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Washington's Realities Illuminated and Exposed

"I've never heard anyone who has made this stuff as clear as you... It was like somebody
had just opened the windows and the light came pouring in."
Keith Morrison - host of CANADA AM, now with Dateline NBC

Mark Bruzonsky's (Bio) incisive columns and articles have appeared in major publicatons in 11 countries. He has lived in Washington for more than 25 years after getting his graduate degrees from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs and New York University Law School where he was a Root-Tilden Scholar. Having lived in Washington for so long Bruzonsky has a special grasp of how the political and legal systems intersect with the vast array of think-tanks, media organizations, lobbyists, and foreign representatives. Bruzonsky has appeared on NBC, BBC, CBC, FOX, C-Span, CTV, Court TV and many foreign media networks. Throughout the historic White House Middle East Peace signing ceremony with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat Bruzonsky provided the live commentary from Washington on the major CTV Canadian Television Network. To contact Mark Bruzonsky - Mark@Bruzonsky.com - 202 Number2 (202 686-2372)

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and
the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be
finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
New Orleans Times-Picayune Newspaper - 8 June 2004

NEW ORLEANS DESTROYED BECAUSE OF IRAQ: That's quite a leap many will be thinking; and
certainly don't expect the public officials, especially the Washington regime, to acknowledge the terrible errors
of their ways and the gross squandering and mismanagement of public resources. But the facts and the statistics
are there if people want to connect the dots.

Fully half of Americans now believe Bush purposefully lied to bring about the Iraq invasion/occupation.
57% believe the Iraq War was 'Not Worth It'. And 42% believe if the President lied about the war he should be impeached!

"The purpose of good journalism is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable" - I.F.Stone
Archives 2005: July August


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Fri - 2 Sept
- AMERICANS Taste the Real World
:
"National Disgrace" indeed! "Hell on Earth"...these the opening comments on the NBC Today Show this morning at 7am. Cruel as it may be to articulate, Americans are unexpectedly getting a taste, and in many ways it is only a small taste, of what has been going on in other parts of the world for some time -- from natural flooding disasters in Bangladesh to human-made disasters in Iraq and Chechnya and Palestine.

"...the vast majority poor, black and Angry... This city
now looks
more like Africa than America..."
- Matt Frei, BBC, in New Orleans

"This is not Iraq, this is not Somalia, this is Home."
-Martin Savage, NBC News

"Private Katrina has joined the global Jihad"
-Islamic website reported on MSNBC

And it is not being insensitive to the catastrophy of the moment to reflect that what has happened because of Hurricane Katrina
would be minor in comparison to the nuclear war that we have so far escaped or to Pandemic Flu which literally is threatening at the door or to decades in the future if the projections of Global Warming and Polar Icecap Meltdown prove to be accurate -- and we may well be already feeling the early effects. Nor should we overlook for now, even in the midst of the Gulf Coast catastrophy still unfolding, that there has been considerable faulty planning and resource allocation on the part of the U.S. government -- all of which has at the least considerably exacerbated today's crisis.

Thu - 1 Sept
- BUSH Keeps Covering-Up and Dissembling
:
On any normal day the fact that another thousand Iraqis got killed compliments of the American invasion/occupation -- this time just on one day -- or that for the first time in human history both Human and Chimp DNA had now been totally mapped out for comparison with untold possibilities from disease cures to future real human Frankensteins would have dominated the news. But today's new coverage is anything but normal with New Orleans and gas prices trumping all. Speaking about President Bush's 9-minute speech late yesterday after his little 'fly-over' of the hurricane devastation:

He also unleashed a torrent of facts and figures: "The Department of Transportation has provided more than 400 trucks to move 1,000 truckloads containing 5.4 million Meals Ready to Eat...13.4 million liters of water, 10,400 tarps, 3.4 million pounds of ice, 144 generators, 20 containers of pre-positioned disaster supplies, 135,000 blankets and 11,000 cots." It was as if by piling so many disparate numbers so high he might be able to block out the two most significant numbers of all: the number of National Guardsmen unable to help out in Louisiana and Mississippi because they are deployed in Iraq, and the tens of millions of hurricane and flood-control dollars that
never made it to Lake Pontchartrain because they had been diverted to Iraq.
- Orina Huffington, Huffington Post, 1 Sept

Oriana is right in concept, as usual, but way off when it comes to the numbers. We'e not talking about misallocation of 'tens of millions' when it comes to accounting for all that has been pumped into the Iraq war and overall into the blotted military-industrial complex machine -- thus diverted from real and basic homeland security issues including flood controls, disaster prevention and relief, alleviation of poverty, promotion of education, national healthcard. We're talking about tens of billions, and over some years in fact hundreds of billions. Americans are being everwhere now short-changed, mislead, lied to, and dupped by their leaders. And the real huge and historic price for such terrible misallocations and gross deception will only become evident in the years ahead...and now probably not that far ahead.

