Arthur,
This is great. Did you or anyone else notice a few things that had
escaped recent memory because we've been so inundated with the emperor's
diurnal crimes and transgressions? It had escaped me that N. Korea had
tested a nuke or two, and that Georgie Jr. merely mumbled about it,
rather than launch pre-emptive strike, and that the press and White
House critics let it slide, along with the rest.
Bush is just too darned busy distracting up a storm, and lists like the
one below are excellent reminders that politicians must be held
accountable for each and every trespass, else a dictatorship be forged
in apathy. All classic signs of it, every bit the dictator his
grandfather Prescott supported when he became known as Hitler's banker!
Dubya has modeled Hitler's power play strategy, making grandpa proud the
way Herbert couldn't, and the press is only just now writing about
similarities of the Iraq war to Viet Nam. Historians will be shaking
their sorry heads, wondering how no one saw it coming, again.
Natalia
Cordell, Arthur: ECOM wrote:
from somewhere on the net.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: You know your empire is crumbling...
You know your empire's crumbling when the folks who are gearing up
their empire to replace yours start blowing up satellites in space.
And then they don't bother to return your phone calls when you ring up
to ask why.
You know your empire's crumbling when those same folks are cutting
deals left, right and center across Asia, Latin America and Africa,
while you, your lousy terms, and your arrogant attitude are no longer
welcome.
You know your empire's crumbling when you're spending your
grandchildren's money like a drunken sailor, and letting your
soon-to-be rivals finance your little splurge (i.e., letting them own
your country).
You know your empire's crumbling when it's considered an achievement
to pretend that you've halved the rate at which you're adding to the
massive mountain of debt you've already accumulated.
You know your empire's crumbling when you weaken your currency until
it looks as anemic as a Paris runway model, and you're still setting
record trade deficits. (Hint: Because you're not making anything anymore.)
You know your empire's crumbling when "the little brown ones" (thank
you George H.W. Bush - certainly not me - for that lovely expression)
in country after country of "your backyard" blow you off and proudly
elect anti-imperialist leftist governments.
You know your empire's crumbling when you can't topple those
governments and replace them with nice puppet regimes - like in the
good old days - even if you wanted to. And you badly want to.
You know your empire's crumbling when one of their leaders comes to
the United Nations and makes fun of your emperor, calling him the
devil, and joking about smelling sulphur where he just stood. And
though a few folks cringe, everybody laughs.
You know your empire's crumbling when just about your entire military
land force is tied up in a worse-than-useless war launched on the
basis of complete fabrications, that every day is actually making you
less - not more - secure from external threat.
You know your empire's crumbling when almost half the soldiers in that
war are high-paid mercenaries, and you don't dare institute a draft.
You know your empire's crumbling when you send soldiers into war with
two weeks training and a lack of armor, and then you keep them there
for three, four and five rotations.
You know your empire's crumbling when a member of the Axis of Evil can
test missiles and explode nuclear warheads, and all you can do about
it is mumble some pathetic warnings about how they better not do that
again or there will be consequences.
You know your empire's crumbling when you even think that there is an
Axis of Evil.
You know your empire's crumbling when a rag-tag military hodge-podge
of irregulars has you pinned down in an endless fight you can't win,
but also can't lose.
You know your empire's crumbling when you're too dumb to even ban
Humvees as a first step toward ending your dependency on a
foreign-owned crucial resource.
You know your empire's crumbling when you trade your prior moral
leadership on human rights issues for global disgust at your torture,
'extraordinary rendition' (a.k.a. kidnaping for torture) and the
dismantling of nine centuries worth of civil liberties progress.
You know your empire's crumbling when you blow off international law
that you once helped create, and undermine the institutions of
international governance that you once helped build.
You know your empire's crumbling when opinion polls confirm that every
month you're more and more despised throughout the world.
You know your empire's crumbling when you can't even pull off the
hanging of a tin-pot murderous former dictator without turning him
into a hero.
You know your empire's crumbling when you're the richest country in
the world, but nearly 50 million of your people don't have basic
health care coverage.
You know your empire's crumbling when the World Health Organization
ranks your healthcare system 37th 'best' in the world, just above
Slovenia, and just below Costa Rica. (And far below Colombia, Cyprus,
Saudi Arabia and Morocco.)
You know your empire's crumbling when instead of making it easier for
citizens to obtain a higher education, you're making it harder and
more expensive.
You know your empire's crumbling when your government gives tax breaks
to industries as a reward for exporting your jobs elsewhere.
You know your empire's crumbling when the so-called 'opposition' party
can't even turn that obscenity into a viable campaign theme and use it
to clobber the worst emperor in your history.
You know your empire's crumbling when your middle class has been
stagnant for three decades, while the wealth of the hyper-rich
continues to climb through the roof.
You know your empire's crumbling when your reaction to that is to
exacerbate the problem by enacting tax policies that massively
increase further still the gap between the rich and the rest.
You know your empire's crumbling when the predatory class has taken
over your government and is stripping the country of everything not
bolted down to the floor. And then it sells the floor itself, as well,
to your rivals.
You know your empire's crumbling when you're spending tens of billions
of dollars you don't own on new nuclear warheads and space weapons
that don't work, to be used against an enemy you don't have.
You know your empire's crumbling when one of your cities drowns and
your government does next to nothing before, during and after.
You know your empire's crumbling when a massive environmental
nightmare is looming around the corner, and your emperor not only
ignores it, but claims it isn't real while taking steps to exacerbate it.
You know your empire's crumbling when your emperor is warned by a CIA
briefer of an imminent terrorist attack of vast proportions, and
responds by remaining on vacation and dismissing the briefer with the
words: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."
You know your empire's crumbling when the same emperor drops
everything to fly across the country from his vacation home in order
to sign a bill intervening on the wrong side of a personal medical
drama involving a single family.
You know your empire's crumbling when gays and immigrants are used as
diversionary issues to keep people from thinking about the pillaging
of their country and their wallets actually taking place. And it works.
You know your empire's crumbling when people are getting more
religious and less scientific, not the other way around.
You know your empire's crumbling when your political leaders start to
be chosen by dynastic rules of succession.
And you especially know your empire's crumbling when the most idiotic
child of one of the least accomplished leaders in its history is not
only crowned as the next emperor, but is even revered for a time by
most of the public as a great one.
Rome? Britain? Spain?
At this rate we'll be lucky to end up like Belgium.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
