CORPORATE ASSASSIN

[Guest guest]

CORPORATE ASSASSIN

 

By David Podvin

 

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.

 

At the founding of the United States, corporations did not exist, so

James Madison couldn't include them in the system of checks and

balances that he believed was necessary to maintain freedom. Less than

a century after the Constitution was ratified, John D. Rockefeller

began the destruction of American democracy by forming Standard Oil,

which became the first multinational conglomerate. Rockefeller

declared that the day of individuality was dead, and that business

alliances would ultimately rule the land.

 

Tragically, he was prescient. Although there were efforts to stem the

tide towards corporate control of society, it was not long before

President Calvin Coolidge had declared that the business of America is

business. With each passing year, the political power of corporations

has increased at the expense of individual Americans, to the point

where democracy in the United States is now a concept rather than a

precept.

 

Modern America has become a subsidiary of the Fortune 500. The

consequence is a social ethos of amorality that stems from existing

solely to accumulate wealth. When making money is the only standard,

what inevitably follows is decadence. It is obvious to those who are

paying attention that barbarity, not democracy, is what we have

exported to Iraq.

 

Relatively few Americans are paying attention because we have been

indoctrinated to accept unquestioningly the rectitude of our nation's

actions abroad. We are therefore deeply offended when foreigners react

negatively to our insistence that anything we do is justified because

if it weren't justified we wouldn't do it. People around the world

somehow fail to appreciate that America is infallible. They seem to

think that our country should abide by formalized rules of conduct.

 

Such apostasy is not an acceptable part of our domestic discourse; it

is dismissed as being disloyal at best, and most likely seditious. The

presidential candidate of the so-called opposition party did not

condemn the incumbent for authorizing the torture of Iraqi children

because that condemnation would have been regarded by the electorate

as un-American. In a society controlled by corporations, decency is

considered to be subversive.

 

Americans now regard corporate control as being the natural order of

things and support an acquisitive foreign policy as long as it is

adorned with patriotic rhetoric. Internationally, business interests

lack the stranglehold on public opinion that they have in the United

States. Most citizens who live in countries where corporations are

less influential have no problem perceiving that Bush has liberated

the Iraqi oil fields instead of the Iraqi people. Moreover, foreigners

are extremely dubious that future corporate plunder will be limited to

Iraq.

 

They should be skeptical because Corporate America is running scared.

Unlike the vastly overrated Soviet Union, China poses a real threat to

American superiority. Soon, the People's Republic will supplant the

United States as the nation with the most powerful economy. With their

tremendous natural resources, well-educated management class, and vast

workforce of skilled cheap labor, the Chinese possess overwhelming

advantages. Given the respective growth rates and debt burdens of the

two countries, unless something unforeseen occurs China will

eventually dwarf America economically. In order to compete,

American-based corporations are going to need help.

 

Towards that end, Bush has overthrown the dictatorship of oil rich

Iraq and has attempted to overthrow the democratically elected

government of oil rich Venezuela. The theocracy of oil rich Iran may

or may not be next, but regardless there will be more aggression

against nations that are unfortunate enough to have something the

corporate brigands covet. Financial muggings will also be conducted on

the sly – Bush is placing Paul Wolfowitz in charge of the World Bank

so that conglomerates can better benefit from the economic extortion

of those countries that own things worth stealing.

 

With an Asian juggernaut looming on the horizon, the American

establishment is desperately trying to forestall the inevitable. The

asinine Bush Doctrine stipulates that the United States will forcibly

prevent any nation from challenging our military supremacy. This

hollow threat is aimed specifically at the Chinese, because if history

is any guide their future economic primacy will be followed soon

thereafter by military primacy, allowing China to supplant the U.S. as

plunderer supreme.

 

There is little chance that Bush will attack the People's Republic,

which is underwriting much of America's staggering debt and could sink

our economy merely by manipulating its own currency. Instead, he will

continue to prey upon weak nations, hurriedly confiscating their

wealth prior to Chinese ascendancy into dominance.

 

In the process, George W. Bush is going to kill those hapless souls

who get in the way. Bush is a corporate assassin, and murdering

defenseless people on behalf of robber barons is the one task that he

performs well. This is not what the Founders had in mind when creating

the presidency, but they had no way of knowing that Madison's dream of

a social democracy would be eclipsed by Rockefeller's dream of a

business dictatorship.

 

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