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• What a Downer

  Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008 3:29PM / Standard Entry / Members only
  2 comments

  Due to the downturn of my country's economy and the fact that it's having a degrading effect on me personally in all areas of my life (BIG TIME!), I've been a thinkin' long and hard about the current state of affairs here in the good ol' U.S. of A.  I feel it's time that I got brutally political and say the things that I've always believed and felt.
  
  I grew up around liberal people and liberal culture here in the Bay Area, but it doesn't take a liberal to admit that my country's leadership has some of the most insane, ego-maniacal, Sith Lord, evil motherf@ckers on the planet!  Let me tell you why I've always thought so...
  
  I have Republican relatives.  Old school people, who fought in WWII, who got brainwashed along the way into believing a philosophy that has proven to be dangerous to all life.  I remember telling my dad, my grandfather, my uncle, "If George Bush gets elected, our economy is going to go down the toilet, and we're going to get wrapped up in another war, MARK MY WORDS!!"  Of course, some programming is not easily undone.
  
  After 8 years of Bush, I find myself enraged over a whole host of issues.  Not the least of which is the fact that it's estimated (according to The Lancet) that the war has wiped out more than 500 people a day in Iraq.  By now, over a million men, women, and children have been killed!!  How can I paint this for people...that's women and children raped by machine gun fire, and blasted to bits by 30mm chain guns, hellfire missiles, and 500lb bombs.  The media here is constantly pointing out how sad it is that we've lost over 4,000 troops.  There's never any mention of the MASSIVE numbers of innocent Iraqis that have been killed in this war.  All you'll ever see is a sort passing acknowledgment of the carnage, or the media showcasing a few tragedies involving some of our more sociopathic, murderous troops out in the field. 
  
  It was the same in Vietnam.  They don't even know how many Vietnamese people we killed.  They think it's somewhere around 3-5 MILLION.  Oh, but it's important that we still only concentrate on grieving for the 58,000 dead Americans, cause their lives are worth more than all of those other...people.  Don't get me wrong, it was absolutely horrible what happened to our guys in that conflict.  I've seen firsthand how Vietnam and Gulf War 1 destroyed the lives of our veterans.  I've known a lot of these guys.  Most of them are severely tweeked in one way or another.  It only goes to show, our leaders don't even care about their own tools.  When it comes down to it, a good portion of the people in our military are expendable.  That's only one of the reasons why my country's leadership has always sickened me. 
  
  One of the main reasons is because, for the last half a century, the U.S. has, basically, been acting like a hegemonic, self-interested, economic empire that will stop at nothing to get what it wants.  And when I say "it", I'm referring to the real corporate, power mongers who control this nation.  I still find myself debating with people all the time about Peak Oil ("so, the demand isn't bigger than the supply, is what you're saying?"), and the fact that the primary reason the U.S. felt it needed to invade Iraq AND Afghanistan was because of oil and resources.  It was not really about ousting the Taliban, or bringing down Saddam, or bringing "democracy" to the region (the funniest notion, when Saudi Arabia is one of our biggest allies, and they're one of the most UNDEMOCRATIC nations ever).  The whole disaster was, and still is, because of OIL and the U.S. feeling like it needs to secure the resources in that region.  Iraq has the second largest oil reserves on the planet, about 17%.  Saudi Arabia (our puppet government, "allies") has the biggest.  With Afghanistan also having a huge geopolitical value due to the proposed Turkmenistan / Caspian Sea pipeline (that will now probably be built by Dick Cheney's Halliburton), was it ever any wonder what this was all about?!
  http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/175.html
  Not only that, but 95% of American aren't seeing a penny of all of the countless billions of dollars being made off Iraq's oil.  THAT'S the betrayal that should hurt Americans the most.  That  this nation and all of it's people would be used as tools to achieve these astronomical levels of wealth, power, and control, and then be left in the dust, to wallow in poverty and depression.  They're taking all the profits and still ripping us off!
  http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/03/08/iraq.main/index.html
  I could go on and on posting articles showing how the Bush Administration is still the totally corrupt, criminal regime that it's always been.
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/02/AR2008070203322.html?nav=rss_business
  But I'll digress for a moment and theorize that all of this turmoil and growing poverty and crime in my neighborhood is due to a sort of "shake-up" in this country.  Just like in Europe, things had to get extremely f@cked up for people to realize a more sensible way of living and treating others.  Maybe someday we will have the same sort of renaissance Europe has been experiencing.  Then, maybe, we can all look back at this time in history and laugh.  In the meantime, I can only curse the day we ever let GW and his cronies be in charge of anything, let alone the United States government.
  Video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WwVnHJ0Zucs&feature=PlayList&p=552123C6A01C9A8C&index=5