Author: Antifa

The strategic situation in the Middle East is eerily similar to the events that led Europe into war in 1914, a war that killed the youth of an entire generation. The War to End All Wars could much better be described as The War That Had To Be.

Wars are economic collisions first and foremost, all gussied up in nationalism afterwards. How did LLoyd George put it — “Every belligerent in 1914 took up arms, either to repel a direct invasion of its territory, or to fulfill a precise obligation which could not be abandoned without shattering consequences to national prestige, morale, and interests”

We are slipping into war in the Middle East on an obscene carpet of blood and oil. No one “can afford” to step back from the edge. Here it comes.  If you have not yet read Terence Ward’s sobering presentation last week to the 5th Annual gathering of the Association for Study of Peak Oil, you will find the full text below the fold —
Full Text of Terence Ward’s ASPO Talk

http://www.oilposter.org/blog/aspoblog.html

Logically, all Israel can gain by making southern Lebanon a free fire zone is to reduce Hezbollah’s fighting infrastructure in that region for a while. Which cannot buy but a bit of time before it all has to be done over again. Like clover, Hezbollah grows faster and taller after you cut it back.

No, there’s much more at play here; these are early moves in the Great Game. This splendid little war is stagecraft to make it clearly necessary for America to attack Iran. That’s the goal, about three moves ahead. Israel is just sacrificing a few pawns right now to clear the way forward.

Here’s the gambit . . .
The American neocons need weakened or compliant states across the Middle East — or else they fail at their Empire, and China becomes ascendant. The way to get weakened or compliant states is to buy them, threaten them, and when necessary attack them.

After bribes and threats fail, you go in and blow up every bridge, road, power plant, airport, dam, school, government building, hospital, TV station, ambulance and nursery. Break their kneecaps — and then either leave their nation and populace staggering on while you do as you please in the region, or help them to establish a compliant puppet government that just loves you to bits and doesn’t shoot at you too much. Ship in some food, paint some schools, and let freedom ring the cash register.

Hey, it’s nuthin’ personal. Just a bit of oil business, capice?

So, let’s walk it backward — the end goal is a shattered or compliant Iran. How do we get there?

Attack them. Break their legs.

Which means they have to give us one excuse, just one excuse . . .

To get Iran to ‘attack’ Israel-America in some way is the neocon’s Holy Grail right now, since they cannot get Americans to go along with another oil war unless it’s revenge for another “Pearl-Harbor type event.”

Iran has to do something belligerent, has to be seen to attack Americans or threaten oil shipments or some such event. After that, the gloves can come off. Condi can draw her pistol and use it, just like a real man.

Provoking Iran to strike at Israel or America or at Western civilization in general requires America or Israel seriously bugging them — how about by knocking out their strategic proxies right in their own backyard, the most prominent of which are Syria and Hezbollah? Let’s go break their kneecaps.

That means reducing Hezbollah’s turf and fighting infrastructure — southern Lebanon. If necessary, that means attacking infrastructure in Syria, whose sovereignty Iran has sworn to defend.

Both are obviously losing moves to Israel, except insofar as they succeed in starting a war between Iran and America, which Iran can only lose, militarily. That makes these early Israeli moves good investments of every type of blood being spilled.

Provoking Iran to strike out, or to openly assist and defend their proxies, requires Israel’s participation in a losing local war, fought for the sole purpose of starting a larger war which will greatly benefit Israel.

An Iranian war.

Will Iran take the bait? Absolutely — since the American neocons and Israel absolutely will keep provoking until Iran does strike out. The American Empire is at stake, is at a crossroads with Tehran blocking all four lanes. America cannot give up on Empire, and yet America cannot dominate the Middle East with Iran intact.

As John Gotti would say, “We gotta whack ’em!”

There will be some incident, some incident that will do, and Mister Bush will give a speech saying America “clearly has no choice” but to take out Iran for the safety of mothers and babies everywhere.

This gambit is falling apart as it proceeds, so I do not think the speech will wait until the end of August. Those 2006 elections need to be about Republican victories overseas, or it’s all over.

Maybe the incident will be kidnapping some Americans, or shooting some NATO peacekeepers. Maybe Hezbollah will hit oil terminals in Kuwait, or the Stock Exchange in New York, or CNN headquarters in Atlanta. With this much pressure on the lid, something will blow.

This is all part of the Great Game, which is at root an economic struggle over decades.

Looking out at the coming years, clearly China, Russia, and India are getting together and acting in their own interests lately, without regard to the West. Economically, the Orient is in the inside lane, ready to take the lead from Europe and America.

Even Latin America is moving up on the backstretch, aiming for a view of the future unobstructed by America’s rear end.

To the casual and sane observer, the result of whacking the shit out of Iran will be to accelerate this gargantuan economic trend. The sane and casual observer would be absolutely right.

Right that is — If. We. Lose.

Consider what Cheney and Rumsfeld and Perle n Feith n Wolfowitz n Cambone n all them other neocons see in this situation. These people are neither casual nor sane. What do they see?

Opportunity. The big brass ring.

Unable to afford the table stakes, holding losing cards, America kicks over the table, whacks Iran and Syria, gains dominance over the Caspian region — and when the smoke clears China, India and Russia and whomever else wants to buy any Middle Eastern oil will HAVE TO come through America for their petrol or fight us for it.

And since no one can fight us, or beat us, America wins, uber alles. The neocons are acclaimed as the greatest heroes of American history, God is in his heaven, and all’s well with the world.

What a glorious future! Rumsfeld must look in the shaving mirror every morning and say to himself, “We could be there in six weeks!”

That’s how neocons think. That’s how neocons create reality.

According to Cheney’s careful prosthesis, we are going to lose the global petro struggle if we remain civilized about America’s decline, if we do nothing impolite. So, why the hell not shoot off everything we’ve got and see if we don’t win sumpin’ hey?

“We’re gonna lose the farm anyway, Gee Dubya — so go ahead and bet the farm.”

What’s the worst that could happen?

An elegant epigram of Serendib says that ‘two elephants cannot be tied to one post.’

The glimmer in this gem is as obvious — and subtle — as he who hears it.

Lifelong sarong and sari wearers among you, who have actually seen two elephants tied to one post know damn well that they will soon wander off with that post. It’s only a matter of time before they happen to pull together or happen to pull opposite — the post survives neither event.
This lesson is portable.

Many see our world’s rising tide of human woes, think it all through, and blame global capitalism.

Capital is widely respected and regarded; it is influential and omnipresent; it is slippery, solvent, and super sexy. Like water, it gets into everything. It can rinse away blood. It can feed millions. It can drown millions.

