December 14, 2006


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

BLOODY CATASTROPHE

It's easy to imagine some future editor of The Oxford English Dictionary adding a new synonym for "catastrophe." "Bush" will be forever made a part of the language and associated with one rotten decision after another. "What a Bush that play was," some critic may write. Unfortunately, there's nothing humorous in death, destruction, maiming, and homelessness. This article by Timothy Garton Ash is at www.guardian.co.uk:

What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.

If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project, memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death, maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese, Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.

THE CREDIT CARD VULTURES

I've noted before that war profiteers are about as low as you can get. But credit card companies are in the same class. They market their cards to people who really can't afford to accrue a lot of debt. They build in despicable fees for late charges and universal defaults. They raise the limits frequently to tempt the unwary into going into more debt. They lobby Congress to make bankruptcy almost impossible. This article by Charles Sullivan is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The booming credit card business is one of the most profitable and destructive industries to ever emerge from the inventive capitalist mind. Citibank is raking in more money than Microsoft and Wal-Mart. Obscene profits are realized without lifting a finger to perform any physical work. In 2004 a single credit card company—the MBNA—realized 1.5 times the profits of fast food industry giant McDonald’s. Collecting on credit card debt is a very lucrative business.

With origins in South Dakota, the modern credit card industry began realizing obscene profits as a result of deregulation. The Supreme Court also played a pivotal role in expanding banking industry profits by lifting limits to the amount of additional fees credit card companies could charge their customers. The sky is the limit now. Industry deregulation has resulted in the systemic fleecing of consumers by practices that can only be described as willful and predatory in nature.