 1787 when 55 of them met in the Philadelphia State House, where the Declaration of Independence was signed 11 years earlier, and framed an historic foundational document for the new federal republic they hoped would last into "remote futurity." Benjamin Franklin was there but wasn't so sure and openly and presciently warned we might not be able to keep it. Even at our nation's birth, he understood the risk.
Our Nation's Beginnings and Path Since
Even at its outset, the flaws in the republic were broad and deep, but we managed to survive anyway and grow as a nation in spite of them. We had the right people give us a remarkable foundational start, and it helped in no small measure that along the way we had enlightened periods like the late 19th century Progressive Movement and later the glorious New and Fair Deals and Great Society when government actually served the needs of the people.
It didn't last, and the modern-day "great transformation" south began in the early 1970s with the breakdown of the post-WW II Bretton Woods international economic order when the enormous debt from the Vietnam war forced Richard Nixon to close the gold window and make the dollar a fiat currency backed by nothing but the good faith of the issuing authority. Trilaterialism also emerged then to counter what its influential members saw as a "crisis of democracy," meaning too much of it. It was founded by Chase Manhattan bank president David Rockeller (scion of the king of the original "robber barons"), Zbignew Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter's national security advisor) and had about 300 other "eminent private citizen" members (including Jimmy Carter) of an elite international ruling class whose power is centered in the dominant transnational corporate interests aiming to rule the world and make it safe for capital - meaning, at the expense of the public interest. This was the period when capital began to be deregulated and what's now called neoliberalism emerged to counter and erode the social and economic legacy of the FDR through LBJ years. Even Republican Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s was wise enough to leave in place the New Deal policies he knew were enlightened and good for the nation overall.
Trilateralists had other ideas, and they only took a few years to begin reversing the great social gains begun under Franklin Roosevelt that would begin to atrophy fast with the engineered election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. He and his administration began a generation of government of, for and by the privileged serving the interests of capital and abusing the people who elected the ones in it. We still had a semblance of real elections then, but it didn't help. Today even that's lost as technology and the corruption of power destroyed the most fundamental element of a democratic society making the way things once were now just a relic of another era. A free and fair election process is not the stock and trade of the current neocon Bush regime, and it proved it the two times we were led to believe the current incumbent and a good number of his congressional cohorts were actually the people's choices. They only were if by "the people" we mean those of privilege who stood to gain the most with them in office.
The Bush Neocon Road to Hell With No Good Intentions
One day, George W. Bush's inauguration on January 20, 2001 will be remembered as a day of infamy in the nation's history if it's not already. It was also disturbingly reminiscent even then of the fall of Paris on June 14,1940 to the Nazi Wehrmacht when the people of that city were assembled to watch the jack boots parade along the Champs-Elysees turning the "City of Light" to darkness. So too a shroud of gloom fell over our capitol and nation on our dark day for those afraid of what would follow from the fall of our government and democracy to the invading neocons. They wasted no time, and as soon as the inaugural festivities ended began the process of dismantling what remained of our democratic freedoms in earnest. Before he could even find the West Wing, George Bush immediately signed executive orders reversing the few more enlightened policies of his predecessor. It was a clear sign of what was coming.
It's an agenda to tyranny aided by a tsunami of socially destructive and authoritarian executive orders to go along with the legislative and judicial acquiescence of the other two government branches to a shameless, corrupted front-man stooge for a cabal of neocon bandits led by the Vice-President in the lead role. This alliance jeopardizes the republic that now hangs by a thread that could give way on any pretext because that's what the people now in charge have in mind. Like other past "master race" regimes, their morality and agenda are corrupted by a Manichean world vision and delusions of superiority that they have a God-given moral authority to rule the world with an unchallengeable closed fist.
For them democracy, freedom and the rule of law are anathema. They stand in the way of their quest for global dominance and the subjugation of everyone in it through the barrel of a gun abroad and the so-called Department of Homeland Security at home that's our version of Hitler's dreaded Gestapo state police and his Schutzstaffel praetorian guard "Protective Squadron" known as the "SS" that had administrative control over the whole Nazi "homeland security" operation. Both these agencies became symbols of terror as justice under them was cruel and arbitrary. Their methods are now becoming standard practice under Bush neocon rule where anyone for any reason (including citizens) can now be seized without cause, called an "enemy combatant", renditioned to a torture-prison hellhole in an undisclosed corner of the earth with no chance to be free again or be able to get help. In CIA terms, the law of the land now allows the state to do openly what it's been secretly doing all along - make everyone it targets "ghost prisoners" taken on "ghost planes" to be held in secret "ghost prisons" subject to the justice of a military tribunal with no competent defense or right of appeal. Is there any clearer definition of tyranny than that?
George Bush's Developing Years
Anyone knowing about George Bush's developing years aren't surprised by how he governs. He showed his dark side sadistic attitude and behavior early on. Bush progressed from a young boy blowing up frogs for sport with firecrackers to doing it now to countries with king-sized "shock and awe" ones. Along the way, he had his problems with alcohol and drugs, evaded serving in Vietnam and once as Texas governor shamelessly mocked a desperate woman's cries for help at the eleventh hour before she was executed refusing to show any mercy in an interview he gave. He can also take "credit" for having presided over more executions as Texas governor than any other governor in the nation since capital punishment was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976. Even his own Texas aides said of him then that this is a man who enjoys killing.
He enjoyed inflicting pain in his college days as well as evidenced by a 1967 so-called fraternity initiation rite he was involved in that was exposed by the Yale Daily News and reported in the New York Times at the time. It involved the barbaric hazing procedure used by Delta Epsilon Kappa (DKE) fraternity when Bush was a Yale senior and fraternity president. New members then had to undergo painful hours of being kicked and beaten with wooden paddles lasting into the early morning hours leading up to the sadistic climax of being burned on their backsides with a hot branding iron in the shape of the letter Delta. It was enough to cause second degree burns and leave a permanent scar on the skin area as well as in the memories of those initiates going through it. When word got out about the practice, DKE fraternity was censured and fined $1,000, and the practice was banned by the university.
Electoral Fraud Is the First Step on the Road to Tyranny
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