An Ism is most anything writ large, writ larger than life itself. Ideology is love of an idea. Ideology of every sort is Ism, is an idea taken to be larger than life itself.

An Ism will not blink or bend if polar bears are drowning, or babies are bleeding. That’s merely life — here is an eternal Idea. We must stay the course.

Capital is money. Money is debt. Usury on debt is the fuel of global capitalism. We extract compound interest from the beating hearts of human lives on every continent and island nowadays. Human sweat congeals into capital instruments that will burn reliably over measured fiscal periods.

Some of us have our lives. Some of us have basis points in other human lives.

When debt creation and servicing becomes our global culture and condition, we are pursuing Global Capital Ism. When that Idea of perpetually increasing debt service is larger than human life itself, when polar bears are drowning and babies are bleeding, we have tied two elephants to one post.

The post is civilization, the maypole, the base agreement between people that we will not kill each another on sight, that we will leave one another’s daughters and property alone in exchange for the same treatment. The post is the promise that people from one valley will not raid the fields of people in the next valley.

The post is the sum of how far we have come since our ancestors drew buffaloes and birds on the cave walls of rural France.

We’ve come all the way to Consumer Man, whose idea larger than life is to get more, to live better than well, and to see that the kids all get even further along the Capital Highway, at any and all collateral damage. Why? Because it’s all good. Because it’s super sexy to have the best and be the best. Elvis is in the building, baby. Hoo-yah!

This is one elephant tugging at the post.

The billions of bug-eaten bastards digging in the dirt all over the world, the filthy and filched in the factories and fisheries and foundries, the various victims of capitalism’s conquests who sometimes in death or crisis join the infinitesimally small percentage of human beings to ever have their picture taken — this faceless multitude is the other elephant tugging at the post.

There are so many people without anything at all. Just the day, and hunger, and the children. So unbelievably many with nothing but that. Human minds do not really count as high as the number of people scratching for edible things around the globe. A billion — is just a word to the human mind. Two billion — is just two words.

But all those lowly lives, and billions more living scarcely above their level, are tugging opposite to Consumer Man, who wants to own everything and run everything. When he comes to collect sweat from them they know not his language or his trade or his tools but they do know they have less when he leaves than they had before. Because he bought basis points in their lives.

He bought their government, he bought their laws, he bought their resources, he bought their property, he bought their lives.

Their sweat builds empires in far off countries. Their sweat congeals into debt instruments and derivatives and Dow Jones daily averages. What gave Consumer Man possession of their sweat is as much a mystery to them as where their lives will go from here. Consumer Man neither knows nor cares. His world does not work that way.

Most of the human race will never — ever — under any circumstances enjoy a tenth of what Consumer Man takes for granted and throws away. There is not enough planet to supply that standard of living for all of us, and not enough environment to hold the garbage. We would need several more Earths to reach that level. Global consumer civilization isn’t going to happen with these numbers. Ever.

So we have two elephants, and you cannot leave two elephants tied to one post. If you do, you must watch them all night and all day, keeping them from tugging together or tugging opposite, keeping them from wandering off with the maypole.

The rich and the poor could tug all together, and wander off with this civilization grounded in debt servicing. They could cease all usury of human lives, and everyone could have somewhat of the Earth’s available bounty, but not at any and all collateral cost to human creatures living and yet to live. The American lifestyle could become, actually, negotiable.

The rich and the poor could tug opposites, wandering off with the maypole shattered and broken, with no one’s daughters or harvest safe anymore. Start tossing nukes around, and Consumer Man will be drawing buffaloes and birds on the walls of caves. We’ll try again. We’ll start over. Maybe we’ll share this time.

One planet spinning through space. One global civilization based on debt servicing, based on the few harvesting from the many. Two elephants tied to that maypole, that civilization.

The sun will come up in an hour. I’ll be in my fields, getting the work done before the heat arrives. I can’t think of a billion, but I can think of one mother or one father somewhere waking up to the day, and hunger, and the children. I can think about elephants.

I don’t want this war, and I don’t want this civilization.

DailyKos and Markos and them rowdy Kossacks are all about Democratic Party activism. Real projects, real politicians, real campaigns, real elections — and oh yes, the unbridled flow of intellectual and emotional and spiritual underpinnings that ignite and drive all those real doings.

Of course, “real lefties” see the entire Democratic Party as simply one half of the single party state that America is. Both political parties are owned by, and serve, the same economic masters.

Even if the Democrats win every office they desire during this political season, the victory will represent nothing more than the handing of the ball to the other team for their fair turn at it.
The game will still be played inside the marked white lines. The game will still take place inside the stadium. The voters will still be spectators forced to choose between two teams only, while the team owners, the team players, the team sponsors, and the stadium owners make obscene amounts of money by providing spectacular croissants and circuses in those two terrific tastes — Dem and GOP. You pick one, or the other.

It reminds me of my mother’s favorite way of announcing dinner — “You have two choices this evening, children. You can eat this, or you can go hungry.”

If You Aren’t Rich, Who The Hell Are You?

With all due respect to the passionate and hard working activists at and represented by DailyKos, the fact remains that political power in America is a direct expression of economic power.

Even netroots campaigns come down to money. Every Kossack will concede that after all the essays and diaries and comments are posted and perused, the netroots difference comes down to putting some money into somebody’s campaign coffers, some money that did not come from a corporation or a wealthy patron of politics.

Economic power in America has steadily shifted since the early 1980’s toward the energy, banking, pharmaceutical and defense industries. Beginning with Reagan, the Administrations of both Democrats and the GOP have worked to keep America’s wealthy as wealthy as the Saudis and other foreign oil suppliers so that wealthy Americans could and would invest in American corporations and assets rather than just letting all of America’s companies and properties be bought up by foreign oil barons on the open and free market.

Had a few foreign cartels been allowed to dominate our economic landscape, they would naturally have dominated our political landscape, and that has been deemed unacceptable up to now.

This has meant class warfare for the rich, and upon the middle class, and this has meant skewing the tax and regulatory systems wholesale, always in the direction of corporate monopolies, privatization of public properties and utilities, deregulation, and reduced taxes on invested capital.

All Our Eggs In Their Basket

This has meant putting all of America’s eggs in one basket — Big, Big Business, especially the energy and defense industries. We are the world’s largest arms supplier. Our military prowess is so far beyond what our next ten nation state competitors can put out that it is ludicrous. Yet we spend on and on because it’s no longer about whatever weapon is being built, it’s about the profits created by building that weapon, in quantity, and then wasting or using it so it needs replacing. These wonder weapons don’t even have to work anymore. The game is to just go build some stuff — the Pentagon or Congress pay for it, plus ten percent for your trouble.

