London bombs: Bush's hypocrisy

"Earlier today, Smiling turned Somber George Bush pretended not to welcome today’s all-too predictable attacks, which were certainly expected at some point by planners in the National Insecurity State.

He seized the opportunity to say that 'the contrast between what we’ve seen on the TV screens here, what’s taken place in London and what’s taking place here is incredibly vivid to me. On the one hand, we have people here who are working to alleviate poverty, to help rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS, working on ways to have a clean environment. And on the other hand, you’ve got people killing innocent people. And the contrast couldn’t be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of those of us who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who kill—those who have got such evil in their heart that they will take the lives of innocent folks.'

Insofar as anything is happening at the G8 summit to reduce poverty, save global ecology, or overcome AIDS, we can be sure it is in spite of the White House’s best efforts. The Bush administration is a zealous, dedicated proponent of militantly regressive, so-called 'free-market' economics at home and abroad. The essence of Bush’s corporate-financed domestic and global policy agenda is massive state protection and subsidy for the already super-opulent combined with savage market discipline and coercive state punishment and regulation of the poor. The essence of this agenda is the externalization of corporate costs on to the broader society and the gravely endangered (in terms of human inhabitability) ecosphere. It is all about the distribution of wealth yet further upward in a world where:

* “The world’s richest 1% of people receive as much income as the poorest 57%”
* “The richest 10% of the U.S. population has an income equal to that of the poorest 43% of the world. Put differently, the income of the richest 25 million Americans is equal to that of almost 2 billion people.”
* “The income of the world’s richest 5% is 114 times that of the poorest 5%.”
(See Box 1.1., titled “Global Inequality – Grotesque Levels, Ambiguous Trends,” on p.19 in the first chapter of United Nations, Human Development Report 2002 at http://stone.undp.org/hdr/reports/global/2002/en/)"

ZNet