Choice Resort Opens the Sanford Juarez Vacation Exclusive

Press Release—for Immediate Distribution

Choice Resort Opens the Sanford Juarez Vacation Exclusive

JUAREZ, Mexico, Choice Resorts Mexico continues to bring exceptional and charming lodging options to U.S. travelers with the opening of the former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s new resort in Juarez, Mexico—the Sanford Suites Pavilion Resort.

Former Gov. Sanford, who separated from his wife in the wake of his affair with an Argentine woman, has opened a new luxury resort hotel here in Juarez, a franchise with Choice Resorts Mexico. Sanford built a political platform in the U.S. based on staunch religious, family values while fiercely attacking his Democrat opponents as immoral.

 “The Sanford Suites,” explains the former governor, “offers 35 Spanish-style guest rooms by designer Alberto Gonzalez, the former Attorney General who resigned his post to pursue a new career. Guests can take advantage of the resort’s tranquil lounge bar, decorated with religious artifacts dating back centuries, while attractive waitresses and waiters cater to your every need in a Christian atmosphere.”

The resort represents the perfect place for both business and leisure travelers visiting the border town. “It’s ideally located in the center of town,” Sanford says, “close to where the action is and near the Cathedral, dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron of the cities.” When asked why the former Governor moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to Juarez, Sanford explains, “Mexico is one of the freest countries. No matter what people say about the drug lords, they have eradicated the government here. And as Ronald Reagan often said in his speeches, and I quote, ‘government is not the solution, government is the problem.’ And,” continues Sanford, “whatever you may have heard, Juarez, Mexico, is full of good people, interesting attractions, fine restaurants, a fascinating history, and very impressive shopping values. Cocaine is less expensive here and so too are the exotic, Latin women who are not only less costly to date, what with the reduced prices in the restaurants, but they also add a spicy twist to an otherwise boring marriage. The women here understand that man holds dominion over them, as laid out in Genesis 1:28. None of that women’s liberation nonsense here. The Church has engrained this as truth in Mexico’s cultural DNA. No need to debate it.”

Sanford notes that, like extended stays, a permanent move to Mexico is financially advantageous for a business owner because the higher the income bracket, the lower the taxes.  Plus there are few labor laws and minimum wages, which can sometimes amount to a couple bucks a day to keep the servants happy. “That means higher profits,” says Sanford, who was known, during his political career back in the U.S., for letting loose a group of live pigs in the state house chambers as a visual protest against the Democrats’ ‘pork projects.’ Here, favors can be bought,” he quipped, “without the hassles or having to qualify them as campaign contributions. In fact, there’s hardly any regulation here to speak of. It’s truly paradise for plutarchy, where the wealthy elite rules and can even buy the best men from the military. You think the United States is the purest form of capitalism, look again.”

Sanford adds, “Although there has recently been a spike in competitive struggles between the various entrepreneurs in the drug industry here, the economy is robust. In fact, the drug industry is one of Mexico’s most competitive, innovative, and lucrative, giving a vibrant boost to exports and fueling the overall well-being of a stable GNP. Even the little man on the street has a chance to make a buck by trafficking.”

“I want to clarify also,” says Sanford, “that, despite rumors, this resort has no affiliations with the C Street group or the Family. But like the Family, at the resort we focus on Christian values. Mexico is a God-chosen country where its people, though mostly down and out, take pride in their nation, where the wealthy are the privileged few, chosen by God. Mexico is a Christian nation, ruled mainly by Christian-based laws and centuries of tradition, where the peasant understands the dominion of God’s selected few. The wealthy are tasked with the duty to shepherd the flock. This understanding is in everyone’s blood, as taught by the authority of the Catholic Church that stretches back to the Spanish monarchy whose power originated by divine intersession. Fortunately for Mexico, its founding fathers were disciples of the Baroque era and not the Enlightenment, unlike those agnostic, deist fools who founded the United States.” 

To celebrate its opening, the resort is offering an enticing “All in One” package for services. Guests who book this limited package will receive a welcome glass of champagne, complimentary access to the resort’s breakfast buffet, and an invite to a special evening buffet that includes two lines of blow, three hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes, and one free hour of Wi-Fi access.

“I want to stress that the Sanford Suites welcome not just Republicans, but Democrats as well,” says Sanford. “In fact, last month, Congressman Mike McIntyre, a North Carolina Democrat, stayed here. Mike is a good ‘ol boy, believes that the Ten Commandments are ‘the fundamental legal code for the laws of the United States’ and thus ought to be on display at schools and courthouses.”

The Sanford Suites is fast becoming a meeting place for influential U.S. elected officials, the perfect spot where high-powered CEO’s and international business professionals can find a sympathetic ear and broker the kinds of deals that require complete privacy and discretion. Recently, prominent men of influence have taken extended stays at the Sanford Suites, such as John Ensign, Republican Senator from Nevada, who needed a time-out after the media portrayed him as having an extramarital affair.

Other very important people to frequent the resort are Republican Congressmen and Senators Larry Craig, Mike Foley, David Vitter, John Boehner, and Richard Curtis. And, of course, Oliver North, who is well known for brokering deals south of the border. Current prison inmates, Jack Abramoff and former Congressman Duke Cunningham are both planning a visit as soon as their time is freed up. Scooter Libby has leased a permanent suite here where he is free to make a new start. In the eventuality that an indictment might actually be issued against him for war crimes, former Vice Pres. Dick Chaney has bought one of the suites. 

About the Sanford Suites
For more information on the Sanford Suites or to book your stay today, visit http://www.biskeborn.com

Choice Resorts, Choice Resorts Mexico, and Sanford Suites International are proprietary trademarks and service marks of Mark Biskeborn’s fictional imagination. Many of the prominent men named here have been involved in public scandals regarding sexual crimes or bribery and other forms of corruption—and many of them are convicted felons. Some of them have been pardoned.
  
2009 Choice Resorts Mexico International, Inc. All rights reserved for the Foundation of a More Equitable Democracy.

Mexico: U.S. Is Borderline to Third World?

