An Iceberg Named Mendacity

He cheated in order to avoid the Vietnam war, he cheated in order to be President, he lied about Iraq, he started a bloody war that already killed 1363 american soldiers, allowing his friends and members of his own family or political staff to actually make money out of it... And now, George W. Bush wants to dismantle his country's social security system. "We are heading to an iceberg", he says.

We had the same speech from our government in France, about our retirement system, that it wants so badly to privatize. It must be said that never ever did privatization allowed a former public system to improve itself. Things only get worse : prices are up - you can never know for sure what you're going to pay in the end -, and customer services are down. There are so many examples of privatization actually leading to a formerly non-existing iceberg. So far, we won. Our governement doesn't dare to do anything in that area. So far.

It's hard to understand how a whole nation can decide to freely give so much money - billions of dollars - to companies like Lockheed Martin (and the whole "defense" sector) for "protection", thus ending up with the higher budget deficit ever, and at the same time come to the conclusion that it's unworthy to go on spending so much money on its social security system, because it would aggravate the budget deficit. This doesn't make any sense. Isn't Iraq an iceberg ? Isn't Bush's foreign policy leading to an iceberg ? Even the CIA says so. And you've seen Titanic, right ? You know what happens when the boat starts to sink. If you want to be saved, you need to have a first class ticket.

I was thinking about all that this afternoon when I saw that beautiful movie, A cat on a hot tin roof, starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. As one of the main characters, Big Daddy, puts it, mendacity is indeed the system in which men live.

See you soon ! Goodbye America !