Restoring Freedom & Democracy post-Bush

By mediagonebad

It is a matter of public record that in August 2001 George W. Bush received a Presidential Daily Briefing stating that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization planned to use jet airplanes as weapons. Did Bush read the report? Did he read it and fail to act upon the information? Did he, by extension, allow 9/11 to happen by not acting upon the information in the PDB?

What would Bush have stood to gain by not acting upon this information, by not beefing up airport security immediately? This would have been the responsible course of action would it not? Well, consider first that the Bush family business is oil and weapons. A president whose family stands to gain financially from war might be less inclined to prevent one. Second, the Bush family world view supports Hitler’s view of unrestricted corporatism.

Under the 8-year Bush/Cheney regime, the United States of America was slowly and methodically overthrown by a small group of economic zealots who believed in the Bush/Hitler view of unrestricted corporatism, a group of zealots who brought the horrific future world foretold in the works of George Orwell to our national doorstep.



The government has spy satellites that can focus on a license plate. It has facial recognition software. It has a computer system that can pick out key words in private telephone conversations and emails, all without our knowledge or consent.

Under the Patriot Act, we allow the government to break into our houses and download our computer files without a warrant under the guise of finding supposed "terrorists." We allow the government access to our library records so it knows who is reading what.

We routinely accept government explanations for world events without even asking questions to determine if the explanations are based on truthful and valid assertions. We allow our government to assert its right to imprison and torture foreign detainees indefinitely as "enemy combatants" even though they have not been charged with any specific crime or act.

We allow our elections to be purchased by the rich and powerful while denying the poor and working class proper access to voting machines. We allow computerized voting that does not even print out a paper record in case a hand re-count is needed.

We allow our government to grant oil, chemical and mining companies access to public lands, where they extract the natural resources with little regard for the long-term environmental impact, water and air pollution, and global warming.

We allow our young soldiers to become occupiers and nation-builders in foreign lands, even though history has shown that such occupations inevitably fail as one oppressor is replaced by another.

And we allow corporate “military contractors” like Haliburton, Blackwater, and dozens of others, to make millions of dollars without any public accountability whatsoever. From kitchens to prisons, corporations have become a huge part of the war business, outnumbering even the “grunts,” the foot soldiers.

The new United States of America under Bush had nothing to do with the principles of freedom and democracy that the nation was founded upon. Rather, the new United States was all about unbridled imperialism, privatization and militarization. Public monies were shifted from the public sector -- which funds education, food programs, jobs programs, health programs and Social Security -- to the private sector, which includes big business, military contractors, big banks, and the stock market. In other words, the people's money was withdrawn from social programs and deposited into the bank accounts of the rich and the super-rich. And the people's money was gambled away in the largest casino in the world -- Wall Street.

This is the reality of the nation as President Barrack Obama was sworn-in, yet some misinformed folks on the far right think of Obama as a “socialist,” and they refer to him as “fascist” because Hitler’s world view is often referred to as “state socialism.” Such terms have so many different meanings that they have now become meaningless without a detailed definition of terms, so it is not surprising that these terms might confuse, say, a FOX News viewer. Scholarly definitions are not used on FOX News. FOX prefers catch-phrases that are easy for their audience to understand and repeat.

Hitler’s imperialist dream foresaw a powerful corporate state where a limited government functions primarily as a servant of the rich and powerful corporations that own the means of production, fund the nation's elections, control the military, and dictate its political decisions. Fascism, also known as “state socialism,” is not to be confused with Karl Marx’s “scientific socialism,” which holds that the people must own and control the means of production and that government must function first and always as a servant of the people. President Obama is a supporter of the capitalist economic system. Marxists are not.

Although the Bush regime is gone, many of its democracy-damaging policies remain in force. Perhaps Obama will overturn these policies, but that remains to be seen. In the meantime, citizens have a responsibility to defend our freedom and democracy. To do that we need to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and bring the troops home. We need to strictly regulate corporations and hold them financially responsible for breaking those regulations. We need to defend the labor unions and progressive organizations that became targeted for extinction under the Bush government.

Our responsibility is immense. Our responsibility extends to all citizens of the world who look to us as a beacon of hope for human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and justice. It we fail, the world fails with us.