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It was a largely secret operation, its true intentions masked by pious
rhetoric and bogus warnings of imminent danger to the American way of
life. Having gained the dazed complicity of a somnolent Congress, U.S.
President George W. Bush calmly signed a death warrant for thousands
upon thousands of innocent victims: a native population whose land and
resources were coveted by a small group of powerful elites seeking to
augment their already vast dominance by any means necessary, including
mass slaughter.
A flashback to March 2003, when Bush finally brought his long- simmering
brew of aggressive war to the boil? Not at all - it happened earlier
this month. This time, however, the victims were not the Iraqi people,
but one of the last remaining symbols of pure freedom left in America
itself: the nation's herd of wild horses, galloping unbridled on the
people's common lands.
With an obscure provision smuggled without any hearings or public notice
into the gargantuan budget bill - 3,000 pages of pork and chicanery
approved, unread, by Bush's rubber-stamp Republicans and that wiggly bit
of protoplasm known laughingly as the "Democratic opposition" - Bush
stripped the nation's wild horses of long-standing legal protections
against being sold off, slaughtered and shipped overseas for meat. The
Bush plan, spearheaded by Montana Senator Conrad Burns - longtime bagman
for Big Cattle interests - sets a production goal of up to 20,000 wild
horse corpses in the coming year, The Associated Press reports.
Why must these magnificent beasts be massacred, after decades of
bipartisan protection? If they could speak, no doubt they'd look at the
state terrorists of the Bush Regime and say: "They hate us for our
freedom." And certainly, anyone cramped within the narrow confines of a
harsh, blinkered worldview would be offended, even unmanned, by the
sight of such splendid exemplars of liberty. First brought to America by
the Spanish conquistadors, these bold rebels broke free of their masters
and have roamed wild and unfettered for centuries. Their very existence
is a living reproach to crippled souls obsessed with conquest, control
and domination. So they must be destroyed.
It's a nice conceit - but the reality of the situation will hardly bear
such tragic grandeur and psychological angst. Like its mirror image, the
Iraq atrocity, Bush's horse caper is just a grubby little piece of
graft: His fat-cat pals want to get fatter, so they use the federal
government as a front for looting the public treasury. Meanwhile - as
with Iraq - Bush ladles out the BS to cover their tracks.
Here's how it works. The 50,000 remaining wild horses roam on federal
land - land held in common by the American people. Big-time ranchers
also use this land to graze millions of their privately owned cattle.
Able to buy and sell politicians like so much prime stock, the wealthy
ranchers have rigged a long-running sweetheart deal that gives them
access to this common pasturage at bargain prices: less than one-tenth
of the going market rate for private grazing land.
The result is an effective annual subsidy of more than $500 million to
some of the richest men in America, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
As always, your rootin', tootin' cowboy capitalists must be protected
from the risks of the "free market" at every turn - even as they impose
it, at gunpoint, on others.
But like all good Bushists, they want more. Why do they want more?
Simply because it's there, and they want it. Yes, our leaders and elites
are that witless. That's not to say they're stupid, of course. Given the
manifold imperfections of our still-evolving brainpans, it's possible to
be remarkably cunning in pursuing your basest desires while remaining
oblivious to their pointlessness and brutality - and to their origin in
the blind electrical firings of those primitive layers of the mind we
all share with the rat, the pig and the chicken.
So the ranchers want the horses off public land so they can cram more
cows in there and make more money through their sweetheart deals. The
resource at issue here is grass, not oil, but the principle is the same
as in Bush's witless, pig-layer adventure in Iraq: Me want, they got;
kill them, give me.
And as in Iraq, Bush's policy is swaddled with lies and fearmongering.
The ranchers say they must be given even more public subsidies, or else
the sacred right of all Americans to churn cheap beef through their
intestines twice a day might be lost - and that would mean the
terrorists win, right? Meanwhile, Bush says it costs too much to let all
the wild horses live out their natural lives. Yet the total cost of the
federal horse programs - $50 million annually - is a fraction of
ranchers' yearly gorging at the public trough. The tiniest increase in
grazing fees could cover the programs' costs for decades. Bush also
claims the horses are gobbling too much government grass; yet private
cattle on federal lands outnumber wild horses by 50-1. Indeed, past
government studies recommended reducing cattle numbers to save
deteriorating rangeland. Needless to say, the ranchers' prime stock in
Congress will never let that happen.
But although they may be witless, you can't say the Bushists don't have
a sense of humor when committing their depredations. For example, even
as they were consigning 20,000 wild horses to unnecessary slaughter last
week, they also declared a new "National Day of the Horse" - a yearly
celebration of the animal's "vital contribution" to American culture.
What yocks, eh? No doubt the dead horses will enjoy this great honor
just as much as the 100,000 slaughtered Iraqis enjoy their "liberation."
Copyright 2004 THE ST. PETERSBURG TIMES all rights reserved as
distributed by WorldSources, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 BY WORLDSOURCES, INC., A JOINT VENTURE OF FDCH e-Media,
INC. AND WORLD TIMES, INC. NO PORTION OF THE MATERIALS CONTAINED HEREIN
MAY BE USED IN ANY MEDIA WITHOUT ATTRIBUTION TO WORLDSOURCES, INC.
