A Look Back and Ahead In An Age of Neocon Rule

by Stephen Lendman

Borrowing the opening line from Dickens’ Tale of Two
Cities - “It was the best of times, it was the worst
of times….”  He referred to the French Revolution
promising “Liberte, egalite and fraternite” that began
in 1789, inspired by ours from 1775 - 1783.  It ended
a 1000 years of monarchal rule in France benefitting
those of privilege and established the nation as a
republic the way ours did for us here a few years
earlier.

That was the good news.  The bad was the wrong people
came to power.  They were the Jacobins who at first
were revolutionary moderates and patriots until they
lost control to extremists like Maximilien Robespierre
who ushered in a “reign of terror” (The Great Terror
sounding a lot like today’s “war on terror”)
characterized by brutal repression against perceived
enemies from within the Revolution who didn’t get a
chance to prove they weren’t.  In the name of
defending it, individual rights were denied and civil
liberties suspended.  Laws were passed that allowed
charging those designated counter-revolutionaries or
enemies of the state with undefined crimes against
liberty. 

It resulted in justice being meted out to thousands
for what Orwell called “thoughtcrimes” or for their
freely expressed opinions and actions judged hostile
to the state under a system of near-vigilante justice
by the Paris Revolutionary (kangaroo) Tribunal with no
right of appeal.  It led to the public spectacle of an
inglorious trip to and quick ending from the death
penalty method of choice of the times - the guillotine
that was barbaric but quick, and a much easier, less
painful way to die for its victims than the use of
state-inflicted torture-murder in the commonly drawn
out lethal injection process used in 37 of the 38
death penalty states and by the federal government
making the condemned endure a slow agonizing death
unable to cry out while they’re being made to suffer
during their last moments of life.  Instances of this
barbarity aren’t exceptions.  They’re the rule, the
exception being this time a report or two of what
really happens slipped out and made news.

Fast forward to the past year and the previous five
under George Bush and ask: sound familiar?  French
Revolutionary laws during the “reign of terror,” like
the Law of Suspects, were earlier versions of our
Patriot I and II and Military Commission Acts today.
The Revolutionary Tribunal, with no chance for
justice or right of appeal, was no different than our
military courts today, and too many civil ones, in
which any US citizen may now be tried anywhere in the
world, with no habeas right of appeal or hope for due
process and from which those sent there won’t fare any
better than the French did, doomed to meet their
unjust fate - even though much in these laws today is
unconstitutional and one day will be reversed by a
High Court upholding the law instead of the extremist
rogue one now empowered that scorns it.

What May Lie Ahead As the New Year Approaches

At the end of the sixth horrific year under the reign
of the Bush modern-day extremist Jacobin-neocons, we
can now look ahead, but to what.  We have an
administration in charge for another two years one
longtime analyst characterizes as “a bunch of crooks,
incompetents and perverts” with the president’s
approval rating plunging as low as 28% in some
independent polls and a growing number of people in
the country demanding his impeachment and removal from
office. 

It’s not likely from the new Democrat-led Congress
arriving in January, as their DLC leadership took it
off the table and so far only promises more of the
same failed policy other than some minor tinkering
around the edges to create an illusion of change no
different than the deceptive kind of course correction
proposed by the Baker “Gang of Ten” Iraq Study Group
(ISG) that guarantees none at all.  It doesn’t leave
members of the body politic with much hope for the new
year that will likely just deliver more of the same
rogue leadership and policy engendering growing public
discontent and anger but not at a level so far to
scare the those in power enough to want to address it.

The heart of the problem is the unpopular illegal war
of aggression in Iraq, the cesspool of corruption and
scorn for the law in Washington, and the assault on
human rights and civil liberties in the country
justified by the so-called “war on terror” now
rebranded a “long war” against “Islamofascism” and
“radicals and extremists” (who happen to be Muslims.)
It’s the same failed policy using the kind of
deliberately provocative language intended to deceive
the public to think a threat great enough exists to
justify any state action in the name of national
security including waging wars of aggression and all
the horrors associated with them at home and abroad.

After the Baker “bob and weave,’’  the now you see a
change of course and now you don’t, disingenuously
suggesting a drawdown and exit strategy, the New York
Times on December 16 reports “Military planners and
White House budget analysts have been asked to provide
President Bush with options for increasing American
forces in Iraq by 20,000 or more.” 