"There is an arms race between the cartels," said Alberto Islas, a security consultant who advises the Mexican government on the current drug wars, as reported in the Los Angeles Times. "One group gets rocket-propelled grenades, the other has to have them."

Since January 2007, when the Mexican war on drugs was officially declared, more than 9,700 people have died in the conflicts, more than the official count of U.S. soldier causalities in Iraq.

When looking at Mexico's history and its current economic and civil predicament, we gain insight into how our own American government is so vulnerable. Only our values and distinguishing principles designed into our system by its founders will save us. If we lose these, we fall into the abyss.

To some, comparing the U.S. to Mexico, or the Third World in general, sounds shocking. Yet, is this comparison really so far-fetched? With our constitutional form of government in jeopardy, the U.S. teeters on the edge of emulating Mexico's dismal style of democracy.

In my previous two articles in a series of essays examining the similarities between Mexico and the U.S.A., Mexico: a Theocratic Model for Republicans and Religious Morality Is Problematic, I consider how certain leaders in Mexico, as in so many countries south of the border, have seized political power through the use of the authoritarian religious traditions that are pervasive in the culture. More than ever in U.S. history, the Republican Party has pursued this model during the G.W. Bush administration's eight long years.

In the U.S. under the G.W. Bush administration, the Republican Party took a page from Mexican history and followed this same process as Mexico's leaders to:

• Bridle the Horses-Concentrate power in the executive branch.
• Use Loopholes-Alter the U.S. Constitution for more control.
• Leverage the Ol'Boy System-Diminish federalism in favor of executive power.
• Burn the Bodies-Oppress the press and thus avoid transparency.

Bridle the Horses: President as King

During Porfirio Diaz's presidency, the time was ripe in Mexico's history to "bridle the horses." Diaz's phrase reveals his "all-encompassing program of political control and centralization," as historian Krauze explains in his book, Mexico, Biography of Power. In Mexico the liberal Constitution called for a "representative, democratic and federal Republic," reflecting the ideals of the U.S. Constitution. But Diaz flouted the Mexican Constitution and took control by diminishing the three branches of government and concentrating power in the executive.

As Krauze writes,

"To contain the overwhelming pressure, he would assert the sanctity of the presidential position more than any other twentieth-century President. He [Diaz] would speak...of the 'majesty of the office.' His concept of the position was almost explicitly theocratic....The new style of power took effect immediately...only pure and naked application of power."

As advisor to President G.W. Bush, Karl Rove could have written his playbook straight from the history of Mexican Presidents from Diaz to Calderon, from the 1960s to the present. What this sequence of Mexican presidents accomplished in more than fifty years, the Republicans did in eight.

The parallels are astonishing as explained in the Cato Institute reports by Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch:

"Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes

• • a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech-and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
    
  • a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;
    
  • a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as "enemy combatants," strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror- in other words, perhaps forever; and
    
  • a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.
    

President Bush's constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers."

Like Diaz, Bush used religion to establish his sense of moral and political authority and was supported by American right-wing Christian groups, the progeny of extremists forged by the fundamentalism of Pat Robertson, Bill O'Reilly and his ilk.

Loopholes & Dirty Tricks-Alter the Constitution to Undo the Legislature and the Judiciary

In doing so, the Republicans weakened the values by which the U.S. distinguishes itself from the Third World. They used religious fundamentalism-superstitions-to replace rational thinking. They disregarded constitutional law which the president's sworn to protect. They ignored laws enacted by Congress with "signing statements" issued by President Bush. With these signing statements, Bush was able to interpret laws as he saw fit, thus further deteriorating the U.S. constitution. Over the last eight years, the Republican Party transgressed the Constitutional form of government for the sake of an ideological vision that included unbridled, free-wheeling capitalism.

As Elizabeth Drew says in her article in The New York Review of Books,

"This power grab has received little attention because it has been carried out largely in obscurity. The press took little notice until Bush, on January 5 of this year [2006], after signing a bill containing the McCain amendment, which placed prohibitions on torture, quietly filed a separate pronouncement, a "signing statement," that he would interpret the bill as he wished....The public scenes of the President surrounded by smiling legislators whom he praises for their wonderful work as he hands out the pens he has used to sign the bill are often utterly misleading. The elected officials aren't informed at that time of the President's real intentions concerning the law. After they leave, the President's signing statements-which he does not issue verbally at the time of signing-are placed in the Federal Register, a compendium of US laws, which members of Congress rarely read. And they are often so technical, referring as they do to this subsection and that statute, that they are difficult to understand."

Again, one of the distinguishing values built into the U.S. Constitution is the division of power that creates a system of checks and balances. However, by using the signing statements and other loopholes asserted in devious arguments, such as the unitary executive power, Rove, Cheney, and Bush found ways to annul the legislative branches in more ways than one. Unlike the Democrat Party, the Republicans enforce a strict code of loyalty and, at least during the reign of Karl Rove, they spoke only according to the party line of well-rehearsed "talking points."

This mirrors another aspect of Mexican history that brought that country into its current plague of corruption, violence, and chaos.

Krauze tells us how:

"Diaz had weakened and corrupted the Legislature by making it a mere adjunct of the Presidential Chair. The bothersome business of electing candidates was conveniently overcome by appointing them. No presidential initiative was ever questioned, and nothing moved in the Legislature without the consent of 'the Great Elector.' A similar process of servitude neutralized the judiciary as Don Profirio [Diaz] freely appointed and removed judges."

And this became a tradition for most all subsequent Mexican presidents. Similarly, the Bush administration transformed the role of the president into 'the Decider' partly by neutralizing the judiciary-appointing only right-wing extremist judges who would serve the president's agenda. As Drew points out:

"As for the judicial branch, the Bush administration, like previous administrations, has tried to appoint judges compatible with the President's views. But Bush has been strikingly successful at putting extreme conservatives on the bench, and probably now has four votes on the Supreme Court for his 'unitary executive' rationale for executive authority over what the other branches do."

