The War on America

The real war on America has not been fought by terrorists who resent our “freedoms.” Unfortunately, we have a track record against nations whose dissidents bloomed in response to our politicians destroying their freedoms and countries. That is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Libya, for starters.

We have a record of violent wars started often for veiled reasons in order to gain oil, gold, minerals or strategic real estate for U.S. bases—or for regime change, during which we resorted to excessive violence against other nations’ internal politics, backing those outriders who favored our “support.” Those like Kaddafi who did not desire our input were brought down as the CIA imported battalions of unemployed alleged Al-Qaeda members to cement the illegal “revolution.”

But more than that, given the recent, overwhelming approval of the National Defense Authorizations Act (NDAA) by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, this also involved a tagged-on bill that tears up the U.S. Constitution for indefinite military detentions provisions, which include U.S. citizens who can be held without reason or proof, a trial or lawyer. This one act puts American citizens in the same category with the so-called enemy combatants and detainees of Guantanamo. Not that their status is much more legal. They were activists, soldiers for the causes of their nations in conflict with ours. The fact that they didn’t wear uniforms or look like “official soldiers” is a slender legal ploy to deny their rights as “prisoners of war” under the Geneva Conventions.

Also, the larger purpose of the National Defense Authorization Act was to hammer out a budget for defense in the coming year, which ended up as $662 billion, not small change. The indefinite military detentions provision was an add-on, hopefully to be overlooked in the eagerness to order more weapons by Congress, but should have been, in all legal fairness, a separate bill discussed in depth as to its constitutionality and viability on its own merits or negatives. This was a traditional congressional technique at obfuscation, burying smaller pork bills in larger, higher ticket bills. Ergo, we can fairly say that the U.S. Congress itself is at war with America’s people to have done something like this. But this is not new.

The Congress itself has been so bitterly set upon by Republicans trying to deny Obama a second term. Not that he deserves one after not vetoing the indefinite military detention provision, but insisting on it remaining in. Yet, according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, making Obama a one-term president has been priority number one since day one. Priority number one should have been the business of the American people, not the business of Congress accepting money and campaign contributions from the financial, defense and insurance industries, to mention a few, to carry out the needs of special interests and lobbyists.

Congress did not deal with the true business of the American people: healthcare not warfare; not protecting further off-shoring of US jobs to fatten corporations bottom lines; excessive bailouts and treasury-breaking easements from the Fed to fatten more failing banks in the US and Europe, rather than using those trillions of dollars to allow infrastructure rebuilding, loans to small businesses, traditionally the backbone of job building; the easement of poverty that rose in 2010 to 46.2 million Americans, with recipients of food stamps at 45.8 million, the latter administered mostly and profitably by multi-billionaire-family-owned Wal-Mart and the corrupt, Jamie Dimon-led JPMorganChase.

The business of the American people for Congress should have been to weed out those failing, over-leveraged banks and break them into smaller entities for taking bad risks, made bad investments in derivatives, or overstocked their coffers with toxic mortgages, or collateralized them into debt obligation securities (CDO’s) and pedaled them as legitimate investment vehicles when they were totally fraudulent, adding to the too-big-to-fail bankruptcy pattern.

The business of the American people for Congress to deal with was to take the profit out of healthcare, which drains the budgets of Medicare and Medicaid, and to pursue them as more-cost efficient single-payer healthcare systems administered by the government, as Social Security is now, and is threatened as well by the pork-addicted Congress to underfund it to death. This despite the several trillions secured in its trust. But no, the Congress claimed that was socialism, which any student in Political Science 1.1 could have told them was not. A system of traffic signals on streets, installed by municipal government, to regulate traffic and protect accidents and fatalities, is not socialism. It’s just good government protecting people in a cost-effective, common sense way.

Another for instance: the 2% holiday payroll tax was exactly that, a year-long holiday reduction for payment on payroll tax. But now it’s time to restore the tax because it pays exclusively for Social Security, which will profit retiring workers down the line. Yet it is being argued to death, because the Congress seems to have forgotten it wasn’t a permanent tax cut but one of Obama’s misled ideas to incentivize his voting base. As of now, the tax renewal has been kicked like a can down the road to renewal for two months, when they will start arguing it again, ad infinitum. In fact, passage of this bill has already had tacked to it fast-tracking the dreaded XL Pipeline bill.

But this War on America by Congress is in part a war of words, buzzwords like “socialism,” “communism,” “Keynesianism,” “Islamo-fascism,” to shortcut effective and real communication and debate. It is the product once again of stupid people, elected legislators responding to these words with pat arguments, rather than fresh, substantive discussion of real issues for real solutions. Gridlocked now in these words and phrases, the congressmen and women flap their tongues and arms like so many puppets in a Punch and Judy show, which ends nowhere.

Result: Once again, Congress was stalemated for months simply trying to raise its own national debt limit, which even the I.Q. challenged Bush administration accomplished seven times in eight years with little trouble. The U.S. debt has been raised some 78 times since 1960 alone to extend or alter the definition of the debt limit—49 times under Republican presidents, and 29 times under Democratic presidents, the New York Times reported.

But what the Congress was and is really doing is holding hostage the development of solutions, using the spoiled child antics of “gimme this or I won’t give you that” tirades. All their arguments were and continue to be circular and freeze the brains of the legislators, the American people, and the world’s people, dizzy from watching the spoiled brat Congress’s show. This war of words continues to this day, the perverse nit-picking and taking hostage each issue, fighting on and on in exasperation, as the nation sinks deeper in debt, corruption, lost blood, lost trillions, lost esteem, and ongoing violence with our fellow nations around the globe, creating more of the very terrorists whom we seek to eliminate.

