'Bush's Best Speech'

According to the Buddhist writer Pema Chodron, "not harming ourselves or others is the basis ofenlightened society. It is how there could be a sane world." In Chodron's view, "the first and mostfundamental harm" is done by and to our selves. It is "to remain ignorant by not having the courageto look at ourselves honestly." When we do exhibit that courage, she argues, "it comes as quite ashock to realize how much we've blinded ourselves to the ways in which we cause harm. Our style is soingrained that we can't hear when people try to tell us, either kindly or rudely, that we're causing harm bythe way we are or the way we relate to others. We've become so used to the way we do things that somehow wethink that others are used to it too."

George W. Bush's recent speech before the NationalEndowment for Democracy is an excellent case in point. It epitomizes the cowardly, moral self-blindnessthat Chodron sees at the heart of global insanity. According to the arch-conservative New York Timescolumnist William Safire, it is "Bush's best speech," and it "is worth reading." (Safire,"The Age of Liberty," New York Times, November 10, 2003). Bush' address certainly merits acareful reading, though not for the reasons Safire thinks.

It is an eloquent, well-crafted monument to self-delusion and the deep resistance powerful people andnations have to taking an honest look in the mirror of past and current history. Focused largely on the MiddleEast, it is a gold mine for students of elite ideology, one of whose core projects is precisely to prevent thepowerful from feeling the "shock" to which Pema Chodron refers - to keep, in other words, themirrors turned away from the main architects of harm and shining back at the victims and others with theblinding light of mass confusion. Again and again, Bush reveals his utter inability to grasp why the majorityof the world's people view him and his government as the greatest threat to world peace, a rogue state ofgreater danger than any of the states he once absurdly lumped together in an "Axis of Evil." He isequally oblivious to the intimately related harm and alienation that is experienced by masses of people in hisown country, thanks to his own actions and to the broader domestic power structures he works to represent.

"Respecting The People?"

Take, for example, Bush's opening approval of Ronald Reagan's statement that (in Bush's words) "Sovietcommunism...failed...because it did not respect its own people." This statement contains no small measureof truth. We are entitled, however, to follow up by asking what sort of "respect" the White Houseunder Bush has shown for "its own people." Beneath the cover of the "war on terrorism"since the terrible jetliner attacks of September 2001, the president and his "posse" (as he likes tocall his inner circle) have launched a deeply contemptuous two-pronged assault on the American population. Thefirst prong is a radical and elaborate campaign to redistribute American wealth and hence power yet furtherupward through massive tax cuts consciously calculated to overwhelmingly benefit the richest Americans and todevastate the nation's ability to meet basic social and civic needs, including even basic homeland securityagainst terrorist attack. The second prong is an attack on American civil liberties, democracy and publicspace, the worst such assault in fifty years, designed to marginalize dissent, restrict the spectrum ofacceptable debate and constrict democratic imagination.

The two prongs are inseparably linked. Policymakers and corporate interests seeking to increase the alreadyextreme concentration and centralization of American wealth and power have found it useful and all-too-easy tosmear their critics as "anti-Americans" in the post-9/11 environment. A time of (apparently endless)public emergency is not an appropriate moment, we are told, to question the Leaders' noble schemes to stuffFat Cat pockets yet fuller with cash originally marked for the most vulnerable among an increasingly insecurepopulace. To criticize such vile plutocracy "while we are fighting our war on terrorism" - to quotethe not-yet-disgraced close Bush ally Trent Lott rebuking that subversive radical Tom Daschle last year - isto flirt, we have been told, with treason.

"Respect" for the people? When George W. Bush spoke on behalf of "free trade"(corporate globalization) and his regressive tax cut in a St. Louis trucking company warehouse last January,he huffed and sneered about the superiority of the American System in front of "a printed canvas backdropof faux cardboard boxes, which featured 'Made in America' in large black letters" (New York Times,January 23, 2003). The canvass read "STRENGTHENING THE AMERICAN ECONOMY." A handful of warehouseofficials applauded in the background, framed by two American flags. But the only real warehouse boxes thatWhite House "volunteers" could find to arrange in front of Bush had large pieces of dark brown ducttape placed on their lower left corner. When reporters peeled the tape off, they found three magic words theWhite House wished to hide: "Made in China."

