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Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Hougland

E-mail: editors@fantompowa.net

Commentary: Look ! The Emperor has no clothes . . .
John Heathcote
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography

In Miami -Dade County . . the dead have been known to vote in mayoral elections. Many Floridians refer to theirstate as "the banana republic", and a popular protest is to throw bananas on the steps of government buildings. Guardian Nov 11th 2000
As we predicted in our previous editorial concerning the election in the USA, things have taken a distinctly wobbly turn. It is becoming apparent that the illusions of democracy projected by the WASPocracy of the greatest state on earth has begun to fall away. What always seemed such a seamless wrapped-up thing has begun to look like a ball of string unravelling from the centre. And if society itself was a ball of string, it would be a ball that is constantly in motion; so once unravelled, it will never be wrapped up quite the same agaiin
Latest Results
Gore 48,512,648 - 260 seats in Electoral College
Bush 48,266,681 - 246 seats in Electoral College
Winner of popular vote - Al Gore, Democrat
32 seats undeclared, 25 of them for the State of Florida
Governor of Florida, ultimately in control of election process in the State - Jeb Bush, brother of George Jnr. (Republican Candidate)
Allegations about voting process in Florida so far include: Confusing ballots in some counties. One such in Palm Beach, known for rich Jewish liberals registered such a large vote for Pat Buchanan, right wing independent demagogue that even he expressed surprise. Numbers given so far talk of up to 3000 votes above expectation for Buchanan, but up to 19,000 spoiled ballots - the result of people unsuccessfully trying to correct the mistake.Reports of old ladies leaving voting booths in tears.
BBC interviewed a Democrat activist (Newsnight 9th 2000) who claimed that they tried to warn people but did not reach many voting stations until late afternoon, and were forced by election officials to stay more than 50 yards from area.
Democrat Committee reports Florida highway patrol officers set up a "safety checkpoint" near one polling station, intimidating black citizens wishing to cast their vote.
Florida one of only 13 states in US to deny the vote to former prisoners who have already served their sentence; There are an estimated 437,000 people disenfranchised - invariably poor and nearly half of whom are black Americans.
Breaking News: Warren Christopher and James Baker (for Democrats and Republicans respectively) sent to Florida, to oversee re-counts and assess mood of local people and party activists.
Although the rest of the world has always had its doubts, the majority of the American people have always been convinced of the integrity of their political system.
Despite the fact that there are only two choices ever offered as President, and most Americans would admit that the selection of those candidates is corrupt. Popular culture and belief has always admitted that conspiracy lay at the heart of the choice of candidates. The original campaign finance bills were introduced in the 1880's when it became clear that the masasive unregulated industrial conglomerates of the time were buying the Presidency.
Eisenhower again warned of the dangers of the military - industrial hierarchy subverting the democracy, but not much notice was paid to the warnings of a retiring President.
Clinton's superb fund-raising abilities meant that the Democrats were able to reach an almost equal footing with the Republicans; and because his victories were clearly the will of the voting public; no real attempt was made at reform.
It would have been a major task to move such a Bill through the Republican controlled House of Representatives or Senate; especially since they were already stacking their coffers for the replay, their revenge.
It would be foolish to imagine that if George Bush Jnr.'s father was not an oil-rich billionaire who had been President, he would be anywhere near becoming the most powerful individual on the planet. He has neither intelligence, a vision or any real charisma. He affects the role of a down-home plain speaking man of the people, when he is in fact a talentless, conniving rich - boy, who sees the Presidency as his birthright. Although decrying Gore for playing class-politics; it is clear that Gore's Democrats want to maintain the fragile social cohesion constructed during Clinton's Presidency, whilst Bush - consciously or unconsciously - would affect a policy agenda which will tear it apart.
Despite reports of negative reaction to some of Gore's points concerning Bush's social policy during the debates; it is clear from a European perspective that he perhaps should have gone much further in extrapolating the real effects of a Republican victory.
Despite right-wing commentators claiming that the liberial urban intelligentsia voted for the Democrats while the "heartlands" voted for Bush; it is now apparent that enough of the urban poor had been woken up to the real cost of Republican government to cast their ballots.
It is unwise to dismiss the poor of the cities,for as they depend on the farmers for their food; urban workers provide the means for rural communities to live in a twenty-first century lifestyle; the two halves of a country are interdependent. Most of the urban poor.are mainly second generation families who were forced off the land by the few still left there in ranches stretching as far as the eye can see.
The cohesion of the USA as a political entity has always been a balancing act. The destructive slaughter of the Civil War was within living memory only a generation back; and the ability of the ruling class to produce candidates who can move society in a certain direction, whilst maintaining that the will of the people has been obeyed, seemed to have been perfected by the constitutional and political system in the USA.
However, so much of this has depended on the sanctity of the ballot; and the fact that in such a vast country, the differential between the two major contenders for the Presidency has been numerically great enough to suggest that local fraud is pointless.
