American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have
descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt
liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond
coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the
dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault
on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of
increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and
rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas.
It is a recipe for fascism.
More than half of those
identified in a poll by the
Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports as "mainstream
Americans" now view the tea party favorably. The other half,
still grounded in a reality-based world, is passive and
apathetic. The liberal class wastes its energy imploring
Barack Obama and the Democrats to promote sane measures
including job creation programs, regulation as well as
criminal proceedings against the financial industry, and an
end to our permanent war economy. Those who view the tea party
favorably want to tear the governmental edifice down, with the
odd exception of the military and the security state,
accelerating our plunge into a nation of masters and serfs.
The corporate state, unchallenged, continues to turn
everything, including human beings and the natural world, into
commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.
All sides of the political equation are lackeys for Wall
Street. They sanction, through continued deregulation, massive
corporate profits and the obscene compensation and bonuses for
corporate managers. Most of that money-hundreds of billions of
dollars-is funneled upward from the U.S. Treasury. The Sarah
Palins and the Glenn Becks use hatred as a mobilizing passion
to get the masses, fearful and angry, to call for their own
enslavement as well as to deny uncomfortable truths, including
global warming. Our dispossessed working class and beleaguered
middle class are vulnerable to this manipulation because they
can no longer bear the chaos and uncertainty that come with
impoverishment, hopelessness and loss of control. They have
retreated into a world of illusion, one peddled by right-wing
demagogues, which offers a reassuring emotional consistency.
This consistency appears to protect them from the turmoil in
which they have been forced to live. The propaganda of a Palin
or a Beck may insult common sense, but, for a growing number
of Americans, common sense has lost its validity.
The liberal class, which remains rooted in a world of fact,
rationalizes placating corporate power as the only practical
response. It understands the systems of corporate power. It
knows the limitations and parameters. And it works within
them. The result, however, is the same. The entire spectrum of
the political landscape collaborates in the strangulation of
our disenfranchised working class, the eroding of state power,
the criminal activity of the financial class and the paralysis
of our political process.
Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This
utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the
liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a
chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the
disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing
capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once
protected and educated the working and middle class. It has
obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies
should be configured around the common good. All social and
cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the
marketplace.
The failure to question the utopian assumptions of
globalization has left us in an intellectual vacuum.
Regulations, which we have dismantled, were the bulwarks that
prevented unobstructed brutality and pillaging by the powerful
and protected democracy. It was a heavily regulated economy,
as well as labor unions and robust liberal institutions, which
made the American working class the envy of the industrialized
world. And it was the loss of those unions, along with a
failure to protect our manufacturing, which transformed this
working class into a permanent underclass clinging to
part-time or poorly paid jobs without protection or benefits.
The "inevitability" of globalization has permitted huge
pockets of the country to be abandoned economically. It has
left tens of millions of Americans in economic ruin. Private
charity is now supposed to feed and house the newly minted
poor, a job that once, the old liberal class argued, belonged
to the government. As
John Ralston Saul in "The Collapse of Globalization"
points out, "the role of charity should be to fill the cracks
of society, the imaginative edges, to go where the public good
hasn't yet focused or can't. Dealing with poverty is the basic
responsibility of the state." But the state no longer has the
interest or the resources to protect us. And the next target
slated for elimination is Social Security.
That human society has an ethical foundation that must be
maintained by citizens and the state is an anathema to utopian
ideologues of all shades. They always demand that we sacrifice
human beings for a distant goal. The propagandists of
globalization-from Lawrence Summers to Francis Fukuyama to
Thomas Friedman-do for globalization and the free market what
Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky did for Marxism. They sell us
a dream. These elite interpreters of globalism are the
vanguard, the elect, the prophets, who alone grasp a great
absolute truth and have the right to impose this truth on a
captive people no matter what the cost. Human suffering is
dismissed as the price to be paid for the coming paradise. The
response of these propagandists to the death rattles around
them is to continue to speak in globalization's empty rhetoric
and use state resources to service a dead system. They lack
the vision to offer any alternative. They can function only as
systems managers. They will hollow out the state to sustain a
casino capitalism that is doomed to fail. And what they offer
as a solution is as irrational as the visions of a Christian
America harbored by many within the tea party.
We are ruled by huge corporate monopolies that replicate
the political and economic power, on a vastly expanded scale,
of the old trading companies of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Wal-Mart's gross annual revenues of $250 billion are greater
than those of most small nation-states. The political theater
funded by the corporate state is composed of hypocritical and
impotent liberals, the traditional moneyed elite, and a
disenfranchised and angry underclass that is being encouraged
to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the
government that once protected them. The tea party rabble, to
placate their anger, will also be encouraged by their puppet
masters to attack helpless minorities, from immigrants to
Muslims to homosexuals. All these political courtiers,
however, serve the interests of the corporate state and the
utopian ideology of globalism. Our social and political ethic
can be summed up in the mantra let the market decide. Greed
is good.
The old left-the Wobblies, the Congress of Industrial
Workers (CIO), the Socialist and Communist parties, the
fiercely independent publications such as Appeal to Reason and
The Masses-would have known what to do with the rage of our
dispossessed. It used anger at injustice, corporate greed and
state repression to mobilize Americans to terrify the power
elite on the eve of World War I. This was the time when
socialism was not a dirty word in America but a promise
embraced by millions who hoped to create a world where
everyone would have a chance. The steady destruction of the
movements of the left was carefully orchestrated. They fell
victim to a mixture of sophisticated forms of government and
corporate propaganda, especially during the witch hunts for
communists, and overt repression. Their disappearance means we
lack the vocabulary of class warfare and the militant
organizations, including an independent press, with which to
fight back.
We believe, like the Spaniards in the 16th century who
pillaged Latin America for gold and silver, that money,
usually the product of making and trading goods, is real. The
Spanish empire, once the money ran out and it no longer
produced anything worth buying, went up in smoke. Today's use
in the United States of some $12 trillion in government funds
to refinance our class of speculators is a similar form of
self-deception. Money markets are still treated, despite the
collapse of the global economy, as a legitimate source of
trade and wealth creation. The destructive power of financial
bubbles, as well as the danger of an unchecked elite, was
discovered in ancient Athens and detailed more than a century
ago in Emile Zola's
novel "Money." But we seem determined to find out this
self-destructive force for ourselves. And when the second
collapse comes, as come it must, we will revisit wrenching
economic and political tragedies forgotten in the mists of
history.
© 2010 TruthDig.com