When many millions across the world, including masses of angry Americans took to the streets against the"war" even before it was technically launched, consistent with US public opinion numbers showingmajority opposition to unilateral war, Bush and his "posse" dismissed this remarkable outpouring ofpre-war antiwar sentiment as irrelevant. Telling reporters that he also remembered many Americans and otherswrongly (in his view) protesting "trade" (his Orwellian description for the top down corporateglobalization that global-activists actually oppose) and refused to directly answer reporters' questions aboutthe reasons for mass opposition to his Iraq policy at home and abroad. Following standard White Housedoctrine, Bush, Rice and Rumsfeld lectured us on how fortunate we are to possess the very right to protest,unlike the people of Iraq, as if this was granted to us conditionally by benevolent masters and not alongstanding freedom won through deadly struggle and asserted as our birthright. As if this birthright wasmore seriously endangered by Saddam Hussein than by the Christian Fundamentalist Confederacy enthusiast JohnAshcroft and other sponsors of the Patriot Act and Total Information Awareness.

Last July, Bush expressed his respect for American working people by taunting Iraqi guerillas to attacktheir many children deployed in Iraq. "There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they canattack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on." Like many of fighting age from his privileged,super-wealthy circle, of course, "bring 'em on Bush" avoided real military service during theVietnam War. He dodged the central military engagement of his time by "making occasional appearances atthe Texas National Guard." Given the opportunity to express his rugged, West-Texas sentiments against the"Communist" enemies of American "freedom" in the jungles of Southeast Asia, he was contentto leave the bloody and dirty work to the sons of the American working-class, who are joined now byblue-collar daughters to comprise to the core basis of America's armed forces today. He recoiled in horror atthe supposedly "elitist" anti-war movement but was pleased to egg America's predominantly poor andworking-class soldiers on to murder and death from the sheltered sidelines of aristocratic advantage.

The list of plutocratic and authoritarian outrages inflicted on the US populace under the guise of the"war on terrorism" and the "leadership" of the Bush administration - by far the wealthiestWhite House in history - goes on and on. Perhaps nothing, however, epitomizes the sheer contempt in which thatadministration and its allies hold the American people and democracy more perfectly than the propagandacampaign it conducted since last September to convince Americans to accept the utterly false notion thatSaddam posed a serious threat to Americans and world peace, linking him to 9/11 and Islamic terrorism. Thisidea cannot withstand scrutiny, which is why it was quickly replaced by America's supposed mission to spread"freedom" and "democracy" - the main theme of Bush's recent speech - as the reason weillegally and immorally invaded Iraq. But, of course, Bush's deceptions are so monumentally profuse thatauthors are already filling entire books with lists and diagnoses of the president's many lies.

Love for Democracy: Plutocracy At Home, Polyarchy (and Worse) Abroad

Later in "Bush's Best Speech," the president claims that the world has undergone the"swiftest advance of freedom in the 2500-year story of democracy" during the last 30 years, whichhave seen the number of democracies in the world rise (according to the calculations of the right-wingthink-tank "Freedom House") from 40 to 120. It is "no accident," Bush argues, that"the rise of so many democracies took place in a time when the world's most influential nation was ademocracy."

But is America truly "a democracy" in the true (dictionary) sense of one-person vote, one vote,with an equal policymaking influence for all, regardless of wealth and other factors of socially constructedinequality?. Not exactly: the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth and possessesvastly greater capacity to fund campaigns and win policies tailored to its interests than the non-affluentmajority. That top hundredth makes more than 80 percent of campaign contributions above $200 in the US,helping contribute to America's reputation as the "best democracy that money can buy" and generatingtruly remarkable levels of voter disengagement and political apathy in the US. Reflecting the massivemedia-driven costs of American campaigns, the candidates who win the race for private dollars tend to winelections in the great preponderance of cases. Candidates serious about winning are beholden to wealthycorporate donors, who possess massive stashes of political cash they use as a profitable investment in thepolicy process. American elections are generally "wealth primaries," with incumbents routinelyout-raising challengers because officeholder's position in policymaking power means they can most effectivelyact on the political investments of the wealthy.

Thanks to this and a host of related factors including highly concentrated media ownership, it is absurdlydifficult for people who might dare to speak against concentrated wealth within (Kucinich) our outside (Nader)the two-party system to win elections or even get a meaningful public hearing. Such candidates are censored bythe nature of the nation's political system, as American elections are becoming little more than a recurrentcelebration of big capital's permanent dictatorship. The democratic ideal is widely understood by Americans tohave been negated by the harsh realities of "dollar democracy" and the "golden rule"("those who have the gold rule"). "As the United States approaches the 2000 presidentialrace," columnist William Pfaff wrote three years ago, "the fact must be faced that America hasbecome a plutocracy, rather than a democracy."

In 2000, of course, even record-breaking private financial investments in America's electoral process werenot enough to guarantee Bush's ascendancy over the expressed popular will. He also required some help from thevote scrubbers of Florida and some scandalous support from high-placed allies in the most explicitlyaristocratic branch of the federal government - the Supreme Court.

