Leaving Iraq a Betrayal: But Whose Betrayal?

Leaving Iraq a Betrayal: But Whose Betrayal?

Senator John McCain has upped the anti in the debate over Iraq. He is now calling the Democratic position of proposing a phased withdrawal from Iraq a “betrayal.” But a betrayal of whom, and by whom; that is the question?

In truth, I agree with him. The entire War in Iraq has been a “betrayal,” but the primary “betrayal” is under the collective ownership of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and John McCain, who have betrayed the American people more fundamentally than any administration since the War in Vietnam.

The Betrayal of Trust:
We elect our officials to treat us with at least some minimal standard of honor, honesty and decency. We expect them to tell us the truth, and telling the truth does not include creating and manipulating facts to support a decision that they had already reached for entirely other reasons. If the people we elect accept no such minimal standard, they are betraying not just our trust for today, but the trust of everyone who gave so much to create the place we call the United States of America. It is a truly terrible betrayal, and certainly one that we will have a hard time explaining to our children.

Senator John McCain is a perfect example of the Biblical exhortation; the sins of the father are oft visited upon the son. John McCain was betrayed. He served honorably and even heroically in Vietnam, in another War that was based on betrayal; where the premise for the war was a fabrication based on deceit, dishonesty, false doctrine, manipulation, and perjury. I assume that he is literate enough to have read the Pentagon Papers, which were commissioned by then Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, and which lay out the ugliness of the betrayal involved with the Vietnam War. Clearly, John McCain, the young pilot, was betrayed by his government when he deserved better.

But Senator McCain, shame on you; shame on you for suggesting that honorable men and women, citizens like you, who find this war a betrayal of our heritage and our values to be somehow suspect. Before you charge us all with “betrayal,” you need to consider the massive fabrication that was and is required to justify this war in the first place.

The Betrayal By the Iraqi Government:
We all know that Saddam Hussein betrayed his people. There is no disagreement on that. What we are faced with now, however, is a continual betrayal in the form of a government in Iraq that refuses to take the most minimal steps required for national reconciliation. We have given them with the blood of our children and their children a new opportunity. What do we get for that blood and a large part of our national wealth? We witness daily the corruption, the theft of oil, the fat cats in the bureaucracy who feed at the public trough, the indifference to the minimal requirements we set for our continued participation, and the willingness to put personal and sectarian objections higher than any national reconciliation. Equally, we see our own political corruption exposed daily – huge contracts to dubious contractors whose primary claim to fame is their closeness with this administration, massive theft on a scale that simply defies our imagination, and mismanagement on a level that seems unmatched in modern time.

You know the old expression: “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” So who is the betrayer? Look no further than the governmental officials who show you around on your trips to Iraq, or to the slick contractors in their fancy clothes and polished flattery, who laugh behind your back at your remarkable naiveté and lack of sophistication. They are the betrayers – they fool you and the Bush Administration, and they betray the trust of their own people who clearly deserve better, and they betray the trust of the American people who are providing them with an opportunity for freedom. How many more American lives do we owe them – 4000, 8000, how many? What Senator McCain is your bottom line, or is there really no bottom line other than a situation that can allow the Republicans to declare some sort of victory before they pull out?

The War without End:
George Bush and Senator McCain offer only a single strategy – war without end, without achievable objections, and without regard for the consequences for either the Iraqi people or the American people. You have only one answer for everything – more troops, more weapons, more violence, and more patience. That has been the trouble with you and your friends in the Bush Administration from the very beginning. They have only one answer for the threats we face in an Al Qaida world – the extension of our massive retaliation doctrine from the Cold War in a different form. The administration takes great delight in the accuracy of our precision bombing; they demonstrate no understanding at all of how to piece the armor of the human heart.

There is no subtlety of thought in this administration; no appreciation of the complexity of the threats we face; and no real understanding of the role that our values play in fighting a battle of values. George Bush prefers a world in which he can go, gloriously, on the deck of aircraft carrier in a flight jacket to proclaim the war over and the job done.

