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If we had talked two months
ago after Bush declared victory, it might have seemed
as if there was no stopping this juggernaut. And yet now
it seems as if they aren't going to be able to implement
their agenda so easily. |
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It's hard to say. This is a very public-relations
oriented administration. I mean, all administrations are,
but this one unusually so. Every figure is carefully crafted,
coming out of central casting with a particular role.
The Abraham Lincoln extravaganza is just a case in point.
What they will probably do is just what Karl Rove indicated,
manufacture another extremely dangerous situation. It
doesn't take much to manufacture one. It doesn't have
to be real, as we saw with Iraq. Whatever you think of
Iraq, it was certainly no threat, but they were able to
convince the country that it was a very serious threat.
And if they manufacture another one then, somehow, people
will forget about the problems in Iraq. Does anybody remember
what happened in Afghanistan or Kosovo? People don’t
even know what they were. |
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So, if you had to predict,
you'd say they were going to be moving on to another target
to distract the public’s attention? |
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If things go badly at home and in Iraq,
they'll have to. But this is not very novel. I mean, we
should remember who they are. The administration is almost
entirely recycled from the more reactionary elements of
the Reagan and first Bush administrations. Not the whole
administration, but the more reactionary elements are
the ones who are now in office. They ran the country for
12 years that way with pretty much the same policies--
not as extreme, but similar.
When the Reagan administration came in, the first thing
they did was enact a sharp tax cut and a big increase
in federal spending, which led to huge deficits, as part
of an effort to cut back social spending and unravel New
Deal legislation. Internationally, likewise, they wanted
to use force for domination. They declared war on terror
in 1981. It wasn't as extreme as this time, but similar.
And the Reagan policies were quite unpopular in the United
States. At the end of the 12 years, after the first Bush
administration, Reagan was ranked right alongside Nixon
as the most unpopular living American president. Throughout
the 80's the policies were unpopular, but they could hold
on to political power by pushing the panic button.
Remember, every year there was another major threat: Libyan
hitmen, the Grenada air base, Nicaragua—"two
days driving time from Harlingen, Texas." Last October,
the Congress passed a resolution authorizing the government
to use force in Iraq, and if you look at the wording of
it, it's almost the same wording as the "national
emergency" that Reagan declared in 1985, because
of the threat to the security of the United States posed
by the government of Nicaragua. If somebody was watching
this from Mars, they'd start laughing. But it worked.
People were afraid.
Domestic problems were also built up with huge propaganda
campaigns to inspire fear, very successfully. George Bush
number one was able to be elected in 1988 by running a
straight, racist campaign. Do you remember Willy Horton?
This black man, this black criminal is going to rape your
sister unless you elect me. That was the theme of the
campaign. People were terrified about crime. By implication,
blacks are rapists and so on.
A couple of months later there was a drug scare: Hispanic
narcotics traffickers are going to destroy the country.
That became the lead issue. Crime and drugs are problems,
but they're no different in the United States from other
industrial countries. Fear of crime, fear of drugs is
way beyond other industrial countries. Fear of everything.
And if you continue to conjure up threats to existence
in a country which is pretty frightened to start with…
This goes way back incidentally. When my children were
in elementary school around 1960, they were literally
being taught to hide under their school desks to protect
themselves from atom bombs. Putting aside the absurdity,
is there any other country where school children were
being taught to hide from atom bombs? There have been
major efforts here for years to frighten the population
into obedience. And people are afraid of everything. They're
afraid of aliens. A very large part of the population
in the United States thinks there already are aliens among
us, and they're going to try to destroy us.
There is fear of the U.N. There are parts of the country
where people are afraid that the U.N. is planning a genocide
against the American people, and they report black helicopters
with U.N. troops and so on. This is unique to the United
States, as far as I'm aware, and unscrupulous leaders
can manipulate it. Crime, drugs, Nicaragua, the Grenada
air base, Saddam Hussein--you know, whatever it will be
next.
But, there are real issues in the background. It's not
just controlling the American population that's required;
you also have to control the world. For 30 years now,
the world has been economically tri-polar, with three
major economic centers, more or less on a par. Europe,
North America, and Japan-based Asia. That was the situation
beginning 30 years ago; Asia is now not just Japan-based,
it's China-based and so on, but these three areas are
still there.
If you look at the three of them, Northeast Asia is the
most dynamic economic region in the world. It has the
fastest growth. China is becoming a major industrial power,
Japan and South Korea already are. There are plenty of
resources. Siberia has lots of energy and other resources.
It's a potentially integrated area. The region actually
holds about half the world's foreign reserves. So, just
in that respect, it's the most important of the three
major areas. |
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