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A Challenge to Corporate Feudalism?
"[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences." --Prof. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966
For the first time in more than four decades, a militant student movement is taking shape across the country. This movement is in direct response to the IMF-style "austerity measures" being waged against all American citizens in the form of new mandatory taxes and a range of government-imposed belt-tightening measures designed to restore "fiscal responsibility." Students are facing astronomical increases in tuition (32% in California's famed UC system), expanding class sizes, loss of vital programs in the arts, music, technical and physical education. 19,000 California public school teachers have received pink slips and 20,000 students will be turned away from community colleges next fall. Add in thousands more support staff facing layoffs, cutbacks, and shrunken benefit packages and you have a mass of angry students, educators, and workers.
Of course, nearly all Americans are feeling the pinch. Nationwide, 50 million people need to use food stamps to eat. 50 million have no health care, with 60% of bankruptcies resulting from medical emergencies. Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings and $13 trillion in the value of their homes since the latest economic crisis began. The real unemployment rate is over 20% with 30 million US citizens unemployed or underemployed. Deutsche Bank predicts that the number of ‘underwater' loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes by 2011. Every day 10,000 US homes enter into foreclosure. 60% of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck.
But it's the students who offer the best potential to make change happen. Unburdened by mortgages and families, young people have the least to lose and the most to gain by overcoming a trend that is turning the majority of U.S. citizens into modern day serfs. And it's students' newfound understanding of the linkage between neoliberal economics and the collapse of public education that may push the kind of change that Barack Obama never imagined in his wildest dreams.
As Will Parrish and Darwin Bond-Graham write in their latest column for Counterpunch titled "WE Make the University Crisis": "Something new is afoot here."
This new student movement, informed by both the successes and failures of movements past, has the potential to probe more deeply into the inherent flaws that plague the American system and thus to achieve more in the way of establishing something closer to real democracy. Young people are especially fed up with seeing public dollars line the pockets of the economic elites while education, and steady employment, increasingly become an unattainable dream. Those young people tenacious and fortunate enough to make it through the system leave school saddled with crushing debt and facing a job market that is dicey at best.
Even as students in large numbers begin to pick up their placards and march, occupy offices and blockade freeway ramps, the state's machinery of repression is oiled-up and ready to roll. A recent article in Harper's magazine titled "The Soft-Kill Solution" describes in grisly detail the expanding arsenal of non-lethal weapons being developed and tested for crowd control, mostly with government funding. The United States now hosts on its soil battle-hardened army brigades trained in places like Fallujah to deal with civil unrest. In a previous post to this site, we discussed HR 645, a bill to establish six command-and-control "emergency centers" under the direction of FEMA and located throughout the continental United States. We have also pointed to the series of single-bid contracts that the Army Corps of Engineers has entered into with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations. ("Rule by Fear or Rule by Law," Common Dreams, 2/4/08)
The latest bombshell is the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010" recently reported by Marc Ambinder on The Atlantic website. This bill, introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman this month, sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of "suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning."
McCain/Lieberman, which does not distinguish between U.S. persons-visa holders or citizens-and non-U.S. persons., appears to be a follow-up to California Rep. Jane Harman's Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act which ultimately failed in Sen. Susan Collins's Homeland Security Committee. Obama may have rebranded Bush's War on Terror as an "overseas contingency operation," but it's clear that the war continues both on foreign lands and right here at home. Those old enough to remember COINTELPRO and more recently, John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program won't be surprised at any of this.
McCain/Lieberman asks the President to determine criteria for designating an individual as a "high-value detainee" if he/she (1) poses a threat of an attack on civilians or civilian facilities with the U.S. or U.S. facilities abroad; (2) poses a threat to U.S. military personnel or U.S. military facilities; (3) has potential intelligence value; (4) is a member of al Qaeda or a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda; or (5) is deemed such based on "other matters the President considers appropriate." Determination of whether an individual is a "high-value detainee" is to be made by the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General after consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the CIA. As Ambinder glibly notes, "The President himself doesn't get to make the call."