Pay to Play

Consider the perfect devotion of both political parties over the decades to this Iron Triangle — the Congressional Military Industrial complex, a rigged game where a dollar in political donations gets you a ten dollar ‘earmarked’ contract to manufacture some stuff in China or the Honduras and then sell it to Halliburton for its latest war of convenience. For a two dollar donation, you get your taxes reduced, and for three dollars you can get the EPA, SEC and IRS off your case, rather permanently.

It works the same for both parties. That’s why both parties are funded by largely the same clientele. It’s just business. The business of politics.

Real lefties perceive that even when the Democratic Party hits full victory mode, no serious plans are afoot to change this basic economic arrangement. Feingold or Kucinich would probably change it, but they are in that unelectable five percent who don’t fiddle the facts.

Political Suicide Not Likely

For the Democrats to change this basic arrangement would require going straight to the American people and saying, “Thanks for your vote. It’s good to be back. Now, we all need to voluntarily reduce our living standards by about 30% in order to avoid national bankruptcy in the coming decade. We need most of our suburban population to give up their private cars and start taking buses and trains to work, or move closer to their jobs. We have unilaterally cut the Pentagon budget by 50% today, and will put those hundreds of billions into getting our national infrastructure on a green basis, our schools back on top, and our national debt under control. More than anything else, friends, we need to make science and mathematics our national pastime instead of baseball and football. Are you with us?”

(cue the crickets . . . )

Well, they’d not be in office more than a few weeks after that, would they? Ach du lieber — how the tar and feathers would fly!

For too many Americans, you can take away their SUV when you can pry it from their cold, dead fingers.

Not In America

And yet our most sober and wise futurists and thinkers say that this downsized, relocalized America is precisely the nation that will emerge from the restrictions forced by Peak Oil and $150 per barrel crude that is coming.

It will happen. Right here.

We can either make the necessary changes with our eyes open, or we can wake up to these changes one distant day, after all the brutish unpleasantness of trying to avoid it gets a lot of Americans hurt and killed, both Over There and here at home.

Real lefties have left the stadium. We see grownups playing a game while reality waits. Oh, we will reliably vote D on Election Day, out of necessity. After all, Mother’s two choices were not really choices, were they?

But please do not presume we see a Democratic sweep of all three branches of government as Judgement Day and Kingdom Come all rolled into one. If such a Democratic Party sweep happens, it will represent nothing more than the first national opportunity in half a century to address the actual problems of our tottering nation instead of the imagined problems of the political gridiron, with its two teams already purchased, and everyone playing for pay.

Real lefties know that on Judgement Day, when Kingdom Comes, and a Democratic sweep is complete, and the Dems stand in serried ranks across all three branches of government — guaran’ ball bearin’ cher the Dems will blow the opportunity. They will play the game inside the stadium, and inside the lines. They will move the ball within the economic boundaries allowed for play until such time as it is the other team’s turn again.

Because that is the business of politics. Politics truly is the art of theater. It is all a performance, all of the time. The politicians are there to fiddle for their audience, and to fiddle their audience.

Why All The Fiddling?

Why did Nero fiddle while Rome burned to the ground? Because he was crazy? No. Because he was a politician performing. Because to not fiddle would be to confess and address harsh reality — that the city outside the stadium is on fire. To confess and address reality leads beyond two, or ten, or twenty political parties. It leads you beyond the marked lines, and out beyond the stadium.

And then whose side are you on? Whose empire? And then where do you stand?

After a farewell to arms, do you stand on the side of humanity? On the side of all species including our own? On the side of the planet, as it tumbles through a vacuum headed who knows where?

After the game leaves you, what work do you do? Where do you go? What do you call that journey where you don’t know a destination, you just know you’re not staying?

If your politics introduces you only to empire, then rosin up your bow and ho’ down. Do the people proud. Do ’em but good. You will never lack for an audience or for assistants.

If your politics introduces you to humanity, congratulations — you have outperformed Nero and all the fiddlers stalking the halls of power today.

You may find yourself out here with the real lefties.

So you pull into your neighborhood gas station one morning to fill `er up.  Pop the gas cap.  Swipe your card.  Stick the nozzle – hey, it doesn’t fit!  What the ?!?  “We’re sorry,” says a disembodied voice over the speaker, “Your vehicle’s gas tank isn’t compatible with our Exxon Gasoline Service.  Also, you don’t seem to be a member of the Exxon Gasoline Portal.  Would you like to order our Exxon Gas Cap today for only $39.95, and get your first month’s membership free?”

“Hey, I just want some gas,” you say.  “Gas is gas.  Your nozzle’s all big and square.  It won’t fit my car here.”

“We hear you, and we can meet your needs,” says the voice.  “You can purchase an Exxon Gas Cap and get your trial membership at 50% off this week.  The Exxon Gas Cap accepts gas only from the Exxon Nozzle.  New members receive a free Exxon Gas Can, a quart of Exxon Oil, and an Exxon Coffee Mug.  Shall I use the credit card you’ve already swiped to sign you up this morning?”

“Oh, that’s all right,” you say, pulling a tire iron from the trunk. “I have a better idea.”
Gas is gas, right?  All over the world.  Electricity is electricity, water is water, rubber is rubber, tin is tin, rice is rice, and potatoes are potatoes, everywhere.  Commodities are commodities.

And the internet is the internet.  It’s a commodity.  Except in America.  In America, plans are afoot to make everybody’s internet the private property of six corporations.  In America, six corporations are going to see if you mind them sabotaging your internet, see if you mind them peeing in your pool.

In America, a half dozen telecom companies want to take us all back to the era of 8-track tapes and CompuServe and GEnie and Prodigy.  They want to seize the `last mile’ of internet cable – the mile that comes right to your home or business – and make it incapable of pumping the internet into your computer unless you subscribe to their internet portal and buy special hardware from them to receive data from ‘their cable.’  In other words, you gotta buy an Exxon Gas Cap, and you can only buy Exxon gas from here on out.  If you want to buy gas from BP, you’ll need to buy a BP gas tank and sign up for the BP Club.

Make any sense to you?

Remember, ninety percent of the internet’s physical cabling – fiber optic and copper wire – is shared, and has to be shared, and this will never change.  The emails and web pages from everywhere have to get to everywhere else by traveling through the main trunk, so all telecom companies use the trunk lines equally.  Network Neutrality stays in place there, and won’t be touched by this current wave of telecom piracy.

