The Republic of Cozenage

Episode MMCIII -- "Just find the black queen and we'll give you your future back. -- in which...Enron Executives the Bush White House loots the pension fund rather than give back their obscene bonuses tax cuts.

Not surprisingly, the moment of maximum, naked plunder is at the end of the bust-out cycle.

It comes on suddenly, violently -- both graphically and National Geographically -- as the last of the mudholes on the Flimflam Savannah dry up and the boundlessly ravenous succubi. When those that have supped lavishly by leeching off of their hosts realize that their predations have finally killed their source of nourishment, and they move in for a final, frenzied Golden Goose Happy Meal.

Look at Washington D.C. and ask yourself if this isn’t exactly what we are witnessing. If the 30-year-long Republican project to destroy the Federal Government isn’t reaching it’s apotheosis.

Strap on your “Take Them At Their Literal Word” goggles and read this, because it really isn’t complicated; all you have to do is take the GOP as serious-as-a-facefull-of-Dick-shot when they say that government should be run like a business.

And then ask the next, logical question: What kind of business?

What kind of fucking “Thomas Gresham & Son Import/Export” company air-lifts in hacks and nitwits and crackpots by the job-lot and forces out the competent professionals?

Slashes its revenue while drive spending off the chart?

Ignores every fundamental rule of money management, employee training and sound accounting and instead launches into one, wild, massive, disastrous Special Project after another that each, in turn, just so happens to hugely profit their friends?

What kind of business other than one that is being deliberately gutted and razed behaves this way?

And now that the Runaway Binge has reached its limit?

Well now there is nothing left to be stolen and hocked to sustained the scam, and the time for hangovers and piper-paying has arrived, guess who has decided to raid the employee’s pension fund rather risk sobering up and having to face up to the cold reality of the shit-sodden sheets that their long night of swinish passion has wound this country into?

Treasury: All legal options exhausted to avoid debt limit
Martin Crutsinger
AP Economics Writer
March 7, 2006 March 7, 2006

WASHINGTON - Treasury Secretary John Snow notified Congress on Monday that the administration has now taken "all prudent and legal actions," including tapping certain government retirement funds, to keep from hitting the $8.2 trillion national debt limit.

In a letter to Congress, Snow urged lawmakers to pass a new debt ceiling immediately to avoid the nation's first-ever default on its obligations.

"I know that you share the president's and my commitment to maintaining the full faith and credit of the U.S. government," Snow said in his letter to leaders in the House and Senate.
…

Snow in his letter notified lawmakers that Treasury would begin tapping the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, which Treasury officials said would provide a "few billion" dollars in extra borrowing ability.

Treasury officials also announced that on Friday they had used the $15 billion in the Exchange Stabilization Fund, a reserve that the Treasury secretary has that is normally used to smooth out volatile movements in the value of the dollar in currency markets.
Treasury has also been taking investments out of a $65.3 billion government pension fund known as the G-fund.

Officials have said that once the debt limit is raised, the investments taken out of the pension funds would be replaced and any lost interest payments would be made up. The formal title for the G-fund is the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees Retirement System.
…

An actual default on the debt, a situation when the government misses making payments to current bondholders, is a doomsday scenario considered highly unlikely given what it would do to the government's credit rating.

So, to translate for those with old-fashioned, Windows 3.1.1 Bullshit Detectors and centrifuge out the important points…

1. This is another Massive Republican Clusterfuck that boils down to the Bush Family Motto: “We will somehow borrow our way out of this huge problem that we’ve borrowed our way into.”

2. When John Snow says that, "all prudent and legal actions," been taken to avoid fucking up out international TRW he is, of course, simply lying. The Congress could easily avoid this clusteruck by simply rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the uberwealthy anytime they like. They choose not to because to be a Republican in the Age of Dubya means is to always place the interests of your Party and your Corporate Owners ahead of your country.