The real betrayal is for this Country to continue fighting a war where the lives of our children are thrown away for no good cause or reason. We are fighting a war where the “end game” is a pure fantasy that captivated the remarkable international naiveté of the Bush Administration – an idyllic, childishly romantic view of a thriving American style democracy in the heart of the Middle East, engineered with American military prowess and created by American multi-national war companies. President Bush and his colleagues, including John McCain, will go into history as among the most naïve and ridiculous group ever to occupy the White House. They would be as laughable as the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” except for the fact that it is Iraqi and American children who are getting hit with their misfired bullets.

There is Plenty of Betrayal to Go Around:
Senator John McCain is a right wing conservative, who takes every opportunity to call himself just that. If you want to find betrayal in Iraqi, what about these betrayals:
The betrayal of the trust and honor of our American values.

1. 
   The betrayal of the values of honesty, decency, and honor when you lie to the American People.
2. The betrayal of honesty with our soldiers, who were told repeatedly that this was going to be over quickly and decisively so that they could go back to their families.
3. The betrayal of the misuse of our national wealth.
4. The betrayal of our commitments to confer with our allies and honor the good opinions of our friends.
5. The betrayal of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s who have paid with their lives for our mistaken approach to dealing with Saddam Hussein.
6. The betrayal to our Secretary of State, who was tricked into delivered an entirely false statement to the United Nations.
7. The betrayal to the Constitution of condoning unwarranted searches and seizures and of incarcerating people without trial or without recourse to our courts.
8. The betrayal to the economic well being of the American people by following economic policies to finance this war that will undermine the economy of the United States for years to come.
9. The betrayal to our children and grandchildren for financing this entire war with a national debt for which they will be held accountable.

The Iraqi War is clearly a betrayal. There is no question about that and we agree. You have much to answer for, Senator McCain, and you are far more clearly in the camp of the betrayer than you are among the betrayed. With great irony, you served very honorably and heroically in the Vietnam War in which you were betrayed by two previous Administrations both of which used fabrications, false doctrines and ideologies, and outright corruption to sustain and continue a war that was a mistake from the very beginning. Now, you are yourself involved in a second great betrayal of the trust and values of the American people and you are allowing yourself to become an agent of the same type of fabrication of which you were once the victim. Like your predecessors with regard to Vietnam, you claim that those who oppose this Administration are engaged in betrayal. Have you no shame, Senator? Have you no shame?

Just my opinion!

Gordon Black

What is the Meaning of Words?

What is the Meaning of Words

I am having trouble finding the right words to use to describe the some of what is happening in this election. I was raised in a household where words were important, where they were “tools” to use with clarity and precision. Mine was not an “Alice in Wonderland” world in which a word was any old thing that I wanted it to mean. This election, however, and this Administration, have taken all of my proper words for defining the positions of the candidates and turned them upside down, and backwards. America has become “Wonderland,” and our some of our words are redefined by George Bush and John McCain in ways that are unrecognizable to me. Given this redefinition, I am not quite sure what to call the positions of the candidates on issues. Some examples of the confusion:

What is a Conservative?
I always thought I knew what a “conservative” was. My mother was a conservative, according to her, and she was passionately Republican in the great tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom she admired greatly. She was a “fair” person, and fair in her dealings with everyone. She found a great sense of “fairness” in Teddy Roosevelt’s unwillingness to have the country pushed around by a bunch of “rich fat cats,” who thought their money gave them a right to set the rules of commerce for everyone. She applauded Roosevelt for taking them “down a peg,” as she would have put it.

She also admired in Teddy Roosevelt for his efforts to preserve and conserve a portion of this beautiful country in national parks, so that her children and grandchildren could enjoy them forever. She told me a “conservative” was a person who believed in “conserving” – preserving, protecting, maintaining, and certainly not wasting. I know this because as a teenager we visited, iat her insistence, almost all of the national parks west of the Mississippi.
She saw in Abraham Lincoln a man who would conserve other things that she loved dearly – her country and her heritage of individual freedom and liberty – and she believed that Lincoln’s commitment to extend those rights to African Americans was the best way to preserve those rights for her own children. “If the government can deny freedom to them, they can deny freedom to you!” She told me. “It’s that simple!” She did not trust the people in the government in Washington, DC, not one little bit, and she lived long enough to have many reasons to support this skeptical view. She believed in laws and in the Constitution, and she was passionate about conserving those rights in the Constitution.

