In 1949, George Orwell penned his timeless and prophetic novel 1984. The novel is truly a must read and a classic that has left an indelible mark on American culture, so much so that terms from or related to the novel such as, Big Brother, Thought Police, and Orwellian are now a part of the national vocabulary. The story revolves around the life of a minor functionary named Winston Smith and his attempt to rebel against, the totalitarian regime in the country/nation of Oceania where he lives. Winston Smith’s journey is a hellish trip through a world ruled by perpetually warring states and a power structure that controls not only information, but individual thoughts and memory – sort of an “Anti-Utopia”. I don’t want to run down the Cliff Notes version of the book (you’ll have to read it for yourself) but in Oceania the government was divided into four main divisions called ministries.

The Ministry of Peace concerned itself with waging war. The Ministry of Love maintained law and order. The Ministry of Plenty was responsible for economic affairs. And finally The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with news, entertainment, educations, the fine arts, and was in the business of telling lies about all of these areas. Through the Ministry of Truth the ideas and thoughts of all the citizens of Oceania were tightly controlled and managed, and when a historical fact became uncomfortable or inconvenient it was simply dropped down “the memory hole” and erased from all written visual, and oral histories, as if it never happened. As Oceania’s ruling party slogan went in the book, “who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past”. The official language of Oceania was called Newspeak, which was an ever-changing language that was based on the tight control and butchery of regular English grammar, which caused statements to often mean the opposite or something significantly different, than whatever the observed reality was. After watching President “Select” Bush’s, January 28^th, State of the Union Address I couldn’t help but think about how profound 1984 was then, and how profound it still is now.

Listening to Bush address the country was one of the most bizarre, frustrating, disturbing, and somehow amusing (sometimes we must laugh to keep from crying) experiences of my life. Possibly the only thing more unnerving than Bush’s address was watching the reaction of the audience in attendance, which was made up of Democrats and Republicans alike. Watching and listening to this partisan group give standing ovations, seemingly after every Bush sentence, made my skin crawl. It was like watching a secret meeting of vampires, discussing their plans for the conquest of earth. I kept waiting for Blade to lower himself in from the roof, and go to work. It was almost as if Bush had really created a new language where almost everything he said meant the opposite of what was stated, perhaps we should call it Bushspeak.

For those who missed the address, here are some samples of this new and exciting language in action.

In just 2 years in office the Bush administration has compiled one of the worst environmental records of any administration in recent memory. For the most part this has been done not through new laws, but through rollback and non-enforcement of existing legislation, and the appointment of former officers and executives from industries and companies who play major parts in degrading the environment, to powerful positions in his administration. One of Bush’s first major environmental actions was to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change (global warming). Until recently this administration was denying the existence or global warming (climate change), until eventually admitting it was real and then more or less concluding – “oh well, too late now, nothing we can do about! May as well continue what we’ve been doing”. The Bush administration's Enron crafted “energy plan”, for example, doesn’t even mention the words "climate change," even though it heavily emphasizes fossil-fuel development which is expected to boost US greenhouse-gas emissions between 14 and 38 percent by 2007.

When it’s not the obvious assaults on the environment, it is the little things that slip under the radar like making environmental impact assessments in the national forests optional, excusing the country's heaviest polluting power plants from upgrading their pollution controls, stripping protection from 20 million acres of wetlands, resisting meaningful increases in vehicle fuel efficiency standards, or recycling nuclear waste within consumer goods (This last one so far remains only a proposal).

What Bush refers to as “Clear Skies legislation” and a “Healthy Forest Initiative” is in reality a green light for increased logging (cutting down) of forest and lower pollution standards for power plants and other major polluters. Bush stated in his State of the Union address - “the greatest environmental progress will come about, not through endless lawsuits or command and control regulations, but through technology and innovation” – in other words allow industries, who have a financial interest in doing as little as possible to limit pollution, regulate themselves and they will do the right thing. This must be the thinking behind the Bush administration’s rollback of the Clean Air Act's so-called New Source Review provision. Approximately 75 percent of all power-plant emissions in the United States come from facilities built before 1977, which pollute four to ten times as much as plants with modern pollution controls. The Clean Air Act has long required companies to install modern pollution controls if they expand capacity at older plants. The companies complained that this requirement discouraged modernization and thereby prevented them from cutting pollution. The Administration has endorsed this logic with its new rules, which make pollution upgrades largely voluntary.