The Ol'Boy System: Federalism as Myth

Under Don Porfirio Diaz, like most subsequent Mexican presidents, state governors tend to be extremely loyal to the president who kept an eye on them. As Krauze tells us, "Bernardo Reyes, the governor of the state of Nuevo Leon and a true proconsul for Don Protfirio in the northeast, received daily instructions, reports, and suggestions from the President concerning issues as varied as elections for the Legislature and the judiciary; pardons...."

Knowingly or not, the Bush administration followed this model closely and raised it up a notch in many ways. G.W.Bush's initial election to the presidency was tainted by the chaotic voting methods in Florida, where his brother Jeb pulled strings with the Republican Party to assure obstacles were placed in the path of Democrat voters. Ultimately, it was not the voting public of the nation that elected the president. It was the right-wing judges in the Supreme Court who appointed G.W. by using obscure technicalities.

Likewise, many Mexican presidents appoint their successor president-for example, as Krauze points out several times, in the case of President Mateos: "He would later confess that it was at that moment he decided that Gustavo Diaz Ordaz would be his successor."

By extending this ol'boy system to the state governments, the president maintained greater control of the states.

In an essay in The New York Times, Franklin Foer reveals how the W administration imposed federal policies over the States.

"Prodded by a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, Clinton actually presided over the revitalized federalism.... Federalism suited his declared ambition to move beyond the era of 'big government....' George W. Bush didn't give Clinton much credit for these achievements. Like many of his predecessors, he entered office promising to rescue the states from federal pummeling. Yet his administration has greatly expanded federal power, and some conservatives have been complaining. Writing in National Review two years ago, Romesh Ponnuru observed that ''more people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the cold war.'' State governments have their own version of this complaint. They say the Bush administration has imposed new demands...without also providing sufficient cash to get these jobs done."

Burn the Bodies-Freedom of the Press and Public Transparency

From Krauze's history, we learn of events like the Corpus Christi Thursday (1971) in the neighborhood of Tlateloco where President Echeverria planned (while he was Minister of the Interior under President Ordaz) to deploy Los Halcones to kill the liberal students demonstrating for political reform.

Just as we find among our own recent politicians in the U.S., Mexico's President Echevirria "would be able to throw the blame on others, as far away as he could from himself, for Tlateloco and the rest of the actions he supervised...." Krauze tells us that "Echeverria had snapped out an order by telephone to burn the bodies."

During the three years after the 9/11 attacks, a period when the American public gave all their trust to Bush-Cheney, the administration moved to intimidate the press by calling journalists unpatriotic if they voiced the slightest word of dissent. The most obvious example of this arose when Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote an article in The New York Times revealing how Bush and Cheney were using trumped-up stories about WMDs in Iraq to justify their long-time neocon plan to invade. Bush-Cheney retaliated by destroying the career of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, in the CIA. And they were able to throw the blame on others, such as Scooter Libby, who was convicted of felony federal charges of obstruction and perjury but never served a day in jail, because Bush pardoned him.

Yet this example pales in comparison to how Bush-Cheney secretly enabled torture to be used as a covert means to create a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, not to mention how they manipulated intelligence documents to justify bombing a country into rubble and killing a large part of its citizens, women and children included.

Unlike Mexico's President Echeverria, Cheney did not need to burn the bodies. The dead Iraqis, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, were killed in places where journalists were not allowed to go. Fortunately, Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel and former senior State Department aide to Colin Powell, spoke the truth behind Cheney's lies, exposing how the former VP used torture to force prisoners to link al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein.

During the Bush administration, the government intimidated journalists' freedom of the press, which was, and still is, already weakened by the pressures of corporate sponsors. Almost every policy Bush-Cheney carried out, they did so as covert operations, from forbidding photographs of the soldiers returning from war in caskets to concealing how torture was authorized, how intelligence was manipulated, and how dissent was squelched, as in the case of Valerie Plame.

We think we are free. That's what we want to believe, and it seems we are because we can choose among 8 types of blue jeans and 21 flavors of ice cream. Now, though, our political leaders have shackled us in the chains of extremist ideology and religious superstitions. These same dismal shenanigans and outright crimes characterize the history of Third World countries as we see in places like Mexico.

Tragically for America, we have become extremely tolerant of political leaders who have taken ownership of our own government and our guiding principles, our only saving virtues. If the new administration under Obama, including Congress, do not willfully and aggressively undo the aberrations created by the Bush administration, then we will continue to roll down the rails, heading closer to a corrupt and failing government-one that no longer finds the courage to correct itself.

Mexico: A Theocratic Model for Republicans

Here in Los Angeles, Sepulveda Boulevard serves as a main traffic artery for over 42 miles, from the San Fernando Valley in the north to Hermosa Beach in the south—the longest road in Los Angeles County. Few Angelinos probably know what history lurks in the name, even if the name of the road was intended for some other historical person. 

Sepulveda, a militant racist, a fascist? A study of Mexico’s history reveals that Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494 - 1573) wrote that the natives are "as children to parents, as women are to men, as cruel people are from mild people.” A Second Democritus: on the just causes of the war with the Indians was his most important book, shaping the course of Mexican history.
In his book, Mexico, Biography of Power, Enrique Krauze tells us: “The imperialist interpretation of the Conquest (stridently represented by Juan Gines de Sepulveda) justified the war against the Indians on the grounds of their allegedly natural vices and defects: they were subhuman, sodomites, barbarians, cannibals, cowards, idolaters, liars and depraved idlers. Their backwardness prevented them from freely submitting to the law; they were ‘slaves by nature.’”

Religious Doctrine--Political Policy

This fervent, Catholic, political ideology represented in Sepulveda’s writings resembles much of the North American Protestant justifications to decimate most of the American Indians. Sepulveda’s view sounds like a line straight from one of today’s Republican propaganda writers (Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, etc.) who brutally attack anyone of a dissenting opinion about torture, preemptive invasions, or any of their other policies.