It’s only that `last mile’ of neighborhood cable they want to lay claim to, under the pirate flag of ‘network diversity.’  They want to change your internet access from a commodity — like gasoline or sugar or tap water — into their private property, and then sell it to you in a ‘feature rich’ new package with their name on it, at prices they dictate.  They want to sabotage the setup you have right now.  They want to make you an offer you can’t refuse.  They want to pee in your pool, call it a service, and bill you for it.

This is the struggle over Net Neutrality, which the Republicans have already pushed through the House, and will try to push through the Senate now.  The bills were written by the telecom companies, and lobbied for real hard by the telecom companies.  No citizen of our country has ever asked for the Exxon Gas Cap.  You are never likely to ask for one.  But then, this is not being done for your benefit.

Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broke

Net Neutrality is your ability to access one worldwide network through standardized hardware, talk to anybody, and surf anywhere, all through your local Internet Service Provider.  Your local ISP is a neutral gatekeeper to the internet, and they cannot favor one set of packets over any other set.  Net Neutrality means you log on today knowing that you are seeing ALL the information out there, and you can confidently base a great many things in your life on that assurance.

You can check out companies on the Web before you invest, you can get reviews on products before you buy them, you can get the facts on politicians before you vote for them, you can judge current events by open and honest reports from all of the world’s news media, and you can start and run a business knowing that you are really working on the cutting edge of innovation and communication, and not on some imaginary, watered down version of reality like CompuServe.

The Telco’s want to seize that last mile of cable wiring, and make it a private bottleneck, a private choke point on your right to full information.  Fox News becomes your only source of news.  A select list of `patriotic Christian bloggers’ get priority access to you, and dKos just times out if you try to load it.  Constant on-screen ads become a ‘service’ provided by your Telco, and pop-up blockers are no longer ‘an approved feature’ of your ISP’s portal.  This is called hijacking, in plain English.  This falls under the definition of extortion.

This is peeing in your pool and telling you it’s good for you.

This is no different than your neighborhood gas station and installing big square nozzles on their pumps so you have to join their club if you want gas.  The Telco’s want to seize that ‘last mile’ of internet cable as their private property, and install their private hardware between the internet and you.  They want to force an Exxon Gas Cap on you.  They want to push you into one of their Telco Portals, and show you only as much of the internet as drives their profits higher.

If the Telcos tried this business model in direct competition with our current, wide-open internet, they would be out of business before they started.  It’s only possible because they already have a monopoly on service.  They are the only companies who install that `last mile’ of cable in the many neighborhoods of America.  They know that you can either sign up with one of them or go without Internet service altogether. “Hey — we’re the phone company.  We don’t care. We don’t have to care.”

That this raises immense Constitutional and antitrust legal issues goes without saying.  There will be a flood of class action lawsuits if the Senate allows this turkey to see the light of day.  It will take heroic work by Scalia, Alito, Roberts and Thomas to get that fifth Supreme Court Justice to go along with their predictable opinion that “this monopoly is not a monopoly.”  That this is all Okay Because It’s Republican.

This new Telco business model is based entirely on sabotage and extortion.  They will not be able to pull this off without walling off their `last mile’ physical networks from the internet, and then making themselves look different from one another.  A ‘feature rich’ computing environment is planned for you, where you will enjoy true ‘network diversity’ and damn well like it.

The truth is that only by walling off a private corner of the internet can they can start charging you for access to it, and charging all those billions of content providers who want to reach you, if they want to reach you.  The Telco’s will make money on every packet coming and going.  They could easily make more profits than Exxon if they get their way on this.

John Gotti would be so proud of this crew.

This business model requires a crime be committed right upfront.  They have to mug you.  They have to pee in our pool get things started.  They have to turn the wide-open internet off at your place, and sabotage the feed so you need to buy their filter in order to unscramble what they scramble on their ‘last mile.’  This is extortion, plain and simple.

The Telcos are already talking about privatizing their own internet protocols, the very packets that carry your bits and bytes out over the wires.  By making their IP packets proprietary, only a computer with their hardware installed can interpret the packets received.  If you receive an email or a web page from someone broadcasting the standard internet packets used all over the world today, the Telco has the option of allowing it through or slowing it way down, or blocking it completely, all according to what the sender AND you have paid them in subscription fees this month.

Isn’t the free marketplace wonderful in its wisdom?

Few people grasp that the rest of the world is NOT going to eliminate Net Neutrality, The rest of the world understands that the internet only functions as a pure meritocracy of relevant information.  They understand that internet innovation only happens in wide-open mode.  That walling off a private section of the internet has the same effect as tying a tourniquet around your leg – it cuts off circulation, and your leg begins to die.

What entrepreneur would risk doing business in such a bastardized environment as the Telco’s want to provide?  If you cannot see what everybody else is thinking, publishing, creating, planning, and doing — how can you risk innovating?  You don’t have full information; instead, you have whatever information the Telco feels is best for the furtherance of their business plan and bottom line.  And if you do start a new internet innovation, you have to start a version for each of the Telco portals, and then pay each of them monthly to give you access to their web customers.

And those customers will have to pay extra to see your innovation.

And as soon as the Telcos can write their own proprietary version of your innovation, you will be starved to death over their wires while their version gets high speed delivery.

America will fall behind immediately in the cutting edge information innovations driving much of modern commerce, and our Telco Portals will have to play catch up as best they can, copying whatever the Europeans and Asians and Brazilians did last year on the real internet.  Even that pathetic effort will fail, as the two Net models diverge ever more starkly.  One is for real and relevant information that’s free for the asking, and one is for filtered info at a fee to both provider and receiver.  One is a race car, and one is last year’s pace car.  Which one would you rather drive?  Which one is really in the race?

If we lose Net Neutrality, smart companies will have to either move their high tech operations overseas or pay to have multiple T1 lines brought in from Ireland or Japan or China so they can continue to compete in the real world.  Smart businesses and smart people will pay whatever it takes to get access somehow to the real internet and leave these Telco’s to wither away like the greedy wraiths they are.

“See?  I told you not to tie that belt around your leg, ya dumb bastard.”

Few people grasp that if Net Neutrality goes away in America, it will be put right back within a year by overwhelming public demand.  Just like Classic Coke.  Either rewritten laws and regulations forced by overwhelming public anger will put it back in place, or it will happen in the marketplace itself as people vote with their wallets, abandoning the Telcos and paying premium fees to whomever will connect them to the real internet again.

As soon as people grasp that they are being returned to the era of 8-track tapes — except at a higher price and with a smaller selection — there will be bloody hell to pay.

