Apocolypse

Republicans seem determined to make their vision of apocalypse for the planet a reality. So far they have chosen a number of strategies for accomplishing it:

Nuclear War - We withdrew from the ABM treaty, embarked on a breathtakingly stupid Ballistic Missile Defense program, and provoked a new arms race that threatens us from a proliferation of nuclear countries.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Planetary Rescue Operations

Turn Off the Life Support: America is Dead

Over Population - Republicans don't believe in family planning, birth control, gay marriage, or other population limiting options for anyone. They are quite willing to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us. Even if it means apocalypse. After all, they are expecting it and it validate their deepest beliefs.

Global Warming - Although oil companies and their paid minions still argue that global warming is not an issue, massive forest fires, strong storms, melting ice caps, collapsing fisheries, pollution and other environmental threats are persuasive. There is not much doubt in the science community.

Disease - militarization of biological agents has taken precedence over public health. Simple techniques to monitor public health go unfunded.

Massive health problems are likely. Public health agencies have been undermined even as a large part of the population goes without coverage. Republicans are working strenuously to break (privatize) Social Security now. Your children will have virtually no social supports except the "faith based" ones so well described in Angela’s Ashes.

Energy - The Republican approach to energy is characterized by maximum pumping. The world has probably reached peak oil production as predicted.

The trickle-up economy has been propelled partly by forcing wages and benefits down, but also by tax cuts, corruption, corporate friendly legislation, and deregulation. Deregulation, as Republicans have fashioned it, has caused a sharp decline of democracy, a surge to plutocracy, a carnival of corporate corruption, and there is no end in sight for it.

We will need to relearn the lessons of the great depression. Probably won’t happen until the currency collapses or the economy does.

Environmental safeguards are not being heeded. The mendacious Bush administration has massively attacked environmental legislation. Increasingly concentrated media assures people that they are destroying the earth for good moral reasons. There is a fire sale on the earth.

Religion can motivate people to destroy themselves for the promise of the afterlife. An apocalypse will validate Republicans religious views, so they are perfectly willing for it to happen. Religion, like media, can deny science and make it appear that business as usual is fine.

Education is an important part of media, and must be controlled to make sure that theocracy can trump science. Don't complain about sub-standard education, Republican ideologues have assured that real science will not be taught in U.S. schools.

Elections have been rigged without causing public outcry. The President’s father was head of the CIA. The CIA has experience rigging elections worldwide, we should have expected it sooner or later here. Control of the media is an essential part of election rigging and it is necessary to sell war.

US Liberal leaders have either been assassinated or killed under mysterious, uninvestigated circumstances. Consider this headline: (April, 2008)

The economy has been militarized, war profiteering is public and visible, the military-industrial complex rules yet, since the media does not regard it as a story, it is not in the public mind. Resources used for the military are lost forever. Bush’s gratuitous war has drained our remaining economic strength. We did not learn the lessons of Vietnam.

Regulatory agencies are all captives of their industries. This is obvious from the drug industry, meat packing, media, environment and others. It is probably prudent not to eat beef…

US leadership is incompetent, illiterate, self-serving, and criminal. Bush does not listen to people who disagree with him, so we are condemned to bad decisions at the highest levels of our government. Nixon era, Iran-Contra felons have been brought back, Enron refugees installed, right wing incompetents like Rumsfeld have already brought us massively expensive, morally repugnant, bad decisions. Secrecy covers most of it so Congress can do no oversight.

Military buildup to an arranged war will be devastating to the US economy, our civil liberties, and most likely will end any meaningful benefits that we came to expect from our Constitution. State sponsored violence will not make you safer.

The Constitution has been undermined by giving covert agencies a free hand (denying the Congress the power of the purse.) Judicial rights have been undermined. (The US is now a country that feels free to torture its prisoners.) The US is also number 1 in incarcerations. The Bill of Rights undermined. The Congress made a serious mistake when it gave the President the power to make war.

The US now meets all of the criteria for a fascist state: a strong dictator intent on world domination, a government that grossly violates human rights, corporate control of all branches of government, degraded civil liberties as a result of the "Patriot Act", and a military that takes resources from all other public purposes, media that has all of the qualities of journalism that we deplored in Pravda.

Congress has been ineffective in oversight, and it is questionable whether the system is still self-correcting. Lobbyists are in the revolving door and many are themselves felons. By packing the judiciary with political hacks, Bush assured that his abuses will go without the checks and balances that were built into the Constitution.

The US thumbs it nose at international law including the Geneva Convention, the Kyoto treaty, the treaty on land mines, the ABM treaty, the treaty on weapons in space,

It is not just the end of the US Constitutional Republic, Republicans will probably get their apocalypse.

Apocalypse

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