underXposed

The “New American Century” has only lasted eight years, but as we all know, its foundations were laid long before 2000. Many of us already knew about the Bush-Nazi ties back in 2003, but this information has been shoved into the black shadows of the neocon closet and the media has been complicit in keeping it there. It’s always a promising sign when this sort of information leaks out on national corporate media.

Yesterday the co-hosts of ABC’s The View talked about remarks President George W. Bush made during a speech in Israel. Bush had suggested that Democrats including Barack Obama wanted to “appease” terrorists in the way that some politicians appeased Hitler.

Co-host Joy Behar mentioned the fact that it was George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, who was known to have ties to Nazi Germany.

Behar said, “It’s very interesting and ironic that George Bush Sr., [George W. Bush’s] grandfather, this one, the late — I don’t like to speak ill of the dead but in this case it’s fun. He was a united states senator, Prescott Bush. He was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. This is his grandfather. He has no business talking to Jewish people when he’s got this right in his backyard, this guy.”

And this exposure alludes to only one of the truckload of disgraces and crimes heaped on us by the neocons in power that spread their toxins around the world. The glaring hypocrisy that characterizes the neoliberal plague affects everyone on the planet. The hypocrisy that is christianity bleeds into everything it touches, and has especially metastasized its vicious death gene into corporations, and this with this plague we find ourselves beneath the heel of fascism.

By hypocrisy I mean that fascist corporations outsource jobs to other countries, pay slave wages, abuse and neglect workers, avoid taxes, decimate the environment, and manufacture inferior products. Through programs like NAFTA, they force people in their own countries to seek other means to survive for themselves and their families when their ability to provide has been stripped from them and their ancient ways destroyed. Their only recourse is often to find their way to the U.S. to work jobs that are beneath the average American-born, the back-breaking sweaty jobs that if left undone would bring America to its knees.

At the same time, these vicious neoliberal psychopaths work tirelessly to destroy opportunities for working people here in the U.S., including those forced to flee their own countries because of intolerable conditions caused by neoliberal policies. In this way the neoliberals (and neocons) deny others what they proclaim as their entitlement. The rabid hypocrisy of biblical corporatism must be driven from our hearts, minds, and memories. Its icy hand drives death into everything it touches.

I thought I’d include a wonderful poem by Gary Soto that illustrates the power of life and humanity in the midst of greed and hypocrisy. For me, the poem contains one of “the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless.” (John Cheever)

Mexicans Begin Jogging (1981)

At the factory I worked
In the fleck of rubber, under the press
Of an oven yellow with flame,
Until the border patrol opened
Their vans and my boss waved for us to run.
“Over the fence, Soto,” he shouted,
And I shouted that I was an American.
“No time for lies,” he said, and pressed
A dollar in my palm, hurrying me
Through the back door.
Since I was on his time, I ran
And became the wag to a short tail of Mexicans–
Ran past the amazed crowds that lined
The street and blurred like photographs, in rain.
I ran from that industrial road to the soft
Houses where people paled at the turn of an autumn sky.
What could I do but yell vivas
To baseball, milkshakes, and those sociologists
Who would clock me
As I jog into the next century
On the power of a great, silly grin.