Home > Impeach Bush Now, Before More Die

Impeach Bush Now, Before More Die

by Open-Publishing - Monday 5 September 2005
7 comments

Wars and conflicts Attack-Terrorism Governments Catastrophes USA

The raison d’etre of the Bush administration is war in the Middle East in order to protect America from terrorism and to insure America’s oil supply. On both counts the Bush administration has failed catastrophically.

Bush’s single-minded focus on the "war against terrorism" has compounded a natural disaster and turned it into the greatest calamity in American history. The US has lost its largest and most strategic port, thousands of lives, and 80% of one of America’s most historic cities is under water.

If terrorists had achieved this result, it would rank as the greatest terrorist success in history.

Prior to 911, the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA) in order to protect the strategic port, the refineries, and the large population.

However, after 2003 the flow of funds to SELA were diverted to the war in Iraq. During 2004 and 2005 the New Orleans Times-Picayune published nine articles citing New Orleans’ loss of hurricane protection to the war in Iraq.

Every expert and newspapers as distant as Texas saw the New Orleans catastrophe coming. But President Bush and his insane government preferred war in Iraq to protecting Americans at home.

Bush’s war left the Corps of Engineers only 20% of the funding to protect New Orleans from flooding from Lake Pontchartrain. On June 18, 2004, the Corps’ project manager, Al Naomi, told the Times-Picayune: "the levees are sinking. If we don’t get the money to raise them, we can’t stay ahead of the settlement."

Despite the dire warnings delivered by the 2004 hurricane season, the Bush administration made deep budget cuts for flood control and hurricane funding for New Orleans. The US Senate, alarmed at the Bush administration’s insanity, was planning to restore the funding for 2006. But now it is too late. Many multiples of the funding that would have saved the city now have to be spent to rescue it.

Not content with leaving New Orleans unprotected, it took the Bush administration five days to get the remnants of the National Guard not serving in Iraq, along with desperately needed food and water, to devastated New Orleans. This is the slowest emergency response by the US government in modern times. By the time the Bush administration could organize any resources for New Orleans, many more people had died and the city was in total chaos.

Despite the most dismal performance on record, Bush’s Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, said on Thursday that the Bush administration has done a "magnificent job."

The on-the-scene mayor of New Orleans sees it differently: "They’re feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying."

"They’re thinking small man, and this is a major, major deal."

It is a major deal, one that will affect Americans far beyond New Orleans. According to reports, 25% of our oil and gasoline comes through the New Orleans port and refineries, all out of commission. Needed goods cannot be imported, and exports will plummet, worsening an already disastrous deficit in the balance of trade.

The increased cost of gasoline will soak up consumers’ disposable incomes, with dire effects on consumer spending. US economic growth will be siphoned off into higher energy costs. American lives far from New Orleans will be adversely affected.

The destruction of New Orleans is the responsibility of the most incompetent government in American history and perhaps in all history. Americans are rapidly learning that they were deceived by the superpower hubris. The powerful US military cannot successfully occupy Baghdad or control the road to the airport—and this against an insurgency based in only 20% of the Iraqi population. Bush’s pointless war has left Washington so pressed for money that the federal government abandoned New Orleans to catastrophe.

The Bush administration is damned by its gross incompetence. Bush has squandered the lives and health of thousands of people. He has run through hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars. He has lost America’s reputation and its allies. With barbaric torture and destruction of our civil liberty, he has stripped America of its inherent goodness and morality. And now Bush has lost America’s largest port and 25 percent of its oil supply. Why? Because Bush started a gratuitous war egged on by a claque of crazy neoconservatives who have sacrificed America’s interests to their insane agenda.

The neoconservatives have brought these disasters to all Americans, Democrat and Republican alike. Now they must he held accountable. Bush and his neoconservatives are guilty of criminal negligence and must be prosecuted.

What will it take for Americans to reestablish accountability in their government? Bush has got away with lies and an illegal war of aggression, with outing CIA agents, with war crimes against Iraqi civilians, with the horrors of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture centers, and now with the destruction of New Orleans.

What disaster will next spring from Bush’s incompetence?

Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate economics education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

http://www.prisonplanet.com/article...

Forum posts

  • I really like this editorial but sure wish Mr. Roberts would tell us once Bush is gone, how do we get rid of KARL ROVE and all of the far reaching tentacles he has put in place over the years. Bush is only a symptom. Rove is the sociopath that puts together all of the horrendous scenarios Bush plays out across the world. Although I will say Bush has brought his own spin on a theocratic society!! Shades of John Haggee!!!!!!!!!!

    • You are right - impeachment of one person doesn’t help! To get rid of these gang you have to bring them to justice and there is enough crime these gang is responsible for. Also the seizure of their accumulated stolen property will teach others in the future.

      The judical system, especial the supreme court need to be changed! Lifetime appointment should not occur.