_____
Source: St. Petersburg Times, The (Russia), Dec 21, 2004
Item: 2W83925476334
It was a largely secret operation, its true intentions masked by pious
rhetoric and bogus warnings of imminent danger to the American way of
life. Having gained the dazed complicity of a somnolent Congress, U.S.
President George W. Bush calmly signed a death warrant for thousands
upon thousands of innocent victims: a native population whose land and
resources were coveted by a small group of powerful elites seeking to
augment their already vast dominance by any means necessary, including
mass slaughter.
A flashback to March 2003, when Bush finally brought his long- simmering
brew of aggressive war to the boil? Not at all - it happened earlier
this month. This time, however, the victims were not the Iraqi people,
but one of the last remaining symbols of pure freedom left in America
itself: the nation's herd of wild horses, galloping unbridled on the
people's common lands.
With an obscure provision smuggled without any hearings or public notice
into the gargantuan budget bill - 3,000 pages of pork and chicanery
approved, unread, by Bush's rubber-stamp Republicans and that wiggly bit
of protoplasm known laughingly as the "Democratic opposition" - Bush
stripped the nation's wild horses of long-standing legal protections
against being sold off, slaughtered and shipped overseas for meat. The
Bush plan, spearheaded by Montana Senator Conrad Burns - longtime bagman
for Big Cattle interests - sets a production goal of up to 20,000 wild
horse corpses in the coming year, The Associated Press reports.
Why must these magnificent beasts be massacred, after decades of
bipartisan protection? If they could speak, no doubt they'd look at the
state terrorists of the Bush Regime and say: "They hate us for our
freedom." And certainly, anyone cramped within the narrow confines of a
harsh, blinkered worldview would be offended, even unmanned, by the
sight of such splendid exemplars of liberty. First brought to America by
the Spanish conquistadors, these bold rebels broke free of their masters
and have roamed wild and unfettered for centuries. Their very existence
is a living reproach to crippled souls obsessed with conquest, control
and domination. So they must be destroyed.
It's a nice conceit - but the reality of the situation will hardly bear
such tragic grandeur and psychological angst. Like its mirror image, the
Iraq atrocity, Bush's horse caper is just a grubby little piece of
graft: His fat-cat pals want to get fatter, so they use the federal
government as a front for looting the public treasury. Meanwhile - as
with Iraq - Bush ladles out the BS to cover their tracks.
Here's how it works. The 50,000 remaining wild horses roam on federal
land - land held in common by the American people. Big-time ranchers
also use this land to graze millions of their privately owned cattle.
Able to buy and sell politicians like so much prime stock, the wealthy
ranchers have rigged a long-running sweetheart deal that gives them
access to this common pasturage at bargain prices: less than one-tenth
of the going market rate for private grazing land.
The result is an effective annual subsidy of more than $500 million to
some of the richest men in America, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
As always, your rootin', tootin' cowboy capitalists must be protected
from the risks of the "free market" at every turn - even as they impose
it, at gunpoint, on others.
But like all good Bushists, they want more. Why do they want more?
Simply because it's there, and they want it. Yes, our leaders and elites
are that witless. That's not to say they're stupid, of course. Given the
manifold imperfections of our still-evolving brainpans, it's possible to
be remarkably cunning in pursuing your basest desires while remaining
oblivious to their pointlessness and brutality - and to their origin in
the blind electrical firings of those primitive layers of the mind we
all share with the rat, the pig and the chicken.
So the ranchers want the horses off public land so they can cram more
cows in there and make more money through their sweetheart deals. The
resource at issue here is grass, not oil, but the principle is the same
as in Bush's witless, pig-layer adventure in Iraq: Me want, they got;
kill them, give me.
And as in Iraq, Bush's policy is swaddled with lies and fearmongering.
The ranchers say they must be given even more public subsidies, or else
the sacred right of all Americans to churn cheap beef through their
intestines twice a day might be lost - and that would mean the
terrorists win, right? Meanwhile, Bush says it costs too much to let all
the wild horses live out their natural lives. Yet the total cost of the
federal horse programs - $50 million annually - is a fraction of
ranchers' yearly gorging at the public trough. The tiniest increase in
grazing fees could cover the programs' costs for decades. Bush also
claims the horses are gobbling too much government grass; yet private
cattle on federal lands outnumber wild horses by 50-1. Indeed, past
government studies recommended reducing cattle numbers to save
deteriorating rangeland. Needless to say, the ranchers' prime stock in
Congress will never let that happen.
But although they may be witless, you can't say the Bushists don't have
a sense of humor when committing their depredations. For example, even
as they were consigning 20,000 wild horses to unnecessary slaughter last
week, they also declared a new "National Day of the Horse" - a yearly
celebration of the animal's "vital contribution" to American culture.
What yocks, eh? No doubt the dead horses will enjoy this great honor
just as much as the 100,000 slaughtered Iraqis enjoy their "liberation."
Copyright 2004 THE ST. PETERSBURG TIMES all rights reserved as
distributed by WorldSources, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 BY WORLDSOURCES, INC., A JOINT VENTURE OF FDCH e-Media,
INC. AND WORLD TIMES, INC. NO PORTION OF THE MATERIALS CONTAINED HEREIN
MAY BE USED IN ANY MEDIA WITHOUT ATTRIBUTION TO WORLDSOURCES, INC.
_____
Source: St. Petersburg Times, The (Russia), Dec 21, 2004
Item: 2W83925476334
