Jeff Koopersmith

Bush Socks It to Europe and Saves His War!
And what's all this? Health care? Education? Tutors for prisoners' kids?
All are camouflage the New American Imperialism
By Jeff Koopersmith

Jan. 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON (APJP) -- Jan. 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON (APJP) -- This year's State of the Union Address was a good speech.

Whoever the speechwriters were, they did a good job. There is no question about it. What the President said was coherent, important and well stated. He took care to explain, he looked determined, and he dealt a blow to those who would not attack Iraq but rather wait or look for another alternative.

The President has matured. He was not super-eloquent, nor did he stammer or stutter over his words.

He made his case against Saddam Hussein. He made it well. If he has been told the truth, then there will be some soul-searching in Germany and France this morning.

And yes, he used many of the psychological tricks that politicians use to inflame nationalism and enrage Americans who like to think we are searching for justice to do so.

George Bush formidably and eloquently may have silenced the opposition on Iraq, unless he is proven to be a liar --and I doubt that is possible. Whether or not there is another way to contain Saddam is unimportant this night.

The die is cast.

But it is what the President did not say tonight that struck me.

I watched Ari Fleischer sum up the President's State of the Union Address this afternoon on a flash film his office produced sometime this week. Fleischer was, as usual, sluggish and seemingly apathetic about his President and what he does.

He was measured, perhaps calculated and Yoda-like in demeanor, without, of course, the wisdom of that mythical Star Wars creature. Fleischer droned, ticking off the four major areas of President Bush's planned speech, the timing of which is designed to find half the nation, less the millions who have lost their jobs, in bumper-to-bumper traffic inhaling noxious exhaust fumes while heading down the highways and byways -- most in terrible disrepair -- from the same lack of planning that seems in clear evidence in this Administration.

President Bush's speech could be called "Facing up to the big challenges" and fell into four distinct parts, the last of which is the focus of American watchfulness this week: Bush's intended war on Iraq.

President Bush focused tonight on the economy -- forgetting entirely that America has lost faith in its corporate institutions, the banking system, corporate leadership, truth in advertising and the scams now called the Dot.Com revolution which turned working people, many readying their impending retirement, into millionaires and then paupers seemingly overnight -- with the President's political allies pocketing the change.

He forgot to mention how banks and other lending institutions target the poor with usurious and punishing interest rates, that the average working American earns less today than he did 15 years ago, and that so-called American super-productivity is due largely to the fact that both husband and wife must work full time jobs simply to buy an average house in the United States.

Instead, he focused on "creating" jobs.

As a lobbyist, I can tell you there is no such thing. It is a misnomer, a smoke-and-mirrors kind of term. One does not create jobs -- one creates markets, or meets demands for product and the jobs naturally follow. But someone -- you and I -- pay the bill for those salaries, and if we are not earning enough, someone else's job disappears instead.

The President also forgot the nearly 60 million Americans who are working for minimum wage -- a paycheck that leaves them with a paltry $165 a week to feed, house and clothe themselves, and their families. He answers to a strong lobby -- Corporate America, who would rather their employees lived in their cars than to increase the size of the burger they're flipping by a quarter or two. And there's no health care with those jobs. Not a chance.

And speaking of health care, while this President does violence to the only men and women fighting the system for justice, namely trial lawyers combating poorly trained physicians and thieving HMOs, he is also plotting to rob you of your right to sue when someone butchers your wife or child, or sends them home to bleed to death because it just isn't cost effective to keep them in the hospital overnight after a surgical procedure.

While he speaks to us about providing health care through small business, he plots to undermine the already destabilized and diluted-from-greed health care system by pulverizing the only thing standing between an HMO CEO's new LearJet and you: strong state laws mandating decent health care practices which this President plans to rape in order to pretend he's giving you an opportunity to get well.

The President seems to have the message from voters that he had better do something about runaway prescription drug prices for our parents -- but again he bends to the will of the pharmaceutical lobby and places the burden on you to pay the hefty tab.

Of course, we will -- willingly.

And so it goes.

The President's well-intentioned balderdash about his latest unconstitutional assault -- "Faith-Based Federal Welfare Programs" -- was alarmingly naive. One had to ask himself whether or not this leader of ours has ever watched even one of the dozens of televangelists who populate as many as 25 of our cable channels every Sunday morning, laying hands on their "flocks" acting as if they are curing cancer and lifelong crippling diseases while lifting the wallets of the most naive Americans in the process.