The article goes on to say one option is to boost the
force level by up to 50,000 even though any increase
greater than 20 - 30,000 would be “prohibitive” - but
it won’t deter the Pentagon, on administration orders,
from extending tours of duty even longer for forces
now there and calling up thousands of reservists and
greatly extended National Guard units to get into this
quagmire even though it’s recognized their presence
will only make things worse as well as place an unfair
burden on those called up, who’ve served before, and
their families. 

As of December 27, it’s somewhat less clear what Iraq
troop strength policy will emerge in January following
comments by incoming Democrat chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, who just
stated “I totally oppose this surging of additional
American troops into Baghdad.  It’s contrary to the
overwhelming body of informed opinion, both inside and
outside the administration.”  Senator Biden will hold
hearings on Iraq on January 9, and at that time things
may heat up a bit at least in rhetoric if not in final
policy.

Additional heat may be created in January after George
Bush admitted for the first time on December 19 that
the US isn’t winning the war even though two weeks
before the November mid-term elections he said
emphatically “absolutely, we’re winning in Iraq.”  He
wouldn’t acknowledge what most every honest observer
knows including the Pentagon Joint Chiefs - that the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are lost.  They can’t be
won and won’t be.  No military solution is possible
now or any time ahead. 

The president is living in a state of denial, obsessed
with his messianic mission fed him by the
vice-president and hardest of his hard line neocon
allies, and it shows in the outlandish solutions he
proposes to an insoluble problem - send in more troops
(that will only make things worse) and increase the
overall size of the military (that guarantees a
permanent state of war). 

It also clearly sounds a lot like the first official
hint from the chief executive that a draft is needed
and will come at some unspecified time ahead - likely
following another “made in Washington” 9/11 calamity
severe enough to get the public to go along with
something now thought intolerable.  The president’s
sentiment was echoed on December 21 by administration
Veterans Affairs secretary Jim Nicholson who
(incredibly) said that “society would benefit” if the
US reinstated the military draft.  He didn’t say for
whom.  He did go further when asked in a press
conference whether it should include women saying: “I
think if we bring back the draft, there should be no
loopholes for anybody who happens to be drafted.”
Maybe, to his thinking, it should include pregnant
mothers as well and single ones with small children.

Such openness by the VA secretary apparently was too
much, too soon, and too clear for the White House that
quickly got the Department of Veterans Affairs to
issue a separate follow-up statement from Nicholson
saying: “Let me be clear, I strongly support the
all-volunteer military and do not support returning to
a draft.”  Let the reader choose which message to
believe, but, with the nation in a permanent state of
war, it looks like the trial balloon and hint of a
draft now being floated is the opening round to
instituting one at some designated time ahead.  That
likelihood looms even greater as the Selective Service
System announced it’s planning a comprehensive test of
the military draft machinery, which it hasn’t done
since 1998 while, at the same time, saying the agency
isn’t gearing up for a draft.  But what else would
they say as they make plans to do this on orders from
the administration.

It all amounts to an increasing level of insanity from
a power-crazed administration as well as sounding much
like Benjamin Franklin’s wisdom who said “The
definition of insanity is doing the same thing over
and over expecting different results.”  In the case of
Iraq, doing it with more troops on the ground is even
more insane as a greater occupying force there only
guarantees a stronger resistance to it presenting more
targets to aim at with virtually no chance for a
peaceful resolution of the conflict short of a full
unconditional withdrawal of all occupying forces, no
strings attached, that won’t happen.  In the case of a
future draft, now seeming more likely, it only
guarantees this nation plans to stay in a permanent
state of war against future enemies to be chosen with
those in or to be included in the “axis of evil”
heading the target list at some point ahead.

George Bush and others floating these lunatic schemes
have no regard for the lives of those affected, and
why should they.  For now, their aim is to buy time,
and as long as they can get away with it, they and
their well-connected cronies and corporate friends
stand to gain from the price everyone else has to pay
- a huge one including the thousands of lives lost
each week and the many more thousands of survivors
whose lives will never be the same again.

