What He Said

Corporate Assassin

By David Podvin 04/02/05 "Make Them Accountable" - - George W. Bush is a murderer, and a prolific one at that. He has deployed surrogates to kill more than one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians in a ruthless slaughter that is ongoing. The fact that he murders via remote control from the Oval Office does not confer legitimacy to his crimes. If anything, it makes them all the more despicable. Bush is slaying people in the name of democracy, yet his commitment to democracy has already been debunked in Haiti and Venezuela, not to mention Florida and Ohio. Recently released State Department papers reveal that the former Texas governor is murdering Iraqis for the purpose of stealing their oil, which was always obvious and is now documented. There may be worse motives for killing people than thievery, but none leaps immediately to mind. The level of cruelty involved in this theft is awe-inspiring. At Bush’s behest, the United States military has “neutralized” unarmed Iraqis by dropping cluster bombs on them, showering them with napalm, shooting them from helicopters, executing them in mosques, and torturing them in dungeons. The BBC broadcast an interview with a grieving woman whose pregnant daughter had been machine-gunned by U.S. troops, which is the one method of abortion that conservatives are willing to tolerate. As the corporate media turns a blind eye, Bush is massacring human beings who pose no danger to America. The corpses of husbands and wives and their children decorate the Iraqi countryside courtesy of the family values president, an evil man whose malevolence provokes nary a discouraging word from the American political/journalistic establishment that avoids the truth as though it had leprosy. Viewed from the perspective of our nation’s high profile opinion makers, the Bush performance has been exemplary. He is being lauded for courageously pressing the cause of Middle East democracy while those who were less stalwart dithered. He is being congratulated for disregarding the vicissitudes of earthly opinion in order to do God’s work. Most surrealistically, he is being praised for his wisdom, which consists of making horrendous decisions and refusing to amend them. No matter how assiduously his courtiers attempt to swaddle him in virtue, our commander-in-chief is a Hun. Bush is not stealing Iraqi oil to enhance American national security. He is plundering a conquered land to enhance petroleum industry profitability. The carnage in Iraq isn’t some horribly misguided attempt at patriotism. It is homicidal mercantilism, the use of the American military to help Exxon Mobil exceed quarterly earnings projections. While killing people for profit constitutes a competent job performance on the part of a mafia hit man, it reflects less favorably on a President of the United States. This remains true even when journalists laud the murder of Iraqis as being heroic. It is important to remember that whether they are openly conservative or pretending to be liberal, every one of America’s prominent media personalities feeds from the corporate trough. Consequently, their views represent the consensus of big business, and facts that interfere with the goals of conglomerates are finessed or ignored. It is a gentlemen’s agreement, absent the gentlemen. Since Bush is an acolyte of Corporate America, and mainstream journalists are acolytes of Corporate America, any intramural squabbling among them is subordinated to the common cause of redistributing the world’s wealth upwards. Redistributing wealth is exactly what Bush is doing in Iraq. Through the persuasive power of overwhelming military force, he is taking oil from primitives who are hardly equipped to handle oppressive wealth and giving it to sophisticates who specialize in these matters. Those primitives who object to this strategy are being raped, tortured, and murdered for the greater good. In the United States, the greater good involves enriching the corporate ruling elite that consists of multinational conglomerates whose sole allegiance is to money. Despite the elaborate charade of representative government, corporations currently determine policy for America just as the Communist Party did for the Soviet Union. The corporate politburo is more sophisticated than its Bolshevik counterpart in that dissent is tolerated, but only as long as the dissent is ineffectual and in no way imperils the status quo. Corporations exercise de facto control over the American economic system through functionaries like Alan Greenspan, whose every move during his long reign as Chairman of the Federal Reserve has been designed to transfer money from workers to their employers. Due to monetary policies favoring capital over labor, multinational conglomerates now own a majority of American assets, and aggressively wield the clout that accompanies phenomenal affluence. Big business dominates the political system by financially underwriting both major parties and supervising them with an army of lobbyists. It also regulates the minds of the American people through a media monopoly that guides the voting public to appropriate conclusions. On those rare occasions when the public fails to conform, the desired leader can be installed by the corporate-controlled judiciary. The result is a nation replete with inspiring verbiage about egalitarianism, but one that operates based strictly on commercial interests....