Does he actually believe that Church leaders have the answers? Does he believe that they are any less corrupt than other Americans looking for a piece of the federal tax dollar pie? Does he think that priests and pastors, rabbis and imams -- many of whom we now find are raping little boys and girls -- will somehow rise to the cause and dole out the money more knowledgeably and fairly than professionals who have studied at our universities and dedicated their lives to social work in an effort to make certain it gets done right?

One need only peruse the newspaper "morgues" to find story after story about religious leaders pilfering the private tills that support them. What's going to happen when President Bush sends the checks -- helter-skelter -- to the likes of super-con-artist Marion "Pat" Robertson, or his clone Jerry Falwell?

I'll tell you what -- they'll build a new wing on their phony "universities" -- or just one more radio station to push their pap and soak the poor who are looking for salvation by giving up one good meal for one free ticket to Heaven.

Will the ugly racist Bob Jones III and his filthy neo-Nazi college see some of this gold?

You betcha. He'll find a way. And others like him also will.

I say, let us fund our churches, Mr. Bush. You have no idea what goes on in the real world. If you did, you wouldn't surround yourself with the same old sycophants your father and grandfather did. One need only look back 5,000 years to see how religion corrupts and is corrupted from greed.

This President is scamming us here -- paying off the pseudo-Christian community and its neoconservative base who will tell you all too happily that you'll burn in Hell unless you accept their version of God.

The President calls the umbrella of this plan his "Compassion Agenda," yet the title contradicts itself. Where was the compassion of George H. Bush for his eight years as Vice President and four long years in the Oval Office? Where was the compassion of his grandfather, Prescott Bush, as he and Averill Harriman laundered money for Hitler and his corporate friends like ThyssenKrupps? Where was Prescott Bush's compassion as he directed German-American companies -- that profited on slave labor from Auschwitz working the mines and steel mills in Poland -- for his Nazi partners throughout almost the entirety of World War II?

There has been no compassion in the Bush family thus far -- and compassion runs in the genes, does it not, President Bush? Did you not sit on your granddaddy's knee and learn all that? Didn't you play with the Farish kids and learn about the Jews? Wasn't Prescott Bush one of those leading the eugenics movement in the United States when the ultra-right was busy?

Here is where President Bush is most vulnerable inasmuch as the rest of the world, including the majority of Britons, believe he, but not Americans in general, is pursuing a personal vendetta of either a vengeful or corporately conspiratorial nature.

The most important I looked for was his references to UN Resolution 1441 which he, Secretary of State Powell, National Security Advisor Rice, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld all tell us includes the disarmament of Iraq.

But the resolution to look at is UN Resolution 687, passed during the former Bush Administration by the United Nations. No place in that resolution does the United Nations request or demand the disarmament of Iraq -- and in fact this was never the intent of either the Bush or Clinton Administrations.

Even the "no-fly zones," which Donald Rumsfeld now claims were put in place to spy on potential Iraqi production or deployment of weapons of mass destruction, were in fact approved by the United Nations to deter military movement by Iraq against its neighbors in the South such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and to protect Kurdish nationals against attacks from Iraq or the orders of Saddam Hussein. It was not approved to spy on Iraq -- although that might have been a good idea.

Secretary Rumsfeld in particular seems to have rewritten Resolution 687, and the lazy-mindedness of the press has left this issue nearly untouched. I read Resolution 687 yesterday -- after much searching, and found among other things that it contained prohibitions against Iraq USING biological, chemical and nuclear weapons -- and developing them.

Unless I missed it, however, I found nothing saying that the nation should be "disarmed" -- and in fact:

C 7. Invites Iraq to reaffirm unconditionally its obligations under the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, signed at Geneva on 17 June 1925, and to ratify the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, of 10 April 1972; At no time has the Bush Administration told Americans that C.7 was violated.

The key word here is USE -- specifically use in war. Iraq has not been accused of using poison gas and biological weapons after this resolution was passed in 1991.

8. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:

(a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;

(b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities;

Again, during 1991 and 1992 and currently, the United States has not alleged that Iraq violated the sections above either. In fact, Americans and people the world over watched as bioweapons, gas, projectiles, missiles and the machinery capable of creating them were destroyed as called for.

