I'm considering going back to the genre: I'm coming to see, over and over, that that scenario is not unrealistic, because I'm watching it play out over and over. The first example where this really hit me was the Iraq war based first on the claims that Iraq had WMD - something I knew was *not* true from information I gleaned while working at the time at a major government facility from whose population some of the inspector teams in Iraq were drawn, and watched in horror as our government baldfacedly lied to our population *and the swallowed it, burped, and asked for more* - and then the so-blatant-even-Joe-the-plumber-could-figure-it-out bait-and-switch that no, it wasn't WMD, it was that Iraq was involved with Al Quaeda and 9-11, yeah, that's the ticket (with a nod to Jon Lovitz' compulsive-liar SNL sketches) (or do I have the sequence of these lies reversed?).
Well, that's old news, but we sure have a whopper staring at us today: President Bush is going to end-around the democratic process and give the automakers the bailout that Congress denied them:
Mr. Bush made his announcement a week after Senate Republicans blocked an automaker bailout that had been negotiated by the White House and Congressional Democrats. The loan package announced by the president includes requirements that are roughly identical to those in that bill, which was approved by the House.I have my complaints about government even when it is an actual democracy, but ours is not even that any longer: in what kind of "separation of powers" is it possible for more than one branch to do exactly the same thing? That's not "separation of powers", that's "or'd" powers: this thing gets done if branch A wants it done or branch B wants it done...
I just can't see how everyone isn't either going apoplectic or hanging their heads in shame for their own complicity and stupidity. A few short months ago, our populace sat quietly by as our government instrumented an extraordinary power grab, authorizing the staggering sum of 700Billion dollars (estimated by most to really be several times that figure by the time we are done) based on weak and hurried arguments about the eminent collapse of our economy and passed only on the promises to "trust them": that the use of these funds would be specific to the "saving" of the financial industry.
And yet
The money to aid the automakers will come from the Treasury’s $700 billion financial stabilization fund.Wwwwwwwhat?? That wasn't what we signed on for (to the extent that we signed on at all)! Where is the outrage? How far away are we from just having a system in which Congress just authorizes a huge sum of money for the government to spend on whatever they want, without any debate, due process, accountability, etc?
How the *fuck* do you take extraordinary measures to authorize the partial nationalization of an industry and a huge hidden tax on everyone (that 700 BN dollars is essentially newly minted money, meaning it comes from every one of us by devaluing the money we already have) based only on our trust that you'll do what you said you were going to do with that money and then mere *weeks* later use that money to run roughshod over the democratic process by having the executive branch essentially make the "laws" that congress voted down, and have no one go ape-shit about it??
This isn't theory, this is in-your-face reality, and yet I *still* don't see the outrage that even the most stringent defender of our system should be expressing at this violation of that very system. I don't see how these thing fail to shake the religious belief in "government" or "the state" as our omnipotent, omniscient God. Where is the *thinking*, people?