Any Telco that survives the massacre they are asking for will do so only by adhering strictly to Net Neutrality.  That’s the standard the public is used to, and the only standard they will accept.  This heist the Telcos are pushing will prove to be the Boston Tea Party of our century.  The Internet is like Classic Coke – now that they’ve tasted the real thing, the public won’t buy anything else, even under the most intense marketing.  They will respond to efforts to force them into private Telco portals with ridicule, neglect and economic force of their own.

The giant is still sleeping on this one.  The House vote drew barely a yawn from the American herd.  But once the outright sabotage and extortion this business model represents becomes clear to American consumers, the corporations who sponsored it and the politicians who sold out to it will be at the receiving end of a hurricane of spite and anger.

No one is going to respond to this by saying, “Well Of Course You Can Pee In My Pool.”

It’s an interesting and inevitable dynamic playing out here.  From their first day in office, the Bushistas have been giving away our Treasury to the wealthiest Americans, for the sole purpose of keeping them investing in American business, as opposed to moving all their money to more profitable climes.

The only thing that will keep that money here at home is high returns plus lower business and investment taxes. And looser regulations. Less restrictive standards. Lawsuit caps. Huge freebies to the oil, pharmaceutical, banking, and defense industries. Leaky pension plans, easily looted. Low minimum wage, lots of hungry immigrants, and a shattered and underfunded social safety net. All that, and unlimited, unimaginable debt, even unto the third or fourth generation.

They’ve been at this for five years now, and here we are, friend — nearly to the endgame of this mafia bustout, this interesting dynamic. The endgame, where even all of this lush and livid thievery proves lacking, though the nation staggers in its stride, dizzy and drained, a victim of vampires.

The endgame is coming.
It could never be enough, this thuggish thievery on behalf of the well heeled, and the Bushistas knew it always. The ventures and investments of the wealthy do, in the end, depend utterly upon the unwashed multitudes more or less going along with the marketing plan, more or less consuming at the required rate.  All financial harvests do depend upon fatted calves in great numbers surrendering their freedom and lives both as they go and at the last.  They depend upon steadily siphoning capital from working beasts.

Ask any cowboy from Texas; he’ll tell you — the money isn’t in the spreadsheets, it’s out there in the herd.  Keeping them dogies moving until such time and place as you can cut their throats is the whole idea, pardner.

But now it appears that even the wholesale merger of corporate and government goals and power, with Congresscritters and Senators perennially out of town fundraising while corporate lawyers and lobbyists write new legislation for them to sponsor without reading — even this has proven insufficient.

The herd must be placed under tighter control, or the bottom line will suffer.  When things get disorderly, profits decline.  That cannot continue.

Lo, the wayward public grows restive and unrestrained.  They return approval polls of 29%.  They change brands unbidden.  They openly discuss civil disobedience.  They make embarrassing inquiries.  They jump ship.  They are not going quietly into the penstocks.  The malls and auto showrooms and real estate offices grow quieter with every new morning.  War does not distract the herd for long, nor does braying about bigotry, nor does the Bogey Man of the week work like it did in the day.

It’s coming.  Put some rice and beans aside, Henry.  It’s coming.

Now, when there is no more to give away, even on the backs of our indebted and enslaved descendants, it comes.  Now, when businesses so lavishly fed at the public trough see shrinking profit margins, and look lustfully overseas for better opportunities, it comes.  Now, when foreign owners of dollar bills start turning them down, and turning them in, it comes.  Now, when fat and dumb American consumers can no longer afford to just jump in the family jalopy and drive over to the mall, nor buy anything there that isn’t canned or marked down, it comes.

The endgame of the Bush clan’s interesting dynamic was always a police state, where every consumer is constantly added up, and can always be subtracted from the political and economic pool when they get uncooperative.  Clearly there comes a day when the imperial ambitions of the corporate and political masters of America require a much closer supervision of the citizenry if this interesting dynamic is to continue at its accustomed rate of profit.  There is a whole world out there to conquer, in this New American Century.  It must be one State over all other nations, or there will be hell to pay all around.

The endgame is clear.  America must go down a totalitarian path if profits are to stay on track.  If this means tightening the screws on non-cooperators, if this means restricting freedoms and dictating the details of individual lives, well it is all for the good of the nation.  In the end, it is the State that must prosper, not the herd.  The herd is for fattening, and for cutting up as needed.  In America, the herd has had its day.

Or, the herd will have its day, if it rejects the political process being foisted upon it.

It’s coming.  The noose is near.  The interesting dynamic reaches its endgame this summer.

America will either become a police state, or we will see a revolution in our relationship to our own government.

Either there will be no more free range Americans, or there will be.

Essential freedoms inherited from the Magna Carta and the English and French and American Revolutions will be eased out of our lives forever, or we the people will not be trod upon.  We will tread on these rascals who represent us falsely.  We who did not ask for any of this will accept none of it.

It’s coming.  It will be one way or the other way, for it cannot be both.

Mothers, the unborn children within you are already debt slaves to these corporate cats, this aristocracy of the non-working.  They have plans for the entire lifetimes of each of your beautiful children, and they do not involve the freedom to do as they please.  They involve them entirely in the economic and military domination of planet Earth, here in this New American Century.  Your children will be conquerors, or die in the attempt.  That’s what they’re good for.

Fathers, the blood of your sons is needed in the sands of the oil countries.  Whether they die in Arabia, Bolivia, Nigeria or Venezuela, neither you nor they will ever see any of the black gold their blood buys for Shell and Exxon.  You and they will see only the flag of a great and free people held high over conquered lands.  And you will wrap their crushed corpses in it, and you will spit on it afterwards, and you will wonder at the choice you made for them, back when the choice was still yours.

The endgame is coming this summer of Ought Six.

Rocket Summer, when missiles launch out of Israel to land upon Iran, and Iran launches in reply, and America’s Lord and Master Bush announces that he has no choice but to launch everything we have from the three carriers that will be so conveniently on station in the Persian Gulf in early June.  They are on their way there as you read this.

Rocket Summer, when we launch our B-2’s hauling bunker buster nukes, and start what cannot be stopped, by anyone, anywhere.

Rocket Summer, when we start WWIII.  When we do — that.

With those mushroom clouds in the Middle East our own American nation will go up in smoke, locked into the endless, unyielding, unwinnable war Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush have arranged for us.  To survive such a war, our nation will have to be very tightly controlled from on high.  Government from the top down, and not otherwise.  Everyone must do their part, whether they like it or not.  Everyone must show up and pull together.  Everyone must stay in line.

