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Will Skull and Bones really change CEO’s?
By Michael Donnelly
Last month, some ninety environmentalists gathered in DC to consider
what to do about the BushCo. assaults on our nation’s public ecosystems.
The group, mostly paid staffers of one group or another, sat through
a two-hour long report from the DC greens’ “political expert.”
She regaled the group with strategies necessary “now that Dean
has the nomination sewed up.” When told this tale, I thought, “Hey.
If someone this clueless can get six-figures for such obviously lame
assessments, maybe I should take a stab at it.” So, here are my
2004 election year predictions:
1) Unless Skull and Bones desires a change in their CEO, it’s Bush
in a landslide. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) will get the DLC nomination.
And then his real record will come out.
A friend recently wrote, “I just ran into a woman in [the organic
grocery] who’s been working on the Kerry campaign for 18 months,
when I asked her what his political accomplishments are, she hesitated
and said, ‘Well, I don’t know, check out his website.’”
Save yourself the website search, here’s a synopsis:
It’s deplorable. Three-hundred-seventeen bills introduced. Seven
passed. And four of those were ceremonial ones — designating special
days. Voted for the horrific Telecommunications Act (in fact, led the
charge); voted for the illegal war/occupation; voted for the Patriot
Act (in fact, helped draft parts of it when it was first drafted under
Clinton); brags about voting for class war on poor moms and kids —
Clinton’s welfare “reform” — need I go on? Yes,
I will. One of the few bills he got passed was 1999’s Plan Columbia,
the phony drug war’s defoliation of the rainforest with toxic chemicals.
Since the Plan was launched some 325,000 acres of South America’s
oldest democracy have been sprayed with toxins, yet there has been no
drop-off in cocaine imports to the US. In fact, according to the Harvard
Political Review, Columbia’s cocaine production increased 11 percent.
The multimillionaire John Kerry, who rails against “special interests”
on the campaign trail, got more special interest PAC money than any
other senator this last six years! And, he refused to accept voluntary
spending limits. Expect to see this GOP ad: Kerry at the helm of the
“Scaramouche,” his $750,000 speed boat (he paid cash!), with
overdubs of Kerry’s pontificating about “millionaires”
and “overprivileged.”
Then, we’ll see ads of Mr. Forbes Heinz skiing at a palatial Aspen
spa (they own it!). And, just wait until they trot out the ad with footage
of Kerry exhorting Vietnam vets to throw their medals over the Capitol
fence and then cut to Kerry’s medals framed on his office wall.
The creep actually threw fake medals while encouraging others to throw
their real ones! They may not even need to point out his lying over
his narcissistic taking of poisonous injections of Botox -- a lie not
even necessary in these MTV days. When a Boston radio announcer asked
him last week: “Can you categorically deny the reports that you
have used Botox or other kinds of cosmetic surgery or cosmetic enhancements
to your appearance?” Kerry responded, “Absolutely, I’ve
never even heard of it.” Very interesting, since his current heiress
wife, Teresa Heinz, has been quoted in Elle magazine about her fondness
for the stuff. Speaking of Teresa Heinz, she heads up the Heinz Environmental
Defense Fund. The fund’s most prominent board member since 1995
is none other than Enron’s Ken Lay. Enron’s bank, Citigroup,
has been a major contributor to Kerry’s various campaigns. In 1995,
Kerry cast the deciding vote to override Clinton’s veto of the
very bill used by Enron and Citigroup to conduct their now well-known
consumer rip-offs. Can you just imagine if Dr. Judy Steinberg Dean was
hanging out with Ken Lay? How about Laura Bush?
2) Dick Cheney? The question here is: will he resign BEFORE or AFTER
the election? If before, expect to see Rudy Giuliani as vice-presidential
candidate. If after, expect to see Elizabeth Dole reprise the Gerry
Ford role. The other Cheney question is: how long before he is indicted
on bribery charges?
3) Colin Powell? Expect to see Powell resign soon after the election
for “health reasons.”
4) Nixon redux. Some time in 2006, Congress will begin exploring impeachment
proceedings for Bush. All sorts of charges will be leveled—most
true. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) will play the hero role here as a member
of the “Intelligence Failure” investigation commission. Expect
the CIA to doggedly defend its turf and turn viciously on BushCo.
Heads will begin to roll over the security “failures” of 9/11.
The country will be in crisis mode. The heroines here will be the few,
courageous 9/11 widows who refused to take the government hush money.
Then faced with possible treason charges, as well as impeachment, Bush
will resign, as will Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle et al. Then, again reprising
the Ford role, President Dole will pardon the lot of them in the fine
American sweep-it-under-the-rug tradition. “Our second long national
nightmare is over.” Then, come 2008, it’ll be Clinton v. Dole
again. H. Clinton and E. Dole provided Dole can get by the right-wing
assault in the Republican primary. (The Brahmins of Skull and Bones
won’t lick wounds for very long.) How that all turns out will depend
on whether or not there is a true progressive in the race.
But, for now, the real question for all those “Nader cost Gore”
head-in-the-sand folks is: why are the Democrats throwing the election
again?
Source: CounterPunch
Second-class citizenship
By Juan Gonzalez
In his State of the Union address, President Bush asked Congress to
reform US immigration laws “to reflect our values and benefit our
economy.” But what he calls a new guest worker program, which matches
“willing foreign workers with willing employers when no Americans
can be found to fill the job,” is a scam Latinos know all too well.
Welcome to Wal-Mart’s Bracero Program.
During the early 20th Century, US companies routinely recruited hundreds
of thousands of Mexicans for industrial jobs in the West and the Midwest.
Whenever the economy soured, the migrants were rounded up and deported
by the trainload. Then came the World War II “Bracero Program,”
a scheme to recruit Mexicans for US agribusiness, which led to such
terrible abuses that Lyndon Johnson mercifully ended it in 1964.
Remember when the feds accused Wal-Mart last year of illegally employing
hundreds of undocumented workers as janitors? Under Bush’s plan,
corporations like Wal-Mart won’t have to resort to clandestine
exploitation. They’ll hire all the immigrants they want at super-low
wages — and it will be legal. Should a guest worker dare demand
better treatment, the corporations can simply revoke his certification,
triggering immediate deportation proceedings.
It’s no secret that Hispanics comprise a huge share of the eight
million undocumented workers in this country, or that Bush needs a bigger
share of the Latino vote to assure reelection. And he will spend from
now until November seeking to persuade Latino voters how hard he worked
to solve the immigration problem.
But Bush’s Bracero program would only create a new permanent American
underclass —one with fewer rights than legal residents. Forget
the hype about matching “willing workers” and “willing
employees” for jobs Americans don’t want. Bush knows, as does
the US Chamber of Commerce, which immediately endorsed the plan, that
the best way to get an American worker to refuse a job is to offer a
wage so miserable only a desperate immigrant would take it.
Juan Gonzalez is a columnist for New York’s Daily News and
In These Times. The winner of a 1998 George Polk journalism award, he
is the author of Roll Down Your Window: Stories of a Forgotten America
and Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America.
Source: In These Times
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