Think what it means as the new year approaches.  The
nation is at war on two fronts, it’s likely more ahead
are contemplated by some in the administration, no
substantive effort is being made to change course, and
the condition at home is a relentless march toward
becoming a full-blown national security police state
we’re already perilously close to.  It’s because the
neocon-dominated Bush administration is reckless in
ambition, out-of-control in policy, and the embodiment
of a relentless and ruthless “weapon of mass
destruction” unleashed on all humanity in its way. 

It’s underpinned by an extremist ideology based on
rule by savage capitalism that’s frighteningly close
to and borders on the tipping edge of the classic
definition of fascism combining corporatism with
strong elements of patriotism and nationalism, a
claimed messianic Almighty-directed and blessed
mission, and characterized by authoritarian rule
backed by the iron fist of militarism and ‘homeland
security” enforcers, illegally spying on everyone, and
intolerant of dissent and opposition in an age where
the law is what the chief executive says it is and all
semblance of checks and balances no longer exist.  In
a word - despotism, but cloaked in the deceptive
rhetoric of a modern democracy falsely claiming to
serve the needs of all its people.

It’s also an age of extreme greed and corruption
infesting government and corporate boardrooms with the
gap between rich and poor at levels greater than since
the 19th century “Gilded Age” of the “robber barons.”
It’s something economist Paul Krugman calls “entirely
unprecedented” under George Bush that “For the first
time in our history, so much (of the nation’s economic
growth has gone) to a small, wealthy minority” while
the great majority can’t stay even as
inflation-adjusted wages fail to keep up with rising
prices and poverty is growing in an age of affluence
affecting tens of millions in the richest country ever
in the world. 

The grossness of this disparity was on the online
business pages of the New York Times on Christmas Day
in a story titled “Wall St. Bonuses” So Much Money,

Too Few ($250,000) Ferraris.  The article highlights
that “The 2006 bonus gold rush has re-energized some
luxury markets” like Manhattan real estate that had
softened earlier in the year and echoed the lament of
a real estate broker about a “dearth of listings for
two clients trying to spend $20 million on Manhattan
properties” while mentioning some of the Wall Street
wealthy already in their luxury nests are buying $5
million apartments for their children and private
resort vacation homes to boot. 

The same ugly data is there overall worldwide in a
newly released study by the Helsinki-based World
Institute for Development Economics Research of the UN
University that shows the richest 2% of adults in the
world own more than half of its wealth compared, on
the other end, with the assets of about half the
world’s population accounting for barely 1% of global
wealth - lumps of coal only for them and a “Ba Humbug”
dismissal for their plight by those with everything
wanting still more.

The Cost to a Society Based on Predatory Capitalism
and Out-of-Control Greed, Corruption and Militarism

The societal breakdown in the US is a national
disgrace and affects many millions.  A sampling of
some of it is listed below:

—47 million Americans can’t afford basic health
insurance.

—Over 80 million in total have no health coverage
during some portion of each year and most of them are
employed.

—The Bush administration just proposed sweeping cuts
in payments to pharmacies to reduce the Medicaid
benefits 50 million poor in the country rely on, can’t
afford to make up the difference for on their own, and
may have to forego medications they vitally need if
pharmacies won’t fill prescriptions at lower prices.

—The US ranks 41st in infant mortality, and the
World Health Organization (WHO) ranks the country 37th
in the world in “overall health performance” and 54th
in the fairness of health care despite spending at a
current level overall of around $2 trillion a year or
about double the amount per capita of the OECD
countries that deliver superior health care overall to
their citizens as a national priority.

—Well over 12 millions Americans struggle daily to
feed themselves, and many thousands across the country
can’t afford housing and are forced to sleep on the
streets including in winter cold.

—A just released December 14 US Conference of Mayors
report said these conditions continue to worsen based
on a survey of 23 cities showing 7% more requests for
food aid in 2006 following a 12% jump in 2005 during a
period of economic growth.

—The same report showed requests for shelter rose 9%
in 2006 with requests from families with children
rising 5%.

—Public education is deliberately being eroded with
illiteracy in basic reading, math and computer skills
shamefully high and rising.

