WHAT HAPPENED to our economy; to gas and food prices, to so many mortgages now “upside-down”? How did the corporations manage to again quash organized labor? How did CEOs get to usurp the wealth created by corporate workforces? Nearly all of the pain and injury is due to gov’t policies. Bush’s $10 billion per month criminal war on Iraq would, by itself, eventually bankrupt our nation (unless he actually pulls off his robbery of its oil). While Bush is responsible for his Iraq war and the sub-prime mortgage scam, part of other damages is due to earlier administrations.

OUR MILITARY in Iraq and Afghanistan are grossly underpaid. As enlistments drop, so do standards. Convicts and mental incompetents are now recruited. Meanwhile, our 130,000 force of mercenaries are carefully vetted; not for technical competence but for political orientation. Entre to that $1,600 per day and all found life of leisure and criminal impunity is granted only, or mostly, to Republicans. Their construction competence is such that, so far, thirteen of our serving armed forces have been electrocuted by faulty wiring in showers. Fourteen hospitals for which US contractors have been paid to build don’t actually exist. The money was paid to contractors who never even began construction.

BUSH’S WARS and his other decisions have all proven to be treasury-looting opportunities for his corporate cronies. Ditto Katrina: the money ostensibly spent for its victims was given directly to corporations, $3 billion for 100,000 trailers that proved to be formaldehyde-contaminated and continue to cost us $130 million annually to store. Bush contractors operate on a pay-to-play basis – whoever pays the biggest bribes gets the contracts.

IT WAS ABOUT OIL after all! Bush/Cheney’s “Strategic Framework Agreement” (SFA) proves it. Under its terms Iraq’s 1958 nationalization of its own oil resources is undone. It restores the self-same four oil giants that, as set up by the Brits in 1930, had looted Iraq’s oil until 1958. The four wrote the new oil exploitation “contracts” which they merely handed to Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki as mandates. The SFA makes Iraq a permanent vassal state coerced by 52 new US bases manned by troops immune to Iraqi laws. Thus the 1.3 million dead Iraqis are nonentities. Ditto the untold hundreds of thousands injured. The five million refugees we have created cannot return due to ongoing violence. We pump their oil as if it’s ours, after reducing their cities and towns to rubble. And despite the propagandists’ “patriotic” blather, our 4,120 troops’ deaths comprise part of Bush’s Supreme Crime.

THE SUB-PRIME SCAM; the largest swindle ever, is now roiling international markets. Its perpetrators still strut the corridors of Bush power, unprosecuted. A bio: As senator, Phil Gramm was successfully $lobbied by Enron which had constant access to his office. Gramm’s wife Wendy was appointed to Enron’s board of directors. Enron Chief Ken Lay co-chaired Gramm’s 1992 presidential campaign. After defrauding $billions with gov’t complicity, Enron collapsed and a few of its officers were convicted, but not its enablers in gov’t. In 2000 Sen. Gramm surreptitiously introduced “The Commodity Futures Modernization Act.” The Republican controlled congress enacted it to ”reduce red tape” and to “free up our futures markets.” That was the law that “legalized” the sub-prime swindle that has now wrecked the international financial system and our once-almighty dollar. In addition to the current wave of foreclosures and corruption of the world’s retirement funds Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act has created skyrocketing prices at the gas pump and food stores. According to The Nation magazine, prior to his entry into political office Gramm was a producer of soft-core pornography movies. Having been so instrumental in creating the sub-prime scam and its consequent wave of foreclosures, Sen. Gramm now $advises the Union Bank of Switzerland on how to escape its effect. He is also chief economic and financial advisor to Sen. McCain, and last week referred to his scam’s victims as “a nation of whiners.” This is no plug for Obama whose toadying to AIPAC’s genocidists (along with Hillary and McCain) speaks for itself. American patriots have never been more challenged; our gov’t systematically violates nine of our Constitution’s first ten amendments. It is very doubtful whether our Constitution will ever be restored.

THE “MISERY INDEX,” the sum of US unemployment and inflation rates, is now the highest since January, 1993.

CAPITALISM TRIUMPHS! Good old Free Enterprise wins! That is how financial TV is “reporting” yesterday’s $100 billion giveaway to the main sub-prime predators. They hadn’t completed palming off on pension funds all of their fraudulent “AAA-Rated” paper and had thus bankrupted themselves. Why such gov’t largesse to those bankrupts? They, the mortgage companies, along with medical insurance companies, are massive political contributors, including to Obama’s and McCain’s campaigns. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac alone had spent $200 million to buy freedom from the regulations prohibiting the very crimes that had now ruined them. They own or guarantee some $6 trillion in mortgages, some of it fictitious. Sen. Phil Gramm was their main man. As McCain’s financial guru his trail of wreckage will continue.

TORTURE. Bush’s British collaborators are backing away. According to The Guardian (7/11/08) Britain’s Defense Ministry will pay a total of $5.6 millions to ten Iraqi families including that of Baha Mousa. Brit soldiers tortured the ten, local hotel workers, beating Mr. Mousa to death, inflicting 91 separate injuries before dumping him into a latrine. Mousa’s children will share in the compensation. An earlier court martial had cleared all soldiers of the crimes excepting one who, earlier, had admitted his participation. Meanwhile, Physicians for Human Rights has just published a report detailing the medical evidence of detainee torture at the hands of US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. US Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (Ret.) wrote the report’s preface that accuses the Bush administration of war crimes. He wrote: “The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, we can see the full scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted – both on American institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

“In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.

“After years of disclosures by governmental investigations, media accounts, and human rights reports, there remains no doubt that the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question remaining is whether those who ordered the torture will be prosecuted.” Where are America’s patriots; those sworn to defend its Constitution?

WHO ARE THE TERRORISTS re Occupied Ireland? See terrorismireland.org.

WHICH BRIT REG’T starved your relatives? See irishholocaust.org. Contact me at 312 664 7651 or fogartyc@att.net.