Meanwhile across town, tell the paper and logging industry to get out their chain saws, it’s time to make American forest “healthy”. Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative would increase commercial logging in National forest and eliminate environmental regulations that allow public participation in logging decisions on public lands. The mood was set for this misleading legislation by this past summer’s fire season and its misrepresentation in the mainstream media. While every other headline seemed to be about an out of control forest fire, during the summer of 2002, one basic but rarely stated fact is that fire is a natural and necessary part of most forest ecosystems in the Western U.S.. Not only have Western forest evolved with fire, they need fire to clean out underbrush and maintain biological diversity.

National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), the agency responsible for coordinating wildland firefighting activities throughout the country reports that 7 to 8 times as many acres burned each year between 1919 and 1949, as currently burn in a typical year. According to ecologist Peter Morrison, executive director of the Pacific Biodiversity Institute, a Washington (State, not D.C.) based environmental research group -  “fires burning in the Western forests in the summertime are just as natural as snow falling in the winter”. Morrison also says allowing logging will intensify forest fire severity since loggers remove the biggest, most fire resistant trees, opening the forest canopy and encouraging the growth of underbrush which is often fuel for these fires. Logging also gives easier access to people who can enter the forest and – by accident or intentionally – start fires. Furthermore, perhaps forest fires would not be so dangerous or costly to taxpayers if large numbers of people would stop moving to fire prone rural areas, often referred to as “red zones”, that often lack zoning restrictions and building codes, where they often build – in an act of sheer genius – highly flammable wooden houses!

Bush wasn’t lying when he said he wanted to “protect our environment in ways that generations before us could not have imagined”. But what else should one expect when we appoint Sylvester to baby sit Tweety-Bird. The Bush administration has made standard practice of appointing former corporate executives and to oversee federal agencies often in industries where they have ties. A few brief examples include appointing:

• Gale Norton - Interior Secretary. Secretary Norton was a lead attorney for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, an anti-environmental nonprofit law firm that has been described as the “litigating arm of the Wise Use movement.” The Wise Use movement is a loosely knit network of anti-environmental organizations that seeks to roll back or weaken laws that protect wildlife, habitat, and public lands, as well as health and safety standards for our water, food, and air.
• Steven Griles - Deputy Interior Secretary. During two years of government service, Griles has continued to be paid $284,000 a year by his former lobby firm, National Environmental Strategies, where he represented mining companies.
• Mark Rey - Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment. Rey spent nearly twenty years (1976-1994) in the employ of various “big timber” trade associations and organizations, including the National Forest Products Association, the American Paper Institute, and the American Forest Resources Alliance. He also served as vice president of forest resources for the American Forest & Paper Association, the country’s leading advocate for logging in our national forests.
• Bennet William Raley - Assistant Secretary, Water and Science. Raley has been a member of the Defenders of Property Rights Attorney Network (DPR), a Washington-based legal foundation dedicated entirely to property rights matters. DPR's primary goal has been to promote "takings" laws, which threaten to make environmental laws and regulations prohibitively expensive by requiring payments to private landowners and others who might be affected by regulations. Also a member of the Board of Litigation at Mountain States Legal Foundation.

These are but a few examples, but the list goes on and on (see the Paybacks report at www.earthjustice.org or www.publiccampaign.org.

According to George Bush Jr., ”Jobs are created when the economy grows; the economy grows when Americans have more money to spend and invest; and the best and fairest way to make sure Americans have that money is not to tax it away in the first place”. If you want to know which “Americans” Bush is talking about you may have to go read the Nightly News Dictionary, but here’s a hint, they aren’t your average kind who can’t afford to miss a few paychecks. Bush talks about poverty, his solution cut taxes for the wealthy, it’s like Ronald Reagon-omics, the remix. Bush also called on Congress to make permanent the $1.35 trillion in tax cuts enacted in 2001, now scheduled to expire in 2010, which would include permanent abolition of the estate tax, which affects only those who inherit estates of $1 million or more. His most recently announced tax cut plan is another obvious plot to plunder the federal treasury, and consequently much of the America’s social infrastructure for the non-wealthy. Almost all of the $664 billion in tax cuts go to the top income brackets, while working class families, the poor, and the unemployed, will receive little or nothing.

