Valenzuela's Veritas

In ominous times truth always finds a way out from darkness into light. Always. Through truth knowledge grows into the power and strength to question the actions of governance. In times that try men's souls it is those who seek enlightenment who are truly free. Given the choice of possessing ignorance or knowledge, even when ignorance would lead to an easier life, I would choose knowledge,thus escaping the life of sheeple, escaping the bondage of not knowing, not caring and not understanding.

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Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic, commentator, Internet essayist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. His essays appear regularly at various alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. He encourages readers to surf the collection of over 100 essays he has written which can be found visiting his archives and by searching the Internet. He welcomes comments at euromeximan@yahoo.com

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Welcome to Valenzuela's Veritas

This blog, Valenzuela's Veritas (Latin for Truth), is an attempt to spread truth and knowledge through my works and essays. In here you will find all new and past (archived) articles I have written, numbering almost 80, along with comments and observations I might occasionally make regarding the state of the world and the journey of humankind. I will also include postings of Internet articles and news that catch my eye. Links to my favorite sites and writers will also be posted. I hope you enjoy this blog, finding it useful in your quest for truth, knowledge and enlightenment.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Bush and Third World America

Out of Chaos, an Awakening

The images coming out of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans in particular have been nothing short of unfathomable, nightmarish visions of anarchy and misery, a ghoulish reality haunting our minds and lives. For what we see on our television sets is a devastation of humanity never before seen or experienced or felt within American shores. It is a surreal and up close glimpse of natural and human made destruction reserved almost exclusively for those peoples living in the underdeveloped nations of the south, those far removed from our gluttonous and privileged lives.

What we see right before our eyes no Hollywood movie could ever reproduce and no bestselling author could ever conjure up because what is transmitted into our monitors is real and tangible and historical, a region inside America utterly devastated, its citizens’ lives made barren and impotent by a catastrophe the most creative and troubled minds could never conjure up.

Human suffering unparalleled in American history, on a scale never before witnessed, with real human emotion and psychology and misery acting out for the world to see, has been thrust upon millions of us, decimating a once vibrant and colorful region, making hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans homeless and displaced, having become refugees from their own city, escaping toxic floods and government failure, left without worldly possessions, sojourning along America’s roads in search of futures and lives and lost family, destined to forever continue living in the indigence of their birth and the suffering the system has placed at their doorstep.

Many Americans watched in horror as New Orleans was rendered destroyed by forces natural and man made, a combination of 90 degree water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico acting as the catalyst for nature’s fury, the incompetent leadership of men small, weak and thoroughly inept, the under funding of barriers and levies, the misallocation of resources and priorities, warmongering greed, and the destruction of wetlands and natural barriers by the hands of man. In this gumbo of destruction thus arose a rare manifestation of violent decimation and suffering spawned not upon Haitians or Indonesians or Sudanese or Rwandans or Guatemalans or Indians or Iraqis, but rather by people born under the red, white and blue.

In the destruction of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina we witnessed first hand, if only vicariously, what it is like to live in the so called third world. The equivalent of a dozen 9/11s, Katrina brought the last remaining superpower to her knees, showing the world the sheer ineptitude of its highest leaders, the impotence of her power and the utter disregard placed upon the less fortunate by her ingrained system conditioned to run on the survival of the richest, where wealth determines happiness, survival and escape from hell and where only the exploiters of poverty and social engineering flourish.

A nation thinking herself invulnerable to Earth and her forces has been woken from her fantasy-filled, prescription-laced stupor of grandeur, our belief in American exceptionalism and omnipotence eviscerated, lying splintered along with thousands of Gulf Coast homes. Upon our eyes has been thrust the reality that we are no different than banana republics or mosquito coasts, third-world nations or lands swamped by corruption or tyranny. Americans have been slapped in the face by Katrina, forced to confront the vulnerability of our character and the impotence of our wealth, seeing the incompetence of our highest leaders and the ineptitude of our sacred government. For if “Red” China can evacuate half a million people from an oncoming typhoon, resulting in the death of ten people, and if “communist” Cuba regularly evacuates hundreds of thousands with every oncoming hurricane with no deaths, how can America fail when it is the greatest nation on Earth?

