My previous blog post originally took a segway into a look at the motivations for putting ourselves on a “war footing”.  It has to do with The Shock Doctrine,  Naomi Klein’s term for how governments take the “opportunity” of a crisis to push through what would otherwise be considered too radical an agenda.  What follows is the original second half of my previous post,  which I am putting here in its own post with a title that separates it but relates it to the first post.

It was “W” who took such pride in calling himself a “War President”, which fed the 21st century start on keeping alive the Military Industrial Complex, which now looms as a big piece of the “bloated” government that the Bush administration devised even as they proclaimed how much they hated government. W left it bigger than ever. And also helped prop up the siphon structure to accelerate the relocation of even more of this country’s economic resources to the richest 1%, who seem to be doing ANYTHING but using that newly minted subsidy into anything remotely resembling jobs or infrastructure.

Bin Laden the demon spawned “W” the demon. Sorry, but when you involve yourself in the processes of propping up the powers that aim to oppress, you are indeed “demonic”. You’re helping that work. Sorry. But it’s the truth. The Bush administration was the force which parlayed 3000+ American deaths into over 100,000 Iraqi deaths. (and , if such a stat even matters in this discussion, hundreds of American deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush committed war crimes. And as he played “War President”, he left in the hands of his appointees to our country’s infrastructure and protection agencies (appointments based on favors rather than any expertise in those areas) a job that was also a disaster in our economy.

Bush saw the government’s job as war, and the rest he left to that God of the GOP, “the market”. The market’s “invisible hand” that would guide us into the Kingdom proclaimed by Atlas Shrugged. Ironic that the movie comes out now as we are wallowing in the fallout from the most concerted effort along these lines since the “Gilded Age” (which ushered us into The Great Depression). Naomi Klein, in “The Shock Doctrine”, outlined how the war in Iraq was seen by the administration as “an opportunity” to set up a “free market zone” in Iraq, and that the insurgency began in earnest as Iraqis began to realize that the US didn’t care about freeing Iraqis, but in occupying their country for the purposes of “setting up business” (and Paul Bremer was the CEO). As the “provisional government” led by Bremer began to sell Iraqi assets to foreign “investors” and put Iraqis out of work (in addition to Bremer “firing” the entire Iraqi army), they saw that “liberation” of their country was far from the goal. Again, demonic, self-centered, greedy, naïve, hubristic, and disgusting. Yes, “demonic” is the best way to describe it. And “free market” as implemented (or the attempt to implement) by the Bremer/US plan, was the “Angel of Light”.

And so,  to pull something like this on other countries under the guise of “liberating them” is a sure fire way to increase that animosity.  And yet,  Americans in their hubris about American exceptionalism,  can’t recognize this.  They refuse to believe that  monied interests would be able to hold such sway in America,  or that “the market” is anything but something like the Holy Spirit’s brother.  And so, to hell with the rest of the world.  Don’t they realize that the US is God’s chosen?  Don’t they know that to question us is to put them in the axis of evil?  Don’t they know that they’re just being selfish to not realize how what the US wants is the best for everybody?