No Way Back ?  

Al Jazeerah has a column asking if there is any way back from the predicament the people of the US are now in.

The Republicans don’t need this victory. They’ve already succeeded in getting approval for the vast number of Bush’s judicial appointments. They could probably even pass legislation right now that would abolish abortion, if that’s what they really wanted. (but, then how would they get their fundamentalist base to the polls?) Who could stop them; protestors in the street? During the lead up to the war in Iraq, Bush casually dismissed them as a “focus group”.

The point of the nuclear option is to demonstrate the unrestrained power of the one-party system. As the German philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche said, “Only excess of power, is proof of power.” Crushing the filibuster is just a muscle-flexing exercise intended to remind the American people that there’s no going back.

And, there is no going back. Americans will soon face the same terrible effects of financial stagnation that have swept through the undeveloped world. The trap has already been set by G.W. Bush and his cadres at the Federal Reserve who have dug the nation into an $8 trillion hole from which there is no conceivable escape. Americans are confronted with a grim future of mountainous debt, diminishing job prospects, rising energy costs, a falling dollar, and endless war.

The effects of the Iraq war will haunt the American people for decades as will the suffocating consequences of the enormous deficits. In just five years of the Bush presidency, Americans are less prosperous, less free, less respected, and less secure than they were before he took office. His tenure has been the most ruinous, disgraceful period in the nation’s 200 year history. It’s impossible to cite even one example when Bush acted in the greater interests of the American people rather than for the small clique of corporate parasites who’ve enhanced their fortunes at the public trough.