In her heart, she could not be anything but a “fiscal conservative.” She and our family went through the Great Depression poor, and she could not spend more than she made because it was fool hardy to live any other way. Her father lectured her repeatedly that it was a whole lot easier to make money, than to keep it, and she worked hard to make what little money we had cover what we needed. She supported Republicans mostly during her lifetime because she thought they stood for the same things she did.

Bush and McCain as Conservatives: No, it is not a joke!
Given my background, you can understand why it is difficult for me to listen to what George Bush and John McCain say about the new brand of “conservatism” they have together brought to American. And “Yes,” I do brand them with the same brush; not as punishment, but because they, together, embrace the words and the policies they now describe as “conservative.” My mother taught me some slogans that help me to understand Bush and McCain. One slogan was: “Never judge a book by its cover.” The second was: “Listen carefully to what people say, but watch what they do. The deed counts for more than the word.”
Given my mother’s predilection to defining a “conservative” by his or her deeds, this is what she would have to believe that a modern day “conservative” really believes (based on what they “do”, and not on what they say they believe):

1. Believes in doubling the national debt every eight years.
2. Believes in massively increasing our Federal spending {and the size of the government) on the products that America makes best – weapons systems, bombs, bullets and rockets, tanks and bomb proof trucks, and a thousand other products that our military-industrial complex manufactures.
3. Believes in devaluing the American Dollar by more than 45 percent in eight years.
4. Believes in providing massive tax breaks and reductions to the economic “interests” that support them, even while they knowingly increase government spending.
5. Believes in encouraging the growth of massive deficits that you finance by selling the debt to the American and Chinese people, and then passing the payment on to the American children and grandchildren who do not yet have the opportunity to vote.
6. Believes in making the United States absolutely dependent and intertwined with those who hold our debt in dollars, mostly the undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and equally undemocratic China.
7. Believes in manufacturing evidence to support wars that they have decided upon for other reasons – reasons that they really would prefer not to share with the American people
8. Believes in increasing our dependence on foreign oil.
9. Believes that energy conservation can be ignored and that carbon dioxide is not the cause of global warming.
10. Believes in expanding the rights of the Federal Government to intrude into our personal life through unwarranted searches and seizures in the name of national security, which is, of course, “conserving” the governmental rights claimed by every dictator since the beginning of time.
11. Believes in putting people with “good Christian, fundamentalist” values in charge of “science policy” in the United States, so that they can “conserve” science by making it conform with the knowledge of the “Old Testament.”
12. Believes that the increase in the disparity of income between the “haves” and the “have not’s,” the rich and the poor, is largely God’s way to rewarding hard work and enterprise.
13. Believes that we should invest our national wealth in building the Infrastructure of Iraq, rather the infrastructure of the United States; and that we have to “win” the war they gave us at any cost –whether it costs $600 billion as they say, or the $2 Trillion that other analysts estimate.

Since this is what the Republicans actually did in the past eight years, and since both Bush and McCain say they are “conservatives,” this is precisely what my mother would say that the word “conservative” means today. She wouldn’t recognize the word, of course, but she was certainly wise enough to look at what they have actually done, not what they say they have done. She would think the word “conservative” was imported from another planet, by comparison with her values.

What Does It Mean to Be a “Liberal?”
Now this is where it really gets confusing. For more than three decades, the so-called “conservatives “in the Republican Party have been vilifying the Democrats as “Liberals.” They have run massive advertising campaigns to tell our children how “dangerous” it would be to have a bunch of “liberal” Americans run the government; how it is the Liberals who massively increase spending, run up huge uncontrolled debts, devalue and debase the currency, and believe in the “big brother” of a government that intrudes into our lives at every step of the way. But wait a minute! Isn’t that precisely what the Republicans have been doing for the past eight years?

