Moral Maze: Bug-Eyed Believers and the Bankruptcy Law

(The battle described below is over now, alas; the bug-eyed believers sold out in the end, and the "Debt Slavery Law" has now been passed (April 2005). But the truth behind the "Bankruptcy Bill" described here is still valid.)

Never let it be said that this column doesn't have a good word to say about the bug-eyed religious extremists who have taken over the Republican Party and poisoned America's political discourse with their frothing ignorance and Talibanic zeal for barbaric repression. In fact, when it comes to their latest battle, we are proud to stand up and say: "Godspeed, you Christian soldiers!"

That's because a few Congressional Bug-Eyes – with a bug up some other part of their anatomy about a woman's right to control her own body – are the only thing now standing between ordinary working people and the white-collar predators of the "financial services industry," who aim to eat up the lives of those they have already crippled with their "easy-money" scams.

This week, anti-abortion extremists in the House of Representatives forced a delay on a final vote on the great googily-moogily "Bankruptcy Bill," the New York Times reports. They're not worried about the countless families that will be devastated by the bill, of course; they're in a snit over an amendment that would curtail the ability of anti-abortion terrorist groups to use bogus bankruptcies to dodge financial penalties after they've been caught burning down clinics, stalking nurses, harassing pregnant women or killing doctors.

Their reasoning may be repellent, but there is some hope that these notorious mollycoddlers of domestic terrorism might be able to mount enough procedural roadblocks to, well, abort the bill altogether – even though the measure enjoys, as the Times hastens to assure us, "broad bipartisan support."

Of course, in mediaspeak, "broad bipartisan support" ordinarily means that some shady outfit has been throwing ungodly amounts of money at the ever-eager courtesans in Washington. And there has sure enough been some money thrown here – as you'd expect, when it's bankers and credit-card companies coming to call.

The new bill – which was actually written by "financial services" lobbyists – would "protect" the little lambs of Wall Street from all the vicious single mothers, unemployed fathers, ghetto scum and trailer-park trash out there who have collapsed beneath the debt they've taken on at the frantic urging of, er, Wall Street. For years, the "financial services industry" has deliberately targeted the most vulnerable people in American society – those on the economic margins, young kids just starting out in life, working parents stretching to pay the bills, sick people laden with medical costs, the luckless, the desperate, the ill-educated, the naïve – and plied them with promises of "instant credit" and "pre-approved loans" in slick advertising campaigns and junk-mail bombardments.

They operate like playground pushers: "Hey, kid, the first bag is free." Once the habit of life on credit is established, then the extortionate interest rates, the "late charges" and "rollovers" kick in. The promised good life is gone, siphoned away into the coffers of credit giants like MBNA Corporation of Delaware, the world's biggest peddler of plastic cash, and the great banking houses, who use the profits they've plucked from the broken backs of grubby proles to fuel their shell games with Enron, WorldCom, Harken and the boys.

Millions of the Americans thus ruined have fled to the slender and humiliating protections of personal bankruptcy. In most cases, the existing laws do wipe away some debts, particularly unsecured debt. But it leaves many others on the books, while destroying the debtor's credit rating for years to come, closing the door on dreams of buying a car or house, or engaging in any of the innumerable transactions that now require ID and surety in the form of – what else? – a credit card. It's no "easy out;" it's a hard step, a desperate measure, fraught with lingering doubts, agonizing decisions, and irrevocable consequences no matter what you choose – much like abortion, in fact.

Now, in the Herbert Hoover-like financial nightmare that has engulfed America in the Second Coming of Bushonomics, millions of people have been thrown out of work. Millions more have seen their pensions, their nest eggs, their financial security wiped out by the gargantuan frauds of Wall Street. But even this has not stopped the "financial services industry" from trying to gut the slim protections of the existing laws and force bankrupts to pay off credit card debts and loans – sometimes before paying for other trifles, such as alimony, medicine or groceries.

Well-heeled supporters of the bill – like the insider-trading wastrel in the White House, who never risked a dime of his own money while making millions in politically-connected sweetheart deals – claim the strongarm measure is in fact a Godly edict, forcing the rabble to face up to their "unhealthy values" and "irresponsibility." Indeed, Senator Charles Grassley, one of the bill's champions, says it will even stem "the eroding moral values of some people."

Those would be the little people – the unconnected people – of course. But not the kind of people who rake in more than $300,000 in "hard money" contributions to their presidential campaigns from MBNA – the largest single corporate briber to the Bush team in 2000, outpointing even Kenny Boy Lay. Or the kind of people who receive $447,000 low-interest loans from MBNA just four days before becoming a chief sponsor of the bill – like House Democrat James Moran of Virginia. Or the hundreds of other congressmen who pocketed a total of $37.7 million in "financial services" baksheesh in 2000 – and God only knows how much since then. No, their "moral values" are firm and uneroded.