We have been confronted with the reality of crony, survival of the richest capitalism, a system where only those with money escape and thrive, and those without remain and perish. For years we are conditioned with this capitalistic fiction, the American Dream it is called, a fallacy that creates fantasy-filled thoughts out of socially engineered subsistence, fabricating worker bees and soldier ants out of human flesh, molding automatons and slaves from the womb, forever destined to serve the exploiters and subjugators of humanity, those Bush calls his base and we call capitalists and exploiters of human beings.

Katrina has, through her winds and surges, opened America to a reality hidden from view and whitewashed throughout society. It exposes the charade of separate but equal, of colorblindness, of social equality and of vanished racism. It tore to shreds the illusion of the American Dream, of one America, of capitalism being a most benign economic system. New Orleans was, once again, the historical marker reminding us that as long as civilization has existed, as long as man has lived, hierarchy of power, wealth, and class has always lived alongside us, dividing the haves from the have nots.

Third World America

New Orleans was a giant Titanic, a ship divided by class, where money assured salvation and indigence guaranteed suffering and death. With wealth comes escape, the means to leave the coming natural onslaught, the opportunity to survive. Through indigence opportunity does not exist. New Orleans and its humanitarian crisis offered proof that black and white America remain divided socioeconomically, separated by a mile-high wall of class warfare, racism and a gulf of socio-engineered destinies.

Since before formation of the Republic, where black slaves were considered animals and one’s skin color determined freedom or misery, being the arbiter of fate, black America has been trailing behind its white counterparts. With emancipation did not come equality, for slaves were many years behind, possessing nothing but the clothes on their backs and years of hard labor behind them. America was run by whites, owned by whites, operated by whites and determined by whites. The entire spectrum of the mechanisms of society was controlled by whites for the benefit of whites.

Institutionalized whiteness permeated, conscious and subconscious racism lingered and, with blacks creeping out of cesspools of slavery into a world they only saw through the periphery, entering a society that had been denied them for centuries, lacking standing, education and political power, a culture white and homogenous placed monolithic barriers to entry. If slavery was no longer a viable way to exploit free labor and cheap production, then society would strive to achieve the next best thing: the exploitation of blacks through the demons of capitalism. America was white America, after all, and blacks were not welcome.

It can be said with certainty that America was first made wealthy from the slave labor of African-Americans. Many corporations of today and many of the wealthiest families that go back centuries can attribute their wealth and profit to the exploitation and free labor of blacks who for centuries toiled in blood, sweat and tears to enrich America’s past, and present, oligarchy. Much of America’s wealth, first accumulated over centuries of slavery, was born in sin, through the death of millions of blacks and the lost destinies of millions more whose white masters smeared the whips of capitalism with the blood of the ancestors to today’s African-Americans.

Laws, regulations, society and American psychology favored the Anglo world. Every step backwards blacks took and every barrier they ran into was because of whites. So established and ingrained was the Anglo community throughout America, and so behind was the black community after emancipation, that the playing field was never equal, becoming a cesspool for blacks and an exploitable profit-making machine for whites. Generation after generation of blacks have suffered from a playing field that has never had a semblance of equality, condemning millions from cradle to grave to linger in utter indigence, forced to live in American Bantustans called inner cities, robbed of happiness and futures, dependent on the crumbs and bones thrown their way by a society eager to make eyes blind and ears deaf to a reality confronting America that Hurricane Katrina has made to surface from the sewers of New Orleans.

African-Americans after the end of slavery were 200 years behind their white counterparts, possessing little and owning nothing, undereducated and destitute, forced to jump a plethora of barriers, forced to live in a society where they were not welcome. For 100 years after winning their freedom African-Americans remained servile entities dependent on the meager wages, jobs and opportunities given them by white America. They owned no land and no business, forcing them to work for new masters under slave-like conditions. The name had changed from slave to laborer, but the result was the same. Still lagging decades if not centuries behind their Anglo counterparts, confronting societal racism and government indifference, the black community never really escaped slavery. While technically free, slave wages and slave income meant slave-like conditions. Without opportunity there was no escape, without escape there was no future.