—The US prison population is the highest in the
world at 2.2 million and increasing by 1000 a week,
half of those in it are black, and half of the total
prison population is there for non-violent offenses
half of which are drug-related.  The US prison system
is a shameful Gulag and an affront to humanity.  The
appalling conviction and sentencing of first-time drug
offender Weldon Angelos is but one of countless
examples.  He was convicted of three sales of
marijuana in 2004 while in possession of a gun
unrelated to the sale.  Under the insane federal
mandatory sentencing laws, he was sentenced to five
years for the first offense and 25 years each for the
other two totaling 55 years in federal prison or a
likely life sentence if he’s forced to serve it all
because he possessed and sold a few “joints” of a
substance less harmful than legal cigarettes that kill
millions yearly while it’s not known marijuana ever
killed anyone using it.  Only in America.

—The true state of things overall is suppressed by
the dominant corporate-controlled media (including the
NPR and PBS parts of it) functioning as a national
thought-control police controlling all mass
communication and depriving the public of any real
information vital to a healthy democracy and their
welfare.

—Racial segregation is as great as in the 1960s, and
the national sport almost is demonizing Muslims as
“terrorists, radicals, extremists and Islamofascists”
and impoverished “people the color of the earth”
Mexicans and Latin Americans as “illegal immigrant
invaders polluting” our white western European society
and culture, mindless that they only come el norte in
desperate search of work because of the devastating
effects of NAFTA on their lives that destroyed their
ability to support their families. 

Data from the Oakland Institute think tank
specializing in social, economic and environmental
issues shows that heavily subsidized US corn exports
to Mexico have tripled since NAFTA came into force
forcing two million Mexican corn farmers out of
business, something that was predicted in advance but
allowed to happen anyway.  It also led to suicides but
at a rate nowhere near the level globalized trade
US-style had on farmers in India where as many as
100,000 of them have taken their own lives because
“New World Order” indebtedness caused them to lose
their farms and then everything else.

—Childhood poverty in the US ranks 22nd and next to
last among developed nations when there should be
virtually none tolerated in the richest country in the
world or toleration of any of the other listed abuses.

—An alarming number of high-paying and other jobs
have been exported abroad in a process that’s gone on
for decades but picked up in momentum since the 1980s
and especially in recent years.  Mckinsey Global
Institute estimates the volume will grow 30 - 40% a
year for the next five years.  Forrester Research
estimates 3.3 million white-collar jobs will be lost
by 2015 with most affected areas in financial services
and information technology, and University of
California researchers estimate that “up to 14 million
American jobs are at risk to outsourcing.”

It adds up to a nation in decline, losing its
industrial base and becoming primarily a
service-oriented economy mainly offering low-skill,
low-pay jobs with the better, higher-paying ones
growing scarcer, making a college degree in areas
outside of critical skills almost worthless.
Exporting jobs to low-wage countries is a boon for
corporate bottom lines in an age of “globalized free
trade” never characterized as fair for the harm it
does to millions of wage earners at home or in the
developing countries on the receiving end being
exploited by capital that sucks out their wealth and
impoverishes their people, many of whom work for
near-slave-rate wages in a modern era of serfdom in
countries around the world in Asia, Africa, Eastern
Europe and Latin and Central America.

—Worker outrage around the world in protest is
growing in response to these abuses (unreported in the
US) because most governments are doing little or
nothing to ameliorate them.  It showed up on November
22 in South Korea when over 200,000 workers belonging
to the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU)
staged a general strike protesting in 17 cities
against the bilateral US-Korea Free Trade Agreement
currently being negotiated that will do to their
members and farmers what NAFTA did to Mexicans and
India’s agricultural trade policies did to their small
farmers.  It continued on the streets in the days
following and spilled over to the Big Sky Ski Resort
in Big Sky, Montana where negotiations are being held
in seclusion but are still unable to escape the daily
protests held against them there.

—It happened as well in Cebu City, Philippines where
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (closely allied to
the failed Bush agenda and elected through fraud) had
to cancel two Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) meetings in December attended by 19 countries
including the US and Canada.  It was an abrupt ending
to the meeting held to ratify trade and security
agreements because of the mass protests by workers,
farmers and others against their harmful effects
forcing thousands in the country to leave daily to go
abroad for work paying enough to support their
families at home.

