The present decade presents certain intertwined stories of George Bush, Blackwater, Halliburton and KBR in Iraq, of al Qaida in Iraq, of neoconistic empire–building, of capitalism's race to deplete the resources of sustainability:
is a discombobulated, five-dimensional puzzle that many Americans are ignoring, while the Planet gazes on in dismay
Like deer in a car's headlights, wallowing blindly, the great majority of US voters are retaining historic allegiance to moribund political philosophies that exist, today, only in name.
The 'dimensions' of this explosive puzzle are:
Temporal
Economic
Geopolitical
Political
Philosophical
The truth about George W Bush, his neoconservative supporters, and the damage wrought by his misAdministration, is more ludicrous than that word could convey.
Yet anyone's imagination, directing itself into the totality of the concept, is too outrageously discordant; most intelligent rationalists ponder the fragments alone, which they may easily grasp, while thinking that equals the whole of the 'real world' (as we know it).
Irrational as it sounds, it's important to know when and how this dilemma will be resolved, and upon completion of the Bush debacle, the incongruous facets of its reality should unite, jointed or meshing as tightly as Inca pyramidal walls.
Temporal Dimension
In eight years under Bill Clinton, it wasn't the downsizing of the US Armed Forces that torqued out America's future.
It was a much simpler fact: after some twelve years of US involvement in both Vietnam and the benign Space Race, then the eleven–year Reagan-Bush (the Greater) defense build-up through the Iran–Contra scandal, the 'war on drugs' in South America, and the Persian Gulf War, the conservative, then neoconservative dream – of perpetually growing America's Permanent Military Industry – was shut down: for the first time in some 25 years or more.
A paradox emerging from this 'peace dividend', which today continues to serve as evidence; how the Republicants used Clinton's concerted efforts to 'streamline' the military as an insult of his capacities, when these were in fact based on recommendations inherited in part from the Defense Secretary of Bush the Greater: Dick Cheney.
Peaceful expansion of the US knowledge economy created a critical–mass economic growth explosion from Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Cisco and so many other companies, all creating their proportional empires which re-channelled wealth and investment flows away from Aeronautics, Defense industries and other dinosaurs of the pre–knowledge economy.
Similarly to how the hippie counter-culture had once almost 'derailed' the US war markets, the 1990s introduced the Geek Revolution, which rapidly overshadowed the US war machine.
At nearly the same time, coincidental geopolitical events were taking place in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Iraq; events that were causing certain men, the likes of whom James Baker III would be sharing lunch hour meetings, to discuss the major impact on US business and its economy.
Thus, temporally and temporarily the Nineties were a decade without massive growth in US military expansion or influence. That is NOT a bad concept.
Economic Dimension
Permanent Military Keynesianism (PmK) is the term by which certain economists have categorized a new form of government spending, which flips upside–down the very core of governmental conceptualization, usually the most disdained by 'conservatives'.
Conservatives are historically said to be (and boast incessantly) for less government, which is linked with greater business freedom (remember that Fascism in government theory, relates a strong interrelationship between business and government).
Conservatives cringed when, during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt invented the multiple Agencies that rebuilt the American work force by work projects to improve National Parks and many other grand infrastructural oeuvres. That peacetime mobilization helped build the working momentum for a new war effort.
Keynesian theory was named for noted economist John Maynard Keynes, who called upon governments to boost just these types of grand scale projects in times of recession or depression, beyond budgeted expenditure levels, as a boost to jump–start a sickly performing economy.
Conservatives, or Republicans if and when they return to normal party principles, detest the Keynesian theory expressly because its implementations are countercyclical: government may be 'spending' money it hadn't yet received as tax revenue.
Thus the flip side, from Keynesianism to Permanent Military Keynesianism, involves an unstated need by the Puppet Mastered, formerly conservative Republicans, to sustain the growth of a War Economy as a cancerous destruction of a healthy balanced economy... mindful that this was clearly predicted by America's greatest modern era military commander, Dwight D Eisenhower:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Notwithstanding these immortal, true phrases, there is no part of the Bush clan, or their friends, that is opposed to skyrocketing gasoline prices (profits!)... a win–win opportunity for those in the highest American echelons, as their oil stocks rise in value, as exploration companies dust off equipment that is now viable, since oil reserves that were previously unthinkable, due to high expense for the return on investment, are now amply–priced for a fat profit margin.
Billions stolen in Iraq, fraudulent contractors operating in Iraq, all taking outrageous profits from fellow US Taxpayers, as more billions are siphoned into the coffers of Big Oil Companies, through excessive profits as a result of dwindling reserves and acutely–focused attacks or distortions of relevant economies such as we see this week in Kenya...
Kenya? Bush?? Don't get it?
Scientists talk about 'entropy theory' in terms of thermodynamics; in a simplistic example, any closed system has working energy and 'wasted energy': as the wasted energy increases, the stability of the system is degraded.