It took another 100 years for black political power to grow to where civil rights could be afforded them, yet in that time African-Americans still could not escape the tremendous disadvantage slavery had engendered and racism had furthered. Those neighborhoods whites no longer cared to live in became black reservations. Jobs whites and European immigrants no longer wanted were instead given to blacks, the lowest end of the totem pole called American society. The disadvantages remain to this day, as exemplified by New Orleans. Little, if anything, has changed.

With no work in rural America blacks migrated to the large cities, afforded, because of low income and racism, no other housing except those inside the ghetto, the black concentration camp, designed to subjugate, exploit, hinder and incarcerate, implemented so white America would not have to be bothered by the black ‘plague’. Throwing away the keys to black neighborhoods, offering no meaningful employment, eviscerating any semblance of a worthy education, white America pretended the ghetto did not exist, even as millions lived in squalor, without opportunity, devoid futures and a chance for improved livelihoods.

By offering only slave wage jobs, though in very short supply with very large demand, thus making wages decrease, by incapacitating and making impotent education from pre-school through high school, by introducing fire-water, drugs and weapons into the inner city, by making high unemployment levels where blacks live, by offering not an ounce of compassion or opportunity, America’s government, and the elite that control it, have destroyed millions of lives, most teeming with abilities and talents on par with their white counterparts.

Social engineering has assured capitalistic and elite America that blacks remain far behind their white counterparts. Relegated to the slums and ghetto, forced to live in poverty, trapped in an almost inescapable vicious cycle of indigence, blacks thus become the slave of the capitalists, forced to scrap a living from the meager slave wage they are paid, forced to compete among each other for a small number of jobs, lacking the education necessary to move ahead in life and the resources to escape the internment camp the elite have shoved them into.

Without education there is pure ignorance and lack of knowledge. Without livable wages there is only slavery, living paycheck to paycheck, indebted more each day, forced to work innumerable hours for little happiness. Without opportunity thousands of blacks are forced to join the military, seen as the only escape, caste drafted into America’s armed forces, sent to foreign lands to become the cannon fodder of corporate greed. Without employment and education two million black men find themselves imprisoned in the largest prison system the world has ever seen, locked away for petty crimes, never to be seen again, products of environment and social engineering.

Black America is Third World America, exemplified by the devastation we have all witnessed in New Orleans. To sojourn into the inner city is to take a trip into Haiti, Sudan, Congo or Niger, a magic carpet ride into the third world, where poverty pervades, class warfare emanates and futures are lost. The ghetto is a reservation where blacks are to remain, surrounded by invisible barriers and walls seen only by the people residing within them. The inner city is to be forgotten, a place we pretend does not exist. We fail to hear its cries and see its tears and smell its rotting infrastructure, preferring to reside inside our white picket fences, believing in the masquerade of the American dream, where every human being is born equal, enjoying the comforts of living in an equal playing field, with the resources necessary to escape the wrath of a monstrous hurricane.

To George Bush, we are All New Orleans' Blacks

It is those, such as George Bush, born with silver spoons and porcelain dishes and gold-plated toilets that prefer living in denial rather than confronting the reality that is the other America. It is they who lack the empathy or concern for those less fortunate than themselves, living delusions of grandeur, hypnotized by the Almighty Dollar and lacking all precepts of human understanding. It is people like George Bush who, upon the calamity of New Orleans, when the utter devastation and levels of suffering could be seen by us all, prefer to engage in guitar lessons in San Diego or birthday cake celebrations in Arizona or rounds of golf in California or political speeches and fundraisers.

It is people like George Bush, selfish, greed infested, morally corrupt and rotten to the core, who under fund barriers and levies experts have told them not to ignore. It is people like George Bush who for political reasons goes to Florida two days after a hurricane for photo ops with his brother Jeb, undoubtedly to help in the governor’s re-election campaign, but fails to attend to the worst natural disaster in America’s history, for days doing nothing but searching for ways to protect himself from the criticism his feeble, inept and incompetent leadership help engender.

When thousands of blacks lie stranded for days on the roofs of their houses, when thousands more have to live days in the filth and decay of the Superdome and the Convention Center, when it takes four days for aid to finally arrive, when the US government lets anarchy arrive and thrive in New Orleans, when Bush is more concerned about photo-ops than in helping people, when New Orleans, with mostly a black population, is allowed to descend into chaos, Kayne West’s comments on national television that Bush does not care about black people seems appropriate, for Bush is a corporate owned lackey, a product of elite upbringing, lacking humanity and empathy for his fellow man, concerned more for profit than people, his image over life, his legacy over that of New Orleans.