The focal point of Bush’s program is the ending of all taxation of corporate dividends, which will go almost entirely to those who receive dividends as direct income, disproportionately the rich. The ending of dividend taxation will have no effect on 401(k) accounts, because dividends paid to these retirement accounts are already non-taxable. Approximately half of the $364 billion will go to the top one percent of Americans, those with incomes of $350,000 a year or more. Some 65 percent will go to the top ten percent. The bottom 80 percent of the population, in income terms, gets less than 10 percent of the tax break. According to the calculations of the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group, people with incomes over $316,895 will save an average of $13,243 on their taxes. People earning $21,350 will save an average of $47. Bush claimed that 92 million taxpayers would benefit from the tax cuts and receive an average reduction of $1,083. Sounds good doesn’t it, well we all know what they say about things that sound to good to be true? A closer look at this $1,083 figure shows it combines the big money going to the millionaires with the spare change going to the vast majority of working people. If one millionaire gets $45,000 and 40 regular workers get $50 apiece, the “average” of their combined tax breaks is very close to $1,083. All of this is course while Bush is in the process of sending a budget to Congress that includes, record deficits of hundreds of Billions of dollars for the foreseeable future and an increase in military spending to near $500 billion a year.

Just as tax cuts for the rich are measures to fight poverty in Bushspeak, gutting government programs that help people pay for their medical expenses is the way to deal with America’s health care crisis. For the young and infirm, more than 40 million people are insured through Medicaid and more than 55 percent of them are in some type of managed care. So don’t pay any attention to the Bush administration’s ruling that managed care organizations can limit and restrict coverage of emergency services for poor people on Medicaid. Administration officials recently decided that the new policy was consistent with President Bush's desire to give states “greater flexibility” in the operation of their Medicaid programs. We don’t need a “Nationalized health care system” that covers everyone, what we need is for everyone to have better “private insurance” which will probably be tied to their non-existent jobs.

In Bushspeak, handouts and sweetheart deals for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, as well as shielding hospital chains and HMOs from serious liability, will give everybody access to medical care. Take for instance the Administration’s medical malpractice reform plan, also known as tort reform. Under Bush’s plan compensation for "pain and suffering" would be limited to $250,000, out of which the plaintiff (person filing the suit) would also have to pay their lawyer. By the industry friendly reasoning of “tort reform”, the sum of a person's life is derived from economic activity - wages and bills - while the devastating loss of happiness and fulfillment is worth practically nothing. Take for example the case of Linda Mcdougal.

In May 2002, McDougal was diagnosed with breast cancer. A biopsy revealed a malignancy so advanced that doctors told her, that her only hope for survival was a double mastectomy (breast removeal), followed by chemotherapy and radiation. Two days after the surgery, however, McDougal's doctor delivered the horrible news - she didn't have cancer after all. The laboratory had mixed up the tissue samples, giving McDougal another woman's results (oops - our bad). Two physicians had failed to check her name against the test records before scheduling the operation. Her two healthy breasts had been amputated because of a pathologist's mistake.

Under the Bush plan, McDougal's ability to sue for malpractice would be drastically limited, mainly to her “economic losses”. In this case, that means she would not have to pay for the needless mastectomies or the lab work. She would be reimbursed for reconstructive surgery. She would receive wages (if any) lost during recovery. And she would be entitled to a lifetime supply of prosthetic brassieres (no, I’m not talking about silicon implants). Linda McDougal was 46 years old, but just imagine if she had been a younger woman, yet to bear children? In that case, her “economic losses” which is a maximum of $250,000 would also include the anticipated cost of infant formula. I don’t know if any amount will cover her pain, but $250 thousand dollars is certainly not going to pay for a lifetime of disfigurement, discomfort, and inescapable emotional and mental anguish.

Of course, the medical malpractice system is not perfect – no system is. Yes there are too many frivolous lawsuits, and juries do occasionally get carried away, and award excessive judgments, but those judgments rarely ever get paid at the original award rate and more importantly this plan is NOT the way to address it. While many believe that it’s easy for a plaintiff’s attorney to get over on a jury, the truth is that defendants actually win about two-thirds of malpractice cases. Furthermore, while this plan may cap damage it does very little to address frivolous cases, which are usually suits aimed at extracting quick, relatively cheap settlements. Instead, the caps will penalize the most severely injured patients, since they are the ones most likely to win large verdicts at trial.

