Beyond the Bush agenda

During pre-computer days, politicians, commentators, news writers, and business leaders could easily circumvent the absolute truth on the subject of their choice, without the fear of inflaming hordes of offended truth mongers. Computers and its offspring, the Internet, has seriously dampened this potential for seasoning the truth.

Photo: Beyond the Bush agenda

Beyond the Bush agenda

The Internet and its simplistic universal access to anyone with minimum dexterity, has compelled perpetrators of slanted thought to resort to spinning their thoughts, a less obvious manner of relaying what are reasonably accepted facts, but with sufficient orientation added or deleted to have those facts fall where the speaker or writer intends. At the top of our own hidden agenda list, is our intellectually perverted belief that most people seldom reveal the whole truth about their reasons for their actions and statements, and this makes for an interesting game of adult hide and seek, which occurs daily during politician interview time on TV.

Needless to say the 2004 presidential election had kept us very busy and provided a wealth of real and potential unseen agendas for agile minds to enjoy. Though we reserve our "exposé" of major serious hidden agendas for the body of this article, these are an on-going daily part of our lives, and we accept their presence as we do breathing and eating.

It is perhaps an unfortunate fact of modern times that we so easily accept that hidden agendas are now widely tolerated in the political arena displacing the trusted old saying of the Walter Cronkites of this world:" Telling it like it is " and replacing it with "Buyer beware". Since politicians are capable of any ploy to garnish votes, most citizen/voters have long ago reduced their expectations of integrity in politics to that which exists today.

The national media professionals and the games they play in trying to help the side which they agree with without being overtly obvious, are perhaps the hidden agenda exponents where our expectations of ethical conduct are the highest, and oddly enough we are not generally disappointed. This does not mean that sides are not adopted. It underlines the fact that both the National Print and the National TV media, allow their bias to occasionally manifest itself when it exists, and when they opt for deceit, they use frequency rather than passion, thereby avoiding self-evident attestations of duplicity.

Politics, at the highest level, is where we find the most serious deviations from the straight and narrow, though politicians at the lower levels do not waste those early years as they hone their art in anticipation of greater opportunities. The war in Iraq has reinvented the words hidden agenda but we would like to look beyond the many popular reasons, which are said to have provided the true motivation for this war. For the record, however, it is thought that G.W. Bush "would have wanted to improve on his father's performance, or "wished to complete his Dad's unfinished business", or "wanted to secure a piece of the Arabic Oil patch", or "preemptively protect the U.S. friends in the area, Saudi Arabia and Israel". No one really believed the official Government guaranteed reasons and they of course merit little attention.

The U.S. military is continuously at war in a manner that escapes public attention, since it generates few explosions on color TV screens. The details of its theatre of war are a closely guarded secret to all but the highest echelons of government hierarchy and we speak of no less than the U.S. Government spending paradise, the Defense budget. In the mid-eighties Ronald Reagan theorized that he could scare the Soviet Union out of their foxholes by increasing the U.S. military spending. He assumed that by spending $486.5 billion on military requisites, as he did in 1985, the Soviet thinkers who possess a sufficient grasp of mathematics to have been first to occupy space, would surely realize that since they were spending only a minor fraction of that as a counter measure, there would be no place for them to hide. Obviously, as with Federal elections, whoever spends the most money wins, right?

Eventually, President Bill Clinton, having no war to needlessly spend money on, and striving to attain that political illusion, a balanced budget, caused the pace of military spending to regress and diminish to the consternation of the generals, the appointed administrators of wars, whose military potential can be severely hampered by peace. The considerations of themilitary establishment are not limited to military strength and involvement. The entire system of war cannot survive without a strong back-up structure commonly known as the league of Defense Contractors, and a made to order philosophy called Military Preparedness. By 1999 U.S. military spending had shrunk to a mere $261 billion, barely 3 times that of China, and 8 times that of Russia, perhaps too close for comfort for followers of the Reagan doctrine.

Enter George W. Bush, the savior of the military and a man who believes that hidden agendas are what governing is all about. The U.S. will be saved whether they like it or not. There is nothing like a war to bolster military strength, and he found one. The point to be appreciated here is that the War in Iraq is more likely to have been initiated by the U.S. military establishment's need for a strong Defense Industry, than any other hidden agenda being attributed to captain G.W. Bush and his band of pirates.

It is probable that to the military establishment, the price paid in fatalities and casualties, as well as a severely wounded economy at a time when China, India, and Europe are making giant international strides, were believed to be a small price to pay, for a critical resurgence of US military power. In 2006 U.S. Defense spending, including non-budgeted items, is expected to approximate $525 billion, which hopefully should be sufficient to offset the total spending of the categorized "Potential Enemy Nations" of the U.S. whose total military budgets are expected to surge to $19 billion.

The perception that the Iraq disaster may possibly have had as its roots in the future well-being of the U.S. military apparatus must surely offend a great number of people. The worst is still ahead however, the war premise being but a part of a more grandiose hidden agenda which the far right reserves for an unsuspecting America .

