This or that sop may be thrown to the suckers who voted for the most conservative of possible Democratic candidates

VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: Real measures of how US politics really work comes first with the confirmation by the US Senate of Tim Geithner to be Secretary of the Treasury. This bizarre crook won approval in this upper body of the Congress in despite of his delinquency in the payment of his income and capital gains taxes.

This same process pertains in the similar approval of another official to become Deputy US Secretary of Defense, William Lynn, this in despite of his active and on-going role as lobbyist for the Raytheon Corporation -- that is bagman, what we call in the USA a corporate functionary whose task is to pass out bribes to public officials -- for the Raytheon Corporation, a prime stakeholder in the defense budget.

In our massively corrupted system of governance we are not even to pretend to honesty: Two areas are beyond the borders of the normal ethical constraints enforced upon appointees to high office here. The one being the piquantly misnamed US Defense Department and its contractors and the other anything to do with enforcement of law or the infliction of regulations on large financial corporations.

This or that sop may be thrown to the suckers who voted for the most conservative of possible Democratic candidates in the late elections. But we may all be certain that when it comes to real money it will remain business as usual in Washington.

Meanwhile the Congress have voted the second tranche of about US$350 billion in pork for the big banks. This in utter despite of the interesting statistic that shows them sitting on near $750 billion in inactive cash reserves. Half of it the bulk of the proceeds of the first tranche of bailout monies.

The fact is that the US working population are in debt to the tune of about $47 trillion and can never pay it off. A long threatened national bankruptcy which has been building since at least the Vietnam War days, and has been made all the worse for forty years of stopgap expediencies, is now unavoidable.

Perhaps in the dead of night, lying sleepless in their beds, our politicians can perceive this frightening and dreadful spectre. But not a single one can publicly go even as far as William Greider in the Nation Magazine. And other real economists, such as James Howard Kunstler or even Joseph Stiglitz are still resolutely ignored by our somnolent mainstream. For some time yet the theories of corporate globalization and neo-liberalism will remain unchallenged in official Washington.

And so much the better ... in the event that matters could be somewhat amended all that could be accomplished would be to make the land of the fascist and the home of the militarist able for a bit longer to squander the world's wealth on its imperial fantasies.

From the imperial capital

Chris Herz
chris.herz@vheadline.com