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It was Reagan who first asked about the "Rapture"
to Billy Graham when Graham came to the White House. I don't
believe for a moment that Reagan took it seriously but it was politic to
ask. Even the fanatics vote and often vote more than the
average person. We seem to be in a really horrid phase much
like the 1880s when the government stole most of the land they had agreed
left for the Indian Nations and when they banned the religion for the same
story that these nuts are telling today. From the Spanish
Repartimeinto (which considered Spanish to be the language of humanity and
so Indians that didn't understand the Requirement of Fealty because they didn't
understand the language were immediately taken into slavery as less than
human), to the surety of today's fundamentalists (who are sure that
they understand the meanings of early Aramaic and Hebrew better than the Jews or
anybody else even though they are largely Anglocentric), there
is a line of periodic religious "awakenings" that creates
atrocities.
America is such an immense nation that there has
always been room for books to be written on both sides of the story without ever
confronting each other. One hopes that the digitization of the
library systems and the archived books will eventually open up these myths and
stories to a good search engine. When and if that happens, all hell
will break loose as the Fundamentalists will face the last defense before their
simplicities disappear in an aerosol burst not unlike the Uranium burst of those
depleted uranium shells. It takes no prisoners and
leaves devastation, cancer and defective fetuses in its
wake. It will require more maturity and humanity than almost
any of us contain to create the Unity necessary for our continuation.
When we are good we are.......... then
the pendulum swings and we are very very good victims. "Never
forget" could be a very bad idea. Our survival may lie with
the reverse......"Always forget"
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 3:35
PM
Subject: [Futurework] Let's start a be
nice to the US movement!
From the Moscow Times. Won't someone, somewhere, anywhere, say
something nice about the Americans? Any volunteers?
Ed Weick
Global Eye -- Blood on the Tracks By Chris Floyd
Before the first cruise missile crushed the first
skull of the first child killed in the first installment of George W. Bush's
crusade for world dominion, the unelected plutocrats occupying the White House
were already plying their corporate cronies with fat contracts to "repair" the
murderous devastation they were about to unleash on Iraq. There was, of
course, no open bidding allowed in the process; just a few "selected"
companies -- selected for their preponderance of campaign bribes to the
Bushist Party, that is -- "invited" to submit their wish lists to the War
Profiteer-in-Chief.
It should come as no surprise that one of the
leading beneficiaries of this hugger-mugger largess is our old friend,
Halliburton Corp., the military-energy servicing conglomerate. Halliburton,
headed by Vice Profiteer Dick Cheney until the Bushist coup d'etat in 2000, is
already reaping billions from the Bush wars -- which Cheney himself says
"might not end in our lifetime."
Cheney is an old hand at this kind of death
merchanting, of course. In the first Bush-Iraq War, Cheney, playing the role
now filled by Don Rumsfeld -- a squinting, smirking, lying Secretary of
Defense -- directed the massacre of some 100,000 Iraqis, many of whom were
buried alive, or machine-gunned while retreating along the "Highway of Death,"
or annihilated in sneak attacks launched after a ceasefire had been called.
When George I and his triumphant conquerors were unceremoniously booted out of
office less than two years later by that radical fringe group so hated by the
Bushists -- the American people -- Cheney made a soft landing at
Halliburton.
There, he grew rich on government contracts and
taxpayer-supported credits doled out by his old pals in the
military-industrial complex. He also hooked up with attractive foreign
partners -- like Saddam Hussein, the "worse-than-Hitler" dictator who paid
Cheney $73 million to rebuild the oil fields that had been destroyed by, er,
Dick Cheney. And while the Halliburton honcho became a multimillionaire many
times over, some of his employees were not so lucky -- Cheney ashcanned more
than 10,000 workers during his boardroom reign. (At least, he didn't bury them
alive.)
Old news, you say? Irrelevant to the current
crisis? Surely, now that Cheney has been translated to glory as the nation's
second-highest public servant, he is beyond any taint of grubby material
concerns? Au contraire, as those ever-dastardly French like to say. At this
very moment, while the smoke is still rising from the rubble of Baghdad, while
the bodies of the unburied dead are still rotting in the desert wastes, Dick
Cheney is receiving $1 million a year in so-called "deferred compensation"
from Halliburton. That's a million smackers from a private company that
profits directly from the mass slaughter in Iraq, going into the pockets of
the "public servant" who is, as the sycophantic media never tires of telling
us, the power behind George W.'s throne -- and a prime architect of the
war.
This is money that Cheney wouldn't get if
Halliburton went down the tubes -- a prospect it faced in the early days of
the Regime, due to a boneheaded merger engineered by its former CEO, a guy
named, er, Dick Cheney. In a deal apparently sealed during a golf game with an
old crony, Cheney acquired a subsidiary, Dresser Industries -- a firm
associated with the Bush family for more than 70 years -- which was facing
billions of dollars in liability claims for its unsafe use of asbestos.
Dresser's bigwigs doubtless made out like bandits from the deal, and Cheney
left the mess behind when the grateful Bushes put him on the presidential
ticket, but there was serious concern that Halliburton itself would be forced
into bankruptcy -- unless it found massive new sources of secure funding to
offset the financial "shock and awe" of the asbestos lawsuits.
Then lo and behold, after Sept. 11, Halliburton
received a multibillion-dollar, open-ended, no-bid contract to build and
service U.S. military bases and operations all over the world. It also won
several shorter-term contracts, such as expanding the concentration camp in
Guantanamo Bay, where the Regime is holding unnamed, uncharged suspected
terrorists in violation of the Geneva Convention. With this fountain of
federal money pouring into its coffers -- and Bushist operatives in Congress
pushing legislation to restrict asbestos lawsuits -- Halliburton was able to
hammer out a surprisingly favorable settlement deal with the asbestos victims.
The company -- and Cheney's million-dollar paychecks -- were saved. Praise
Allah!
Halliburton is just the tip of the slagheap, of
course. Daddy Bush's popsicle stand, the Carlyle Group -- which controls a
vast network of defense firms and "security" operations around the world -- is
also panning gold from the streams of blood pouring down the ancient tracks of
Babylon. Junior Bush -- who like a kept woman made his own influence-peddling
fortune through services rendered to a series of sugar daddies -- has
conveniently gutted the national inheritance tax, swelling his own eventual
bottom line when his father joins the legions of Panamanian, Iranian, Afghan,
Iraqi -- and American -- dead he and his son have sent down to
Sheol.
Never in American history has a group of government
leaders profited so directly from war -- never. Like their brothers-in-arms,
Saddam's Baathists, the Bushists treat their own country like a sacked town,
looting the treasury for their family retainers and turning public policy to
private gain. Like Saddam, they feed on fear and glorify aggression. Like
Saddam, they have dishonored their nation and betrayed its people.
But the money sure is good, eh,
Dick?
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