Excessive military spending, had Eisenhower been a scientist and not a general, could have been stated as a simple entropic waste of governmental resources, that could be building homes, schools and hospitals, instead of an insatiable supply of deathToys.
Geopolitical Dimension
Bush and Rove taught EVERY political Chief of any country how to blatantly steal elections, forcing the citizens of the world to ponder the essential meaning of 'Democracy'.
The Bush misAdministration has encouraged and educated (passively, at the least) various Heads of State, from Putin to Hu Jintao in China, how to deal with 'domestic political opponents', through misuse and abuse of the all–encompassing label of 'terrorist'.
Moreover, pushing the neoconservative political agenda towards its most extreme points, Bush and his cronies, puppet–masters or disciples are achieving the opposite of their rhetoric, as they prop up the fading Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan, while proclaiming support for democracy in all the Islamic countries.
The times we are witnessing, show that the roles of governments around the world have a sense of 'take what we can grab, however we can take it!'.
Political Dimension
While back at home, Bush presents AND represents the worst aspects of PmK, siphoning off hope for a better world (except in his rhetoric), through the massive deficit 'War President' campaigns of Fear and Terror, that he waged under the maniacal tutelage of Karl Rove. Campaigns abroad fed into political campaigns at home: the 2002 and 2006 Congressional campaigns were waged against a fear–driven public, as well as in 2004, during the reelection campaign of Bush the Lesser.
With the MIC (military–industrial–complex) rooted like dandelions across every Congressional district in our country, a long process that now seems irreversible, the MIC has mutated, since the loss of Bush the Grand in 1992. Here at ZEN Central, the transformation into the
Petroleum–Military–Communications–Industrial–Complex, or PMCIC,
... has created a seamless web of petroleum–related industries (including of course the prime addicts: automobiles), communications and media, and industry (in general, and of course defense or aerospace), a complex fascist influence on US government policy.
No politician in America can combat the 'PMCIC'... they are 'selected' through a monetization process, selected for 'name appeal' and possessing a ZERO Fuck UPs history (or better: ZERO unexplainable Fuck Ups).
There's a corollary to this statement: any politician who comes out in favor of reducing the military, reducing US dependence on petroleum imports, reducing Health Care costs, reforming the US media through the FCC, is NEVER going to win office, under our present corrupted system.
Philosophical Dimension
More than two hundred years ago, Western civilizations, under monarchic economies, worldwide conquest campaigns, and the hubris of hegemony over foreign peoples, cultures and traditions, produced 'the Enlightenment' in both a spiritual and secular sense.
Manifest Destiny became the rallying cry for US policy, as it conquered, then negotiated treaties with Native American tribes, all of which treaties were promptly and continuously broken.
Somehow, that feeling of superiority transcended itself, in the second half of the Twentieth Century, as America 'saved Europe' twice, leapfrogging over the older European States in economic prowess, bolstered by the rising exportation of cultural manifestations: films, music and TV, as well as consumer goods that flaired in the nostrils of younger generations.
America succeeded in Coca Cola'ing the world, in McDonalds'izing the planet, a commercial victory over communism that politics could never countervail.
But as the world sought to keep up, to take the economic role of cheap labour provider, as economic advancement farmed off 'old tech' jobs (making lightbulbs, tires, running shoes, etc) to distant shores.
Those peoples all yearned, as well, for compensatory purchasing power to sustain these markets, the Homeland attitude in America was growing stronger, in the neoconservative model of life in the Twenty–first Century.
The philosophy of fear, combined with the enjoyment of consumer goods consumption, equates in near totality with the concepts presented in the work of a dystopian future:
1984
Conclusion
Through the advent of the Military Industrial Complex, its evolution into the PMCIC, and the moral degeneration of politics in the United States, it is clear that a trend has been established, of reducing citizens into two (not mutually exclusive) classes:
the Sellers
the Buyers
One can simply decipher one's location on any two–axis graph, how high up the 'food chain' one's life is.
This presumes one has accepted to climb a ladder of advancement and achievement in their society, at the personal level.
How, in the future, momentous shifts away from overwhelming Defense budgets, over–depleting of natural resources, over–fishing of ocean populations, and over–consumption are to be effected, is a question affecting every living being.
America has for some years now, and that means 'AMERICA' as the abstract ideal of a world that once admired our ideals much more than today, been on a road that is perfectly described by 'short term gains'.
Gains for politicians, to get elected without taking any stands.
Gains for capitalists, to increase profits today, by ignoring 'external costs', climate change and resource depletion.
Wherein the gains for a common, persevering man or woman? A family? Their 'Seventh Generation'?
Look elsewhere than to the United States, as once people's backs turned away from Rome. Hear this, however: the end of the Roman Empire did produce something of rare note...
the Dark Ages
How justifiable to ponder that, as petroleum passes One Hundred dollars the barrel, in a simple supply and demand ratio that won't retrograde significantly.
And tomorrow, we begin to fathom, the choices that America will offer the world, the world post-Bush...
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© 2008