While you’re thinking about Ms. McDougal’s situation, please keep in mind this is in addition to the near blanket immunity already provided to many pharmaceutical companies who manufacture vaccines for diseases such as small pox and anthrax, under the Department of Homeland Security. That’s right, people if you get sick and/or die from one of those forced vaccinations allowed under the Homeland Security Act, you and/or your family have virtually no legal recourse. Clauses in the new department of Homeland Security legislation grant liability protection to corporations, which are currently involved in class action lawsuits regarding the safety of their products. For instance, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co., benefits greatly from this provision. Eli Lilly and several other pharmaceuticals have been served a class action lawsuit by a group of parents contending that Thimerasol, an additive in vaccines provided by these corporations, led to autism in their children.

Furthermore, Department of Homeland Security legislation adds loopholes, that prevents the government from releasing any information that a corporation says could involve "vulnerabilities". Company's can shield their illicit activity (say illegally dumping poisons in a river or releasing toxins into the air, etc.) from the public. The loophole also prevents these “secrets” from being able to be used in civil lawsuits against the companies by the state, federal government or private citizens. I know, I know – you didn’t know about this, and you can’t believe it – well this is what President Select Bush is actually doing while he is at the podium speaking in his new language!

Meanwhile, the Bushspeak translation of all the talk about helping Africans with AIDs, is the U.S. blocking of global deals to provide cheap drugs to poor countries, after heavy lobbying by the White House on behalf of America’s pharmaceutical industry. Faced with serious opposition from almost all of the other 140 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. single-handedly prevented the relaxation of global patent laws, which keep drug prices beyond the reach of most developing countries dealing with the AIDs crisis. This is of course in addition to doing things like removing information about condoms, from health related U.S. government websites, publications, and promoting an unrealistic, abstinence only approach to fighting HIV infection.

While many at the White House hoped Bush’s speech would make the case for War against Iraq, in actuality all it did was repeat a laundry list of lies and alleged transgressions of the security council resolution by the Iraqi regime, many of which have already been refuted. Few of them are more noteworthy and telling than the unsubstantiated, and thus far, politically illogical allegations of Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, a movement whose Islamic fundamentalist hostility for secular nationalist movements like Hussein’s Ba’ath party in Iraq is well known. These are virtually the same allegations, that only weeks after the September 11^th attacks, and as recently as a few weeks ago, heads of the CIA and other intelligence agencies were dismissed as lacking evidence and implausible. Now as if by magic we are told that they are somehow true (“who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past”).

Then of course we had you’re usual “Bushspeakisms”, such as the aluminum tube story. It’s almost as if the entire Bush administration doesn’t read intelligence briefings, or the newspaper for that matter. The International Atomic agency had already refuted such allegations only a couple of days before his speech, citing that the tubes were not suitable for nuclear weapons and were already declared by the Iraqi regime. In addition Hans Blix, head of the inspection team had already addressed and discounted claims that; the inspectors had found that Iraqi officials were hiding and moving illicit materials within and outside of Iraq; that Iraq was sending weapons scientists to other countries to prevent them from being interviewed; that Iraqi agents were posing as scientists; that Blix’s inspection agency had been penetrated by Iraqi agents and that sensitive information might have been leaked to Baghdad; and that Iraq was building mobile germ-warfare laboratories.

We also had other misleading claims such as, that Iraq is blocking U-2 spy flights over its territory, when in actuality the UN refuses to conduct such flights as long as Iraq continues to fire anti-aircraft weapons at US and British warplanes, which repeatedly invade Iraqi airspace, enforcing the “no-fly” zones that were established by Washington, not by the UN Security Council. Then we have the claim that UN inspectors allege Iraq had “biological weapons material sufficient to produce” Anthrax, VX, Botulinum toxin, etc, in large quantities. However if you look closely at the language, notice that the allegation is not that Iraq either produced any those chemical or biological weapons or succeeded in weaponizing the anthrax it. Much of this “weapons material” is commonplace in facilities making vaccines, insecticides and other biological and chemical products for agriculture and industry. For example according to one CIA report, chlorine and phenol, are “raw materials for the synthesis of precursor chemicals used to produce blister and nerve agents”. Not to mention these two chemicals are also used in common disinfectants and in water treatment plants, vital for a modern society. In stating that “It is up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see and destroy them as directed” – Bush has gotten away with asserting that his very questionable allegations, that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction and is a threat to its neighbors – are true. Bush is essentially saying that Iraq must admit its guilt, in order to prove its innocence – oh, the wonders of Bushspeak!

