TWO LETTERS TO THE BELLINGHAM WEEKLY

[These two letters were published in the Bellingham Weekly, February 10-16, 2005 mailto:letters@bellinghamweekly.com.]



(BOB) HOPE IS GONE

It has finally sunk in. Superman is dead.

Ideally, America’s missions abroad would promote the values we hold dear – truth, justice and the American Way.

The reality is shockingly different. Foreign policy based on deception, detention without due process, torture and sexual humiliation, massive civilian casualties and a leading combat general who believes, “It’s a hoot…to shoot some people.”

All this is financed with a massive federal deficit that will cut into needed domestic programs for years, decades.

The latest debacle – buck naked females mud wrestling for “jeering and leering” G.I.s – drives home another revelation.

It has finally sunk in. Bob Hope is dead.

America has entered a sad, new phase.

- Tip Johnson, Bellingham



LET’S ORGANIZE

I don’t know if anyone else has the notion that our so-called political leadership knows what they are doing or not, but I just have to write and express my increasing concern that a kind of insanity is gripping these guys.

Every political administration from the Roosevelt era on has had to use debt creation and warfare to make our economic system flounder along. The Bush administration, with arrogance and total disregard for most of us, has thrown out all the stops. I was going to say huge or vast, but words can’t describe the amount of phony money that is now being created to satisfy the inmates now running our political nut house.

But where has all this money gone? Has it been to upgrade and repair our infrastructure of bridges, roads and rail systems? Do all our communities have clea4n and safe drinking water and modern waste-disposal systems? Is it for our schools, health care, Social Security and above-poverty-level incomes for our men and women in the armed services? And on and on. Don’t bother your brain because we know where the money has not gone, but where it has been dispensed other than for a bloated military budget used to promote “preemptive” wars, is not as clear.

It is not just economics, either. Our forefathers devised a pretty good plan for a country to aspire and advance. But what has been the main thrust of the insolent leadership we are saddled with today? It is the incremental dissolution of our Constitution and Bill of Rights by fostering “fear and danger from all around us.” To disregard “due process under the law,” and canceling the criteria of habeas corpus, (literal Latin translation of “where’s the body” meaning why one has been arrested and the arrestee’s location) puts us in the same category as was Germany under the Nazi regime.

It is our present leadership we should fear. The difference between nations of people who really are free is to let these3 sickos know we won’t take any more of this and dump them, and a nation that is so cowardly that it can be bullied by the implication that criticism is “unpatriotic.”

To those people who think our present national direction is OK, I have news for them.

This is all going to end. It will end, and it doesn’t look like too far down the line either.

When this giant Ponzi scheme finally collapses, our beloved leaders along with their true benefactors) and we know who they will be), will escape to their offshore hideaways and their Swiss bank accounts and leave us holding the proverbial bag. What to do? You tell me. Can we vote them all out of office in the next election? Even if we could do that, it does not answer the basic question of why we need to keep endlessly going into debt.

One of the possibilities of why we need continuous debt creation is that technology is now doing most of the work people used to do. Add to that the race to offload our factories to China and elsewhere thereby eradicating any possibility to collect enough taxes to keep our country going, let alone feed and clothe people.

I have a suggestion: let’s look for another way to organize our society where the economy benefits people and not some ill-conceived philosophical concept. I suspect some valuable information will shortly be available for us to consider. It had better be – the alternative is too grim to contemplate.

- George Wright, Bellingham

Here's a great book to share with your children. In simple terms, it explains what Bush is up to...
The Lemming King