It is difficult to reconcile all of this. Based on what they do, and not what they say, aren’t George Bush and John McCain really “Liberals” at heart? And if they are really the “Liberals” in this campaign, what do I call Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton? Aren’t they both really “fair market conservatives”. They want “fair markets”, markets which treat everyone the same and not with different standards and rights for the rich as opposed to the poor. Based on what they say, the want to “conserve” oil, “conserve” our planet, “conserve” the lives of our young men and women, “conserve” the Constitution, particularly the Amendments dealing the human rights, “conserve” our independence from foreign interests, “conserve” the value of our currency, “conserve” our liberty (at least as much from our government as from the threats from abroad), “conserve” our infrastructure, etc.

But, both John McCain and his mentor, George Bush, have already told you very explicitly that they are running as the true “conservatives” in this race – Bush to defend his “conservative” record of accomplishment over eight years and McCain to defend George Bush. Maybe, they really mean to say, “Confusionists” instead of Conservatives. If they practice being “Confusionists” long enough, they believe that they can convert a narrow majority of Americans to embrace “Confusionism” as the new doctrine of the middle class in American.

Who knows? It could happen? Just my opinion,

Gordon Black

Obama and a Realigning Election

Obama and a Realigning Election: A Look at the Future
I want to introduce you to a rather simple concept, which is useful to explain where this election might move if Barak Obama is the candidate of the Democratic Party in 2008.

The Distribution of Partisan Loyalties in the United States:
One of the bedrocks of the two-party system in the United States is the distribution of partisan loyalties within the electorate at any given point in time. Partisan loyalty refers to the extent to which voters think of themselves as Republicans, Democrats, Independents, or something else. These attachments of voters to the Republican and Democratic parties vary by degree from people who are very loyal and generally vote only for candidates of their party to voters who feel inclined toward one party or the other, and generally vote for that party’s candidates, but who will switch on occasion and vote for candidates of other parties.

As pollsters, we often measure these loyalties in terms of scales that include points called “strong Democrat, weak Democrat, independent, weak Republican, or strong Republican. The percentage of voters at each point on the scale represents the “distribution of partisan loyalties” at any given point in time.

The Importance of the Distribution of Partisan Loyalties:
The relative percentage of voters who think of themselves as Democrats, Republicans or Independents shapes every electoral campaign that occurs. If one party enjoys a sizable plurality of voters who favor it, as the Democrats do presently, that party has an advantage in every election that occurs. Where the number of Republicans and Democrats are relatively balanced, by contrast, those districts or states are likely to be highly competitive with elections that are more hotly contested. In the Country as a whole, there have been periods in which one of the two major parties has been relatively dominant in politics, and those periods have usually had as their basis an underlying distribution of partisan loyalties that was decidedly in favor of the dominant political party.

These distributions of partisan loyalty continually shift over time, normally as new voters join the ranks of the “partisans,” choosing one party over time. Since 2000, for example, the percentage of people who think of themselves as Democrats has been gradually growing in response to the hostility that many Americans feel toward the Bush/Cheney War in Iraq and the deteriorating economy driven by huge tax cuts for the rich, massive deficits, a deteriorating dollar, and growing price inflation for imported goods, especially oil. At other times in history, these realignments have occurred more dramatically, sometimes during a single election cycle.

There have been two great “realigning election” periods in recent American electoral history. The first was the period defined by the first election victory of Franklin Roosevelt over Herbert Hoover in 1932, which culminated in the great landslide victory of Roosevelt over Alf Landon, in 1936. The second started with the campaign of Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter in 1980, and culminated with the landslide victory of Reagan over Walter Mondale in 1984. There are, of course, changing alignments of party loyalties going on regularly in politics, such as the shift of conservative White voters in the south to the Republican Party, but these two periods are distinguished by the fact that the realignment produced a more dramatic redistribution of party loyalties in the electorate that shaped much of politics in the decades that followed.