What haunts us upon looking at a city such as New Orleans, whose buildings survived Katrina but not its under funded barriers and levies, is that an American city, the Big Easy, withstood Katrina’s powerful winds but not human greed. It shows us that more concern was given Bush’s failed war in Iraq than an American city at the heart of black America. It shows us that had the levies and barriers been properly funded, and had Bush not diverted monies away for his little quagmire in Iraq, perhaps New Orleans would never had been flooded, saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars in costs. A few hundred million dollars was taken from the funding of barriers and levies and given towards the war in Iraq, risking the lives of thousands for the legacy of the Bush administration and the profits of the corporate world.

Through the greed of the warmongers an entire American city now lies in ruins, its hundreds of thousands of citizens dead or made refugees wondering the wastelands of America, sent to live in gymnasiums and projects and borrowed homes. The fact that most displaced people are black is not by coincidence, for Bush has risked not his life but that of many, many thousands. The administration knew full well the dangers of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans but instead of helping to secure the city’s safety they gambled that the remoteness of a devastating hurricane hitting the Big Easy was so slim that the risk was worth taking. All for a war in Iraq that has only succeeded in making America a target of more people, making us less secure in our own cities.

Through Bush’s criminal negligence tens of thousands are dead, rotting corpses floating in New Orleans’ streets. Remember, it was the levies and water barriers breaking that caused the vast percentage of damage, not Katrina’s powerful winds. It was under funded barriers and levies that broke that killed so many people. Bush cared nothing for New Orleans, as shown by his criminal procrastination in mobilizing America. How many Americans have died under George W. Bush since he took office? How many have been poor, minority or both?

George Bush not only does not care about black people, he does not care about common people. We, the masses, are nothing to Bush and the elite that control him. We are expendable peons in their game of profit over people, power over freedom and greed over happiness. New Orleans’ citizens were left to suffer and die for days while Bush golfed, rock and rolled and ate cake.

The worst President America has ever known thus continues his reign of error over these United States of America. How much more incompetence are we willing to put up with? How much more error leading to death can we stand? When will enough be enough? In the Big Easy can we see third world America, how the elite treat it, and a reality that has stunned millions of us. Perhaps one day we will steer away from the course we have been living in for too long. Perhaps one day we will see the damage our history has done to the lives of millions of fellow Americans whose only crime is being born black.

Perhaps, if we one day open our eyes, we will see the charade that is the American Dream, and that we live in many America’s, not just one. We might awaken one day to see the injustices and the inequality and the lost opportunities inflicted on millions, as well as the crimes of criminals and murderers and exploiters of human flesh that continue steering us towards eventual degeneration and self-implosion. The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina has woken us all to truth and reality at the dawn of 21st century America.

The question is, will we wake up and act, or will we fall back asleep, pretending reality does not exist, continuing to live in our delusions and denials, leaving millions to continued destituteness of life, liberty and happiness. If we cannot see what Bush and his kind have done to New Orleans, then perhaps we never will, until that day when the corporate world, and the elite that control it, come knocking on our own door. Maybe, some day, we will all be the black citizens of New Orleans, swimming in toxic cocktails of waste and water, dehydrating for lack of water, hungry for days on end, forced to endure anarchy and chaos, living on the street, seeing death, destruction and hell on Earth.

Maybe, some day, we will experience what it is like for an elitist, corporatist dominated government to abandon your city and your kind, leaving you to fend for yourself, sacrificing thousands of your neighbors for greed, for power, for profit, forgetting that you exist and that you are in desperate need of help, seeing you as an expendable entity less worthy than the almighty Dollar. Maybe then, if we are lucky, we will realize that what we believe to be has been a fallacy, that what we thought was reality is but a charade, and that in the end, to the elite that own us, we are all black citizens of New Orleans.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Grave and Gathering Dangers: The War President’s Threat to National and Global Security Part I of III: War Against Science, Health and the Environment

In light of Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath, this article, published first on 4 March 2004, exposes Bush and his corporatist cabal to the criminal negligence they have undertaken, risking the lives of millions in order to secure for themselves continued wealth and power. The devastation of New Orleans is one such example of what is in store for America if we continue our silence to the reality of global warming. What caused Hurricane Katrina to unleash such fury and power, growing from a tropical storm into a high category hurricane? Perhaps it was the 90 degree temperatures of the waters in the Gulf of Mexico which acted like engines emasculating Katrina. Welcome to the Age of Global Warming.....


“Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration--aided by right-wing allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to further their goals--are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes, rather than suppress good science, they simply order up their own. Meanwhile, the Bush White House is purging, censoring and blacklisting scientists and engineers whose work threatens the profits of the Administration's corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda.”
---- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

"If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster."
---- Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer

The tip of the iceberg continues its ominous melting and the giant unseen mass of ice below remains submerged, a grave and gathering danger lying waiting in the path of the vessel that is human existence. The state of the planet’s environment and by consequence human health continues its steady decline, in no small part a result of the Bush administration’s ignorant and hypnotizing love of the almighty dollar and the Corporate Leviathan that has shredded rules, regulations and protections once designed to slow the progress of environmental devastation. Today, after three years of the war president’s reign, our environment and health have been methodically pilfered through a carefully orchestrated strategy of lies, deceits and appointments designed to suppress and alter scientific fact and facilitate the Leviathan’s unhindered exploitation of land and man.

From the start of Bush’s ascendancy to the Presidency by the Supreme Court, a plethora of high level and policy-making position appointments were made, selected from a large contingent of minions who had at one time or presently been employed by environmentally degrading industries, utilities and companies, namely those of the mining, logging, energy (coal, oil, gas), chemical, pharmaceutical, agribusiness and military industries. From Cabinet positions to lower level ones, from scientists to engineers, advisors to panelists, the army of the Leviathan marched proudly into Washington trumpeting its intent and determination to facilitate and bring forth the continuing corporate leeching of America’s air, lands, forests and waterways. Dispersed throughout the government’s agencies and departments, the vast array of industry and corporate executives, lobbyists, CEO’s, attorneys and scientists immediately began undermining the many mechanisms that protected our environment, health and scientific fact.

The introduction of the Bush administration into Washington began the most systematic evisceration of environmental laws and protections the country has ever been witness to. As a result, those industries whose interest, profit and power lies in undoing environmental regulations began a reign of terror onto everything pristine, sacred and beautiful. A war against our lungs and bodies was declared; a war against our unborn children and grandchildren was unleashed. Our air continues to be polluted at unprecedented levels, causing massive amounts of asthma and disease in children. The lowering of human immune systems has also resulted along with hundreds of thousands of deaths in older adults. Our water continues to be made less clean, with increasing levels of arsenic, mercury, factory chemicals, pesticides and agribusiness runoffs being mixed with once clean water, leading to disease, death and the absorption of mercury and pesticides into the bodies of fertile American women. The health consequences on fetuses and babies, it is being learned, are devastating and criminal.

Bush has been unwilling to make fuel efficiency a priority, something that, given our dependence on foreign oil, would help bring security to our shores. His administration has granted subsidies and as consequence tax rebates for those buying gas guzzling SUVs. Investment in more efficient engines such as hydrogen fuel cells is minimal, a joke if the situation was not so serious. When Big Oil runs smoothly through the corridors of power, however, the expectation of self-cannibalization is an experiment in futility. The oilgarchs’ omnipotent power derives from the continued flow of black blood, and it seems they have no scruples sacrificing the red kind in order to achieve this goal.

American energy and foreign policy have been created by Cheney and his cronies in the energy/oil industries. Wars have been started and waged to attain feudal lands rich in black gold for energy conglomerates. Science has been corrupted, distorted and suppressed to fall in line with the energy industry’s goals. The surface of the planet is being mercilessly scarred and made barren; developing nations and their peoples are being turned into oppressed estates and serfs of the exploiting elite few.