Not only is there a fundamental lack of intelligence being exhibited; there is an absence of a bona fide sense of truly serving the American people who elected these clods, including their two-faced president.

We’re watching a tennis match where the players are so incompetent that they can’t even serve the balls into the playing area. They go flying in all directions, for all kinds of irrelevant reasons. There is no focus. It’s like watching a game played by blind people. From this blindness comes no ongoing solutions that produces results, only more problems from the players themselves and their quirks, their pet phrases and faux personal issues. By definition, Congress means to congregate, to be a congregation, a gathering of people with common cause as a legislative party to discuss and solve problems and create legislation that betters the lives of those who voted those people into office.

That process has been dramatically interfered with as well with by the Supreme Court’s odious Citizens Union ruling with, its power of Personage, i.e., corporations as people speaking for their own interests, with enough money to throw at these perverts willing to whore for them and sell out their electorate, going from six figure incomes to eight figure incomes like Harry Reid. How does a man making $175,000 a year do that? How do any of them do that, open their pockets and close their eyes, close their ears to the outlandish things they’re saying and opening their eyes to new opportunities to exercise their relentless greed. This is the War on America of which I speak and more, made by our own representatives, with few exceptions who stand out like beacons in the darkest of storms.

Among the buzz phrases are “no tax cuts for the rich,” as if the rich paying into a progressive income tax system were a dirty joke, not a system that helped build America into the most powerful nation on earth. That was once. This is now, in which the rich somehow cannot be tainted by paying their share, according to the windfalls and miracles of cash bestowed upon them by the system.

They are the fabled 1%, the untouchables, while the 99% are manhandled like their Occupy Groups by the various paramilitary police departments of our cities, armed with billions in advanced weapons designed for repelling and hurting, even killing protesters in crowds. This is the War on America, designed to maim and kill for the rich. Tell me it doesn’t exist. Tell me there aren’t concentration camps already built that will take up the excess of the arrested for permanent detention. Tell me America has not itself become GITMO with legislation to destroy all dissent. Tell me why our government is hurting and killing its own people.

Perhaps I’ll tell you. It is to continue the progress of the XL Pipeline of sand-tar dirty oil like dirty money that will poison the environment, the way dirty stock market money poisons the minds of people like Jon Corzine, killer of MF Global; or Lloyd Blankfein, whose Goldman Sachs’ stock has spiked down to $96 a share; or Jamey Dimon, who thinks that we’re saying “success is evil.” Success is having an America that gave you the opportunity and infrastructure to be rich. His helping to provide for its human safety net, which could be his employees or consumers of his firm’s products is not a sin or punishment. Only a certified idiot could make a statement like that and get a round of applause for it, not a slap in the face.

The willful bleeding of compassion and human kindness to create a dog-eat-dog climate is a fundamental part of this War on America. The middle-class and working classes are sucked dry like anonymous tax-paying cogs, paying more proportionately of their income than the 1%. But then they don’t have the $500 an hour tax lawyers who know all the loopholes that Bush provided them. They don’t have the offshore whore banks in which to deposit their illicit monies and avoid taxes.

But we have millions of offshore workers in faraway countries to suck up our jobs from the marrow of America. That’s war! That’s killing hope and killing people! That’s leaving the next generation to poverty and lack of opportunity. In fact, there is an unprecedented $3 trillion in student debt incurred by young people trying to prepare themselves for the future, for jobs that may not even be there when and if they graduate. This is the War on America: ongoing, relentless, and worsening day by day as we little folk, honest as the day is wrong, try to fight it.

The net effect of our dysfunctional Congress and failed president, the first with a Guantanamo power-net to throw over U.S. citizens, is paralysis. But don’t worry. There’s television, the movies, sports, more television and conservative newspaper chains buying up progressive papers and magazines to dumb down the uninformed. Yet the rich, the politically landed must know that if and when this dumbed-down beast wakes up, there will be hell on earth to pay—and not from terrorists. These rivals will be the people they have abused for decades, going back at least to FDR. These people are labor, organized and unorganized, the disadvantaged, the disaffected, the disengaged, the dispirited and disillusioned, who more and more have nothing to lose but their unemployment checks, which are chains in disguise, that hold them back from a real income. These checks are K-rations in the daily battle to keep them alive for the next battle.

And in this ongoing War on America, the government philandering reminds me of what T.S. Eliot described in Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, as “being distracted from distraction by distraction,” so the truth is never seen clearly. So you are always dizzy, carrying fear, if not of terrorism, of being one yourself if you speak out; terrorist by decree for exercising your lost freedom of speech, and trapped in the GITMO-like matrix of time.

Eliot writes . . .

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know. . . .

These lines are about the paucity of our lives in this trashed world, made war upon by centuries of power-hungry, wealth-seeking barons of the money realm. And the War on America continues, as “footfalls echo down the memory” of what it was or could have been in the founders’ minds. And we walk the treadmill of days in this materialistic monopoly of power that chews up people and spits them out. We swallow its poison, becoming more toxic by the day, like a BP Oil spill, a Monsanto seed, Fukishima fallout, a sickening Depression, all made and blessed by the worst among us.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.