What are the main characteristics of a realigning period, and why does large scale realignment occur? One necessary element essential to the realignment is a large body of relatively young voters who are not closely tied with either political party. These voters have not yet chosen up sides in the continuing battle between the two parties, and they are characterized as “independents” or “weakly affiliated voters.” When individuals have acquired a strong sense of partisan loyalty to either party, they are very hard to dislodge from those loyalties. As we age, voters tend to attach themselves to one party or the other, rendering them unlikely to shift their loyalty to the other party.

A second characteristic of the realigning period is the presence of Presidential candidates who appear to be highly differentiated on policy grounds in the perception of the electorate. In a line made famous by Barry Goldwater, the candidates provide “a choice, not an echo.” In the Roosevelt’s case, the Great Depression pushed a desperate electorate in the direction of supporting a more “activist government”. In a sense, the “center of the electorate” itself shifted to the left, and neither Landon nor Hoover was able to accompany themselves in their movement. In a real sense, the Republicans remained the captive of its older guard, recruited in a previous period, and they do not give up control easily to people who want to take the party in a different direction. In 1932, Roosevelt actually ran as a fiscal conservative, lauding the importance of balanced budgets and reduced government spending. As the Depression deepened, Roosevelt became a much more vocal proponent of government action, turning that view into a whole range of new government programs he called, “The New Deal.” Roosevelt’s 1936 election landslide victory was a clear endorsement of that policy, and the shift toward the Democrats among the voters persisted for decades.

In 1980, the specter of uncontrollable inflation, coupled with appearance of American ineptitude in our treatment by Iran and the threat from the Soviet Union, launched the success of the Reagan campaign. That race was very close right up to the last week, when the swing of undecided voters shifted the outcome decidedly against Carter. Again, the “center of politics” was shifting toward a renewal of American pride and confidence, coupled with a profound distrust of many of the bureaucratic “solutions” to social problems created by the Democrats, and Reagan was just the candidate to give voice to that new majority. Again, the 1984 campaign marked a ratification of the change away from traditional “bureaucratic liberalism,” where the government was seen as the cure to all social and economic ills, toward a reliance of less governmental interference in social policy and a more open commitment to a free market philosophy and economic growth. Walter Mondale represented the older, “bureaucratic liberalism” coalition of "activist liberals", teachers, government employees, welfare client groups, etc., and he was roundly defeated. During that campaign, the number of new voters calling themselves “Republican” rose by such a margin that we could see the distribution of partisan loyalty changing in the course of the 12 month election cycle.

In both of these instances, the Presidential candidate attracted and galvanized a disproportionate number of those people with weak or no party affiliation, mostly voters under 35, and these new voters came into the political mainstream disproportionately as affiliated with the Party of the Presidential candidate. Once the new voters acquired a “partisan identity,” they tended to vote for their political party at all levels of government, thereby intensifying the loyalty they had acquired. As a result, their voting behavior shaped the character of American politics for decades.

Realignment With an Obama Campaign:
With Barak Obama at the head of the Democratic ticket, I believe quite strongly that we are moving into just this type of realigning period. John McCain has clearly declared his intention to stick with the policies of George Bush on the Iraq War, and with the tax cuts that Bush created. Although he claims to be a "fiscal conservative," he has publicly stated that he will continue with the War in Iraq and make the tax cuts permanent, and that inevitably ties him to a policy that will continue deficits, the erosion of the dollar, and the growth of Federal debt. Moreover, he continues to genuflect to the religious right in the Republican Party even as it voted for others in the primary process, and he has promised to select judges according the doctrines established under George Bush and the religious right wing of the Republican Party. Like Mondale in 1984 and Alf Landon in 1936, he reflects a portion of the political spectrum that is far outside of the center in American politics.

Hillary Clinton, however, would prove a very poor choice against McCain, largely because she is so disliked by such a large portion of the electorate, particularly among the independents and weakly affiliated Republicans. She herself is largely captive of the older wing of the Democratic Party, which has financed her campaign, and she is unlikely for forge new policy positions given her commitment to the bureaucratic establishment within the party. McCain and his Republican coalition partners will renew every personal and ethical accusation against her, reminding the voters of why they dislike and distrust the Clintons.

