ON NATIVE GROUND: HERE IN OUR OWN BACKYARD
by Marie Villarreal

There was a story in The Miami Herald the other day about how the federal government will likely accumulate deficits until at least fiscal year 2005. The Herald reported that President Bush's budget director Mitch Daniels told Congress that the federal government will have to dip into the Social Security surplus to pay for other federal programs, something that Mr. Bush promised, during the 2000 president campaign he would not do,  (read: "The Lock Box")  except in case of war, recession or a national emergency.

"Lucky me -- I hit the trifecta," the president told Daniels shortly after the September 11 attacks, according to the Herald. (I don't think that the president was as crass as the Herald had portrayed him to be) And it wasn't luck that ended us up the way we did. We ended up with a recession and a national emergency thanks to the diligent work of the Bush administration. This new war we are in has merely been a convenient event to help accelerate matters.

Bill Clinton wasn't the best of presidents, but he did do one thing right. He managed the economy to keep federal spending under control and accumulate surpluses to pay down the national debt. While unevenly distributed, the economic boom that occurred during the Clinton years put to rest the old knock against the Democrats that they can't be trusted with the economy, the reality is that the Republicans can't be trusted with the economy!

As I look back at the 1980's, those terrible Republican years I got personally hit the hardest, I am appalled at all the waste, fraud and graft that we as taxpayers are still paying for. The $500 billion it cost to bail out the S&Ls after they went belly up; the $59 billion unaccounted for at the federal Housing and Urban Development; the $10 billion that's still missing from the Bureau of Indian Affairs trust fund; the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Defense Department was overcharged for weapons; the billions ripped off by insurers from state and federal health programs.

Looting the federal treasury at the expense of ordinary citizens to benefit the wealthy and corporations that support them is what the Republican Party is all about. It happened in the 70's, under Nixon, under President Ronald Reagan in the 80's and George H.W. Bush in the 90's. It's happening again under President George W. Bush, and it was well under way before the Sept. 11th massacre.

The electoral coup d'etat in Florida  (read: "Voting Reform")  was the first sign that the president's team was more than prepared to do whatever it took to claim power. Without even the pretense of a mandate, President Bush the Younger appointed the most reactionary and pro-corporate cabinet ever assembled. He railroaded a tax cut package that will cost us $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years,  (read: "The Big Tax Refund")  and  (read: "The Big Giveaway")  tax cuts that mainly went to the wealthy. He gave an upraised middle finger to the world as he pulled us out of a variety of international treaties, agreements and protocols that were deemed contrary to the national interest.

The Democrats turned their heads and offered up only the minimum of opposition. After all, nearly half of the eligible voters in 2000 didn't even bother to cast a ballot because many believed it didn't really matter whether Vice President Al Gore or Gov. George W. Bush became president. (What a crying shame!) While Democrats still believed that fairness and the rule of law would prevail, the GOP went all out -- from the day after the election to the December evening when five conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court selected George W. Bush to be our president -- to use whatever means were necessary to secure victory.

The horrific, murderous events of Sept. 11 have reinforced this. Suddenly, every desire by the conservatives to have complete and unfettered control of the nation became a reality. The polls, wicked soothsayers, have spoken. The American public is in favor of the press being censored, having their civil liberties curtailed, and support the bombing of any terrorist ridden country. This trifecta has unfortunately given President Bush a 90 percent approval rating. Add to that a compliant press corps, which acts as if they were in a totalitarian state in its enforcement of the party line and you have a winner! That pushes the president's opponents even further to their margins.

Wrapping itself in the flag, Congress and the Bush Administration is allowing itself to give the rich more tax breaks, to devote more money to the still unworkable "Star Wars" strategic missile defense sham, to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, to give the President the authority to approve trade deals without congressional approval, and to privatize Social Security. They will take Social Security out of its "Lock Box", as our past presidential candidate, Al Gore, warned us!  (read: "The Lock Box")   Lest they be seen as "disloyal" to their "wartime" president, The Democrats will stand by and do nothing.

People, like the movie industry, like to trot out World War II analogies to compare this current war to what many still believe was "The Good War." There is one similarity between the two -- as in World War II, the enemy in this new war is fascism. There are two kinds in this war. We know about the religious fascism of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. We have another fascism we don't talked about. The one we grow at home when the economy is weak and a nation's ownership class seeks to maintain control.

Do you remember that Adolf Hitler was a nobody until the German industrialists pumped money into the Nazi Party in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The wealthy and powerful did likewise for Benito Mussolini in Italy and in Spain for Francisco Franco. The subsidizers of fascism in these three nations saw their fortunes grow, while the citizens were stripped of their civil liberties, as we are today in the guise of national security, they saw their labor unions abolished, worked longer hours for less pay or worked less hours with less take home pay, which led directly to a reduced standard of living

Than God our nation doesn't quite look like Germany circa 1933, but things don't look particularly good. Unemployment is at a 10-year high and rising. Consumer and the corporate debt are at unsustainable levels. And we're trying to fight a global war and a recession at the same time without raising taxes or increasing public spending -- two things that traditionally happen during wars and recessions. Instead, President Bush and Congress are trying to shovel billions of dollars in "economic stimulus" to industries that don't need the money. A prime example: $15 billion that went to the airlines was a move of corporate welfare at its worst; the CEOs kept their bonuses while the industry fired more than 100,000 workers after Sept. 11.

When I look at all the things that have happened in the past year, I am fearful that we are heading toward an economic collapse that will rival the depression of the thirties!

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