Thu - 1 Sept
- NEW ORLEANS DESTROYED BECAUSE OF IRAQ
:
That's quite a leap many will be thinking; and certainly don't expect the public officials, especially the Washington regime, to acknowledge the terrible errors of their ways and the gross squandering and mismanagement of public resources. But the facts and the statistics are there if people want to connect the dots.

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and
the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.
"
Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana
New Orleans Times-Picayune, 8 June 2004

With nearly $300 billion now having been spent to invade, occupy, and essentially destroy Iraq -- and with more money now flowing to the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex than even during the cold war -- the public sectors of America are being short-changed time and again, over and over, issue after issue.
If less than 1% of just the Iraq war costs had been allocated to New Orleans, a city which has been continually begging Washington for funds to improve the well-known inadequate levee systems that protected the city, the tremendous loss of life and the untold billions in property damage and nation-wide economic consequences now sufferenced could have been and should have been prevented.
But as I said don't expect the politicians to admit the terrible errors of their ways, the gross mismanagement of public resources, the abominable mistakes that have been made and lies they have been told. And don't expect the corporate mass media -- itself interwined with and largely dependent on the largess of the military-industrial-corporate complex -- to seriously and properly connect the dots either.
If and when the Pandemic Flu hits -- which top scientists have been warning for years is all but inevitable now -- and millions die with untold consequences for American society and international relations, it will be another case of having squandered hundreds of billions for the wrong things while the alternative allocation of those billions could have, should have, saved large numbers of lives and greatly strengthened the basic fabric and textue of American society.
In the Reagan years proper emergency funding could have significantly lessened the AIDs epidemic; but now an amazing 1 in 20 citizens in the national capital, in Washington D.C. itself, are infected with HIV! Decades from now others will look back and lament how the Americans wasted trillions of dollars on imperial adventures -- on war and destruction -- even as they criminally allowed global warming to become irreversible, the polar ice cap to melt leading to catastrophic new weather patterns, both world and national poverty to increase, the social infracture to crumble, political an social poliarization to reach unprecedented proportions, and, in all likelihood, a Pandemic Flu to ravage Americans and humanity in the year 20??.
Had such huge amounts of money and human energy been properly, thoughtfully, and honestly spent in preventive ways and for anticipatory preparations for what was known to be coming much of what has now happened, and much of what is likely to soon happen, could have and should have been prevented. In the future they will look back and lament how they could have made all the difference by choosing to focus their attention and spend their recourses and energies on other things; but they we did not...


Washington, modern-day Rome, has evolved since World War II into an amazingly hubristic, nationalistic, militaristic, and politically incestuous corporate town. The two parties that control the capital continually hand out considerable favors and financial rewards to themselves and partners -- dealing ostracism, vilification, and punishment to everyone else who won't sing the same jingoistic tunes. When it comes to foreign policy issues the two parties can now be considered in reality a fairly unified Imperial Party pursuing with crusading zealotry a worldwide Manifest Destiny-inspired ideology. BlogWashington's daunting task is to dissect, unravel, and indeed just plain explain to non-Washingtonians crucial bits and pieces of what's really going on this world capital -- realities you certainly will not find dealt with candidly and honestly by the big corporate newspapers or commercial Television Networks.

Mark A. Bruzonsky
NYU Law School - JD, Root-Tilden Scholar /
Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, Princeton Univ - MPA

Past Associations:
Washington Rep World Jewish Congress / Ed Worldview Magazine (New York) / Ed Middle East Magazine (London)
Middle East Consultant - Woodrow Wilson Inter Center for Scholars Smithsonian., National Geographic, Congressional Quarterly
Full bio and publication list Mark@Bruzonsky.com 202 Number2 (202 686-2372)



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