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The InsiderOne Daily Report |
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Tuesday, May 22, 2001
President Bush Wants To Kill You (Or At Least Your Grandkids) InsiderOne's Michael Goldberg writes: With each day the impact of the Republican coup that put Cheney and Bush in the White House — you remember all that funny business in Florida? And how Bush lost the popular vote? — becomes more devastating. A "president" with no mandate has been acting like he's been given a mandate from god him- or herself to do whatever his corporate owners wish. Take the tax cut, presented as a 1.35 trillion-dollar tax reduction over the next 10 years. The New York Timesestimates that it's really a four trillion-dollar cut, and that "it can not be paid for except by raiding the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. It is a scheme that seems deliberately aimed at wrecking the basic American retirement programs, perhaps to force their dismantling or privatization." We understand what W and his henchmen are really up to. Do the math, and it's clear who benefits from the tax cut — the wealthy, Bush and Cheney among them. That's not the paranoid rant of some radical; in news stories and editorials, the New York Times and other media have been simply laying out the facts: that we have greedy, self-serving individuals in the power seats, spinning their half-truths and lies like crazy as they systematically work to push through their agenda. With their tax cut seemingly in the bag, Bush/Cheney have spent the past week promoting their go-go energy plan, A.K.A. the Bush-Cheney End-of-the-World strategy, or at least the End-of-the-World-as-we-know-it. But hey, who really cares if our environment becomes unlivable? Folks have been living in a sewer-like environment in L.A. for decades. Ever been to San Jose? Livermore? Many Americans seem to love to wallow in shit. (Polls show that more and more Americans favor the Bush tax plan, the plan that benefits the rich, not them.) Why else do they spend much of their free time at the mall? Whey do they eat at McDonald's or Burger King? Is it really that hard to slap together a sandwich with wheat bread, some lettuce, maybe a slice of tomato and some turkey? You know, something healthy? Something that won't shoot your cholesterol through the ceiling? But then, it would seem that many Americans don't care about their health either. But I digress. Cheney doesn't give a damn what the American people think anyway. What he cares about is shifting as much money as possible out of the government's hands — your money, remember; you paid it to the government as taxes — and into the bank accounts of energy producers. (Bush and Cheney still "work" in the energy industry, it's just that the government temporarily pays their salaries. But when the dust clears, and both are out of office, guess where we'll find 'em.) As Paul Krugman noted in his Sunday Times op-ed piece, "Burn, Baby, Burn": "The Libertarian Cato Institute calls the [energy] plan a 'smorgasbord of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington.' " Bush/Cheney have purposefully let California's energy crisis sputter along, without lifting a Federal finger to help, and blaming California whenever it suits them. They have cynically used California's troubles as evidence of what can happen if we don't charge ahead with a new approach that makes conservation irrelevant and puts the emphasis on "supply." They laugh and sneer at the very idea of conservation, as if it were some kind of joke that those crazies out in earthquake country came up with. In other words, who cares if your grandkids can't breathe? Americans have the right to drive gas guzzling SUVs, by god, and run their air-conditioners 24 hours a day with every light in the house on, and they're gonna exercise those rights. Americans are such suckers. We get taken coming and going. The InsiderOne Daily Report appears weekdays at 9 AM PST, except when it doesn't. Michael Goldberg is the president of insiderone.net. He founded Addicted To Noise in 1994. |