What Profit

*The Colossus, Francisco Goya

FLASH: Click on Comments below, Blogger comments aren't posting
the regular way. I've posted Robert Fisk's piece in The Independent
today about the view over Tripoli which looks hauntingly
like this Goya piece. Or google The Independent. They haven't put
this into the portfolio yet so it's still free reading.

What Profit?

Mark 16:26
What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?

I doubt American history will reveal the depth of American Fascism
in the administration of George W. Bush because the coil
from which it catapulted to mass insanity was tightly wound,
by accident and intent, in other administrations,
by other profiteers, and Amerians don't consider ourselves
war criminals.

Historians could point to CIA backed revolutions throughout
the 20th Century — Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Argentina,
Colombia, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Venezuela, Guatemala,
Angola, Haiti, Somalia — to track
America's habit of foreign policy for profit,
but will they?

History is written by the winner, but there will be none.

Jimmy Carter said recently GW Bush is the worst
president in history. There's more.
We're looking at a world-scale Nero
with his finger on a nuclear trigger.

How did we allow election after election
to be stolen without demanding verifiable voting?

Yesterday there was a huge party on the other side
of our backyard fence. Scraps of conversation drifted into
our yard late into the night. "I don't think they even
listen to Fox News," Jay said.

The news re-writes history as it happens and ferments
mass delusion.

The "civil war" which has "broken out" in Gaza this week
for instance, looks more like stage three (or 30) in a US backed
coup to take out the democratically elected Hamas government —
Stage one sent the Hamas leader to prison, stage two was Israel’s
invasion of Gaza which "caused" the invasion of Lebanon.
Now US backed Fatah war lords kill scores of Hamas leaders,
and Israel air strikes back them up.

By now this should sound familiar to us,
but if it does, why don’t we stop it?

What we should see is a sixty-year Palistinian Diaspora,
tragic and bloody, "just"-ified by Hitler's horrific holocaust,
what we ought to understand is that these horrors
have no Justice in them.

Hitler didn't do it alone. Neither did George W. Bush,
Tony Blair, Dick Cheney.

The postmortum on Democracy?
Will anyone lay out how global capitalism killed it?

Here is what the women in Iraq say about
our latest democracy born of shock and awe,
funnel for vast profiteering.

from Yanar Mohammed interviewed by Kasia Anderson, Truthdig

. . . Mohammed: Well, you know, the billions of dollars that we hear should have reached Iraq and been spent for the reconstruction-well, we don't see any reconstruction. Whatever they have tried to construct, like the electricity generators and water supply and all of that-they have been blown away by the resistance over and over again, so they stopped doing those.

Anderson: Those are particular targets for the resistance.

Mohammed: Yes, yes, because they do not like to see the country run in the American way. So, the answer here is that it cannot be solved by money. There is a political issue to be solved, and later on the reconstruction follows. We're not saying that money should not be spent on the reconstruction, but the political issues have really stopped, and there is absolutely no communication, and all of the solutions are reaching a dead end. So, all talk of reconstruction is nonsense at this point. We have not seen any buildings reconstructed in Iraq. I wonder what they're talking about.

Anderson: And the utilities are, at this point, shot?

Mohammed: Nothing! We get electricity one hour in the morning and one hour at night, and in the last two days there was no electricity. We did not see any new buildings built, unless they are inside the Green Zone, where we cannot see them.

Anderson: And there was a wall being constructed in April. ...

Mohammed: Not one wall-there are 10 layers of concrete walls that we have to be searched over and over until we reach the Green Zone. So, maybe there is some reconstruction in there, but I've been there and I haven't seen really much. So where are these billions going? I have no answer, but I think they are going somewhere else.

Click here for Keith Oberman Video -- War Profiteering

©Susan Bright, 2007

Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-ninety books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.

Announcement: The Plain View Press e-store is online.

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