Barak Obama is a much more difficult target for McCain, and especially his Republican allies. His "approval profile" is very similar to McCain’s, although voters have had more time to form an opinion about McCain and, therefore, his approval scores are more durable. Obama simply has none of the liabilities that Hillary Clinton carries with her into the campaign.

A McCain/Clinton election campaign will be all about Hillary Clinton herself, and her husband, and she will constantly have to deal with partisan attacks via the media that are personal in character. McCain may disavow some of these attacks, but he cannot under the law stop them and his allies know it. The allied groups will paint her for every infraction from Whitewater forward, including her failed health care monstrosity in 1994, and they will not be anywhere as gentle as Obama has been with her.

A McCain/Obama election campaign, by contrast, will be all about the War in Iraq, massive deficits, tax cuts for the rich, and the deteriorating economy, and it is on these issues that McCain is out of step with the public at large. McCain’s positions on these issues are simply not in the mainstream of the public, and that makes him vulnerable to a defection of the moderates among the independents and the weakly affiliated Republicans. Although Obama is not yet an established figure for many voters, McCain will have a very hard time “defining” him in ways that alienate the middle of the electorate. They will try, of course, and the attempt to label him as a "black separatist and Muslim extremist" is already underway via the Internet. At the same time, the election will provide a distinctive policy choice, and certainly not an echo, but it will be McCain who is trapped into the unpopular wing of politics as the middle moves away from him.

The realignment will start with Obama’s election, which is likely to be close and not a landslide. The realignment will occur if an Obama Presidency starts the movement of public policy away from the policies that the electorate questions and dislikes under George Bush and Dick Cheney. There is a full generation of new voters up for grabs, and they clearly admire and like Barak Obama. Over time, four years and perhaps eight years, they will become a larger portion of the electorate and the older opposing interests less significant.

A realignment that begins with an Obama victory in November is a realignment that will aid Democrats up and down the ticket, both today and in the future. However, it does mean that many “interests” supporting Clinton will lose some of their prominence under an Obama Presidency, and that is very threatening indeed.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black

Devaluing America

Facts to Consider in 2008: The Value of Your Assets
This is your Country, but only if you have the courage and strength to take it back.

You have received this “factoid” either because I sent it to you or because someone you know thought it important that you see this fact. My hope is that this message and others than follow will reach as many people as possible, giving voters’ real facts about the status of the two parties in the 2008 contest for the “soul” of America.

This message is my contribution to the debate over the two parties, neither of which totally matches my political profile. The fact that I am very angry at what the Bush and the Republicans have done to America will be obvious in the message, but I deeply believe that an enlightened electorate is the best answer to what can be done. I will not insult your intelligence with irrelevant arguments, character assassinations, and the like.

However, if you understand this argument, the Internet provides you with a tool of great power – the power to forward these facts to as many Americans as we can reach. The real power is in your hands directly -- the power to cast an intelligent ballot for the future and the power to send this message as far and wide as you can over the next few months. You can join me in this effort!

The Devaluing of the United States
The 2008 Presidential Election should be a referendum on the performance of George Bush and the Republicans, including John McCain, in Congress over the past eight years. It was Ronald Reagan that reminded us in 1980 that we should ask ourselves whether we are better off today than we were four years ago. This is how it should be. It is a simple question, one that people can easily answer for themselves. One very valid answer to the question arises from the relative value of the American Dollar compared with the Euro, the other great international currency. If the American Dollar increases in value, the United States as a whole – every asset – increases in value. If the American Dollar declines in value, the United States as a whole – every asset – decreases in value.

When George Bush and Dick Cheney entered office in January, 2001, the Euro was worth .98 cents. In February 2008, the Euro costs an average of $1.47 per Euro, but on March 7, 2008, the Dollar fell again to a new low, costing $1.53 per Euro. This is fact, not opinion and not campaign propaganda! In other words, the Dollar is less than 60 percent of what it was when Bush and Cheney took office, and this decline is the direct product of their policies.