While it may be true that Iraq hid or otherwise secreted these materials, thus far none have been uncovered save for a dozen or so hollow small shells that we are told, and I believe, could be filled with biological or poison material. The question is whether these shells or warheads could be used against the United States, or any nation without the requisite delivery system.

9. Decides, for the implementation of paragraph 8 above, the following:

(a) Iraq shall submit to the Secretary-General, within fifteen days of the adoption of the present resolution, a declaration of the locations, amounts and types of all items specified in paragraph 8 and agree to urgent, on-site inspection as specified below;

This was done in 1991 and again in 1992 and the sites were inspected. Whether other sites remained uninspected was a matter for the Bush and Clinton administrations which made no allegations that such was the case. In fact, the first allegation that Saddam Hussein was secreting such material was made in mid-2002, after the tragedies of September 11, 2001. The rest of Res. 687 speaks for itself, but does not seem to require the "disarmament" of Iraq, which of course would destabilize the entire region and invite Iran in particular to invade its territory. In fact, United States foreign policy -- up until the Bush Administration formulated its international strategies, or lack thereof -- was to hold the status quo, balancing Iraq against Iran as far as possible, but keeping Iraq in check against movements toward Kuwait, Israel or Saudi Arabia. At no time did the State Department believe that Iraq was a direct aggressor threat to the United States, and it at least appears that the terrible incidents of November 2001, provided what could be an excuse for domination of the area.

The remainder of the salient text of Res. 687 appears here.

No American would argue with the case made by President for improved domestic policies, save lives abroad from AIDS, and reckon with our enemies. However, the President's allusion that somehow President Clinton passed his problems along to Mr. Bush were childish and not appropriate.

It was disheartening to hear the President still talking about education reform after two years with little or no progress in this arena. He is still promising that every child will be able to read when most Americans -- for the past fifty years -- assumed they could read.

His remarks about bringing the American economy out of recession by delivering the largest tax relief "in a generation" last year got applause -- but of course, he forgot to mention it didn't work, no more than the next $300 check from the IRS will work.

I was surprised that the White House and the President's handlers allowed him to talk of economic recovery even as the stock market plunged to its lowest point since last October -- and quite quickly over the past few weeks.

The President also spoke of "holding corporate criminals to account," yet he forgets that his personal friends from Enron and elsewhere still idle in their $30 million mansions while senior citizens vested in these stocks are now working slinging burgers at Wendy's -- where they'll remain until the day they die. It was an unfortunate and stupid reference. To date, the Attorney General has utterly failed to focus on corporate crime, and he should have been chided -- at least gently for this misfeasance.

President Bush seemed at a loss to suggest any clear program or set of goals that would provide "an economy that grows fast enough to employ every man and woman who seeks a job." In fact unemployment is greater than it has been in more than decade, and getting worse.

He used the term "after recession" -- and yet all Americans know the recession remains, and is getting worse. He told us we were "recovering" but not how. He talked of needs:

... our Nation needs more small businesses to open, more companies to invest and expand, more employers to put up the sign that says, "Help Wanted." Jobs are created when the economy grows; the economy grows when Americans have more money to spend and invest; and the best, fairest way to make sure Americans have that money is not to tax it away in the first place. I am proposing that all the income tax reductions set for 2004 and 2006 be made permanent and effective this year.

Yet the President's advisors know that these funds -- paltry really in scope -- will be spent to pay off the largest outstanding short term loan and credit card debt in American history -- not to buy more "stuff."

He offers the 30% of Americans less than $100 a month to change the tide of recession. Most Americans spend nearly that much on car insurance, cable television, or food for less than three days. Thus one has to ask, "What is he talking about?"

To give one a case in point of his gullibility, the President gives this example:

A family of four with an income of $40,000 would see their federal income taxes fall from $1,178 to $45 per year. And our plan will improve the bottom line for more than 23 million small businesses.

The President ought to know that the average family of four only earns -- with both parents working -- around $40-45,000 a year. They cannot afford to buy even the average house, which now costs in excess of $200 thousand. What on earth will $23 dollars a week do for them? It is not tax relief that is issue -- it is the hourly wage.

President Bush spoke of his plan to end taxation on dividends. This argument is so specious as to be laughable. He made the purposefully misleading point that 10 million seniors receive dividend income, and this is true -- actually is more than 13 million older Americans -- but it is not the seniors who own the bulk of dividend paying stocks -- it is the corporate moguls who run those companies. The money saved by seniors on taxed dividends might average less than $100 a year, but the money saved by the wealthy averages more than $26,000 annually -- more than 25 times the President's example.

