DRANT #228: VICTORY IN IRAQ!!!

Today and next week signify the anniversaries of the massacres at Kent State and Jackson State (1970), barely observed in the pimp media, scarcely noted by network news, and hardly discernible in the world of Google Search. Not quite the voracious media pigout of May 2003, when the idiot George in his green USAF monkey suit, complete with regulation USAF codpiece, strod arrogantly across the flight deck of the USS Lincoln, where the huge "Mission Accomplished" banner yet waved, and declaimed to tumultuous near-unanimous cheering that the major military operations in Iraq were over, and we had won.
He was right.
Make no mistake: George Bush has WON his war. He has won his war in Iraq, and he has won his war against Us as well.
We have lost, the Iraqis have lost, the world has lost, our progeny have lost, and the planet has lost, but Bush and Cheney and the murderers they work for have WON, and won big time. THEIR mission has been accomplished.
They have basically achieved their every objective. Here is a short list: ( I know you can easily add to this)
1- They control the OIL in Iraq, and have created a chaotic mess, breaking Iraq up into warring fiefdoms, which purposefully and effectively eliminates any possibility of organized opposition.
2- They have built and will forever inhabit gargantuan armed Garrisons in Iraq, throughout the region, and around the world. The new US "Embassy" in Baghdad stands as the perfect example of endless armed occupation and military control of Iraq's resources. The co-conspirators in Congress can blather and pass bills and do the talk shows and "re-deploy" til doomsday, but the U S of A is never leaving Iraq, whether the "troops" withdraw or not.
3- They have fundamentally destroyed Individual rights and fundamental constitutional protections, and continue to do so with little or no effective opposition.
4- They have essentially neutered the other branches of Government: they have castrated Congress, eliminated Congressional Oversight, and transmogrified the Supreme Court into an ideological servant which has reversed fundamental legal precedent in the pursuit of ideology.
5- They have greatly expanded a tiny and increasingly omnipotent ruling class, whose income, possessions, and access to resources has exploded logarithmically, while concomitantly diminishing the quality of life for all the rest of us, dooming us to ever increasing financial hardship and drastically circumscribed prospects.
6- They have pursued an environmentally genocidal policy of global rape in the name of near-term profit, while the profits earned by their global bosses have likewise swollen geometrically to the largest in history.
7- They have "privatized" every possible aspect of our lives, destroying the traditional concept of The Common, and by drastically reducing funding and support for public services, profoundly changed the way we (and our children) will eat, drink and breathe.
8- They have put the United States under military command (NORTHCOMM) -- and implemented their plan for military takeover/martial law, including the construction and enforced population of widespread prison camps and "detention" centers.
9- They have greatly expanded the prison system (also "privatized") and the prison population.
10- They have created and funded (50 BILLION DOLLARS for 2008) an un-regulated and un-scrutinized Department of so-called "Homeland Security" which now has control over all domestic security in the USA, outside any ostensible Congressional or civilian oversight, employing "privatized" armies and spy networks, and creating unregulated draconian governmental gestapo like the I.C.E.
11- They have shackled us and countless future generations under onerous un-countable debt, in the pursuit of war and the abandonment of social services, and funded this debt by borrowing from those who are unquestionably our greatest rivals.
12- They have created the concept of "illegal" immigrants, and pursued a policy of racist aggression against those of us who are most defenseless, while importing virtual slave labor for their industries, thereby eliminating collective bargaining and actually reducing real wages and benefits for all workers.
13- They have created a Theocracy, violating one of the most fundamental concepts in the Constitution.
14- They have politicized and subverted historically independent and apolitical government operations, those branches of government most responsible for the protection and safeguarding of our rights, property, health and well-being, and turned them instead into instruments of private profit and public plunder, run by stooges of the very people and industries they are charged with regulating.
15- They have implemented and financed a policy of racial/ethnic cleansing in Palestine that recalls nothing less than the German Holocaust, Slavery, the mass genocide of Indigenous People in the Americas, and Apartheid in South Africa.
16- They have made imprisonment and torture basic and ubiquitous tools of domination.
17- They have created an environment where continual intrusive personal searches, ID checks, XRAY detectors, security alerts, pat downs, and baggage inspections have become an ingrained and barely perceived part of life's daily routine.
18- They have stolen two elections, and are in place to steal the next.

Now what exactly have they lost ? Name ONE goddamned thing they have lost.

They don't count dead bodies. They don't count lives destroyed, nor environments ruined. These are merely collateral damages.
They WANT Africans and the countless "Others" dead, the fewer mouths to feed.
They WANT Americans poor and uneducated, the more helpless cannon fodder for their future armies and occupiers and police. The more workers for their prison factories.
They WANT resources concentrated in the hands of a very few, and they WANT scarcity- not merely for profit, but further to dominate and control the rest of us.
They WANT us divided and angry and jealous of each other, further to enslave us.
They WANT us to have guns and ammo everywhere; they WANT crackpots killing innocent bystanders, further to inculcate an atmosphere of fear and mutual distrust, paranoia and violence.
They WANT all of this, and they have gotten it.

They have WON. Mission accomplished.

And all the while, the great majority of us live our lives as if nothing whatever is going on.
As if there is no war, as if there are no victims, no corpses, no mutilated.
As if we have lost nothing, as if we have nothing to fear, as if its all going to happen sometime down the road, in some vague future, where magically there will be enough for everyone, and everything will work itself out like it always has.
As if American Idol is crucial and Arctic Ice is not.
And ultimately- as if what happens to our children and their children is of no consequence in our rapacious pursuit of immediate instant gratification and greed.
Given all that has been done- what more could possibly be necessary to incite us to act ? Must there be a Kent State or Jackson State again before we are awakened ?
As Paul Rieckhoff said --
“The president can say we’re a country at war all he wants. We’re not.
The military is at war. And the military families are at war. Everybody else is shopping.”

They have WON. Mission accomplished.

Except - if we do something. Drastic. Urgent. Revolutionary. Now.
Don't tell me any more about marches and demonstrations and signs.
Calling Congress, writing letters, blogging.
We've tried all of that. Its very lack of effect makes it attractive to us, so we can lose, but proclaim how hard we tried.
To make us feel better, cause we did our best, but well you know....
Its time for much much more than that.
In the face of the comic parade of so-called "opposition" candidates trotted out on stage by the Democratic Party last week, we better not expect any changes from those people. Especially not from the ones most heavily supported by the DLC and the Democratic Party establishment.
Its time to take this on ourselves.

Quote of the day:

"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us." Thich Nhat Hanh - Vietnamese monk, activist and writer.