Bush and the Republicans inherited budget surpluses and a strengthening dollar caused by a decision in the Clinton administration to balance the budget for the first prolonged period since World War II. Under the control of the Republicans in Congress and the Bush Administration, established in January 2001, the Republicans have managed through their fiscal policies to devalue the American Dollar – today referred to by many abroad as the “Bush” Dollar – by more than 40 percent and headed downward. In fact, John McCain has promised to continue the two main policies that caused this decline – continuing indefinitely the War in Iraq, using deficit financing to support it, and making permanent the Bush tax cuts, which mostly went to the rich.

Please take a moment to think about this. Bush and his Republicans in Congress, most of whom proudly proclaim themselves to be “fiscal conservatives,” have managed to reduce in just seven years the relative value of every asset in America by nearly 40 percent – an amount in dollars that is in the tens of trillions of dollars of losses—that’s $10,000,000,000.000.00. This, of course, includes your house, your savings accounts and retirement accounts, your investment portfolio, your land – every asset you own. The effect is also profound on nearly everything you buy that is imported – the oil to heat your home, the gasoline for your car, all of the toys for your children and grandchildren, the clothes you wear, and a thousand other goods and services. The effect is equally profound on the ability of foreign corporations to buy into American corporations and businesses, and many American “assets” are being purchased with the strong Euro by foreign corporations and individuals, i.e., the selling of America, wholesale, to interests internationally allied with and friendly to Bush and Cheney!

But the devaluation of the Dollar means more than that. The value accorded the Dollar is a reflection of the confidence in America that people have all over the World, and the decline of the Dollar matches the growth in the contempt with which the Bush/Cheney administration is held by those who buy and sell currency. Bush and Cheney, with their unnecessary War in Iraq, have squandered much of the good will America has earned in the world over the last hundred years.
George Bush did not do this alone. He had great help from the Republicans in the House and the Senate, including John McCain, many of whom are going to now tell you that they were against all of this. They tell the “Big Lie!” They broadcast this particular lie during every election, with advertising and media purchased with tens of millions of dollars contributed by the lobbies in Washington, D.C. These lobbies trade campaign contributions for their ability feed off of actions by the government, and they provide their support primarily to the incumbents in Congress. The incumbents go home then and run “against” Congress and national policy and think that you, their seemingly ignorant, constituents, will just let them get away with it. The question is: Will you really allow them to get away with it?

What Can You Do About This?
The religious right in America, most of whom prefer very socially conservative Republicans, believes in Biblical injunctions. Personally, I like the one that says, in effect, “As you sow, so shall you reap.” The Republican Party and the Bush administration have, through the policies they followed, sowed the relative devaluation of everything we own in America by more than 40 percent. Now, they need to reap the catastrophic electoral defeat that they have so generously earned; a defeat felt at every level of government, in the House and in the Senate, and in the race for the White House. So what can you do personally to see to it that they reap what they have sowed? It is pretty simple again, but it does take your participation.
1. You can, of course, vote against Republicans for every office they seek, especially the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Presidency. You have the power to punish them!
2. You can support Barak Obama for President, because he is by far the strongest candidate to defeat the Republicans and John McCain in the fall, and defeating them matters to all of us, our children and our grandchildren.
3. You can make contributions, on line, to most of the Democratic candidates who are running either for reelection or to unseat entrenched Republicans. In particular, you need to fund the Democratic candidates in your area who will run against entrenched Republicans. The Republicans almost uniformly will be funded by entrenched special interests.
4. You can circulate this information to as many people as you can, asking them to send it on to their family members and friends, and so on. This democratic idea is also simple. If you just pass these messages on, and your friends and family follow suit, the longer term effect will be to reach millions of Americans with real facts, and not political propaganda.

Email, blogging, and the Internet have made you a powerful voice in the election. You have the ability to influence others, by giving them real facts – not political propaganda – on which to base their own decision. The information on the devaluation of the dollar is indisputable, and it is the cumulative reflection of the phony economics followed by the Republicans. As the say in the movie, “Pass it on,” to everyone that you can. You can send this to anyone, post it on Web sites, or send it to the media!