When the fiery legend of Quebec politics, Rene Levesque, originally an extreme left socialist, was asked how far he was prepared to go towards communism, he answered: "I am a socialist with a direction. It is up to my opponents to stop me." When William Zeckendorf elaborated plans to add size to New York City, he was also asked how far he intended to go, and his answer was: "The ultimate maximum". Would these answers not serve George W. Bush if asked the question: "How far to the right would you take the United States of America if given the opportunity?

The radical right philosophy by its nature is quite simple and consists of the dominance of the few over the many, within the confines of the political U.S.A. Their struggle should not be confused with the hidden agenda of the neo-conservatives, a movement created by Irving Krystol in the 1950s and whose stalwart proponents today include Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and the charming John Bolton. Their motivation for getting up in the morning is to create an all-powerful USA capable of dominating the world and therefore be able to assist their friends who are equally to the right of right and may need assistance to fulfill their agendas.

George W. Bush has invited these specialists to assist him in his enterprise and has provided them with an open road for their own narrow objectives. Together they have failed miserably and only succeeded in bankrupting the federal budget, alienating traditional friends of the U.S. and creating a gamut of new enemies. Despite these results, they have now talked themselves into positions where they have now infiltrated and infected the World Bank and United Nations organizations, and continue their mindless interferences, with little true regard for the well being of the real people of the U.S. For anyone wishing to fully understand the neocons and their true agenda, a good place to start is by clicking on their pictures on the Christian Science Monitor site: "Empire Builders".

George W. Bush is not a neo-conservative. He surrounded himself with these parasites in the hope that their agenda of dominance through power would be invaluable in the pursuit of his own prized goal which is: To help perpetuate a wealth based aristocratic class of families, companies and individuals of which he believes himself to be part. His program he assumes could be achieved by favoring the powerful in all ways possible and since the formula entails disadvantaging the lesser classes, so be it. At every turn, every opportunity he has proposed legislation and taken decision with that orientation as a constant. Since it is apparent that this stratagemina freesociety cannotbe realized in onlytwo Presidential tenures, effort is being made to extend its influence beyond the hidden agendas for current implementation. His Social Security reform package is the ultimate reflection of that effort.

His roots are from a family deeply embedded in old money going back generations, and involved in financings ably described in the movie Fahrenheit 911, which details some of his family's international financial dealings.

He chose a Vice-President whose sole interest is the accumulation of wealth, and whose life is intertwined with wealthy individuals and companies.

He, and his likes, designed a taxation system favoring the wealthy, while depriving the country and its average people of sufficient revenues to maintain a stable economy.

He stood by while American companies outsourced jobs to developing countries thereby encouraging this process, and at the same time eroding labor union powers, an important hidden subagenda.

He reduced the budget designed to monitor and prevent illegal immigration, surely with the thought in mind that he will thereby, help to lower working class costs and favor employers.

He created the reasons for a war that in a few years inflicted a direct cost to the economy, therefore to everyone, of more than $400 billion, most of which will find its way to benefit the few, the defense contractors and their controlling interests. As wehave previously noted, under President Clinton, this spending was severely constrained and the war industry overlords in their view, were deprived of anywhere from one half to one trillion dollars of revenues during those eight years, and the Bush administration wasted no time in initiating the process for making that up.

The proposed Social Security Reform is receiving little public support and, if anyone wishes to know why that is, a good place to start is on the Century Foundation site: (www.socsec.org/), and they should read the article "The Point of No Return", among others. We are in our analysis more interested in the reasons for this project, in the light of the G.W. Bush agenda for the furtherance of a society class based on status through wealth. We note that the White House's promotion of this Social Security reform is based on a potential crisis that would occur by the year 2017. Does this not remind us of another crisis? Does Weapons of Mass Destruction ring a bell?

Why is this project so important to the ultimate right wing proponents? Could it be that privatizing Social Security even partially, would create a massive amount of revenues for the controlling interests of Insurance Companies, Investment Dealers and other Financial Institutions in the act of providing Annuities, Stocks and Bonds, and charging unregulated commissions for these transactions. Additional revenues would accrue from hidden costs, such as Safekeeping and Administrative charges, Bond spreads, New Issues, and the perennial Stockbroker inducements to trade? It is clear that even this project presented as a Godsend for the young who would otherwise suffer the agonies of a moneyless retirement, even that is in reality a nefarious scam designed to enable the powerful to get richer on the backs of the deprived.

Meanwhile, in the background looms a formidable adversary who was deeply admired as a first lady and who is now a respected Senator from the State of New York. To them, she stands as tall as the Statue of Liberty as a future deterrent to their social revolution. Nowhere does the horizon provide us from either side with any other public figure who could enter the next presidential nomination or election contest against her and seriously expect to win. It is not a wild assumption to believe that her agenda must surely involve matters, orientations that are in serious conflict with the Radical Right and the Neo Conservative's master plan for a docile society.

All our attention for the coming years should be riveted on the intrigues which they will undoubtedly unleash to perpetuate their designs on a society which they repudiate, since it is a society based on the principles of equality. Our question therefore should be: They who display so little social morality and do not enforce laws that are inconvenient to them, how far will their basic instincts lead them to perpetuate their ultimate hidden agenda?

Paul Forest
Burlington
Vermont
[email protected]

Discuss this article on Pravda.Ru English Forum