The acceptance of a mandate for the victor has only been questioned once before in recent times; in the 1960 election which saw Kennedy defeat Nixon. The election was about as close as this one; and the vanquished Republicans questioned the conduct of the ballot in Illinois. The Democrats won the popular vote and took the White House. It is clear from what we know now that there was the usual mob-inspired vote rigging in that election. The people accepted JFK as their President; but it is certain that some parts of the Republican establishment ever accepted his election as legitimate.
It was probable that if not actual conspirators in the assassination in Dallas, Texas they were more than happy to help cover up the trail and benefit from the consequences.
Nixon, who never forgave the Kennedy's and needed little justification as a former right -hand man of Senator Joe McCarthy, indulged in his own version of conspiracy fixing of elections in the race against Hubert Humphrey, which he won.
In a country as big as the US, with so many regional and ethnic differences, the "myth" of Government by the people, for the People, has a resonance which can pull the strands together.
Sections of society who feel under-priveliged or ignored have to accept that the general will of the people has chosen both
The announcement from the State of Florida expected to give not only the final tally for the votes cast by its citizens, but also the name of the next President of the United States has been suspended for up to a further week. Legal challenges to the ballots in Florida - as well as other States - threaten to delay the result even longer.
Behind Bush are figures who are not shadowy, as much as the forces of darkness. The Guardian (November 7th, 2000) produced an article focussing on two of the more prominent men who will be operating as central players in any future Bush administration.
As i started to read the article I began to think that the Guardian, one of the bastions of independent broadsheet journalism in Britain, had been subjected to a hoax; or perhaps was just testing the credulityof its liberal readership.
A cold horror started crawling through my bones as I began to realise that far from being some hilarious parody, I was reading a dry factual description of the reactionary forces propelling an idiot frontman into the White House.
Sadly George Dubya as he seems to be called in a strange mutation of baby-talk, is no benign idiot savant, like the man played by Peter Sellers in the film Being There.
No man of goodwill to his fellow man would sentence 148 of them to death with only a 15 minute review of their final appeals.
The Guardian article focussed on two of Bush's closest advisers on social affairs - a brief which they both appear to think has been handed them by God Almighty.
The photos show two people that you might imagine seeing on a really odd acid trip. One of them, the ludicrously named Myron Magnet, is a Benny Hill lookalike who sports white mutton - chop whiskers, which he claims he was inspired to grow when at Cambridge (Massacheusetts? )
They are of such incredible dimensions that they dwarfed a lot of what he said; which is dangerous because his world is totally different from the one we all share - although that might change soon.
Described as:
'. . . a cultural hawk from the right-wing Manhattan Institute" ,
Mr Magnet decries the liberation of society during the Cultural Revolution of the sixties. He mourns the death of the mental straitjacket imposed on the free citizens of the Western World; through War,recession ,War, austerity, Cold War.
The main theme in his book The Dream and the Nightmare is the dehabilitating effect on the poor of any social welfare provision. He claims that the spiritual will of the poor is weakened by making their lives any easier; or the possibilities of their survival any better.
Like someone who became a Dickens admirer after seeing a Hollywood sacharined version of A Christmas Carol, without ever knowing that the author wrote Bleak House, he proffers a solution to the United States' massive - and potentially explosive - social divide, and inner city problems.
In hypocrisy befitting the typical Victorian aristocrat or industrialist; believing that the rich had been rewarded by God, and the poor should work at it; justifying seperate moral values for the haves and have-nots, Myron blames the depressive poverty enjoyed by so many of his compatriots as a direct result of their acceptance of the liberl attitudes of the 60's.
He claimed that the decade
'. . . permitted, even celebrated behavior that when poor practice it will imprison them inextricably in poverty."
So people don;t do loads of drugs to block out the shituation that they are in; they are living in a trashcan because their momma did drugs.
For millionaires, of course, and the frat-brat sons of ex-Presidents, a little experimentation isn't a precursor of moral degeneration; its just a little experimentation. They won't end up in a back alley, in a cardboard box, being a tax burden on the rich. They have the safety net of money coined out of the sweat of the poor folks whose children end up on the pipe, working the street corner. Thats the cost of downsizing, relocating, the global corporate economy.
All we can say to that pile of horseshit, as they say in the West, is get real, Myron. George Bush Jnr. however, has descibed Mr. Magnet's fantasy world for whacked-out acid casualties with a strange obsession for Victoria values as having helped
"crystallise some of my thinking about cultures and of part of the legacy of my generation."
So, this is what happens to your brain when you don't smoke dope?
Anyway, talking of people who have crossed over the great divide, looked into the abyss, had a really bad experience and not come back in the same shape as they were before; you only have to do a quick check on the other featured 'adviser' to realise how far over the edge this lot really are.
If one wanted to be charitable about the other adviser featured in the Guardian article, Marvin Olasky; one would say that he was just a touch confused. Looking like someone who woke up one day after a really bad trip and thought shit, I'm a hippy; giving himself a pudding-bowl haircut but forgetting the beard, Mr. Olasky's case history could well support this theory.
