The Maui Examiner Commentary

COMMENTARY

Americans Need To Take Back Their Country

Commentary by Bonnie McFadden, Makawao resident

We all witnessed on T.V. the miserable failure of the Bush Administration to provide basic services and help to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and flooding in New Orleans.
Why did this happen?
Because President Bush appointed Michael Brown and other unqualified political cronies to run FEMA, and these people had neither the expertise, nor the interest in doing so.
Water, food and emergency transportation didn't get to those who needed it because Brown had hired private companies – companies which donated to Republican election campaigns – to deliver the goods and they didn't.
There was only one FEMA employee in all of Louisiana when Katrina hit, despite four days notice prior to storm making landfall.
Providing emergency services to Americans was just not a Bush administration priority.
Bush has appointed unqualified cronies to head virtually every agency in the U.S. government. Their task is not to efficiently carry out the agencies' duties, but to "privatize" these government services, which means they give contracts to Republican Party donor companies to do the jobs that the agencies were created to do.
These political cronies are also tasked with removing all government regulations that might impede private profits, thus we see the reduction in clean air, water, mining, oil drilling and timber cutting standards.
The Department of the Interior is now embarked on a project to sell millions of acres of heretofore public land to private companies at bargain basement prices.
Karl Rove and the neo-conservative Republicans didn't get George Bush the presidency in order to govern the United States or to provide services to its people; they put him in office in order to loot it.
The invasion of Iraq is the prime example. It was planned before Bush was even in office. Then, in April and May of 2001, once Bush was in office, Vice President Cheney's "Energy Task Force" was meeting with oil company executives to parcel out leases to Iraq's oil fields in anticipation of our later invasion.
Note that these plans were laid well prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, an event which the Bush Administration used to justify the Iraq invasion by falsely leading the American people to believe that Iraq was involved in that attack. Bush well knew from our own experts that Iraq was not involved in 9/11.
The administration's objective was to seize control of Iraq's oil, hand leases over to American energy companies, and to place permanent military bases in Iraq in order to control the Middle East economically and politically, while freezing China and Russia out of access to increasingly scarce Middle East oil.
Bush claimed Saddam was an imminent threat to the U.S. because he had weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear weapons program, which, Bush maintained, Saddam might give to Al Qaeda terrorists.
Bush suppressed reports from his own intelligence agencies that Saddam's secular government was anathema to the Al Qaeda religious fundamentalists, and Saddam was highly unlikely to give weapons to his Al Qaeda enemies.
To see what Bush's priorities were in Iraq, we have only to look at his actions on the ground after the invasion.
When Bush sent our military into Iraq, did he assign our troops to locate and protect Saddam's weapons sites? No, he assigned them to protect the oil ministry and the oil fields, allowing thousands of weapons caches, including even previously UN supervised nuclear components, to be freely looted. The explosives looted from those unguarded sites have since been used to blow up our own troops.
Congress allocated billions of U.S. dollars to the "reconstruction of Iraq" under the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) headed by Paul Bremer. Did Bremer bring in professionals from the State Department with experience in reconstruction? No, he actually banned them from Iraq and brought in hundreds of unqualified political cronies who proceeded to give billions of dollars in un-bid and undocumented contracts to Republican donor companies.
Millions of dollars in cash was handed out directly from Bremer's own office safe, without any documentation or audit trail. Now government auditors say it is impossible to trace the distribution of over nine billion dollars by the CPA.
Contractors hauled their loot away on hand trucks.
It is little wonder why Iraq still lacks electricity, water and sewerage. It was just like New Orleans. There was no requirement that these companies actually provide the services that they were paid to provide.
Why is the Iraqi unemployment rate still at sixty percent?
Because there was no requirement and little expectation that the U.S. contractors would hire Iraqis to work on the reconstruction projects and the contracts did not go to local Iraqi companies.
If six out of ten Americans didn't have jobs, water, electricity, medical care or even operable plumbing, we would all soon be "insurgents". Despite Bush's repeated claims that foreign terrorists are responsible for all the violence in Iraq, only some seven percent of those arrested as "terrorists" are non-Iraqi, and we have arrested thousands upon thousands of Iraqis, held them without charge or trial and tortured them. Under those same circumstances, wouldn't all Americans become "insurgents"?