Rocket Summer.  The carriers Abraham Lincoln and Enterprise and are on their way to make war on Iran.  The Ronald Reagan is already on station in the Gulf.  Our boomers are already underwater in the region, testing their Tomahawk firing systems for their grand day out.  Out in Omaha, our B-2’s are tooling up.  Our B-52’s in Britain and Diego Garcia are squared away for combat runs.  The end of our trail is near.  All the cowboys are shouting, driving for the slaughterhouse.  The herd is being hustled for the very last time.

Rocket Summer, right this way. Right this way.

How about it?  Are you going to stay in line?

The Republican plan for America, all along, was Banana Republic.

A nation of poorly educated renters and workers, ruled by their betters — the wealthy five percent who own everything worthwhile, control all the capital, rule over the government, dictate laws in their own favor, stack the courts with their own judges, and send out the police and army to enforce those laws.

The Republican plan for America is the Five Percent Solution — move all money and power into higher, tighter, whiter, righter hands.
What Grover Norquist and the GOP really want to drown in the bathtub is a free people. They need renters, they need peons, they need blind believers, they need economic slaves.

They are succeeding in their quest.

Peak Oil is upon us. Cheap energy is now an oxymoron. We will never pump more oil than we do right now, and the price of everything touched or served by oil will rise from here on — yet every economy, company, and living human being on Earth wants to grow, every coming year, from now on. It won’t happen because it cannot happen.

Yet, at the very moment in history when the American people need to pull all together to redefine and reprioritize as a nation, need to move from planetary policeman to an energy independent nation that sees to its own people before its global empire, these Republicans have Americans deeply divided.

They use immigration as a bogeyman while they reduce every working American to the status of immigrants.

They use faith-based social services to break government services — and when those government services are thoroughly broken they will stop funding faith-based services.

They starve and constrict the public school system to break it, driving people toward vouchers for religious schools — and when that public school system is thoroughly broken, they will stop funding religious schools.

They use Christianism to break Christianity, turning it into a State religion for control of the restless poor, just as Emperor Constantine used it in 325 AD to control the restive masses and hold on to a failed and fading Empire.

They use corporate deregulation and self-regulation to rape the environment, despoiling the very air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we eat for the further profit of a few. That air, water, and soil will belong to your grandchildren, and we allow it to be permanently poisoned for the sake of one corporation’s profits in one fiscal year. That fiscal year matters more than our grandchild’s health and happiness?

And we, the people, are to pay for it all, as with the Savings and Loan scandal, as with the Vietnam War, as with the Iraq War, as with the next war, and the next.

Making off with government pensions, corporate pensions and Social Security by bankrupting corporations, local governments and the Federal government itself is the Republican plan.

Keep moving moolah to the top five percent of the population, the five percent who already own over half the assets and capital of this nation. Go forth to tell the public to live in fear, tell the public they are being attacked from without and within, tell them outright lies, but just keep moving that moolah to the top five percent.

The Five Percent Solution is upon us, yet we sleep, eat, and work, and think it cannot happen here. We march to the nearest Diebold voting machine now and then to cast our sacred vote into the whirlwind, never to be counted or to count again.

We cannot bring ourselves to believe that they are after our freedoms and funds and future — and after us. Not us. Not we, the people.

They’re just a political party. They’re not gangsters, thugs and thieves. Surely they do not mean us any real harm. Surely it cannot happen here. This isn’t Argentina.

Yet.

 As we approach this very last Great American Summer, the neocons have clearly given up on boiling the frog.  Time’s up.  Now they plan to place it firmly underfoot, take aim, and pull the trigger . . . war it will be.

What transpires over the six short months before Election Day ought to be a steady eruption of hidden Republican corruption, and a steady erosion of patience and polity on the part of the public. Scandal alone should sink the GOP.

We ought to arrive at the second Tuesday in November with sufficient supply of tar and feathers to finish off the neocon experiment in full frontier fashion, and then begin to take back something of what’s been stolen from current and future generations.
Ah, but cruising into that bruising won’t do, for this Administration. So, they can be relied upon to overturn the table before then. All cards up in the air, all bets are off the moment we strike Iran. Nuclear or not, it doesn’t matter. If the neocons don’t change that regime, their own regime is forfeit.

They will go for broke. They’ll hit Iran. But there is no military solution to the political corner they’ve painted themselves into in the Middle East. It’s like fixing a Swiss watch with a hammer: the moment you begin, you are also all done.

But they will try, and in short order Americans will enter an uncharted economic era with their pockets and prospects picked clean. An era of no real choices, and no real opportunities. That’s when black flags will fly, and bloody murder will be both the mood and the method of the masses.

While the neocons count — incredibly count — on a quick collapse of the parlous Persians for their salvation and safety before November, alas, nothing can deliver them now. They have so divided and reduced America through their lying and looting that we are incapable of anything but further decline.

It’s over. The high water mark of the American Empire was Bush landing on that aircraft carrier with an extra pair of socks stuffed down his skivvies. That was it. That’s his legacy. That’s as high as we’re ever going to piss on the pillar of Ozymandias.

The money, the means, the military, and the manufacturing base that would have let us make war on the whole planet and win, that would have allowed us to attain full spectrum dominance of everyone, everywhere, all the time — has either been looted, lost, broken, or sold by the very neocon nutcases who so wanted that Empire — on the cheap.

Perhaps it is best that the neocon’s grasp for glory this year will make our decline rapid, instead of tawdry and tedious, for the sooner we start back down the road to being a nation among other nations, the closer to reality we will be.

Despite all this neocon narcissism and military madness, that is who we are. One nation. We, the people, governing ourselves. Not other people.

We aren’t royalty.  We aren’t the destined masters of the planet. We aren’t God’s holy warriors. We aren’t the meanest mofos in the valley. We aren’t lords over anyone, anywhere.

We are free people. We made ourselves free. We make ourselves free.

And free is the single greatest thing to be.

There are only two ways to deliver a 700 ton bomb unto your enemy’s locale.

One is by freight forwarding — trains or trucks haul thousands of crates of high explosives to the target.  Cranes and forklifts stack them up until one million, four hundred thousand pounds are in place, and then you set it all off at once . . .

Or, you substitute all that tonnage with a small nuclear device . . .
Seven hundred tons of TNT translates to a 0.7 kiloton tactical atomic weapon, affectionately known in the nation building business as a Baby Nuke. They are highly effective for getting your enemy’s full attention, and for capturing their hearts and minds by means of seizing the short and curly.

