Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans-Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild Reviews

There’s a spiffy, hip kind of feel to this nouveau Wobblie update on how George W. Bush and his craven cronies and currish corporate sponsors are trying to turn America into a kind of gargantuan banana republic. Even if half of world-renowned journalist Greg Palast’s indictment is even fifty percent correct, Momma, pack the kids and the dog and my old guitar: this country is going to hell.

I’ve got a friend or two who have actually left the good old US of A for places like Panama and Canada, not so much out of fear of a neo-fascist takeover, but out of pure disgust, the kind of disgust that can only be bought with stolen elections and massive redistributions of the nation’s wealth from the poor and the middle classes to the conspicuously rich.

Before reading this I couldn’t believe that the Democrats were so incompetent and so stupid as to allow the Republicans to steal two national elections. Now I wonder if it matters whether they can prevent a third. Probably Hillary will win, but after four years of her, the power structure will have had enough and it’ll be the reincarnation of some cardboard flunky like Reagan or some idiot like the present occupant who will be installed in power and who will again rob the treasury, sell off the public lands and start a war for ExxonMobil and kill a gook for God.

People like Cheney and Rumsfeld will probably be dead or deathlike, writing their mendacious memoirs, but there’ll be others from the think tanks and the corporate world to look out for the interests of the ruling class. And, yes, the rich will get richer and the poor poorer and there’s nothing new under the sun–although this “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” once seemed so.

Goodbye yellow brick road. Welcome to the armed madhouse!

The problem with America, with this democracy by capitalism, is that it isn’t what it once was. We used to be the greatest country on earth. But sometime around the time that Kennedy got shot we began to change. We won the Cold War but it ruined us morally. With our idealism and sense of fair play compromised by our need to stem the tide of the red menace, we became, step by step, like every other country in the history of the world, hopelessly corrupt.

Clearly, if Palast is to be believed, we are corrupt, right down to the very core of our being. When elections are stolen in a democracy, it is no longer a democracy. When a powerful nation invades another country to control the supply of oil (as Palast charges) under false pretexts, it is no different than Iraq invading Kuwait or Germany invading Poland.

When a country allows profiteers to poison and despoil the land and the people (as Palast charges) that country is no better than the robber barons of old or the dictators of South America and Africa. When the president steals from the middle class to feed the gluttonous, the middle class will eventually dry up and die and we will have the wealth distribution pyramid of a banana republic.

Obviously this book will delight and entertain those on the left. Palast is a gifted writer as well as a tenacious researcher who serves well as a pied piper to those about to be disenfranchised. (People on the right will send him death threats.) I suggest you read this book regardless of how you feel about what is happening in America today and who’s responsible. If nothing else, reading Palast’s prose is an education in how to express yourself with verve, gumption, and the employment of le mot juste. Here’s an example from pages 262-263. Noting that 59 million Americans actually cast votes for George W. Bush in 2004 (regardless of whether he really won or not), Palast writes:

What we witnessed on November 2, 2004, was a 59 million strong army of pinheads on parade ready to gamble away their pensions so long as George Bush makes sure that boys kill each other, not kiss; who feel right proud that our uniformed services can kick some scrawny brown people in the ass in some far-off place when we’re mad and can’t find Osama; who can’t bring themselves to vote for a guy with a snooty Boston accent who’s never been to a NASCAR tractor pull and who certainly thinks anyone who does [sic] is a low-Q [sic] beer-burping blockhead.

Palast adds, “Nitwits who think Ollie North’s a hero not a conman, who can’t name their congressman, who believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were going steady, who can’t tell Afghanistan from a souvlaki stand and, bloated with lies and super size fries, clomped to the polls 59 million strong to vent their small-minded hatreds on us all.”

He sums that up with, “I fear the election was an intelligence test that America failed.”

It is said that domesticated animals are not as smart as the wild kind. It is put forward that humans were smarter in, say, 30,000 BCE than we are now. Some call it "devolution." We are domesticated animals: we and the massage of TV and fast foods and soft couches, and the pounding rhythms of the ads relentlessly aimed at us, have domesticated ourselves. Nowhere in the world is this truer than in America. Alas.