He was raised in a Jewish family in Brooklyn; but claiming to have become an atheist in his youth, Marvin turned towards the humanistic philosophy of Marxism .
In a similar episode to one in the life of that other great shadow player in the history of the Presidency, Lee Harvey Oswald, it is reported that Olasky travelled on a freighter to Russia in 1972 to prove his " . . . Marxist-Leninist credentials.' .
However, a year later he was back at Yale University in the USA, doing a cultural studies degree.
Whilst at college we are led to believe that he underwent a glorious epiphany without the aid of psychotropic drugs.
At some point the overwhelming diet of Hollywood Westerns softened his brain to the extent that we are told he began to wonder "What if there is a God?' One assumes that a self-proclaimed atheiest since his teens, Olasky might have approached this question a little earlier in his life.
One might also wonder, just in passing, whether Olasky ever thought that a Native American audience watching the very same Westerns , might have asked the same question with a different tone in their voice. . .
However, Marvin emerged from this cathartic experience with the self-righteous zeal of the most committed convert.
Publisher of a frighteningly ambitious journal called World (devoted, The Guardian report tells us, to proving that Bill Clinton is the Antichrist Incarnate); he has also started his own church in (where else?) Austin, Texas called Redeemer Presbyterian. One of the main tenets of the Church is the unsuitability of the female gender for any position of power; after all, they were instrumental in Mankind's Fall from grace in the Garden of Eden.
He describes voting for a woman as shameful. One wonders if he doesn't have a certain confusion regarding his sexuality as well....
Olasky also has described "liberal journalists" as having a "hole in their soul" (a hate-shaped hole, perhaps); which is a little worrying for someone who also manages to hold down a job teaching journalism at University of Texas (the home of ethical impartiality).
He also desribed the East-Coast liberal intelligentsia as being adherents of "the Church of Zeus" which left the Guardian journalist a little perplexed . However, in the sort of right - wing circles where the beliefs of the so-called "Aryan":churches are common knowledge, this is seen as a direct reference to the Jewish faith.
The right-wing rascists who proclaim their "Christianity" as being that of an Aryan Christ, often point to the close relationship between the Hellenic and Judaic cultures in the historic Kingdoms of Israel. Much of that part of the Middle East was conquered by Alexander, and the Jewish aristocracy and middle classes intermarried with their imperial overlords. The Jewish and classical Greek philosophies did intermingle,and culture and religion of both were affected.
However, the idea that the version of Christianity espoused by people who believe that Christ's message has any racial overtones is authentic, must be seen as a sad act of self-deception. Surely the one belief of Christ that raised Christianity above all the ancient tribal religions, and the imperial synthesis of those beliefs; was his espousal of universal humanity created by one God.
Anyway, it is obvious that Olasky could neatly wear the label so readily handed out by Zionists of "self - hating Jew'. It is worrying that he should have such a distorted view of history and so much potential influence on the future course of world events.
Not only will these people attempt to influence the governance of the United States, but they will do their best to affect foreign policy as well.
They have already made statements affirming their intention to persuade Bush to make the provision of international aid programmes conditional on the abolition of birth -control and abortion programmes in recipient countries; with no regard to the Aids pandemic, or the problems of global over-population.
Magnet and Olasky believe that the whole state machinery of safety-net welfare provision and affirmative action should be dismantled and replaced with soup kitchen charities sponsored by the rich on a voluntary basis.
What would be compulsory though, would be the religious indoctrination which came with every bowl of soup.One wonders whether these suggestions are in fact the work of closet atheists bent on undermining any religious belief in the poor ?
If the rich revert to their kind-hearted phianthropic ways of the nineteenth century, and set up a few soup kitchens in the ghettos; they can wean those indolent, ignorant poor folks away from the evil weed, the crack, drive-bys and gang-bangings. Before we know it, they'll be queuing up at the church on Sunday; and every rich man will again have his choice of a plentiful supply of serving wenches.
The ones not suffering from diseases like TB, syphillus, typhus; or worn out by too many infant mortalities, multiple childbirths or scrubbing the rich mans floor sixty/ seven since the age of fifteen.
Perhaps even more shadowy and dangerous than these two is a man named Larry Lindsey, one of the first Reaganite crusaders for "supply - side economics", famously described by Bush Snr. as "voodoo economics".
Also described as the "trickle-down" theory of monetary policy, this whole agenda rests on the idea that if you give the rich more than they could ever spend, some of it will eventually get to the poor.
Another well-known Bush adviser, Condoleeza Rice - confusingly - a black woman who is also a Cold War warrior, promises to renew the adversarial mentality towards Russia and China; coupled with a promise to withdraw all US aid for UN intervention which does not correspond to an isolationist, Christian fundamentalism.
They are clowns in a carnival of fools, but behind the greasepaint smiles and moralising platitudes are social theories which could send the US spinning into an even greater polarisation of attitude and vision than existed at the height of the Vietnam conflict.
 © 2000
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