In addition, with regard to Iraq’s past U.S. sanctioned possession and use biological and chemical weapons, they were mostly expended during the Iraq/Iran war, destroyed by US bombing during the Persian Gulf War, or seized by seized by previous UNSCOM inspections, and destroyed. For example, a UNSCOM paper from 1998, cited by former inspector Scott Ritter, declared: “Taking into consideration the conditions and the quality of CW-agents and munitions produced by Iraq at that time, there is no possibility of weapons remaining from the mid-1980s.” The same is true of biological toxins produced in the 1980s. Botulinum has a shelf life of about a year, while wet anthrax, the principal form produced by Iraq, has a relatively short lifespan as well.

Ironically in one of the Pentagon’s own studies on Gulf War illness (of course they were seeking to deny any blame in the various illnesses of Gulf War veterans), they downplayed the likelihood that Iraqi chemical and biological warfare stocks could have caused damage in 1991, much less 2003, noting that Iraqi production techniques were poor and the resulting toxins too diluted to be militarily effective. (see “Chemical Warfare Agent Issues During the Persian Gulf War,” Persian Gulf War Illnesses Task Force, April 2002)

Finally, we have the tired and ridiculous comparison of Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler. There is little question Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator with a long history of suppressing his citizens and violating human rights. Undoubtedly many people, myself include would like to see him no longer in power, but certainly not at this price, and not under false pretexts and imperialist intervention. Iraq is just one of many nations in need of “regime change” (this country could certainly use one). In modern times, in terms of foreign policy there hasn’t been a regime whose plans more closely resembled that of Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany, than the current Bush administration.

Speaking in “Bushspeak” we heard the president say things like “throughout the twentieth century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world”. He continued: “Now in this century, the ideology of power and domination has appeared again....Once again we are called to defend the safety of our people and the hopes of all mankind”. Silly me, I thought Iraq was a war ravaged, poor, and feeble nation whose leadership no longer even had control of its entire territory or sovereignty.  I thought the U.S. had by far the most powerful, deadly, and well-armed military in human history. I thought the U.S. was armed to the teeth, with smart bombs, chemical and biological weapons, enough nuclear weapons to make earth uninhabitable several times over; and threatening unprovoked nuclear first strikes against any nation it believed could be a threat in the future. Some kind of fool I am!

No Bushspeak speech is complete however, without talk of war. In what had to be one of the most bizarre and nauseating distortions or reality, ever uttered by the president of any nation, Bush told the Iraqi people: “And tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country. Your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.” This is of course as the Pentagon has leaked reports of the “shock and awe” strategy it plans to use in Iraq at the commencement of war. In the “shock and awe strategy” the American military plans to annihilate Iraq with 800 cruise missile strikes in the first 2 days, which in roughly 48-hours will likely include more explosive and destructive firepower than was used in the entire 1991 Gulf War offensive. This barbaric strategy is designed to destroy most facets of Iraqi civilization and life for all sections of the society, thus terrorizing and demoralizing the country’s population to the point it is believed they will be unable to resist in any fashion.

When Bush was not explaining the coming siege in Iraq, in terms that only someone speaking Bushspeak could use, he was doing his best Al Capone impersonation, as he described the American government’s success in executing alleged terrorists, Bush boasted, “Many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way, they are no longer a problem to the United States.”

In Bushspeak, America’s ruling elite “strive for peace” and - by laying waste to an entire nation, committing genocide against it’s population, and destabilizing the geopolitical situation of much of the world – they are in fact “defending the peace”  because you see, “war is being forced upon them”. So behold world, the hundreds of thousands of people you may soon see, being incinerated by American smart bombs, starving to death, or dying quietly, are in fact being “liberated”  in Bushspeak - and maybe they are, assuming death truly does “liberate” one from his/her body! Remember, “America is a strong nation and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest and sacrifice for the liberty of strangers” – so you see, this has nothing to do with oil or American hegemony. George Bush has spoken!

Released: February 2003

Suggested Websites and Links:

Text of January 28th State of the Union Address

An Alternative State of the Union Address (audio)

Shock and Awe Strategy Information:

http://www.dodccrp.org/shockch1.html

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil

CIA Weapons Report