If you are concerned with America, our way of life, our political process, and there is only one book you can read this year, I recommend you make it this one. Using creative colloqualisms that may annoy or amuse you, you cannot get away from the author’s facts, statistics, leaked documents and information that prove why we really went into Iraq, how your vote was stolen or not counted, and how you are producing more today and earning less, and how your rights and security are being taken away from you.

In five long chapters, Palast covers a wide range of topics. I began highlighting important portions of the book for this review. In short order there was too much highlighted text to add here.

But it’s Chapters 4 and 5 that will really scare the hell out of me because I realize that even if all of us vote, it is not enough. Palast shows:

*how the republican machine kept minorities from voting in 2000, 2004 and will keep them from voting in 2008.

* with statistical evidence how voting machines were too few in minority communities or too far away. Either the lines were too long or the trip back and forth was.

* that Kerry’s name didn’t even show on the ballot in some places.

* statistical anomalies where Black, Hispanic and American Indian votes where not even counted, or their machines didn’t even register a vote for president. In white neighborhoods, such anomalies were almost nonexistent.

* how provisional and absentee ballots were simply discarded, or mailed to the voters too late to be returned and counted.

* how voting machine error and evidence were destroyed even after there were calls for an investigation that secretaries of states ignored.

* how voter reform is nothing but a blatent attempt to perpetuate this fraud rather than fix it e.g. In New Mexico anyone now challenging a vote must put up a ,000,000 bond first!

* how the Republicans still managed to list thousands of law-abiding, registered voters from voting because they were on felon lists (even in Ohio) where there is no law against that.

* how republicans are clamoring for national ID cards (poll tax)costing , which will require that you to produce an ID to get the ID! Palast muses how many people are going to risk jail voting twice when you can barely get many of them to vote even once, or how many felons will risk going back to the jail just so they can vote. (In many states, they may.)

Palast got wind of some of these vote-destroying practices before the election and published and broadcast them to British and European audiences where they received wide attention, everywhere except the US of A. Now that our networks are owned by conglomerate businesses, the chances of receiving such news is nil.

Over three million votes tossed, unrecorded, thrown out, or people kept from voting, and the democrats did nothing! Even I thought more people had voted for Bush, but with Mr. Palast’s evidence, Kerry won.

His last chapter is equally disturbing. Americans are producing more, yet taking home less. Power deregulation and higher gas prices have replaced the increased taxes we were not going to have. Both industries have forced black-outs or profit gouging. Companies have reneged on their pension and health care contracts while maintaining those for management. We are now making less wages than we did when Lyndon Johnson was president. Our Department of LABOR actually shows businesses (in public registers) how they can avoid paying overtime to their workers by making them hourly wage earners or simply calling them managers. That’s our US Department of Labor!

This book is too important to ignore. This book tells you that you cannot ignore politics simply because you don’t trust politicians. They are sapping our earning power, our quality of life, and our rights. The only constituents they have are the ones with the deepest pockets. This book should stir you into action, to make sure “voter reform” does not take your vote away, to ensure that there are voting machines that give you a printed receipt, that secretaries of state do not have conflicts of interest with voting machine companies or work for a presidential campaign at the same time they are counting votes.

This book reminds me a little too much of “Animal Farm.” I see the 59,000,000 people who voted for Bush as being the same as the character Thumper, the horse that works hard, looking for his reward in the end. Thinking he is going to the hospital, Thumper is sent off to the glue factory by Napoleon (guess who?)when he is too sick to produce anymore. If you actually believe that this administration or congress actually cares about Americans over business interests, than you really need to read this book.

We could take a page from Equador, Palast insists. They knew their election was rigged. They struck, and took to the streets, and chased the usurper out of the country. We might have to do the same if we don't want to end up in the glue factory.

If you don't believe it, ask the pilots of United Airlines when the company managers reneged on honoring their pensions but kept their own.

Happy Independence Day!