The development and introduction of renewable solar and wind energy has been hindered and is but an afterthought as the growth of American corporatism continues. This technology is the future, the only solution to a world reeling from the released energies of carbon. Wind and solar technology can provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, it can clean our skies and help progress our planet forward, providing much needed stability, equality and opportunity. Yet Bush has done close to nothing with this amazingly available technology.

Rather, it continues to be suppressed by those entities that have everything to lose and nothing to gain from the introduction of clean and renewable energy. Threats to the establishment and to the greed infested Leviathan cannot be allowed to flourish, or to be made known. Carbon based industries must be allowed to prosper, even to the great detriment of the planet and its inhabitants.

The rape and pillage of America’s and the world’s forests and lands has accelerated. Through Orwellian doublespeak phrases such as Healthy Forests and Clear Skies the administration baits and switches its way toward granting the Leviathan unfettered powers to decimate forests and infest our air. Accountable to no one, polluters have carte blanche power to conduct profit-making devastation and free-market genocide.

Bush’s environmental record can aptly be termed a Scorched Earth Policy (SEP), a profound manifestation of a will to wage a war of terror on Earth’s resources, its breathable air and drinkable water while arrogantly ignoring the future of humanity and the only home we possess. This is a crime against humanity and against the planet.

Bush’s Scorched Earth Policy is one where the future is abandoned, the long term is an afterthought and the present is trashed. It is enabling the insatiable appetite of the Leviathan to gorge, becoming a bloodsucking vampire robbing life from the planet. Today’s children and tomorrow’s future are being denied the life they have an inalienable right to thanks to the unquenchable destructive appetite of those made blind by the hypnotizing blindfold of the almighty dollar and the captivating echo of the great Leviathan and the destructive power it espouses to protect. As more decimation is unleashed, humankind’s future will grow more and more diseased, living in a world once dreamed up by the realm of science fiction.

The lackey in the White House has placed the collective future of the human race in peril through his symphonious double-footed waltz with the corporate oligarchy. The hundreds of thousands who die yearly as a result of air, water and land pollution, not to mention through the introduction of carcinogens, chemicals, pesticides, hormones, preservatives, fats and sugars we ingest with the foods we eat are but an inconsequential necessity to corporate decision-makers in the system of exploitation we call capitalism.

We are made to fear the bogeymen that killed 3000 souls but not the terrorists who knowingly, clandestinely and with corporatist approval destroy hundreds of thousands of energies through the despoilment of the environment and the slow corrosion of human bodies. Wearing expensively tailored Armani suits is the armor and shield protecting white-skinned terrorists from the war proclaimed against brown-skinned ones wearing but turbans.

Since January 2000, the Bush administration has continuously lied about, altered and suppressed vital scientific fact from Americans and the world. It has distorted findings and research contrary to its political and corporate interests, pressured and cajoled government scientists and engineers into either acquiescing to its commands or being fired and has set back perhaps for decades the trustworthiness of government scientific findings.

Just recently a renowned amalgam of scientists and engineers, including Nobel laureates, published a report critical of the Bush administration for the realities mentioned above and for eviscerating governmental science that is unfavorable to those interests it upholds and protects, namely those of the Leviathan it serves. The report criticizes the Bush administration for purposely distorting scientific fact "for partisan political ends."

Any finding that does not serve its purpose or political aspirations is hidden from view, criticized, lied about or changed in favor of one, usually sponsored by corporate powers, that falls in line with the fiction Bush wants to make public. All objective, professional research, reports and facts that are seen as a threat to the Leviathan faces a collection of firewalls and obstacles that assure the public will never see or believe the reality that exists. Instead, the administration flaunts corporate sponsored scientific research, conducted by scientists friendly to polluting industries, utilities and companies, that distort the mess that is being created and the rape and pillage of both man and land that exploitation has brought forth. The legal form of corruption called lobbying and contributions has its rewards.

The suppression and outright lies of EPA air quality reports near Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9/11 in which the true extent of damaging pollution never saw the light of day is but one example of an administration that sacrifices American citizens’ health and lives for the continued profiteering of its corporate friends. In order for Wall Street to open in the days and months following 9/11, the administration assured New Yorkers the air quality near the tragic scene was acceptable and non-threatening.