We might excuse Sepulveda at least a little if we consider his own historical context during the end of the Dark Ages, a period of cultural decline and societal collapse, even though several of Sepulveda’s contemporaries advocated respect and tolerance for human rights. The Jesuit humanist Francisco Javier Clavijero “ascribed to the civilization of the Mexicas a classical rank equal to that of Greece and Rome.”  

Despite Sepulveda’s disadvantage of being born into the Dark Ages, the neocons and other Republicans cannot use any such excuse for their medieval views. When reading Sepulveda’s theocratic ideology, we find the same twisted logic and bellicose policies, supported by claiming it’s God’s will. Referring to God as support for a political policy was a hallmark of the Dark Ages, when reason was left twisting in the wind. The use of trumped-up religious authority as a justification for a political doctrine reveals the weakness of that doctrine. Instead of using rational thought and logic, theocrats lean on so-called sacred text, dictated by God, as the basis of policy.

Religion as a Political Platform 
It’s as though the Republicans ripped their policies out of Sepulveda’s pages and used them as their playbook. Sepulveda’s words contain the sounds of the same strand of blind theology that the W Administration used to manipulate the general public into a frenzy after the 9/11 attack, calling for a “crusade” and using it to justify the implementation of their long-planned, extreme, right-wing policies.

Bush often used religious terms in grandiose statements. "This crusade, this war on terrorism is gonna take awhile.” “We will rid the world of the evil-doers." His use of religious expressions gained him popularity among gullible groups of born-again Christians throughout his career. W’s born-again Christian fundamentalism helped him to become governor of Texas. “But I feel God wants me to do this, and I must do it.” It was the right-wing members of the U.S. Supreme Court who made him president.

Once in the White House, W’s unreasoned policies fell straight into the greatest wishes of the likes of Osama bin Laden whose goal was to cause confusion and terror. What fundamentalist plans Osama bin Laden instigated, W unwittingly fulfilled. Leaders like these rely on traditionalism, meaning that they claim their authority derived from a religious text. In his essay, Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt, Umberto Eco explains how this style of leadership is an early form of fascism. 

Religious Doctrine--Traditionalism--Dangerous PoliciesIn its recent eight-year reign, the Republican Party took the U.S. from peace and prosperity to a historic deficit, unbridled financial disaster, preemptive war justified by lies to the public, and corporate corruption, especially among the oil titans which only expedites the looming environmental breakdown. Most born-again Christians believe that environmentalism is futile since the End Days are soon approaching for the Rapture and Christ’s second coming. Why bother trying to save the planet if God is going to snatch up the righteous to heaven and leave the rest of us sinners here to face the apocalypse?  

Such painful incompetence, irrational policies, and corruption once were the mark of third world countries like Mexico—until now. Given another Republican administration, the U.S. would have become a failed state, like Mexico today. Driven by a religious ideology that influenced every aspect of policy from economics to the judicial system, W’s presidency is an example of how religious fervor can bring a peaceful and prosperous nation into war and financial collapse.

If Republicans had remained in power, they would have gleefully transformed the U.S. into a born-again Christian theocratic government, run by and for the wealthy and justified by God’s will. Certain traits create the third-world conditions of Mexico, and they reflect closely the fundamentalist policies of the Republican Party in the U.S. today.

Like most Central and South American countries, Mexico has been under the yoke of the Catholic Church since before Cortés. For most Mexicans the Church still is the main source of culture and education. Krauze writes, “It was in other areas, like education, where the influence of the Church was clearly harmful.” He notes that the Church was responsible “above all, [for] the intolerant strain in Mexican thought, evident in 1910….”

Church + State = Third WorldOne church, one god, one dogma, one catechism, one way of thinking—this narrow mindedness is what fuels theocratic regimes. This holds true for Mexico today as it does for many other third-world countries like Israel, Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, where reason flutters in the wind like a battle-torn flag, and where people view the world in terms of what God wills. They do this without realizing that God can be quite different from one tribe, gang, or congregation to the next.  They result is endless wars in the Golan Heights, the West Bank, or on the streets of Juarez.

Theocracies most often resemble fascist regimes, with their dogmatic control over every life. At different times and places, the degree of tyranny varies but the underlying characteristic of centralized command remains, just as it does in right-wing regimes, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or Panama under Noriega, or Saudi Arabia under the Saud Monarchy, or Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu.

Or Profirio Diaz, like many other Mexican presidents all the way to recent ex-President Vincente Fox, who “ran an ‘integral’ or ‘total’ government…by integrating into the person of the President the real powers—national and local politico-military leaders and army generals…and by neutralizing dissident voices.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, W’s administration muzzled dissident voices for several years by calling them unpatriotic, a claim that could ruin the career of a journalist like Dan Rather and former Ambassador Joe Wilson who published an opinion piece in the The New York Times, revealing how W twisted intelligence reports to justify the invasion of Iraq.   

Like most third-world countries, Mexico escaped the influence of the century of the Enlightenment. For Europe and the United States, the Enlightenment meant that facts, scientific method, and reason reemerge from antiquity as the measure of truth and sound ideas. It was a time when revolution tore down the arbitrary and whimsical “divine rights” of kings and other nutcase right-wing manipulators. As in France, the “Founding Fathers” of the U.S. fortunately had embraced the Age of Reason with its ideals of human rights, rational justice, and democracy.

Age of Enlightenment Revisited
Contrary to claims by members of the Republican Party, most of the Founders were Deists, hardly interested in any religion. They thought the universe had a creator, but one not concerned with the daily lives of humans and not in direct contact with them, either by revelation or by sacred texts. No, the Republicans are horribly wrong in their claims that America was founded as a Christian nation. As usual, when they make statements in the mainstream media, they revise history according to their own mythologies. Jefferson, on the contrary, believed that America’s strength arises from free thinking, critical citizens, unfettered from the chains of religious nonsense.

Eco writes that right-wing traditionalists see “the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason…as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”Krauze points out that the values of the Enlightenment “affected only the topmost level of society, and despite the historic breakthroughs of that period, Mexico held tight to the culture of the Baroque with centralized power in a monarchal-type president or a despot and religious superstitions in the place of science. Mexico remained resistant to the political and intellectual currents of the European Enlightenment.” The Republican Party ignores any type of rational system of justice and instead attempts to transform the U.S. justice system into an extension of its own arbitrary policies. Like Islam and Judaism, Christianity has been used as a propaganda channel for unified political power ever since it was accepted by political authorities, such as Constantine.