    • Yep, Bush is just the actor in front of the public...and if he only knew it, the fall guy. Corporate America owns and runs Washington and as Americans, all we will be "given" is just enough to prevent all
      out revolt by the masses and enough to maintain our own selfish interests. When we as a nation realize this we’ll take back our America, but until then...we’ll just keep paying and paying...in dollars, lives and freedoms.

      Rove went with Bush to New Orleans for a reason. Dick Cheney has been absent for a reason....probably getting Haliburton its contracts to rebuild the south. If Americans will accept what has happened in Iraq and following Katrina without demanding accountability...without putting those responsible in JAIL, then they’ve succeeded and we deserve everything we get from our inaction. Start with DeLay at the bottom of the stinking pile and put them all in prison for a very long time....and their buddy Kenny Boy Lay too.

      FIRST: ELECTION REFORM!! PAPER BALLOTS PERIOD. Take back our representative form of government and place our representatives in office by popular vote ONLY...no more electoral college. Senators and Representatives subject to recall and/or impeachment after one year and President after two years by review of the electorate (thats us), and hold politicians accountable for their actions.
      Reinstate the income taxes to pre-Bush and structure it on a sliding scale according to income as it should be.
      Reinstate social programs that provide jobs and improve
      infrastructure like the old Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration and let young men and women fulfill their military obligations at home helping America first.
      Foreign trade on a one-to-one basis only and put our people back to work.
      Separate monopolies, especially energy and media. Competition encourages honesty, lowers prices, and improves products.
      Have a national lottery, a tax on cigarettes and a tax on liquor...solely to finance socialized medicine.
      Renewable energy alternatives grown HERE at home....instead of paying the small
      farmer NOT to grow corn.

      Any of that make sense?

      Put the bastards in jail and clean out Washington. Start with a clean slate and our original Constitution. Election reform. Accountability. Social programs benefitting Americans. FAIR trade. Socialized medicine. Fair sliding tax structure. Just think....no more smirk.

      Mike

  • I have been calling for the impeachment of this man in letters to the editor of the Miami Herald and Sun Sentinel for a couple of years now.

    HOWEVER, as my friends remind me - LOOK WHO WOULD REPLACE HIM! The whole nasty gang is in line after him.

    What a debacle and what destruction of our nation’s democracy and ecology has been wrought in the last 5 years. And still many support him! Even those who have nothing to do but lose under his administration.

    God Preserve Us.

    • I’m always amazed when people want to "return to our democracy". I think it’s a comforting thought even to those who would be unable to describe a time when such a thing was in place.
      Money has operated to have its needs met from the time of the East India Company to Halliburton. Opposed to this force of money are unions, blacks, women, protesters, and the notion of democracy dearly held by people. Even these groups seldom act in unison, nor do most individuals within a group share a common political goal. They have, at times, brought humanity anti-racism, an end to a war, the eight hour day and the weekend, living wages, and in fact a whole plethora of hard fought gains (health care, public schooling. notions of human equality, civil rights etc). Only collectively (for the most part) do movements create a real policy alternative. It’s simply to much for an individual to imagine a economy or the environment democratically managed. However members of huge movements begin to realize what is at stake, what is possible, and eventually, what is necessary, only in the context of collective struggle.
      The fundamental thing is that none of the gains mentioned above were "given" to us by Democrats and Republicans on their own. All of it was fought for outside those institutions and later claimed by them.
      thTry and think of a time when economic policy for the U.S. was somehow on the ballot? Try to think of a time when (aside from election thetoric) real progress was made for working people outside of strikes, boycotts, mass movements, and the like.
      The "balance of power" is in reality a function of big money (in a chaotic and discordant unison of policy) and working people who make up 95% percent of everbody but only very rarely and almost unconciously express any policy at all in unison.
      MLK learned as he went, but what he learned is almost never included in the usual portrayal of him leading marches in the South. He learned that the partial and specific policies he championed so well (voting and civil rights)) could never be achieved and held onto unless there was a "radical redistribution of wealth and power".
      It was when he (and many in the movement) went from particular regional goals to larger economic and foreign policy goals, that he was killed.
      He stopped taking much interest in electoral politics and ceased believing in the U.S. as a democracy. He’d learned that "Only movements matter".
      I’d encourage you to do the same.

  • I am an American, and I STRONGLY agree that we have to impeach Bush before many more people die. I live in Boston, Massachusetts and I know many, many people who feel the way I do (the majority here do), but the feeling here is that of hopelessness. I know I do what I can (vote on issues every chance I get, try to make my voice heard), yet it feels like most of the country (deep south and mid-west, in particular) is under some sort of spell, and eating up Bush’s propoganda like a person starved. I used to be proud to be an American - now I am humiliated and feel defeated. I wish I could move to another country, but nobody likes us. I don’t blame them at all.

  • Why give up before we begin? Why assume the future of the country before we assess the country today? TODAY, we have a president who has failed at his job. It should not be tolerated. The voice of the American people has to be voiced, before it can be heard. Come what may. Long term reform is obviously needed, but part of that reform is ours to make. To stand up against a government that has poisoned its own waters.

    Who amongst us can lead us to impeachment?