Every day Americans are taxed twice, three times, even four times on profits, on everything they buy. Why would President Bush choose dividend income which favors the rich, naturally more than poor or working class. To the wealthier American this represents a windfall almost in tsunami-like proportions. Why not also suspend the sales tax for the wealthy? After all, they buy more.

The President used voodoo logic (much as his father did when he spoke of addressing the deficit he had largely created almost single-handedly), and with the advice and consent of the free-spending Republican-controlled Congress. To be fair, Democrats like to spend money on pet projects as well -- but they at least make certain that some of the loot trickles down to their voting blocs -- the poor, the minorities and the working man and woman.

The President claimed.

More jobs mean more taxpayers — and higher revenues to our government. The best way to address the deficit and move toward a balanced budget is to encourage economic growth — and to show some spending discipline in Washington, D.C. We must work together to fund only our most important priorities.

Using this logic, why not simply stop collecting most taxes altogether? Why, the rich would be so rich they would offer to fund the entire federal budget -- maybe the state budgets as well.

Of course, to repay Wall Street for enriching itself from the pockets of the dumbest American investors, the President proposed that we trust them -- the men of Enron -- with our youngsters' social security trust funds. He knows that we, the parents, are too smart, too burned to trust our meager Social Security checks to the New York Stock Exchange, but the youngsters? Hell, they'll buy it -- after all, they've been raised in the greediest economy on earth.

The President spoke eloquently about health care -- for all Americans -- but provided little hope that it will come. He did remember to attack national health care, and trial lawyers of course. And then, in a moment that stunned me, he also attacked HMOs --and that was, as Martha Stewart puts it, "A good thing." There were several HMO executives whose right arms began to ache at that moment. Naturally he said that national health care "dictates coverage and rations care." Well, gee, what does the current system do? I think it does the same, and it pays the do-nothings at the top of these systems in the tens of millions each year.

President Bush claims he will re-empower doctors, but gave no indication how he proposes to do this. He also talked about prescription drugs for seniors, and seemed to offer a double edged sword -- keep what you have now -- a good Medicare system without pharmaceutical help -- or give up some of your care in exchange for some help with your meds.

Gee. That's not what I had in mind for my aging uncles, cousins and friends. Did you?

I must say, the usual "shocker" was in this speech and this time it was aimed at Detroit. The President will propose to fund all the R&D needed by the auto makers to produce hydrogen powered fuel celled cars within the next 16-18 years. Of course, this is not an R&D program at all -- it's a handout to Detroit to pay for the retooling and you can bet that along with that will be a hefty oil company bailouts demand for gasoline tanks around 2020. The truth is that hydrogen fuel cell technology has already been developed and the President should have been more forthcoming about the purpose of his billion dollar plus giveaway to the Big Three.

President Bush, for some strange reason, then focused on the need to educate and mentor the children of prisoners. God only knows where that one came from. To be honest, I was uneasy at this point -- was he planning to stuff our prisons even fuller than overflowing in the near future, and will be there be an unrelenting demand for "prison kids" tutors? He also went on about alcoholics and drug addicts -- well, no surprise there. It's a family thing.

Sorry, Mr. President, I couldn't resist.

For the churches and the "hysteriacs" who think children are more important than anything else, he offered the usual empty promise -- no more partial birth abortion, and -- God help us -- no more cloning. The fact that nothing President Bush can do will change the reality that late-term abortions and cloning will go on whether he likes it or not seemed unimportant.

All these remarks, of course, were cover for the President's primary concern -- that he was losing the battle for the American vote and that people were beginning to think he was simply "off his rocker" about this war with Iraq. All the spending he promised above was camouflage -- for the REAL spending -- the $500-800 billion he plans to hand to the Pentagon and their suppliers as the war on Iraq takes on a life of its own.

And these were the finest minutes of his speech. Read them here, for these 2400 words may have changed the tide of public opinion against this war -- and perhaps even the course of international opinion.

And after all is said and one -- it is just this section of the speech that the world tuned in for.

President Bush, God help him, is hell bent to attack Iraq. This speech may have provided him the key to doing just that -- and with the super majority of the American people supporting him.

Time, and Mr. Gallup, will tell.