We actually make Baby Nukes right here in America, as small as a 0.3 kiloton yield. They manifest mushroom clouds like the big boys, and are a delight to deliver.  You can ship them by missile, plane, cruise missile — or insert them manually using your Special Forces, Hollywood style.  America makes Baby Nukes in the 0.7 kiloton range that this Nevada Boom is meant to emulate.  In fact, all you need to do is set the dial for the kiloton yield you want, and then stoke that Launch button.  It’s just that simple. It’s just that easy.

Which method will we use?

Clearly we won’t be freight forwarding multiple TNT crates into Iran, so when the time comes, nuking them with as many 0.7 kiloton devices as necessary will simply have to do.

While there is clearly a ‘loud warning to Iran’ element in this spring’s Nevada Boom, the genuine purpose of this freight forwarded blast is to show our military what a Baby Nuke actually does to hardened bunkers below ground. Lots of sensors buried in test bunkers under the Nevada desert will record the effects of the explosion. There will be enough data for countless Powerpoint slides.

Strake? What’s a strake?

Our Air Force uses the term ‘strake’ to indicate that they hope the blast’s shock waves will virtually liquefy the seemingly solid ground beneath it, shaking the shit out of everything down there, transforming any personnel and equipment in bunkers below ground into functional non-effectives.  If you’ve ever seen workmen vibrating freshly poured concrete, you’ve seen what solid ground does during a nuclear blast. It shakes and liquefies it, and to some depth underground, too.

To strake some poor bastards, then, is to shake the shit out of ’em. To transform them into Jell-O versions of themselves, useless thereafter for their intended purpose. Neither the personnel nor their equipment will function as planned after a good straking from above.

The Nevada Boom will also tell our military what they can plausibly claim a 0.7 kiloton Baby Nuke does to hardened bunkers.  After we hit Iran with nukes of this size, we can claim we’ve destroyed all of their hidden bunkers — and prove the claim with Powerpoint slides from the Nevada Boom showing strake damage to Nevada test facilities.

Of course, the ground is different in different places on earth, so what a Baby Nuke will do to Iran’s soil has no direct relation to what a very big stack of TNT will do to Nevada.  Alas, there’s never any room in sound bites or headlines for that kind of nuance, so our media will just join the military in assuming that Nevada and Iran are the same place.  You strake one, you’ve straked the other. Right?

Besides, no one will ever know what effect our nuclear bombs will have on Iran’s underground bunkers. We don’t have an Army to occupy that country, to see for ourselves.  Iran isn’t going to invite us to come see.  They’re just going to get really busy building some nukes to save themselves from us and Israel.

What makes it Divine?

Why our military wishes to call this freight forwarded stack o’ crates bomb ‘Divine’ we can only guess at.  Perhaps they feel God is on our side, ready to smite our enemies as ever and always, and willingly takes top billing for a military orgasm this large.

OOO RAH!!

But it won’t be good for me, and it won’t be good for you, and it won’t be good for Iran or anybody else in this world for Rumsfeld’s crusaders to get their rocks off in the Nevada desert or in the Iranian desert later this year. It will just be more military masturbation, waving our big stick at other nations, demanding that the rest of the world service our non-negotiable lifestyle lest we go all nation building on somebody’s ass.

We’re going to drop Jell-O making nukes on Iran this year, some time after we test and calibrate the strake concept up north of Las Vegas.  God is behind this, and everything else our armed forces do.

But Divine Strake? That’s puerile euphemism.  Pentagonese.  It’s a Powerpoint title page.  No one really talks like that.

So I shall christen this military tool Jehovah’s Jell-O Bomb. Isn’t that more fun?

Baby Nukes make Jell-O, wherever they go. It’s just that easy. It’s just that simple.

You, too, can build your nation on Jell-O! All you have to do is defy us. We’ll do the rest.

War across the entire Middle East will boil over by March 15th, if you don’t stop it. Yes, you.

You, me, everybody.  It’s crunch time.  There are enough pressure points to force the White House to act now to take America into a wider war.  They can’t afford to wait for the summer or fall.  The mad men and women in the White House wholeheartedly believe that they have no choice but to launch a regional war in the Middle East by the middle of March, by bombing Iran.  They must, to save their mission to establish the American Empire.

If you have other plans for America than endless war, you need to help derail any attack on Iran in the coming six weeks, because the game’s afoot.  It’s got the green light.  Bush is going smiting again if we don’t all stand up and say no.

The neocon Plan for the New American Century has one pervasive goal — full spectrum domination of every nation on earth through overwhelming American military, economic and political power. We shall be lords over all; we shall be first among nations, or there will be preemptive hell to pay.  That is the Plan.

To fuel and further this American Empire, the neocon Plan for the New American Century has one keystone goal, one central condition that all else flows from — we must control all of the oil in the Middle East. That control keeps America motoring along, business as usual, and that control yields potent influence over all other nation states in this world.  They will have to buy that oil on our terms, with our currency, or fight for it.  They will have to surrender other dwindling resources the Empire requires, or suffer the consequences.

The neocon Plan for the New American Century calls for reducing the entire Middle East into a chaotic array of weak or puppet states, which America can easily dominate. States that cannot develop their oil without us, states that cannot act militarily against us, states that must deal on our terms, states that must obey.

Iraq was to be our central police station in the Middle East.  From there we could destabilize and dominate the economies, governments and cultures of every oil-producing state in the region, because we could hit them, in minutes. We could immediately make them offers they couldn’t refuse.

Except, the occupation of Iraq has not gone according to Plan; it has failed.  We may not even be able to keep our fourteen permanent bases there, in which case we won’t be able to make any of those offers.  So, the neocon Plan is at a highly critical point; it must be abandoned — or expanded, very soon.  One or the other.  It’s crunch time.

At this juncture, February 1st of 2006, Iran is openly exercising its right to build nuclear power plants.  Iran may also be setting enriched uranium aside for weapons; however, every genuine expert on this subject — worldwide — sees their ability to explode even a test weapon as ten years out, at the minimum.  Iran is not an imminent threat to anybody.

And, given the ability of Israel and America to respond with hundreds of nuclear bombs to every one bomb Iran ever launches, it is not logical to think Iran wants a nuclear bomb for aggressive purposes. No, they want it for a poison pill — if you invade us, we will set it off in our oil fields, and we both lose.  So don’t invade us.  It’s the same logic that had Saddam setting fire to the oil wells of Kuwait when the Americans came to take them back.  It’s the same logic that has Saudi Arabia rigging their oil fields for demolition in case of an invasion.

No sane person wants Iran to build a nuclear bomb. But threatening Iran with attack and invasion if they seek one is no way to stop them — rather it is the best possible motivation they could have for building one.  The sooner they have that poison pill, the sooner they feel some safety.  The sooner they feel safe from us, the less they need that poison pill.

