As often seems the case lately, there’s not much time for full-on and in-depth articles of the sort I prefer to write. I’ve been given another appeal to write (this one goes to the California Supremes) and I’m not liking where it’s going. That makes it all the harder (and more time-consuming) for me.

Nevertheless, it’s difficult — no, impossible — for me to ignore some of the things happening around us. Unfortunately, it’s just as impossible to catalog them all, let alone blog about them.

Despite the fact that we can only pretend to afford the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States is starting to rattle the saber more loudly at Iran. I suspect we’ll be at war with them by this summer — certainly before the end of 2005. That also means we’ll be drafting young Americans — something we can ill afford as the rest of our society is aging and depends upon a smaller group of youngsters to sustain our pretense of a successful economy.

I’m starting to come to the conclusion that there are three reasons for the continued warring, none of which is positive and none of which are reasons that have been stated anywhere else so far as I know. (So, remember, you heard it from me first!)

1. The Bush’s have, for generations, profited from war.

   This has been much written about in the past, so I may not be the first to mention how the new wars directly improve the fortunes of the Bush family. It has just as much been ignored. The people talking about it are apparently written off as kooks. And it doesn’t matter how credentialed or well-positioned they are to know the truth. It’s clear, however, that the modern military-industrial complex has been forcefully developed and sustained by (now) four generations of Bushes. (See Bush Family Values: War, Wealth, Oil, among the numerous articles you could read on the topic.)

2. It distracts from the stolen American elections.

   At first, I didn’t know what to think about “stolen election” claims. But there’s just too much new evidence coming out about it. However, as one commentator has noted,

   [T]he investigation into the voting irregularities of November 2nd has moved from the Reynolds Wrap Hat stage into legal and governmental action. Keith Olbermann, “Relax about Ohio, Relax about the guy tailing me” (November 21, 2004) Bloggermann on MSNBC.

   Perhaps predictably, the clearest evidence is being found in Florida and Ohio. Florida, of course, was the key state in 2000 that forced the Supreme Court to install our President in order to forestall another couple weeks of uncertainty and, more critically, accurate counting of votes. Ohio was this election’s Florida. And it looked like it was swinging towards John Kerry until Diebold’s votes started coming in. Even without what the studies being done now are showing, one had to wonder why electronic votes, which should be known faster, didn’t start to swing the election Bush’s way until after the paper votes started showing that he was losing the state. (See Berkeley analysis of Fla. electronic voting finds Bush wrongly awarded between 133,000 and 260,000 votes, for more on Florida. For Ohio’s situation, where the man who supervised the Ohio vote also served as chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, check out bellacaio.org’s “Hearings on Ohio voting put 2004 election in doubt” or just Google “ohio voting irregularity” for other stories.)

   Additionally, the Berkeley analysis itself (rather than the story about it) along with the data that support its findings can be obtained from this UC Data site. It finds that the voting machines appear to have shifted the votes most significantly in counties that were more Democratic, such as Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade.

The third reason is perhaps less evil — and is more typical of past presidential handling of domestic problems — it distracts us from the problems at home. However, I’m starting to think that it also distracts us from the recognition that the problems at home are not accidental byproducts of an inept administration. Rather, they appear to be the planned byproducts of coroporate entities emboldened and abetted by the Bush Administration. The corporations are bent on globalization; Bush is bent on empire-building. (And, in fact, this destruction of the Middle Class in the pursuit of greater corporate profit isn’t limited to the United States, as recent complaints in places like Great Britain mirror those of United States’ workers.)

Corporations profit most when they can reduce costs associated with laborers. Those costs include not just wages, but also benefits. And the benefits aren’t limited to health benefits, either. They include Unemployment and Social Security matching funds.

And so, first, there’s the systematic “outsourcing” of our jobs to third-world countries. As I recently wrote, a tech support phone call to my own telephone company hooked me up (eventually, when someone deigned to answer) with an uninformed young “tech” worker in India. It was like pulling teeth to finally reach someone who explained that there was a known outage in our “region” and that contrary to what the first “tech” said, I was correct and my firewall was not the cause of the problem.

But in addition to this outsourcing of jobs, there are movements to eliminate tax incentives for businesses that provide health insurance to employees. (In addition, there’s a movement to eliminate deductions for the taxes you already pay to state and local governments. That means you’ll get taxed twice — once by local and/or state government and then again, on the same income, by the federal government. Whee!)

It will be interesting to see what happens when the United States’ economy finally collapses. Bush has already taken us from huge budget surpluses to even more huge budget deficits in four short years. Could he take us from being the strongest country in the world, backed by a significant and vital Middle Class, to become one of the world’s largest Third-World countries in the next four years?