In reality, however, air quality was exceedingly dangerous for human activity, with high levels of asbestos present, in many instances causing sickness in people working near the site of the World Trade Center. This outright lie will in the end cause premature deaths to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who will suffer long-term disease due to the fictional assurances of the Bush administration. After all, money and stock trading had to continue making the few richer.

We pursue turban-wearing Arabs “hiding in caves” half a world away when the worst kind of terrorist lies, distorts, manipulates, suppresses and alters relevant information that is leading to the unnecessary death of hundreds of thousands of Americans per year. Wearing a small American flag push-pin on a suit and hiding behind a sentinel army of American red, white and blue flags, while proclaiming undying patriotism and divine inspiration should not make our “elected leaders” immune from the crimes against humanity they help perpetrate.

Perhaps the greatest deception being committed by the Bush administration is the perverse suppression of scientific fact and policy within the private and public scientific community detailing the increasingly real dangers of global warming. This growing and gathering menace, seen in many circles as a threat much bigger than terrorism, has the potential of creating devastation and havoc around the world. The signs are everywhere, they do not discriminate and they are gathering energy, not unlike a massive and catastrophic typhoon ready to unleash its tumultuous fury on civilization.

Our devastation of Earth’s resources and our consumption of carbon based energy are heating the planet at unprecedented levels. Oceans are getting warmer, coral reefs are being wiped out, glaciers are melting, Arctic sheets of ice are disappearing and animal and plant species are being made extinct. Summers are seeing hundreds of deaths due to heat; storms are bigger, stronger and much more devastating. Ocean currents are changing, leading to an alteration of temperatures and weather patterns worldwide. The dreams of fantasy are rapidly becoming our nightmarish reality. We are helping to seal our own fates, and the Bush administration is hiding this frightful reality from billions of world citizens.

A Pentagon study that outlined a very grim future for mankind due to global warming was concealed by a White House that tried everything in its power to prevent its dissemination to the public. Fortunately, the report was leaked and today we see the military’s deep seated worry about our planet in the next twenty years if global warming is not treated and dealt with as a threat much greater than terrorism. The study outlines a future of anarchy and perpetual war, of the deaths of hundreds of millions of humans, of extreme drought, human displacement due to famine and increased ocean levels.

It predicts famine and dwindling supplies of food, water and oil will lead to wars and nuclear proliferation. Weather fluctuations will change the complexion of entire countries. Rich nations will become fortresses as starving and displaced peoples, mostly those of the south, will migrate north. Given human history and nature and the dire prognostications of the study, our continued reign is about to come to an abrupt end.

The Pentagon study was conducted by a department that today possesses the most power in the US government, so it is safe to assume that its conclusions should be taken extremely seriously and have indeed reached the highest office in the land. Instead, Bush hid it from view, saying not a word, no doubt to protect the interests of his masters who contribute mightily to the growing phenomenon that could make us all extinct creatures that brought about their own demise.

The Bush administration is a grave and growing danger, a threat to national and global security. Bush has declared war on the environment and our health; he has lied and hidden to appease those holding his puppet strings. By association, the war president has declared war on the planet, on each and every one of us. His policies serve not 285 million people but those holding the reigns of the Leviathan, thereby endangering all six billion of us. It seems the man cares not for his own progeny, condemning their future to a world bordering on the unthinkable.

Sacrificing the future of our species for the present profits, power and wealth of the Leviathan, Bush and the new era of corporatism is making cockroaches of us all, a mere pestilence for the greed-infested demons of the corporate world that will soon have us living in sewers of waste squabbling for the crumbs of a civilization lost.

The present American administration has catapulted our world through barren forests and wasted lands, flying into contaminated air and landing in toxic waters. The globe is changing, and we are the culprits. Mother Nature is pissed, and she is ready to purge us from her surface. Four more years of George W. Bush and this process will be accelerated.

A grave and gathering danger has been unearthed, global security is in peril, the Leviathan and its legions in government see neither what they are creating nor what they are destroying. The disease in Washington is coughing up toxic futures devoid of truths or pragmatism. Its acidic phlegm is infecting the world’s environment and its peoples. A gang of miscreants is deciding our collective futures. One man is leading the charge into oblivion and into the fossilized record books. In the end, without action from the Other Superpower, we are all dead apes walking. Our failure to act today is sealing our fates tomorrow.