Today, the Republicans use religion to legitimize their own goals, such as to ignoring the habeas corpus and due process of the law in order to imprison and torture people without trial. Motivated by personal gain and fueled by favoritism for members of their own religious tribe, they appoint religious extremists to the Supreme Court and make deals with lobbyists of large corporations against the best interests of the people and the greater welfare of the country. As Octavio Paz describes Mexico in his book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, “ours is the Counter-reformation, Monopoly and Feudalism….”

By shifting power to a centralized executive branch, by favoring corporations that become monopolistic, by legislating religious superstitions like creationism as part of the educational curriculum in public schools, and so encouraging citizens to lose their grasp on clear thinking, not to mention science and reason, the Republican Party sought the dumbing-down of the  general public. The dumber citizens are, the easier it is to beguile them. The right wing is continuing its quest to bring the U.S. closer to the Dark Ages of feudalism, monopoly, and ignorance—and shared status, with Mexico, as a failed state.

In the Case of Iraq, a War Story Might Best Take Place on U.S. Soil

In the last few days, reports appeared about how the Pulitzer committee awarded their prestigious prize to topics like the luxury bordello scandals involving elected officials, Thomas Jefferson’s various mistresses, and international sex trafficking, among others.

No doubt these subjects are important and sizzle in the public mind, yet something feels missing—a shoe lace untied, a hole worn through a pocket by a house key, or that war lasting more than 7 years now.

The Pulitzer committee grants awards for socially redeeming art, beautiful music, or fine writing that pierces the veil of deception in high places. Plenty of journalists and writers have accomplished this on the subject of Operation Iraqi Freedom, focusing not on the sizzling sex scandals but on the more primitive forms of brutality and rape in the chaos of a destroyed country.

Does this explain why the war topic was passed over this year, the seventh of a long war?

The Pulitzer was founded on values of professional journalism and artistic merit. Has it turned its eyes to new, more important subjects than the U.S. invasion of another country?

If you consider how mainstream media and journalism have botched so many opportunities to pierce the veil of high-power deception, you’ll not be surprised that a prestigious prize for journalism shows a lack of interest in Iraq, war, soldiers and civilians dying. After all, how many newspapers, or congressmen for that matter, risked dissent from the W administration during the wake of the hyped-up, politically exploited, hysterical 9/11 reaction?

Plenty of novels and nonfiction books criticized the war and risked public outrage and the lethal label of “un-American” during the period when the native authority of W and Cheney commanded support for their own cleverly crafted, massive destruction and public deception. In this sense, the Iraq war took place more right here in the U.S. than in the bombing missions and in the Humvees where blood spills out to this day.

Perhaps Americans at home just don’t have the stomach to think of the war anymore—though the war was, and still is, fundamentally right here at home. The battleground is in the American political arena. Now more than ever, this becomes clear as the reports pile up to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the war was planned long before the causus belli –the justification and the opportunity that presented itself in the form of the 9/11 attack.

America’s political system failed—and so did its journalism. Collectively, reflecting our country’s culture, we Americans wanted to find a fast solution to an otherwise complicated situation. Suddenly faced with difficult decisions and questions, we clung tightly to our Bibles, searching for quick answers and whispering curses to the Muslims in a “crusade,” as W often called it. We did not want to analyze the facts before we reacted. We wanted to follow a leader, regardless of how nefarious and duplicitous the power brokers played their hand in a twisted plan.

Ironically, these officials, W and Cheney, were not even elected officials, rather just appointed hastily by a small group of extremists at the Supreme Court. This is why the real battleground has always been right here at home. It began as a struggle for the power to impose an ideological belief on a democracy. By grasping the power to command, the extreme American ideologues overreacted, waged a war of political passion, and thus fulfilled the greatest wishes, plans, and prayers of the likes of Osama bin Laden.

So, a nonfiction book, and especially a novel about the war, might best be situated at home, not in the smoking battlegrounds where the bombs explode. This war is all about political ideology that affects every aspect of American culture and economics. This war is not about WMDs, not about a brutal tryant, not about evil terrorists, and not about the security of our nation.

Church of Later Day Neocons

Fighting Guerrilla Warriors with Conventional Tactics All for the Sake of Godly Profits

“War on terror” coins a sacred phrase in the Iraq crusade. Karl Rove, high priest of spin, led the neocons’ faithful choir through the doctrinal hymns, especially regarding Bush’s military mission.

Now the Sanctified Church of Later Day Neocons has anointed John McCain to take the pulpit for the steadfast congregation, a political party on a mission from God, bowing down to corporate avarice at the detriment of public interests. The neocon party promises to maintain stilted, stodgy status quo of old, slogging industries. Though, what we need these days is Yankee ingenuity, innovation, and invention--the heart of American entrepreneurism in government and in business.

Except for Secretary of State Rice, the ex-oil executive automaton, this special cabal of wealthy, white codgers has woven a web of myths so thick that everyone believes the country is divided between the red and the blue: the virtuous, righteous party versus the diabolical, liberal socialists. Behind the neocon marketing hype, the issues draw a real line between rich and the bleeding middle class and the economic policies that shove the poor deeper into debtor’s slavery while the wealthy reap the profits from the uneducated, gullible middle class.

At least twenty percent of Americans still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. As many Americans also believe they pay fewer taxes than Europeans who enjoy high quality public healthcare and education through university level.

I know firsthand by attending a German university. Otherwise, coming from a blue collar background in America, I never would have been able to afford an education. I lived and worked more than twenty years in Germany and France and paid fewer taxes than we do in America. I pursued the American dream where it was available.