—Workers almost everywhere have been harmed,
including in the US, as union clout and worker rights
here have declined in an age where the social contract
government once had with its working people has been
dismantled with less than 13% of the work force (the
lowest in the industrialized world) unionized today
compared to one-third of it in 1958.  In an age of
modern-day “robber barons,” the middle class bedrock
of a democratic state is slowly disappearing as the
nation moves closer to becoming a banana republic at a
time when 51 of the world’s largest economies are
corporate giants, most of them US-based.

It all goes on with no redress or sign of change in an
age of out-of-control militarism and outlandish
budgets supporting it that began ratcheting up under
Ronald Reagan, along with big budget deficits to pay
for it, and have gone wild under George Bush.  The
White House just approved a fiscal year 2008 near $470
billion Pentagon budget on top of an additional $100+
billion off-the-books amount minimum more that will
boost this year’s war budget for Iraq and Afghanistan
to a yearly record of about $170 billion.  It also
needs tens of billions annually for “Homeland
Security” and tens of billions more for the “spy
agencies” totaling numbers in the range of well over
$700 billion a year and rising - while social spending
continues to be slashed to pay for it all in a
heartless society scorning its people and their
essential needs as long as the interests of capital
are served along with the militarists in it profiting
from its blood money.

Since WW II, when the US emerged as the only dominant
nation left standing, Washington, instead of disarming
and fostering peace, embarked on a now long-running
program of militarization to maintain the country’s
political, economic and military preeminence over all
others.  It takes a lot of military spending to do it,
that could have been used far more productively
investing in human capital (like health and education)
and physical capital (like essential infrastructure)
as well as promoting non-military related business and
industry that over time pay back far greater dividends
than the short-term gains from building weapons and
having large standing armies, navies and air forces
that only exist to kill and destroy.

Productive spending also pays off in creating a
society free from a dominant military culture like now
exists out-of-control and hard to contain in the
Pentagon that scorns civil liberties and democratic
principles and values that have nearly vanished.  The
course this nation chose 60 years ago led to today’s
corrupted society armed to the teeth for endless wars
with the most destructive weapons in human history
deployed on over 800 known military bases in about 155
of the 192 countries of the world.  It cost an
unimaginable amount creating this monster as
documented by the Center for Defense Information.  It
reported this country spent an estimated $21 trillion
in constant dollars since 1945 on defense, the numbers
continue to rise sharply, and the mindset of most of
the nation’s leaders, especially George Bush, is when
you’ve got the might, you have to throw it around to
prove it as well as scare off potential challengers.

Shamefully the US stands as a modern-day Sparta
glorifying war and those put in charge to wage it.
Witness the retirement ceremony for Army Major General
Geoffrey Miller last summer when Army Vice Chief of
Staff General Richard Cody awarded the man who
supervised the infamous US Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib
torture-prisons with the Distinguished Service Medal
(DDSM).  This award was established by Richard Nixon
in 1970 so the Secretary of Defense could reward
officers of the US Armed Forces “whose exceptional
performance of duty and contributions to national
security or defense have been at the highest levels.”

Witness also the December 16 retirement ceremony at
the Pentagon for unindicted war criminal and
torture-authorizer Donald Rumsfeld complete with pomp
and circumstance, George Bush and Dick Cheney in
attendance for the spectacle, and a 19 round cannon
salute that might have been better aimed.  In open
defiance of growing public anger over the war,
speakers, including the president, shamelessly lauded
Rumsfeld for the war of aggression he directed and his
leadership in doing it.  The galling scene showed Bush
hugging Rumsfeld saying: “This man knows how to lead,
and he did.  And the country is better off for it.”
He failed to say for whom, but it got worse with Dick
Cheney saying: “I believe the record speaks for itself
- Don Rumsfeld is the finest Secretary of Defense this
nation ever had.”

Contrast those spectacles with the fate of
extraordinary people like Lynne Stewart prosecuted for
her crime of courage, honor and resisting tyranny.
She was unjustly charged under the 1996 Antiterrorism
Act with four counts of aiding and abetting a
terrorist organization and violating Special
Administration Measures (SAMS) imposed by the US
Bureau of Prisons, which included a gag order on Sheik
Abdel Rahman whom she represented as counsel for the
defense in his 1995 trial because former US Attorney
General Ramsey Clark asked her to take the case.