The neocons of the Bush Regime are well aware of all this.  But then, creative destruction is their stock in trade, and war is their best friend.  In the end, their supposed concerns with Iran’s nuclear activities are not based so much on controlling Iran as on keeping their control over America.  If the American public isn’t transfixed by imminent attack by strangers from Over There, they start looking around America, and asking hard questions.

The neocons have no answers.  Only lies about imminent attack by strangers from Over There.  They have no skills of government; they have only dreams of empire.

At this juncture, February 1st of 2006, the Bush Administration is presenting Iran as an imminent nuclear threat to the entire world, even while their own experts say this is unsupported by facts. Why are they shoveling this panic-mode ‘intelligence’ out to the media?  Why are they coercing the UN Security Council to make threats they will not follow through on?

Because it helps the Bush Regime cling to power over America.

If Americans come to the conclusion that our only business in the Middle East is the Iraq debacle, they will want us out of there pronto, so we can get back to our own affairs here at home.  And those affairs turn out to be — the Bush Administration’s spying on us, lying us into Iraq, emptying the Treasury, stealing money from all directions, and remaining incompetent at protecting us — from the weather, from the world, or from corporate thieves making off with our life savings.

It’s an election year.  Were you aware that the levees in New Orleans are barely under repair, and the city is guaranteed to flood again in hurricane season, seven months from now?  Dick Cheney is aware of that, and it’s another pressure point forcing him to act now, not next fall.  If the Bush Regime waits to bomb Iran, if they work through their backlog of criminal charges instead, they will be promptly impeached even by a Republican Congress.  Then, the Republicans will lose control of Congress and the White House for decades to come. There is no chance they will let that happen.

The Bush Administration cannot let Americans bring their minds to rest at home; they must distract them with fear of an imminent attack.  To leave Iraq, or to leave Iran be, would leave the Bush Regime with nothing on their calendar except answering for their crimes between now and November.  To remain in power, they must present a bogey man to the American public, and send them pell mell after it.  They can never retreat, or hold back, or their crimes will catch up with them.  It’s forward into a wider war — or impeachment and imprisonment back home.

They dare not wait until summer or this fall for their latest stovepiped spectre to raise its shadow in the public eye.  No, it will be before the Ides of March, before the middle of next month, that they will hit Iran, and knowingly cause the entire Middle East to boil over into regional war.  They need the Middle East in complete chaos, so they can run the oil through their fingers, and build the American Empire.

Before the middle of March, they will bomb Iran, and Iran will strike back across the Middle East.  Pakistan will go mad, Saudi Arabia will be in open revolt, every Muslim state will be sucked into the war in some capacity, and it will bring the entire world into immediate crisis over the loss of Iranian oil shipments.  Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Condi and Bolton will say we had no choice; the Terror from Tehran was coming for our children and mothers.  We had no choice, we did it for America, they will declare, wrapping themselves in our tri-colored flag.

That’s a lie.  The truth is, it is the Bush Regime that has no choice.  They do this for themselves, for their grasp on power.  They do this because war is their only hope, and because saying and doing anything to create war is their only creed.

Indeed, the Bush program from here on out will be to scare Americans with horrible visions of impending apocalypse, so that they will allow the Bush Regime to save them, whatever it costs, whatever it takes from America’s Constitution or values or peace, or pursuit of happiness.

So, Iran is the next bogey man.  With their lies and crimes catching up to them fast, the neocons must bomb Iran to rule America any longer. They must bomb Iran or the GOP can’t play the heroes as we head into the November elections.  They must bomb Iran no matter how wide the ensuing war may be; they prefer that to giving up power over America.

Beware the Ides of March.  Bush/Cheney will NOT wait until the summer or fall to bomb Iran. They need to distract the American public now, right now, before impeachment hearings proceed, and this Administration falls like the house of cards it is.  Only a wider Middle Eastern war can save them now.

With a wide open war Over There, they can declare martial law back here, open up the Selective Service for immediate inductions, and never look back.  Their Four Horsemen will be turned loose; their names are Dick Tater, Marshall Law, Jack Bootz, and GI Joe.  They must loose them soon on America, or Americans of both parties will escort them out of the White House, and in November they will all vote for Anyone-But-The Republican.

There’s another pressure point.  Iran is opening an oil trading bourse in March, which will trade oil in Euros only, not dollars.  Financially, it is hardly more than a symbolic gesture.  Politically, it is a pistol in America’s face, a deadly gesture to America’s dollar dominance. If one nation does it, other nations will do it.  So you stop the first one, real hard, to stop all the others from even trying. They must bomb Iran soon, or lose their grip on America.

As an immediate consequence of the massive Iranian response — which will include closing the Gulf to all shipping, striking Israel with missiles, shutting off all oil shipments, and infiltrating a million jihadis into Iraq and Afghanistan to kill all our troops there — Bush will “have no choice” but to declare de facto, or actual, martial law here in America for the duration of a multi-generational war for the freedom of Muslim people everywhere.

If we can stop Bush and Cheney before they launch this wider war in the Middle East, if we can stop them before they do, the neocon Plan for the New American Century will fold for good, and the Bush/Cheney Administration will be hounded out of office in short order.

If we cannot or do not stop them, this war will drag in every other major power to some degree, overnight.  They will have to act to preserve their access to Middle Eastern Oil, to preserve their nation.  They won’t talk about it, they will have to choose sides and take action immediately to get the oil flowing again.  It will be World War IV.  Let us hope it is not nuclear war.

These neocons in our White House honestly see no choice, for themselves or the American nation, but wider war in the Middle East.  They believe it will save America, and make us greater than ever.  That’s why they will act — because they Know that they are absolutely right, and that history will judge them as true visionaries and enlightened leaders whose creative destruction established an American Empire that lasted a thousand years.

They do not believe their next excellent adventure will go down in flames.  They will bomb Iran, and start a wider war, if you do not stop them.  They’ll do it in the dead of night, a few weeks from now, and tell you about it on CNN in the morning.  Things will spiral out of anyone’s control.  Soon your sons will get a call from the draft board.  There will be curfews.  There will be no need for political parties or elections until the war ends, if ever. It will be the war of survival that Dick Cheney has always wanted.  Like Hitler, he doesn’t want any place but first place for America.  He wants us on top, or reduced to ashes.

It’s crunch time.  For you, me, everybody.  We’re cruising into the abyss.  We’re sliding into war, and then wider war, and then wider still.

We have to stop Bush before he bombs Iran.  The moment he does, a much wider war begins, and it will not under anyone’s control.