Considered an enlightened saint among the neocons, Milton Friedman claimed that unregulated industries operate most efficiently. Contrary to this twaddle, we have witnessed how unbridled Savings and Loan banks imploded under Bush Sr. in the early 90’s. Corporations can and will destroy themselves by greedy feeding frenzies as we watched in the scandals like Enron and Anderson Consulting. Lack of government intervention, a lack of political will and leadership in America generally allows this trend to continue.

Once the Berlin Wall fell, hollow winds blew through the streets of Soviet Union’s communist ideals and gave the captains of American industry free reign to practice arrogant forms of unrestrained and turgid capitalism at the high costs of public interests.

After disastrous Reaganomics were implemented, Bush Sr. became president, campaigning on a promise to reduce taxes which he later increased in a desperate attempt to reduce Reagan’s inflamed deficit, and pushed Friedman policies, voodoo economics, further, allowing certain industries to gorge on consumers’ savings accounts, wolves on meek lambs. Bush Sr. cooled the corporate feeding frenzy that turned into a blood bath by paying over $120 billion in public tax funds to bail out the Savings & Loan crisis in the early 1990’s.

So, rather than maintain a Keynesian mixed economy in which government calms corporate passions for predatory profits, the neocon doctrine allows industries to devour gullible consumers until streets flow red with blood. Unimaginative industries, banking, healthcare insurance, and energy, resist innovation and change. The only way left for them to make profits is by praying on consumers' ignorance. Only then does government intervene by giving the status quo industries, which lack any innovation, a transfusion of tax payers’ money.

America’s government has become a mere socialized emergency room for industries that overdose on the crack cocaine of greed. Tax payers now pay industries to cure them of their own addiction to larger and larger profits and executive salaries.

As if ambitious to outdo dad, President Bush Jr. drove Milton Friedman’s free wheeling economic policies like a freight train on a downward spiraling track until it finally crashed into the limits of melting consumer credit cards and fraudulent, bloated mortgages. Bush Jr.’s administration will hand out hundreds of billions of tax dollars to subsidize the mismanagement of credit card and mortgage banks while their CEO’s carry their multimillion dollar paychecks to the bank, laughing all the way. Meanwhile middle class workers lose their homes at a neck breaking rate.

In so far as incompetent politicians sell their souls to corporate contributions and voodoo economics and consequently mislead this country into destruction and mayhem, the guerrilla Islamist warriors, like Osama bin Laden, are accurate in assessing the US as corrupt and decadent.

McCain’s campaign promises continue the neoconservative holy crusade for the Iraq War which directly affects the economy. The differences between Obama and MacCain are blatantly clear. Whatever McCain says about the economic fiascos of the mortgage crisis, the credit card crisis, or the Iraq War, Obama has an opposite view and innovative solutions.

The 2008 election is about diametrically opposing views between the Keynesian versus the Friedmaniac policies. In 2008 we also choose between the neocons’ imperial war to impose corporate turgid status quo over a sovereign nation for the sake of its oil reserves versus the innovative solutions in such industries as healthcare, banking, energy, and war.

Corporate Campaign Contributions – Industrial Domination

Tied to the unparalleled power of the Israeli lobby money and to the huge corporate defense and energy contractors, Bush and his chums have been operating only in terms of conventional warfare. Influenced by corporate campaign money, they only think in terms of corporate interests. This involves no bid contracts and the use of expensive, sophisticated weaponry that applies best to the warfare of one sovereign nation against another and not to guerilla warfare.

In other words, the stodgy political church of Bush and McCain is less interested in armor to protect the individual soldiers on the ground, fighting house to house. That sort of activity represents social welfare to individual human beings, brave soldiers. Armor for body and Humvee hardly increases profit margins in comparison to a billion dollar B2 bomber.

Following Bush’s footsteps, McCain embraces this same agenda. If Bush says, “stay the course in Iraq,” McCain says, “stay there a hundred years.” If Bush says timetable to pull out, McCain dittos the Anointed Decider. McSame has developed his economic and war policies from his ties with big business lobbies and not with the interest of the American people. Like Bush, McCain abides by unregulated big business as indoctrinated by Milton Friedman since the Reagan years.

This is the reason why Bush invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation. “It’s just business,” as he would say, “nothin’ pers’nal.” He could have pointed his finger at any piece of fresh meat and the American people were eagerly drooling to revenge the 9/11 attack.

The golden opportunity, the casus belli,a perfect justification for war arrived. The neocons knew exactly which war to wage, the low hanging fruit of the world’s second largest oil reserves. Despite many warnings of the 9/11 attack, W did nothing to restrain the well known Islamist guerrilla warriors, as indicated in his August 6, 2001 Presidential Brief, which he chose to ignore.

According to Ron Suskind's new book, Way of the World, Bush chose to ignore and deny clear intelligence that Iraq had no connection with al-Qaida and no WMDs:

Then, in the fall of 2003, the White House decided that a letter should be fabricated, dated July 2001, from the Iraqi to Saddam Hussein establishing a link to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. "And the letter should as well say that Saddam Hussein has been actively buying yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help of al-Qaida," Suskind says.

The neocons had long ago planned to knock off Saddam Hussein since the day he nationalized Iraqi oil. They have well documented this fact. Take a look at PNAC. It’s always been about the oil and a drive for global dominance backed by a fanatical Judeo-Christian fundamentalism. We cannot act too surprised when former Fed Chairman Allen Greenspan explained as much in his biography after he left his cushy government job where he practiced the Milton Friedman rituals devoutly in his bathtub, enlightened by flickering candles.

Invading Iraq made great financial and political sense at least for Dubya and his Friedman disciples from Podhoretz to Falwell and Pat Robertson. Defense and petroleum contractors made boat loads of profits, thus fattening the coffers for Bush’s 2004 campaign. Beyond campaign money, the Bush family as well as members of his neocon church, including Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and so on—they own millions of dollars in stocks with defense contractors and petroleum companies such as the Carlyle Group and a long list of others.