Lynne took it in the same spirit she spent her entire
30 year professional life as a courageous champion for
the rights of the poor, underprivileged and those in
society never afforded due process unless they’re
lucky enough to have an advocate like her.  She broke
no law, and her trial was a gross miscarriage of
justice.  Still, the Justice Department asked for a
harsh 30 year sentence.  It wasn’t for any crime
committed.  It was to send a clear message to all in
the legal community not to represent “unpopular
clients” and not to afford them their legal right of
due process with competent counsel when the government
wants them put away. 

Lynne for the present had the last word being
vindicated in court on October 17 when Judge John G.
Koeltl rejected the prosecution’s case in the 28 month
sentence he handed down allowing Lynne to remain free
pending her appeal to a higher court, acknowledging it
might overturn her conviction and effectively rebuking
the Justice Department for their prosecution of a
courageous woman who spent a lifetime fighting for
justice.

The outcome was painfully different in an age of
Muslim demonization and persecution shown in the
prosecution of Dr. Rafil Dhafir, a Muslim American of
Iraqi descent and practicing oncologist until his
license was unjustly revoked as a prelude to the
greater outrage committed against him.  Dr. Dhafir was
charged and tried in another US “kangaroo court” for
what Katherine Hughes called and wrote his “crime of
compassion.”  Katherine followed the trial daily in
court for 17 weeks and remains his champion,
continuing to work tirelessly for his vindication and
release.

Dr. Dhafir was convicted and is now serving a 22 year
sentence in federal prison for violating the Iraqi
Sanctions Regulations (the IEEPA) having used his own
funds and what he could raise from others to bring
desperately needed humanitarian aid, including food
and medical supplies, to Iraqi people unable to get
them because of the punitive, harsh and unjust
sanctions imposed prior to the 2003 war.  He did it
through his Help the Needy charity, and for it was
convicted of violating the sanctions, tax fraud, money
laundering, and mail and wire fraud - a total of 60
counts and found guilty on 59 of them. 

The verdict sent another chill through the Muslim
community, and as Katherine explained on her web site
- dhafirtrial.net - “If we can get Rafil Dhafir, we
can get anyone.”  Not quite, as Lynne Stewart’s
vindication proves.  But it proves something else too.
In the age of George Bush, the chance of prevailing
against injustice as a white American is a lot better
than for a “not-as-white” Arab Muslim, even an
American one, especially one courageous enough to take
on a mission of mercy in defiance of state policy
unjustly prohibiting it. 

Dr. Dhafir was confined at the federal prison in
Fairton, NJ until December when he was transfered
further away from his family, who weren’t told.  He’s
now at what’s been described as the hellhole in Terre
Haute, IN, in an area of right wing extremism and KKK
influence, in a deliberate act of further barbaric
vengeance to break his spirit, restrict his access to
legal help and his family, and cause him undue pain
and suffering in an age of US-sanctioned and
authorized torture as a method of social control and
inhumanity and because no dissenting authority has the
courage to challenge Washington’s willingness to go
against the most basic principles of equity and
justice.

A Look Back to Find Direction Ahead

A look back to an important anniversary just reached
should have been duly noted and reflected on in the
major media, but it passed nearly unnoticed.  It was
the December 15 anniversary of the Bill of Rights of
1791 to the Constitution framed in 1787.  It gave us
unimaginable freedoms up to that time written into the
law of the land that overall was a great democratic
experiment never tried before outside of ancient
Athens for a few decades before it ended.  It gave
people the rights of free expression, religion and
peaceable assembly; protection from illegal searches
and seizure; the right of due process, against double
jeopardy and to remain silent if accused; to a speedy
trial by jury if charged with the right to counsel and
to be able to call witnesses; protection from any
cruel and unusual punishment and more.

Most of the credit for this historic achievement goes
to James Madison who drafted the first 10 amendments
and with his perseverance got the other Framers to go
along.  He then managed to get the needed two-thirds
vote from both Houses of Congress and ratification by
the required three-fourths of the states in 1791 to
have them become the law of the land - a major
landmark achievement today being defiled by those in
power who have contempt for the freedoms the Founders
gave us.

Madison is thought of by some to be the “Father of the
Constitution,” but it’s more accurate to call him its
Godfather as he had a lot of help from the other 54
Founders who met in the Philadelphia State House,
where the Declaration of Independence was signed 11
years earlier, to frame this historic document for the
new republic they hoped would last into “remote
futurity” - if we could keep it as Ben Franklin warned
at the time and would shudder now at how things turned
out and condemn those in power responsible.