The policy and related socioeconomic consequences of American plutocracy are all too evident. American government lacksthe resources to provide universal health coverage (leaving more than 42 million American without basicmedical insurance), to properly match unemployment benefits to millions out of work, and to meet the needs ofveterans. It can afford, however, to spend trillions on Fat Cat Tax Cuts that reward those least in need andto spend more on the military than all of its possible enemy ("evildoer") states combined many timesover, providing massive subsidy to the high-tech corporate sector, including billions on weapons and"defense" systems that bear no meaningful relations to any real threat faced by the American people.

Turning abroad, many if not most of Bush's 120 "democracies"  (a count generated by theright-wing think-tank "Freedom House"), supposedly brought to life under the benevolent influence ofthe freedom-loving United States are democracies in name only. The real term for the prevailing politicalsystem in many of them (as in the homeland) is "polyarchy," a US-favored "system in which asmall group actually rules and mass participation in decision making is confined to leadership choicecarefully managed by competing elites. The polyarchic concept of democracy," notes sociologist William I.Robinson, "is an effective arrangement for legitimating and sustaining inequalities within and betweennations (deepening in a global economy) far more effectively than authoritarian solutions." Under thiswatered down system of "democracy" promoted by the NED and the US, Noam Chomsky has noted, the bigdecisions belong to "leading sectors of the business community and related elites." The "publicare to be only 'spectators of action,' not 'participants' ...They are permitted to ratify the decisions oftheir betters and to lend their support to one or another of them, but not to interfere with matters - likepublic policy - that are none of their business. If segments of the public depart from their apathy and beginto organize and enter the public arena [as in Venezuala today] that's not democracy. Rather it's a crisis ofdemocracy in proper technical usage, a threat that has to be overcome in one or another way: in El Salvador,by death squads - at home by more subtle and indirect means."

When democracy and elections are perceived as incompatible with perceived US economic and militaryinterests, as in Vietnam during the 1950s, Chilein the 1970s, or in Iraq today, to give just three of manypossible examples, US policymakers have always preferred dictatorship and authoritarianism. From the 1950sthrough the 1970s, this preference cost millions of Vietnamese lives, snuffed out in the interest of freedom'ssalvation. It claimed hundreds of thousands in Indonesia during the 1960s and in Central America during the1970s and 1980s. Other examples are abundant.

The Bush administration recently displayed its love for democracy in Venezeula, a leading oil exporter tothe US. In April 2002, it actively fostered a short-lived coup against that nation's popularly elected leaderHugo Chavez, whose commitment to national self-determination, social justice, and popular political engagementand related critic of US imposed neo-liberal globalization made him a target for US efforts at regime change.The NED, interestingly enough, provided nearly $900,000 to dissident anti-Chavez forces from withinVenezuela's socioeconomic elite and military in the year leading up to the coup, which the White Houseimmediately welcomed - only to be embarrassed when a mass popular rebellion of the nation's newly empowerednon-affluent majority put that country's supposed "hated" dictator back in office (see the amazingdocumentary, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," screenings available at www.chavezthefilm.com).

Nearly one year later, American leaders' commitment to the democratic ideal was displayed in the Bushadministration's biting rhetorical division between an archaic "Old [because officially anti-war]Europe" and a progressive, forward-looking "New [because officially pro-war] Europe" - adistinction that neglected to note that the very preponderant majority of all (including "New")Europeans opposed Bush's attack on Iraq. The White House criticized Turkey's refusal to serve as an imperialstaging ground as anti-democratic when it knew full well that refusal was demanded by a huge majority of theTurkish population.

Meanwhile, authoritarian US-sponsored war- and drug-lords have replaced the Taliban as theAmerican-approved rulers of Afghanistan. The US enrages the people of South Korean by reversing previouspolicies of engagement with North Korea and turns a wary eye at a heroic but (for US policymakers) disturbingoutburst of mass protest in defense of national resources in Bolivia. America continues to support Israel'sbloody, illegal occupation of Palestine and deepens its alliance with authoritarian and state-terrorist forcesin Russia,Indonesia, and Columbia. It does so in the name of supposed "wars" "on""terrorism" and "drugs" that have emerged from and displaced the war on Communism asofficial new pretexts for a permanent imperial campaign in the not-so post-Cold War era.

Sacrificing for "Rescue and Liberation"

Beyond the inspiring influence exercised by America's brilliant model, Bush's speech claims that part ofthe explanation for the planet's supposed spectacular "advance of freedom" is found in thewillingness of America's "free people" to "sacrifice for liberty" with their blood.