Tags: analysis | politics | review

Apparently a bunch of sexually repressed rightwing Southern Congressmen have spent the past year attacking an anti-labor, anti-poor Democratic President for alleged perjury and extended foreplay with an ambitous, chunky intern. Apparently the matter has completely consumed the American media and hinges on the precise legal definitions of oral and vaginal intercourse.

And apparently a growing majority of Americans couldn't give a f*ck, don't vote, and have lost near total interest in whatever happens in the capital of what has become a startlingly blatent one-party State. And to insure that the country remains a one-party State, finance reform was once again wheeled out, toyed with, and shelved. The death of the Feingold-McCain bill only reinforced the similarities between America and its superpower-to-be nemesis, China.

In America they let you organize your own party and "express" yourself, but make sure the primary tax is so high that power over policy remains well out of reach for grassroots political movements. In China they just do without the pretense. Other notable domestic stories include the building of more Supermax prisons to house the young minorities that the exciting new economy has made superfluous.

Human rights groups claim that the windowless prisons constitute psychological torture and that they are in violation of the recently celebrated United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. But despite reports of widespread abuse in these increasingly privatized hellholes, Washington has done little more than hire more cops and toughen sentencing laws. 1998 was a banner year for law'n'order.

The eco-fraudulent Clinton/Gore team buckled under right-wing pressure to sit on the Kyoto Treaty limiting carbon emissions until Mongolia signed. This despite record high temperatures, crop losses and mass death due to extreme weather. The ideas coming from our capital continue to revolve around continued energy based "GROWTH" and the enlargement of consumer markets. Don't expect anything more from a Gore Presidency either, who just announced his Green candidacy.

And people wonder why the leading capitalist state isn't more of a leader in protecting the environment. On the foreign policy front, large military contractors forced through the expansion of NATO despite the lack of any real military threat. This in turn led the Russian Duma to scrap the START-2 arms reduction treaty and put its ever unreliable nuclear forces on a hair trigger. Despite the clear dangers of expanding the alliance towards the Russian border, the American people were given no say in the matter.

Nor did anyone bother to explain that it was their taxes that would pay for much of the new Polish, Czech and Hungarian arsenal; weapons that, once paid for, will generate vast amounts of private arms industry profit1998 also witnessed the biggest military power in the history of the world launch deadly missle attacks into three of the poorest countries on earth (all Muslim): Sudan, Pakistan, Iraq.

The first of which was based upon what turned out to be a false rumor about a medicine factory. The other instigated by a sovereign nation's refusal to allow the country which has murdered over 2 million of its citizens over the last 8 years to continue to search for weapons that America itself has in such massive quantities as to be able to kill everyone on earth many times over. No pressure was put on Israel in 1998 to abandon its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, the only move that could give any credibility to US efforts to disarm Israel's neighbors.

Nevermind the fact that the States used Depleted Uranium against Iraq in 1991 when non-stop bombing raids killed upwards of 400,000 civilians; never mind the fact that US-enforced sanctions have killed at least 1. 5 million children (one every six minutes) since then, it is Iraq that is the real threat to the region. Iraq, not America, is the murderous rogue state. That is the line that Washington has had the gall to spew for the past year. One can only hope that such lies, among others, will begin to break up upon the rocks of public resistance in 1999.