Meanwhile, as always, the weakest go to the wall – unless the Bug-Eyes stand fast for terrorism.
Murky old world, ain't it?

Darkness Visible: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism is Now in Operation (2005)

From the Moscow Times, Jan. 25, 2005. This is the follow-up to "Into the Dark."

More than two years ago, we wrote here of a secret Pentagon plan to foment terrorism: sending covert agents to infiltrate terrorist groups and goad them into action – i.e., committing acts of murder and destruction. The purpose was two-fold: first, to bring the terrorist groups into the open, where they could be counterattacked; and second, to justify U.S. military attacks on the countries where the terrorists were operating – attacks which, in the Pentagon's words, would put those nations' "sovereignty at risk." It was a plan that countenanced – indeed, encouraged – the deliberate murder of innocent people and the imposition of U.S. military rule anywhere in the world that American leaders desired.

This plan is now being activated.

In fact, it's being expanded, as the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh revealed last week. Not only will U.S.-directed agents infiltrate existing terrorist groups and provoke them into action; the Pentagon itself will create its own terrorist groups and "death squads." After establishing their terrorist "credentials" through various atrocities and crimes, these American-run groups will then be able to ally with – and ultimately undermine – existing terrorist groups.

Top-level officials in the Pentagon, the U.S. intelligence services and the Bush administration confirmed to Hersh that the plan is going forward, under the direction of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – just as we noted here in November 2002. Through a series of secret executive orders, George W. Bush has given Rumsfeld the authority to turn the entire world into "a global free-fire zone," a top Pentagon adviser says. These secret operations will be carried out with virtually no oversight; in many cases, even the top military commanders in the affected regions will not be told about them. The American people, of course, will never know what's being done in their name.

The covert units – including the Pentagon-funded terrorist groups and hit squads – will be operating outside all constraints of law and morality. "We're going to be riding with the bad boys," one insider told Hersh. Another likened it to the palmy days of the Reagan-Bush years: "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador? We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." Indeed, we reported here last summer that Bush has already budgeted $500 million to fund local paramilitaries and guerrilla groups in the most volatile areas of the world, a measure guaranteed to produce needless bloodshed, destruction and suffering for innocent people already ravaged by conflict.

Incredibly, as Hersh notes, the Bushists are now openly citing a sinister role model for their campaign: Britain's brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups and killed thousands of innocent civilians in putting down an "insurgency" against their colonial rule. And in fact, Rumsfeld and other Bush officials increasingly talk of combating not just terrorism but a "global insurgency" – as if the whole world is now an American colony, filled with recalcitrant "natives" rising up against their rightful masters.

The activation of the Pentagon terrorist operation is part of Bush's second-term expansion of the "war on terror." Despite some obfuscating rhetoric about "diplomacy," the Bush regime is pressing ahead with a hard-line strategy aimed at opening new military fronts in the "global free-fire zone." Any dissenting voices within the government are being ruthlessly purged. The Pentagon's secret forces are set for operations in at least 10 countries, and Bush insiders "repeatedly" told Hersh that "Iran is the next strategic target."

Iran has long been a focus of the small clique of "global dominationists" – led by Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and their acolytes – who engineered the invasion of Iraq. This group is determined to "whack Iran," as one insider put it, and they're not at all discouraged by the debacle in Iraq; indeed, to them it's a rousing success. Their first objective – openly stated years ago, before Bush took office – was the overthrow of Saddam's regime and the planting of a U.S. "military footprint" in Iraq. This has now been done. The fact that it has plunged the Iraqi people into a hell of violence, chaos, terror and extremism is of no real concern to the clique. Their lofty rhetoric about "freedom" and "liberation" is meaningless sham, shuck and jive for the rubes. By the admission of the clique's own publications, they seek strategic control over the world's energy resources in order to preserve and expand American geopolitical and economic hegemony in the new century. Everything else – including the security of the American people, put at increasing risk by the clique's reckless policies – is of secondary importance.

U.S. forces are already conducting military reconnaissance inside Iran in preparation for strikes on alleged nuclear weapons facilities, Hersh reports. The Pentagon is feverishly updating war plans for a "maximum ground and air invasion of Iran," incorporating the new staging areas now available in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, while employing an Iranian terrorist group, MEK, to launch covert ops and terrorist acts against Tehran. MEK was once given sanctuary by Saddam Hussein, who used the group as a brutal enforcer against Kurd and Shiite insurgents. Now Bush, "riding with the bad boys," has embraced the MEK murderers as his own.

In their ignorance and arrogance, the Bushists will almost certainly strike at Iran – despite the fact that even Iranian dissidents support the effort to make their nation a nuclear power and would join the mullahs in retaliation. The result will be a conflict far surpassing the horror and magnitude of the Iraq disaster.

