Decline and Fall of the US political system

It's the autumn of our old republic
By Justin Raimondo"

.....Power breeds arrogance and quickly becomes an overweening pride.In Washington, they imagine they can legislate their way out of the crisis and once again conjure up a convenient reality: this, they believe, is their prerogative as history's actors.

The rest of us, you see, are only acted upon.Their failure is inevitable, but there's a way out for them, if they can manage to pull it off. Yes, you guessed it: another war, another foreign "enemy," a heretofore undetected threat to the Homeland that will divert us – and keep the engines of the economy running.Of course, it will be a different sort of economy.

You can forget all that rhetoric about the "free market" and the joys of "globalization." In the global division of labor, America has chosen the niche of the world's policeman: the undeveloped world provides agricultural and unfinished goods, the East is the world's factory, and the U.S. "protects" the whole arrangement, putting down insurgencies when they erupt and toppling "rogue" regimes that don't go along with the program.

Any nation that defies the will of the "benevolent global hegemon" faces an American military colossus, which feeds upon a budget equal to the combined defense budgets of all the other nations on earth, by some measures more than equal.

The problem with this arrangement is that an empire, far from being a benefit, is nothing but a burden. Our $3 trillion war with Iraq is ample testimony to that. And the bill will only get larger. It is a cliché that America no longer produces anything. Yet we do produce something, in these latter days of our perishing republic – wars, and plenty of them......."


Stunning defeat of bill exposes failures of the US political system
Tuesday, 30 September 2008

Yesterday was not only a black Monday for markets. It was the blackest of Mondays too for the US political system, saddled with a discredited president who has completely lost control of his own party and a Congress that responds to a national emergency with little except snarling partisanship.

The stunning defeat of the financial bailout bill has exposed the weakness of the system at its moment of maximum vulnerability, in the quasi-interregnum of the weeks immediately before and after a presidential election. Even so, had a similar crisis erupted at the same stage of the second term of Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan it is hard to imagine Congress staging a similar rebellion. For George W Bush, alas, it is a different story.

His lack of clout was first exposed last Thursday when the bailout summit he convened at the White House degenerated into a blazing row. But that humiliation paled beside yesterday's. The President went on TV at 7.30am to plead for the measure that had been thrashed out over the weekend, to no avail. Then he called two dozen recalcitrant House Republicans, begging them to hold their noses and do their patriotic duty – but again to no avail.

When the vote came, his own party voted almost two to one against the bill, more than cancelling out the 140-95 majority of Democrats who did hold their noses to support the wishes of a President most of them despise.

Thus did US politics enter the world of Alice Through the Looking Glass. A president who prided himself on being a champion of free markets was urging the biggest state intervention in the economy in more than 50 years.

Then not only did a majority of Republicans disown their own president. After they sent the bailout compromise down in flames, those same Republicans then blamed the Democrats for their own disloyalty, accusing Speaker Nancy Pelosi of being too harsh in her criticism of their president. This despite the fact her Democrats, instinctively far less inclined to come to Wall Street's aid, had in fact done so.

Maybe Ms Pelosi should have been more restrained in her language. Maybe the head counters on both sides can be blamed for misjudging the balance of forces. More than a dozen Republicans were assumed to be in favour when they were not.

But in a deeper sense this is a crisis of the political system. The stately and endless process of electing a new president has produced a power vacuum at the worst possible moment.

Mr Bush's power, it has been conclusively demonstrated, is exhausted. Yet more than five weeks remain until election day – when either John McCain or Barack Obama morally takes power – and three and a half months until Inauguration Day, when one of them actually moves into the Oval Office. On the campaign trail, they can make uplifting speeches and put forward ingenious proposals. But speeches and policy papers will not make banks lend again.

However, yesterday already looks like Black Monday for Mr McCain. He returned to Washington last week as the self-styled statesman who would knock heads together for the country. But he, like Mr Bush, could not bring his Republicans into line. The tumultuous events of yesterday have only strengthened the feeling that America's worst financial crisis since the 1930s has doomed his bid for the presidency – just as the crash of 1929 doomed Herbert Hoover.

The PRE-PLANNED Financial/Economic 911 of 2008
The Bush Administration's Banking Rescue Plan
A Fox to Protect the Henhouse?
Bush: Our Entire Economy is in Danger
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway
America Pays the Piper, Big Time
Bush rescues Wall Street but leaves his soldiers to die in Iraq

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ritalin said...
Perhaps this is off topic but there is a linkage to the title "Pre-Planned".Clearly, there are elite eugenicists who are involved in pre-planned actions against the poor. This, in order to reduce the world population of poor peasants.

PSYCHOTROPIC DRUG USE SOARS IN UK TEENS
Posted On: September 26th, 2008
Source: Naturalnews.com

(NaturalNews) The number of children being treated with anti-psychotic drugs has drastically increased in the United Kingdom, according to a study conducted by researchers from University of London's School of Pharmacy and published in the journal Pediatrics. The increase among children in the United States is believed to be substantially higher still.

Researchers reviewed the records of more than 16,000 children seen by 400 doctors. They found that while fewer than four in 10,000 children were prescribed antipsychotics in 1992, the rate had increased to seven per 10,000 by 2005. When the researchers looked at the rate of new prescriptions, however, it did not appear to have changed much, "which suggests that the patients remain on treatment longer."

This increase was largest among children between the ages of seven and 12, who underwent a threefold increase in prescription rate from 2 per 10,000 to 6 per 10,000. Much of this increase appeared to be due to so-called "off label use," meaning uses not approved for the government, most often for treatment of autism or hyperactivity.

The use of such drugs is not approved for these conditions in children because their effectiveness has never been proven.

Many of the drugs being given to children are fairly new, the researchers noted, making their effects even more uncertain. They noted that the prescription of atypical antipsychotics increased by 60 times from 192 to 2005, while the prescription rate of older antipsychotic drugs actually fell.

"The prescribing of atypical anti-psychotic drugs has increased despite the lack of conclusive evidence showing their superiority over older conventional anti-psychotics," they said.

Known side effects of antipsychotics include extreme weight gain, heart problems and even malfunctioning of the nervous system.

"This highlights the need for long-term safety investigations and ongoing monitoring, particularly if the prescribing rate of these medicines continues to rise," the researchers wrote.

According to the Associated Press, children in the United States are prescribed antipsychotics at six times the rate of children in the United Kingdom.

This massive "soft kill" of children is ghoulish. Big Pharma is an elite run bunch of gangsters who are contolling populations and greedily profiting from this same
activity.

"soft kill"
8:54 AM, September 27, 2008