Once it was established that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush then claimed that the purpose of his invasion was to bring "democracy" to Iraq.
Initially, the U.S. appointed all the provisional leaders, then the Administration financially supported those candidates favored in the later "democratic" election of the constitutional framers.
Even with U.S. financial support, our candidates lost and the religious fundamentalists gained a majority and crafted a constitution fit for a theocracy, not a democracy. Women's rights are relegated to the whims of fundamentalist religious leaders.
Now it looks like Bush will support convicted embezzler Ahmed Chalabi as the next prime minister of Iraq. This is the same man who provided, at considerable U.S. expense, false intelligence to justify the American invasion.
A few months ago, the U.S. accused Chalabi of being an Iranian spy who alerted Iran to the fact that the U.S. had broken their communications code.
Now, it seems, he's back on our payroll.
When Paul Bremer took control of the occupation he had all the plenary powers of a Roman "pro-consul," not a Democrat.
He immediately changed Iraq's laws so that private corporations would pay no taxes, and no import or export tariffs and would be allowed to export unlimited profits out of Iraq. Bremer even made a law that Iraqi farmers had to buy patented seeds from U.S. companies that cannot be re-used from crop to crop.
Bremer tried, if unsuccessfully, to privatize all Iraq's industries, except oil, which he kept under de facto U.S. control. The head of Shell Oil was appointed consultant (controller) of the Iraqi oil ministry.
After the invasion, the UN permitted the U.S. to use the proceeds from Iraqi oil exports to fund reconstruction.
The U.S. was required to account for all the oil and all the
proceeds. They didn't.
Where previously the amount of oil that flowed from Iraqi oil pipes had been monitored by meters, Bremer stopped the metering, so the actual amount of oil sold could not be
calculated.
Bremer took the un-metered proceeds of Iraqi oil sales and gave billions for projects to American companies, or rather to those American companies that had donated to Republican campaigns. The Iraqis saw little reconstruction, and only a few shared in the profits.
But the Bush Administration's looting goes way beyond the devastation it caused in Iraq. In less than five years, the Bush administration has been responsible for the most colossal profiteering in world history. The primary economic victim has been the American economy and the American taxpayer.
While lowering taxes for the super rich and drastically cutting basic services to the middle class and the poor, Bush has borrowed billions of dollars, largely from China and Japan, to hand over to private corporations such as Cheney's Haliburton for war-related supplies and services.
The interest on these loans will be paid out of American taxpayer's pockets for generations.
While our tax money is going to pay interest to foreign creditors, it cannot be used for the needed government services for our citizens – there will be no money for school lunches, food stamps, health care and medical research, student loans, the development of alternative energy sources, domestic housing, flood control, or road repairs, to say nothing about true homeland security such as equipment and training for first responders, cargo inspection, and protection against biological and chemical weapons attacks.
The Republican Congress just passed a budget bill that further reduces taxes for the super-rich while cutting the above-listed services for the rest of us.
How long are we going to let these looters keep stealing our money, our children's money, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren's money?
We must demand that Congress cut off all funds for the occupation of Iraq and bring our troops home immediately.
We must demand the impeachment or resignation of Bush and all his cohorts in crime, and actively campaign against all of the politicians who have acquiesced in the most colossal looting in world history.
As the Republicans now have majority control over both the House and the Senate, we need to put pressure on them to exercise their oversight responsibilities to stop the profiteering by the White House and the executive departments.
Call 1-800-426-8073 toll-free to tell Republican U.S. senators and congressional representatives, especially House Majority Leader Ray Blunt and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, that the looting must stop or they will be out of a job in 2006. Get active now in the political party of your choice and work to elect sane and honest candidates to Congress.
Better yet, run for office yourself and work to stop corporations from buying our elected officials through their lobbyists and enormous campaign contributions. Vote for public financing of all election campaigns and verifiable ballots in all elections. Take action and restore sanity, honesty and democracy to our government.