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Strategies & Market Trends : John Pitera's Market Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Enigma who wrote (6316)	6/25/2002 5:57:41 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 33421

Enigma, Thank you for your very civil and polite discussion of matters of the deepest concern to this nation. We all need to getting more concerned about the intensely wrong direction the present leadership is taking us in. It is a scandal of historical significance that we have had the worst explosion of business failure due to criminality that we've been forced to endure since the start of the Great Depression. Those who think we are at the cusp of a "recovery" are whistling past the grave. Bush is rearranging the fiscal priorities of this nation to that of an arrogant, irrepressible imperialistic war machine. The only comparable rise of militarism in peace time that I can compare it to is the rise of Nazism in Germany in the mid-1930's. The parallels are extremely ominous. The steady attacks by Bush on our civil liberties and privacy is one matter. But one of the most damning things about Bush is how he uses deceit, secrecy and stonewalling to protect criminals. Like his pal Ken Lay. This is a national tragedy that we have a corrupt Chief Executive who is bending the rules in order to protect morally and ethically bankrupt robber barons. How can I say it any more forcefully. It is disgusting. The rest of the world simply will not tolerate our crass imperialism and hubristic thumbing of our noses at morality and ethics forever. They will clearly become disgusted with our phony claims to be champions of "liberty and justice". We're in the process of proving that we are nothing of the sort. We are nation led by a corrupt favored son who is racketeering to protect other members of his organized crime family. Re: But IMO we have crass ineptitude being shown in Washington - in foreign and fiscal policy Here I disagree with you. It certainly is crass, calculated, conniving and craven. But it is not inept. The fiscal policy is a reversion to the financial enslavement of the middle and lower classes that was a hallmark of the Reagan/Bush era. The rapid rise of the national debt isn't the result of ineptitude. It is the result of a cynical plan to transfer the wealth of the taxpayer to the banking elite. As to foreign policy, we are engaged in, primarily, a thrust into Central Asia, which serves two global strategic purposes. The first, of course, is the oil prize, but the other, and less well understood is the pincer movement that our U.S. imperialists are starting to effectuate against the Red Army. We have them covered fairly well on most sides with our fortresses in South Korea, Japan, Diego Garcia and the Pacific Fleet. Central Asia was an attractive arena for expansion of Chinese hegemony and resource exploitation, and we are well on the way to checkmating that possibility. The other resource prize that is still up for grabs is eastern Siberia. It will be very interesting to see developments there over the next decade. Re: Civil liberties, fiscal prudence, etc., have been thrown out the window in the name of what? A bogus war without end. This is all part and parcel of the rise of totalitarianism here in the U.S. Comparably Germany in the 1930's is an example and probably a model for the Bush strategy. Them method includes: 1)Terrorize the population, 20 inflate military budgets, 3) aggressively pick fights around the world and 4) conquer the resources deemed necessary to keep the machine running. This is the Great Game of the 21st Century. Not much different in concept from what Polk was doing when he stole the U.S. Southwest from the Mexicans in 1848. whitehouse.gov We won't be acquiring territories any longer, of course, since we've grown much more sophisticated about how to extract the economic value out of foreign nations without actually having to administrate unruly local populations. But we'll still do what it takes to prop up corrupt local despots who will sell out their nation's welfare for a percentage of the action as American corporations make vast profits, protected as always, by a mercenary army supplied at vast expense by the duped American taxpayer. As Lt. Gen. Smedley Butler said about this 70 years ago, "it's a swell racket." -Ray PS: The reason we haven't broken up al Qaeda and killed Bin Laden is because they are too valuable to the propaganda machine.