Don’t Blame Bush

George W. Bush has taken on the appearance of something not natural, something supernatural, since he became president. Prior to his ascension he was just a bumbling fool. Sure he was cavalier with the gallows, but a bumbling fool nonetheless. Now he has become Satan to many horrified innocent bystanders.

But we can’t blame Bush.

During the last presidential campaign John Kerry was sounding more hawkish than Bush and his cabal of demons. And really, do you believe that if Kerry had won the election things would be any different in Iraq? It is likely that even if the Democrats had won the first election that by now Iraq would have been invaded.

This all depends on who is really in control. While it is true that the GOP is top heavy with oil billionaires, it is also true that the billionaires that dictate policy to the Republicans also tell the Democrats what to do. The lines of control are more convoluted than Halliburton and Cheney.

Here we come to the heart of a very important question. The question is; who really controls the American State? That is, who is in the shadows? Who is behind closed doors when the really big decisions are made? Who is it that tells Bush what to do?

Another interesting question is why this question is apparently completely off the radar as far as the mainstream media is concerned.

What seems to be happening recently would likely be happening if the marriage between the American state and the private sector was almost complete. Previously, American politicians held a modicum of political power but were heavily influenced by the business class. It may have shifted, apparently subtly, that the business class has taken full control of political decision making. The effects are not so subtle.

We might turn our attention to the question of who profits directly from war. If we peruse the who’s who in the war party (Boeing, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, etc.) we begin to get a picture that is bigger than partisan politics.

According to John Kenneth Galbraith, “In 2003, close to half the total US government discretionary expenditure was used for military purposes. A large part was for weapons procurement or development. Nuclear-powered submarines run to billions of dollars, individual planes to tens of millions each.

Galbraith explains further that weapons profiteers provide politicians with plans and designs for new weaponry that will provide good jobs and salaries for politicians constituencies and the privateers themselves will make a killing. What Galbraith does not explain, at least in this particular article (Corporate Power) is that this type of spending is immensely wasteful. It is really corporate welfare and it is not very useful to the general public.

And so here we have it; the dictatorship of the bourgeoise. They are seeming benevolent monarchs and they provide us with oodles of material goods whether we like them or not. In fact, they spend billions convincing us that our measure as a human being is gauged by the car we drive, our PC, our home and our gadgets. And we swallow it all, hook, line and sinker. They divert our collective attention away from the starving masses that live outside the tent of American hegemony. People that starve directly as a result of capitalsim. People in Haiti for instance. They divert our attention away from the 40 million plus Americans that have no heatlth insurance. They divert our attention away from the carnage and massive slaughter that is going on in Iraq. A slaughter that is aimed at keeping the hegemony healthy and our trinkets flowing. And to hell with the people that have to survive on this planet two hundred years from now – party on Wayne.

American foreign policy is shaped and dictated by the corporations that run the American state and so is a good deal of domestic policy. So called free trade agreements also give these very same corporate managers a handle and a great deal of leverage on domestic policies in other countries as well. It is corporate managers or their representatives behind those closed doors that pull Bush’s strings and they would be attaching the very same strings to John Kerry if he were president. The figurehead really doesn’t matter at this point.

It looks as if we're not in Kansas anymore Dorothy. Concentration camps, torture, pre-emptive war, the spitting on the Geneva Conventions, the cavalier disregard for spirit of the American Constitution and so on have Americans bewildered and non-Americans in awe. Bush has said that 9-11 will change everything. In this case, he was almost telling the truth. The recent exposure of the nature of the American state may have been helped along by 9-11. It was not caused by it however.

We can look forward to the privatization of all that is public in the future. We can look forward to unabashed corporate control of domestic policy not only in the USA, but everywhere. Because if we look into the nature of capitalism, it grows in one direction.

When that all happens, the dictatorship of the bourgeoise will be complete.