“As the Bush administration comes to a close, one overarching question is this: how were the transgressions and abuses of the last eight years allowed to be unleashed with so little backlash and resistance? Just consider — with no hyperbole — what our Government, our country, has done. We systematically tortured people in our custody using techniques approved at the highest levels, many of whom died as a result. We created secret prisons — “black site” gulags — beyond the reach of international monitoring groups. We abducted and imprisoned even U.S. citizens and legal residents without any trial, holding them incommunicado and without even the right to access lawyers for years, while we tortured them to the point of insanity. We disappeared innocent people off the streets, sent them to countries where we knew they’d be tortured, and then closed off our courts to them once it was clear they had done nothing wrong. We adopted the very policies and techniques long considered to be the very definition of “war crimes”. Our Government turned the NSA apparatus inward — something that was never supposed to happen — spying on our conversations in secret and without warrants or oversight, all in violation of the law, and then, once revealed, acted to immunize the private-sector lawbreakers. And that’s to say nothing about the hundreds of thousands of people we killed and the millions more we displaced with a war launched on false pretense.”
“Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders’ intellectual virtues — indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities … but their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes…. Back in the ’70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about “radical chic,” the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their “struggles.” But “populist chic” is just the inversion of “radical chic,” and is no less absurd, comical or ominous.”
“What the Bail-Out does is saddle the country and all its “taxpayers” with new trillions of debt and makes it such that every “taxpayer”, regardless of how wise, cautious and frugal he may be, owes loads of Federal Reserve Notes (money) to the Federal Reserve Banking system. What will the “taxpayers” receive for this new tax saddle? The answer is that they have received and will receive nothing. Almost all of the Bail-Out money goes to the corporations whose errand boys like Greenspan, Paulson, Bernanke, Dimon, Mozilo and Fuld carried out the debt trap that was set 9-10 years ago…. The bankers have discovered a way to force the people of America and the world into an intense form of debt slavery and that is the reason for their reckless past lending practices, credit cards for all and now this massive Wall Street Bankers Bail-Out. In the past, only wars created that amount of national debt. But now those debt creating war mongers have found the more friendly face of public bail-outs.”