Cheney’s stock options at Halliburton skyrocketed, once the company landed those no-bid billion dollar contracts. Unless you’ve read up on this subject, you wouldn’t recognize the names of these companies, except for maybe the ones that advertise regularly on TV like Exxon, Boeing, Lockhead… By paying for multi-million dollar ads, they were able to stifle freedom of media journalism for at least as long as it took to get Neil Cavuto, comedian Bill O’Reilly, and Wolf Blitzer a whoring chance to sway public opinion to wage an imperial, conventional war against a loosely organized network of guerrilla fundamentalists.

Waging Conventional War Is Good for Re-elections

Bush desperately needed to increase his plummeting popularity score after the Supreme Court appointed him to the presidency by overturning the 2001 election. He could only win a second term in office if he initiated a major war against a well defined country. Iraq was a ripe target with an army impoverished by decades of sanctions. US history shows that no president has lost a second term election after declaring a war in the first term. Now the same scenario plays out for opportunist, citizen McCain who playfully sings his own song, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

This is how the American industrial military complex works. It’s become a cookie cutter process for presidents since the Mexican American War when the Thornton Skirmish arose between the U.S. and Mexican militaries, handing President Polk a justification of war against Mexico in 1846. The sinking of the USS Maine gave Teddy Roosevelt a trumped up reason for the Spanish American War just as the Tokin incidenthelped justify the Vietnam War.

This is how the American industrial military complex has operated at least since the Mexican American War (1846). President Eisenhower knew this and warned us about it. However, at the slightest incident, the unschooled masses repeatedly jump on the bandwagon for nationalistic pride, all too willing to take a blind patriotic ride to hell while all the way handing the pillaged profits to the robber barons of war. Is there a cure for the American middle class’s credulity?

Well, everyone could turn off the boob tube and read some books other than the Bible. In France and Germany, they’ve developed a remedy to some extent. It’s called a damn good secular public education system, one that does not muddle science and reason with religious poppycock like creationism, End Days, and all the hooey about holy lands.

Guerrilla Warriors, Not Iraqi Armies

There’s a little problem, though. The groups--groups plural--that perpetrate terrorist activities in the name of Allah are non-conventional warriors. They harbor loyalty to no sovereign nation but to a fundamentalist creed similar to White Supremists or the 700 Club. The US military could never bomb the terrorist groups involved in attacking US and European cities. The US could never invade any one country and expect its leaders to surrender and end the “war on terrorism.”

If attacking any main source of the trouble makers would solve the problem, then they would have to bomb Saudi Arabia because 15 of the 19 terrorists were born, raised, and indoctrinated there. The Devine Decider didn’t invade Saudi Arabia for the simple reason that, unlike Saddam Hussein, the royal family of Saud are long term allies and reliable petroleum suppliers since Franklin Roosevelt made the deal with King Saud in 1945, essentially saying, “We’ll support and protect your tyrannical monarchy so long as you deliver the crude.” It seemed like a good deal at the time, but times change.

The American industrial military complex makes less money in the labor intensive guerrilla wars than they do in wars that require sophisticated, manufactured weaponry. It’s basic business strategy to maintain high profits—to hell with the reasons or the outcomes of the war. Defense contractors earn much smaller profits in guerrilla warfare which requires labor intensive work in urban settings with ears to the ground. In his books, Robert Baer makes this a central argument. Using bombers, sophisticated equipment, missiles,...it's the only thing that makes business sense.

The guerrilla war we face has no one leader, no one country, no standing army. Our enemies in this so-called war on terrorism do not wear uniforms. They are guerrilla warriors who use any means possible to harm their enemies. They use bombs, booby traps, and hijacked airliners because they have neither conventional weapons nor armies. They made this point abundantly clear when they bombed the World Trade Center’s basement in 1993, not to mention earlier bombings of American assets in many places like Tanzania and the Congo.

Any one with a pulse could understand this as early as 1983, when a terrorist cell blew up the US Marine barracks in Lebanon. Likewise most intelligence agents operating in the Middle East knew that a persistent, organized movement of Islamist guerrilla fighters bombed the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. In his many books on the subject Robert Baer describes how he tracked militant Islamists. They had been a well known enemy decades before 9/11/2001.

Bush Jr. would have us believe that these guerrilla warriors hate America and its freedom. He never bothers to consider the simple economic situation in which only the small royal families control the opulent oil wealth in most Arab countries and they do not give a fig to diversify their own economies and develop their own people.

Unemployment (over 35% in Saudi Arabia) and poverty enrage Muslims. Fanatical anti-American religious training helps to set an unemployed, hungry, angry, idle man down a path to murder and mayhem, as was the case for Mohammed Atta and others. Most any religious group provides this sort of narrow education. Just watch Pat Robertson on his evangelical TV show, the 700 Club, or visit one of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Universities to witness how the later day church of neocons indoctrinate our own credulous youth.

Among Bush’s many mutating reasons for invading Iraq, he finally claimed that it was America’s moral duty to create a democracy throughout the Middle East. For a year or two around 2003, he had most American yahoos believing this. It is another part of the neocon catechism.

Another one of Friedman’s mind boggling theories is that once a country’s economy begins to operate in a capitalistic fashion, it will inevitably become a democracy. Likewise, so the theory goes, if a country becomes democratic, it naturally seeks to implement a liberal capitalism. Neither has proven true in the real world. As a totalitarian regime, China thrives on capitalism. We buy products from totalitarian capitalist China because their regime encourages, nay, enforces, sweatshop labor. It's why US corporations outsource American jobs; labor is cheaper in authoritarian regimes.

Contrary to Pope Friedman’s crack-pot ideas, once given the vote for a democratic government, several countries have recently voted against democracy in favor of theocracy, Islamist regimes like Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or President Gull in Turkey who has an Islamist background. Like the Catholic dominated politics in most of South America, many Islamic countries are theocracies.

Given the theocratic proclivities of President Bush, he too would like to see America governed by some inerrant, one and only Biblical interpretation and not by its Constitution. "We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God," --As quoted in Understanding the President and his God

Guerrilla warfare is messy and much more difficult to win than invading a crumbling nation. For this reason it never benefits individuals like Bush who intend to expand their personal, political, and financial success at the detriment of national security and economic stability.