Two future presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams
were serving abroad as envoys to France and Britain
and weren’t in Philadelphia for this historic
gathering.  When they were back later on, Jefferson
and Madison wanted twelve initial amendments to the
Constitution instead of the original 10 that were
adopted.  Federalists John Adams and Alexander
Hamilton, however, opposed the Bill of Rights entirely
and managed to exclude from them the other two that
included “freedom from monopolies in commerce,” or
what are now giant corporate predators, and “freedom
from a permanent military,” or today’s standing armies
waging wars of illegal aggression. 

Imagine what might have been, what was lost, and how
the country might be governed today had Jefferson and
Madison prevailed.  Still they deserve our gratitude
for what they accomplished, and it’s disconcerting at
the least to wonder how much worse off we’d be now if
they hadn’t gotten any of the Bill of Rights freedoms
in our founding law that although lost under neocon
rule may one day be restored if we can survive in the
meantime.

A Look Ahead In An Age of State-Sponsored Terror Under
Neocon Rule

It’s time to pause at year’s end to give thanks for
our blessings but reflect that the spirit of the
season demands that the madness of Bush neocon rule be
stopped and ended before it’s too late.  Six years is
more than enough to know the administration’s agenda
at home and abroad is roguish, corrupted by greed and
contempt for the law, ruthless in its pursuit of world
dominance through the barrel of a gun, and arrogant
enough to think it can get away with it because who’ll
challenge those in charge.

Internally, there no longer are checks and balances as
the three branches of government under Republicans and
Democrats are united for a common purpose, and their
agenda to carry it out is hostile to the public
interest.  It’s the ultimate expression of Lord
Acton’s dictum that “power corrupts, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely.”  Positively it does in the
age of George Bush and a culture obsessed with power,
the lust for more of it, and the worship of the wealth
and privilege that comes with it.  It wreaks of the
Vince Lombardi philosophy that “Winning isn’t
everything; it’s the only thing,” and the only rules
are the ones those now in power make up as they go
along justifying whatever they choose to do,
regardless of its consequences always harmful to the
great majority. 

It’s also based on might making right but not the way
Abe Lincoln meant it when he said in his February,
1860 Cooper Union speech prior to his July
presidential nomination that year: “Let us have faith
that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to
the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”  He
later expressed a spirit of reconciliation with the
South and kind of humanity George Bush has contempt
for in his second inaugural address in March, 1865
when he spoke of “malice toward none (and) charity for
all” only weeks before his life was taken by an
assassin’s bullet.  Imagining that language from
George Bush, and meaning it, would be to imagine the
unimaginable from a man who likely doesn’t even
understand it.

What is imaginable in the year ahead and thenceforth
is a world without George Bush and his neocon
extremist administration leading the nation on a path
to hell.  Those wanting justice demand the Congress
act to impeach him and the vice-president and then
remove them from office allowing for the chance
charges will be brought against them both and others
in their administration so they’ll be held to account
in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague
or another judicial venue where officials may be
prosecuted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and
genocide.  They committed them all and more against
the people of Iraq, at least two of the three in
Afghanistan, and a legion of others against the people
of the United States and its Constitution.

It’ll only happen if it comes from the bottom up, from
enough public outrage bubbling to the surface vocally
demanding justice be served and the rule of law
restored and again respected.  No one at any level in
public or private life should ever be allowed to get
away with the kind of reckless and gross criminality
that’s been rampant and out-of-control in Washington
for the past six years under Republican neocon rule. 

It’s long past time to put an end to this criminal
class of rogues in charge, running the country like
their private fiefdom in a culture of galling
corruption and scorn for the law that exceeds anything
here ever preceding their tenure.  Already there’s a
groundswell of growing outrage slowly building in size
and intensity.  As the new year approaches, it remains
to be seen if a combination of those people of
conscience can unite with enough others in the body
politic to give us all what everyone should want and
demand - an end to wars, a renewed respect for the
law, accountability for those in government who
violated it, and a commitment to serve the public
interest with equity and equal justice for all in the
true spirit of a real democracy restored from the
grave and once again respected and cherished.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).  Also visit his blog
site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.