American Dynasty + The Shock Doctrine = Enlightenment

From conservative political commentator and former White House advisor Kevin Phillips' American Dynasty (Viking: 2004, p. 267):

The political economics of the Bush dynasty over four generations, two of them presidential, suggested no such nation-building commitment [as building democracy in Iraq]. Indeed, their taste for covert operations and transactions suggests the reverse. As good a case could be made that their exercise of power has been biased toward destabilization: in Central America, Chile, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The family's ties were to wealthy U.S. and foreign elites--from Cuban sugar plantation owners to Persian Gulf sheikhs--as well as to the intelligence and national security establishment, the oil business, 'crony' capitalism, and related foreign policy specialists. Ground-level popular democracy has more often been something to subvert rather than something to promote.

No other family in American history has sat at the precise intersection of oil, banking, armaments, intelligence, and the White House. No other is as closely associated as the Bushes with 'arms deals,' 'clandestine operations,' and 'cover-ups.' (Phillips, 268.)

The usual, predictable response to suggestions that the Bush family is anything but patriotic is to make fun of tin-hatted conspiracy theorists. It's the same approach that blinded us to the 30-year rise of a deadly fundamentalist theocratic Right.

But there's this problem. At some point, coincidences cease to be accidents of fate and become so many deliberate acts woven together by specific personalities, ideology, self-interest, and power. Only fools ignore them then.

We know the Bush mentality--wealth and power have one obligation: to generate more wealth and more power. We know a good deal about the nasty lineage of its wealth, from early Brown Brothers Harriman and Union Banking Corporation ties to Nazi financiers, to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Arbusto, Harken Energy, to its intimate personal and financial ties to Saudi investors, including Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz, Osama's brother-in-law), to the Carlyle Group and to Sun Myung Moon's fascist empire.

We also know a little about the large and growing web of direct financial involvements of W, his family, and his advisors--Cheney, Perle, Bremer, Ridge, and others--to manufactories and consultancies in homeland security, defense, and "private military corporations." Just recently we found out about BlackwaterUSA.

We know about this President's crusade to concentrate unprecedented powers in the White House, even to the extreme of dismissing the law, the Constitution, the Congress, and the courts.

We know the enormous, largely secret, and extra-legal domestic spying apparatus he has constructed, and the work in progress to construct 40,000-bed domestic detention facilities here in the US, operated by private, for-profit prison management firms.

We even know that, under Bush, we've experienced a national conversion from human rights advocacy to torture.

We know the deep ideological commitment of this President, his advisors, and his Cabinet to Milton Friedman "privatization" and a "free market economy," the twin engines that drove Chile's Pinochet into power, launched a bloody terrorizing domestic house-cleaning, and plunged a 160 year-old democracy into ruin. Beyond its ideological family tree, we know the infrastructure required to pull off that coup: secret ties among high military officers, a vast detention capability, CIA-trained experts in torture and reprogramming.

We even know that three major shocks have occurred during this administration, each resulting in more presidential power, more war, more war- and security/defense profiteering, and in the largest "homeland security" concentration in US history, with yet more privatization, secrecy, destruction of federal documents, and domestic spying.

It might be a good idea to look more closely now in the directions suggested by renewable energy, such as Brazil's sugarcane business and its utilization of slave labor. At the privatization of water worldwide and, increasingly, in the US. At the outsourcing of middle class jobs in America, and the systematic, 35-year decline in middle America's standard of living. At the concomitant astronomical rise in CEO compensation and the wealth of the upper 5% of the population from an economy designed to benefit just that sector. At the Republican Party's inroads into controlling American elections and disenfranchising minorities and Democrats. At Bush appointments to the the agencies and departments comprising the Executive Branch. At Bush appointments to our courts. At the gradual dismantling of workplace, labor, product, investment, telecommunications, and banking regulations. At Enron and its relationship to the Republicanization of California. At the President's insistence on retroactive immunity for war crimes and crimes against the Constitution.

Somehow, it all seems of a piece.