In our original report on the Pentagon's terror scheme, we wrote: "Bush and his cohorts are plunging the world into an abyss, an endless night of murder and terror – wholesale, retail, state-sponsored, privatized; of fear and degradation, servility, chaos, and the perversion of all that's best in us." Now the night has come. Now the United States stands openly – even proudly – for terrorism, torture and the Hitlerian principle of aggressive war. America has fallen into the pit – and the hopes of the world go with it.

Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism

From the Moscow Times, Nov. 1, 2002. This piece was chosen as number 4 in Project Censored's "Top Censored Stories of 2002."

"This age: layers of lime harden in the sick son's blood…
There's nowhere to run from the tyrant-epoch…
Who else will you kill? Who else glorify?
What other lies will you invent?"
— Osip Mandelshtam, "1 January 1924"

This column stands foursquare with the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, when he warns that there will be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large. We know, as does the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, that this statement is an incontrovertible fact, a matter of scientific certainty. And how can we and the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, be so sure that there will be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large?

Because these attacks will be instigated at the order of the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense.

This astonishing admission was buried deep in a story which was itself submerged by mounds of gray newsprint and glossy underwear ads in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times. There – in an article by military analyst William Arkin, detailing the vast expansion of the secret armies being massed by the former Nixon bureaucrat now lording it over the Pentagon – came the revelation of Rumsfeld's plan to create "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that will "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception." According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization – the "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)" – will carry out secret missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to "counterattack" by U.S. forces.

In other words – and let's say this plainly, clearly and soberly, so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld's plan – the United States government is planning to use "cover and deception" and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people. Let's say it again: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the other members of the unelected regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people – your family, your friends, your lovers, you – in order to further their geopolitical ambitions.

For P2OG is not designed solely to flush out terrorists and bring them to justice – a laudable goal in itself, although the Rumsfeld way of combating terrorism by causing it is pure moral lunacy. (Or should we use the Regime's own preferred terminology and just call it "evil"?) No, it seems the Pee-Twos have bigger fish to fry. Once they have sparked terrorists into action – by killing their family members? luring them with loot? fueling them with drugs? plying them with jihad propaganda? messing with their mamas? or with agents provocateurs, perhaps, who infiltrate groups then plan and direct the attacks themselves? – they can then take measures against the "states/sub-state actors accountable" for "harboring" the Rumsfeld-roused gangs. What kind of measures exactly? Well, the classified Pentagon program puts it this way: "Their sovereignty will be at risk."

The Pee-Twos will thus come in handy whenever the Regime hankers to add a little oil-laden real estate or a new military base to the Empire's burgeoning portfolio. Just find a nest of violent malcontents, stir 'em with a stick, and presto: instant "justification" for whatever level of intervention/conquest/rapine you might desire. And what if the territory you fancy doesn't actually harbor any convenient marauders to use for fun and profit? Well, surely a God-like "super-Intelligence Support Activity" is capable of creation ex nihilo, yes?

The Rumsfeld-Bush plan to employ murder and terrorism for political, financial and ideological gain does have historical roots (besides al Qaeda, the Stern Gang, the SA, the SS, the KGB, the IRA, the UDF, Eta, Hamas, Shining Path and countless other upholders of Bushian morality, decency and freedom). We refer of course to Operation Northwoods, oft mentioned in these pages: the plan that America's top military brass presented to President John Kennedy in 1963, calling for a phony terrorist campaign – complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans – to provide "justification" for an invasion of Cuba, the Mafia/Corporate fiefdom which had recently been lost to Castro.

Kennedy rejected the plan, and was killed a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but on a far grander scale, with resources at his disposal undreamed of by those brass of yore, with no counterbalancing global rival to restrain him – and with an ignorant, corrupt president who has shown himself all too eager to embrace any means whatsoever that will augment the wealth and power of his own narrow, undemocratic, elitist clique.

There is genuine transgression here, a stepping-over – deliberately, with open eyes, with forethought, planning, and conscious will – of lines that should never be crossed. Acting in deadly symbiosis with their supposed enemies, the terrorist mafias, Bush and his cohorts are plunging the world into an abyss, an endless night of black ops, retribution, blowback, deceit, of murder and terror – wholesale, retail, state-sponsored, privatized; of fear and degradation, servility, chaos: the perversion of all that's best in us, of all that we've won from the bestiality of our primal nature, all that we've raised above the mindless ravening urges and impulses still boiling in the mud of our monkey brains.

It's not a fight for freedom; it's a retreat into darkness.

And the day will be a long time coming.