As we learned in our own War of Independence and, likewise in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare is extremely messy, costly, and bloody. Contrary to Rumsfeld’s infamous statement that “democracy is messy,” it is the insurgency and the guerrilla fighters that clog the wheels of industry. The Russians learned this when they invaded Afghanistan and it cost them the collapse of their already frail economy. And these schmoes would have us believe that Reagan caused the fall of the Soviet Union.

Conspiracy Theories

The media, TV journalists in particular, continue to leave some important questions lying dormant beneath the dusty cover of “conspiracy theory.” Why did W decide to invade Iraq while 15 of the 19 terrorists of 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia? Why is Saudi Arabia a cradle for such terrorists?

Years ago, when W still had some credibility, he and his Roving gang could ridicule anyone who spoke against his actions. Whenever brave souls dared to question the Divine Decider, he and his cronies dismissed the dissenters as nutcase conspiracy theorists. And they continue to do so even after the Iraq War has officially run its miserable course to disastrous guerrilla warfare and our economy whimpers.

UFOs

Back in September 2004, Senator Bob Graham, (Florida Democrat) a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the Divine Decider of covering up evidence that might have linked Saudi Arabia to the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Graham made the accusation in his book, Intelligence Matters, and repeated it at news conferences. Republicans called the accusations "bizarre conspiracy theories," and Saudi officials said they were unsubstantiated and reckless.

In his highly informative book, House of Bush, House of Saud, , Craig Unger criticizes the Bush administration for allowing so many Saudis, including the relatives of bin Laden, to leave the country quickly, while all other flights were grounded, without being questioned about the terrorist attacks. Unger cites FBI and Police agents as witnesses.

In his book, Saudi Arabia Exposed, John Bradley, who lived and worked as a journalist in Saudi Arabia, interviews several bin Laden relatives who rode on the very same plans that the FBI and the White House deny ever existed.

These UFO’s, such as the small LearJet 35 from TIA, among others, that flew bin Laden relatives and Saud family members from the USA quickly on 9/14, represent just the tip of an iceberg of cover ups that conceal the special treatment for the Royal family of Saud.

Money Walks

Once upon a time there was a Prince Naif bin Fawwaz Al-Shalaan, with a diplomatic passport and a family Boeing 747, who transported cocaine often from Columbia to France. DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) Agent Raffanello says some of the drug profits have been used to fund terrorism. The Prince transported up to two tons of cocaine. In order to shake the charges against him, he threatened French business interests of cancelling huge defense deals in an effort to persuade the authorities to drop the investigation. The Saudi Royal Family united to help their Prince out of the jam. Case closed.

Yes, Saudi Royalty is above the law. They are the law. After all they control trillions in petrol-dollars. Any surprise that they are close friends with Bush Sr. and Jr.? The family dynasties are joined at the wallet in oil interests.

Once upon another time there was a Prince Turki bin Nasser, the Royal Saud family's principal contact with the British defense industry, who allegedly received about $32 million worth of luxury benefits paid for by BAE Systems, the largest British defense contractor. British authorities opened a case of serious fraud against the Prince. To pressure the British into dropping all charges, Saud Royalty threatened to cancel billions of dollars in defense deals for combat aircraft. Case closed.

Many other cases haunt the halls of the Saud family palaces.

In London police arrested a 41-year old Saudi, close friend of Saud Royalty, for sexual assault against an 11-year old girl. London police were forced to release the man who claimed diplomatic immunity. The Royal family of Saud supported his return to Saudi Arabia and complained that the London media was putting him on trial, not the courts. Saudi authorities would not allow police to question the man further. Case closed.

Back in Riyadh, the Saudi government owns the media and uses it to smear any and all opposition.

Justice for All

For the regular guy on the street, apart from soccer matches, the only form of public entertainment is a beheading. If you ever vacation in Saudi Arabia, you’ll learn to recognize this occasional diversion by the way people leave their cars parked chockablock in the streets near a city’s chop-chop square where authorities carry out the executions. Of course, members of Saudi Royalty are virtually exempt from this system.

In partnership with the Saud Royalty, Wahhabi fundamentalists run the justice system. The country still applies a strict form of Shariah law, which includes public beheadings for, among other offenses, murder, drug trafficking, apostasy, rape, and adultery—and occasionally thieves’ hands are amputated. More than 50 beheadings take place per year...in a country the size and population of Texas.

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency reported that crime among young jobless Saudis rose 320 percent between 1990 and 1996 and more than 136 percent by 2005.

Slums such as Kerantina in Jeddah and Al-Suwaidi, a southern district in Riyadh, are two of many homes to prostitutes, drug traffickers, and booze peddlers among the poor and destitute. The gap between the haves and have-nots has grown at least as fast as the population. Unemployment rises above 35 percent.

Terrorist Incubators

As these slums grow, so too the pressure for the young and unemployed to seek retribution for the inequality and hopelessness. The slums, like the provincial countryside of tribal villages, have predictably become fertile breeding grounds for Islamic radicalism and perfect for guerilla warfare.

These slums provide little sources of culture, education or entertainment other than drugs or the fundamentalist Wahhabi schools where young men receive their Islamist indoctrination. Many documented terrorists graduate from hard-line radical schools such as Imam Mohamed Bin Saud University. They learn to hate the West for many reasons, including supporting the tyrannical monarchy which hordes the petro-dollars. Resentment grows naturally against the Saudi government because its inequality, arrogance, and greed is rubbed in the faces of the poor every day. Hatred for the West arises from a natural logic that the Royal family of Saud exercises its abusive power because the West supports them as reliable suppliers of America's most intoxicating drug. Meanwhile Big Oil uses its financial power to maintain status quo, restraining alternative and cleaner sources of energy.

The combination of radical Islamic doctrine, hatred of the West, poverty, and a perceived pro-Western ruling elite has created a schizophrenic monster in the very heart of the country. This combination delivers a powerful recruitment tool that the likes of Al-Qaeda could only pray for.

And for some reason, we were led to believe that 9/11 was only about an irrational religious war.