3. When John Snow says, "I know that you share the president's and my commitment to maintaining the full faith and credit of the U.S. government," understand that the clear subtext and inflection of his message is identical to that of a mob enforcer expressing his “concern” over the continued health of your bones and organs should you be unable to scrape together the vig on your “loan” by Friday. Snow is picking his teeth with your future and mine, sneering “Would be an awful pity if anything got, y’know ‘broken’,” as sure a Dinsdale Piranha fears Spiny Norman.

4. For a little fun with numbers, let’s take the amount the Bush Administration has recklessly pissed away on the Iraqi Rebuilding Debacle and add to that the amount that the Republican Congress has decided to steal from taxpayers and give away to the insurance industry. Care to guess what you come up with? Bingo! Tallies up to a total pretty damned near exactly the 65.3 billion dollars the Bush Administration has chosen to loot out of the pension fund of working men and women.

What’s maddening, of course, is that there is no special trick to seeing the truth about this Administration if you are at all interested in it. That to only way to avoid seeing the glaring reality of their grotesque agenda stretching off in every direction is to practically force rats to eat out your optical nerves like so much angel hair pasta.

Consider…

After all the SCOTUS “up or down vote” happytalk, what actually happened? Harriet Myers was never voted on, or even debated for one minute -- either in committee or on the floor of Congress -- even though the President boldly she was the most qualified jurist in the Universe. No, her nomination was loudly aborted a-borning -- almost at the moment of conception -- by the Jebus-Freak-Show Shadow Government that pull Dubya's strings. And now before Sam Alito has had a chance to get his name spelled right on the letterhead, we see the itchy Gynephobic Uteropaths of the Right are already blowing the seals on the anti-choice silos and launching their missiles over this “settled law-of-the-land”.

Because Alito was never about “the process”: it was about advancing the theocratic agenda of the Party of God by any means necessary.

After all the “Strong Defense” happytalk, what actually happened? Our blood and treasure squandered in an orgy of profligacy, plunder and incompetence. Our Army being broken for lack of armor, lack of support, lack any mission statement except “Bring ‘em on” and an overall “They volunteered, so fuck ‘em” contempt for the grunt from the Right. Our good name squandered by people who have never had to worry about the messes they leave behind, ‘cause that’s what little people are for.

Because Iraq was supposed to be a Republican, ouchless photo-op, staged by gutless child-men for political purposes who never once took the terrible business of war seriously.

After all the Patriot Games and Terra’Talk, what is actually happening? Right now, in an Undisclosed Location far, far away, by a dark miracle of synchronicity, Al Qaeda operatives are doing exactly what the GOP Leadership Caste is doing: plotting out how they can somehow, some way, maintain One Party, Republican rule in America through the election of 2006, and how they can help Dubya's hand-picked successor in 2008.

"Put me on the Al Qaeda-llac Board (obligatory "Glengarry, Glen Ross" reference)!", roars Dubya as he exceeds his quota for manufacturing new terrorists each and every month. Because in this wide world, Osama Bin Laden has no greater snuggle-buddy and AQ Propaganda Salesman "Employee Of The Year" than George Bush. And Dubya has no greater ally than his pet rubber-stamp congress.

After our five years of round-the-clock fear-mongering and Swiftboating all dissent, what has actually happened?

...A major American city lost to a disaster that came with a week’s advance notice and was visible from space.

...A Republican investigation into root causes of the worst attack on American soil lying conspicuously fallow.

...A now-openly lying Republican President wandering lazily from one GOP set-piece diorama to another, gabbling on in a way so unmoored from reality that it's starting to scare children and puppies.

...A Republican Congress of muppets and seat-fillers and wheel-men who are obediently letting it all go down. Our elected Firemen, who instead of raising the alarm and containing the conflagration have chosen to sabotage the sprinkler system and slash the hoses; who for their thirty-pieces-of-silver and a thick slice of the plunder are content to watch the nation we once were slide beneath the waves.

The Bush Administration is and always has been a Bunko Mutual Benefit Society of charlatans, sociopaths and Elmer Gantrys. And the only people who continue to fall for the okey-doke are those who fit into one of the following five categories:

1. Stupid

2. Scared Stupid

3. Suicidally Dogmatic

4. Rapture Drunk

Or,

5. Co-Conspirator