No Ways Tired: A Post-Election Manifesto

From The Moscow Times, Nov. 5, 2005

Well, that's it. The great American electoral agon is over at last. Now George W. Bush – the duly elected, finally legitimate president of the United States – can get back to doing what he does best: killing people for corporate profit and personal aggrandizement.
Yes, it's a hard blow for the world. Yes, it's a deep shame for American democracy, poisoned by lies, fear, greed and hysteria. Yes, it means that tens of thousands of innocent people will now be killed – by more war, more neglect, more ignorance, more repression, more brutality, more hatred, more fanaticism. Yes, it means that the planet will be gashed with more wounds, smeared with more filth, left to wither and die. Yes, it's a giant step backward for the human spirit, back to the muck of arbitrary rule by vicious elites and their ham-fisted goons, their well-wadded courtiers, their yapping sycophants. Yes, it means that somewhere out there, in the blood-dimmed haze of a dark age falling, Lucifer and bin Laden are lighting cigars and raising a glass to toast the victory of their good friend George.
These are the facts, and they can't be altered. But how to respond to this catastrophe? Shall we weep, moan, rend our garments, cover ourselves with sackcloth and ashes? Shall we sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of republics? Shall we cower in the shadows and sing glamorous dirges for the Lost Cause, for vanished glories and broken dreams?
Or shall we come out fighting, unbowed, heads high, laughing fools to scorn, rejecting at every turn the moral authority of murderers and thieves to rule our lives, determine our reality, act in our name? Let's dispense with lamentation – give not a single moment to that emotional indulgence – and get right back to work, more determined than ever to bear down harder, dig deeper and excavate the radioactive nuggets of truth still glowing beneath the slag-heap of ruin that Bush and his terrorist partners have made of the world.
Let's fight, let's reject, let's resist – without violence, the weapon of the stupid, the hormonal secretion of evolutionary backsliders in thrall to the chemical soup in their heads, dull primitives dressing up their ape-lust for power with scraps of religion, philosophy and cant. Let's fight these pathetic, malfunctioning wretches who lay their hands on our world and rape it like beasts in mindless rut. Fight them with the truths we find, exposing their crimes and deadly hypocrisies to the people they've suckered, perverted and betrayed.
This is not an insurmountable task, no matter how impervious the Bush Machine – that monstrous conglomeration of judicial bagmen, Congressional rubber-stamps, hard-right media moguls, dopehead radio ranters, sex-crazed theocrats, neo-conservatives, neo-Confederates, war profiteers, think-tank bleaters, Wall Street sharks, oilmen, Moonies, gun nuts and woman-haters – might appear at the moment. Let's look at the facts. Despite four years of the most relentless barrage of propaganda, deceit, misinformation and fearmongering ever hurled against a free society, more than 55 million people voted to reject Bush and all his works: his Hitlerite policy of aggressive war; his gulag system of torture and lawless detention; his savage assault on civil rights, the environment, working people and the poor; his systematic destruction of social programs; his transfer of sovereignty from individuals and communities to the iron grip of his corporate donors; his trashing of hard-won international agreements on nuclear weapons, conventional arms, war crimes, global warming, the rights of women and the protection of children; his unleashing of rabid religious zealots into the bowels of government to set policies on science, health, education, welfare, while sucking up billions in public money to fund their sectarian causes.
Such mass dissent – even in "wartime," in the face of the Machine – is surely cause for hope. Moreover, recent academic studies show that a large majority of Bush supporters actually disagree with him on everything from the Kyoto treaty to missile defense to international law to workers' rights – but somehow believe that he shares their views. Most Bush-backers also still believe that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda colluded in the September 11 attacks and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – yet this same majority says that the conquest of Iraq would be illegitimate if there were no WMD and no 9/11 connection. Thus more than half of the Bush voters on Tuesday oppose his actual policies, including the criminal war in Iraq – they just don't know it yet, because they're mired in carefully-cultivated delusion.
Of course, many Bush voters are willfully deluded, glad to be suckered and betrayed. They love the ludicrous puppet-show of his supposed greatness, his all-seeing wisdom, his mandate from God. They get teary-eyed at the thought of his honesty and goodness – while he kills 100,000 innocent people in Iraq, as a new medical study shows, with a brutally stupid military aggression based on lies and fantasies, fomenting more terrorism with each new barbarity and gorging his cronies on blood money. This hard core will never respond to the truth.
But if we can enlighten even the smallest percentage of Bush's razor-thin majority, then support for his murderous folly and waste will quickly erode. One by one, the puppet-strings will snap, and America's headlong plunge into tyranny, bigotry and endless imperial war can perhaps – perhaps – be halted, even reversed.
It's worth the fight. Let's take it on, let's take them down. In the words of the old spiritual, let us be in no ways tired. The road back to sanity and justice starts now.

Chris Floyd