A very noxious brew is being cooked up here. First, the elites, lurking in the shadows behind a neutered government, squeeze the vast majority of citizens, workers, and students, moving their jobs overseas, foreclosing on their homes, looting their savings, stealing their hopes and dreams. When they rebel, they are gassed, tased, shot with rubber bullets, and have their nervous systems attacked with high-tech non-lethal weaponry. If they persist in their protests, they will be jailed (according to a new report cited by David DeGraw on Alternet, "a new prison opens every week somewhere in America") without habeus corpus or rights to trial. They can then be detained indefinitely in camps. They can even be disappeared.
Yes, disappeared as in murdered. It may be hard to believe but just last month it was none other than President Obama's very own Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair who acknowledged in a congressional hearing that "the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism."
This is America as it moves into the second decade of the 21st century. All we can say is that we the people better wake up fast, before there's nothing worth waking up for.
54 Comments so far
Show AllIt's enough to make you hope the Mayan calendar is accurate...
Since only 20% of the college graduating class of 2009 found jobs, that would put the unemployment rate for that demographic at 80%, right? I wonder if that 20% includes the ROTC students, many of whom shipped off to the Ir-Af-Pak occupation?
With millions of baby boomers delaying or cancelling retirement solely to keep their relatively affordable employer-sponsored medical insurance, job opportunities for college grads are getting bleaker. If Obamacare is enacted, even more boomers will delay retirement. Had Obama pushed through Medicare for all, many of these boomers would retire immediately, opening millions of family wage jobs for young Americans.
The recent tuition-based protests proved that today's students are not apathetic, they are just too narrowly focussed. Until they rise up and protest Obama's failure to restore New Deal financial industry regulation, Obama's failure to implement a single-payer medical insurance program, and Obama's failure to end the Ir-Af-Pak occupation and restore habeas corpus, students will not be getting to the root cause of their tuition and employment problem.
This is another step on the road to fascism, and we've already come a long, long way on that road, and the excuses are always the same: expediency and security.
Jim Shea
We've come a long way on the road to fascism? Partner, we have arrived and been parked for at least 9 years!
"I'm not gonna leave you alone."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08
2012 means nothing. The guy who carved the calendar ran out of stone. Do you think the troops will fire on the people or will they become a revolutionary vanguard? In 1917 in Russia the army turned against the Czar. Perhaps the same will happen here.
Unlike the soldiers in both the French and Russian revolutions, our soldiers will not have to face the people whom they will slaughter. Drones and other high-tech weaponry will do the work that muskets and rifles used to do.
The most irritating thing about this situation is that we cannot get most Americans to see the threat from corporate misconduct not only to their happiness and security but also to their lives. People have had Reagan's hatred of government drilled into them so thoroughly that they believe government to be their greatest fear.
q
"...they believe government to be their greatest fear."
Why wouldn't it be.
It's mine.
It shouldn't be, but in many cases it is. I personally can't decide which is worse, our corporations or the police state part of our government. I guess when you think about it they are for the most part one in the same.
Government has become the enforcer for its corporate masters...like Sen. Dick Durbin told us: "Wall Street owns the place" (referring to Washington DC).
Obamacare is a prime example...the IRS will fine you if you don't buy medical insurance from a governmnet approved corporation with no assurance that you will receive adequate coverage.
Yeah but, a guy like Dennis Kucinich or Bernie Sanders can get elected and try and change things.
The government is not the problem, it's the people who vote and those who don't. Change the way people vote and you can change the government.
phasor, If you consider the Penatagon, the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and Homeland Security a part of the government, then the government is part of the problem.
Your belief in voting as a method of combatting the corporate elite is an oversimplification. The electoral system is rigged by electronic voting fraud and the campaign finance "system."
It will take a massive amount of organization to overcome the advatages possessed by the oligarchy, not just an "if we all just..." mentality.
While the second part of this article is enough to make your hair stand on end, I want to address the beginning of the article first.
As I said elsewhere, I figured the students would be the spark, and at first the driving force, behind a rebellion against: >> Nationwide, 50 million people need to use food stamps to eat. 50 million have no health care, with 60% of bankruptcies resulting from medical emergencies. Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings and $13 trillion in the value of their homes since the latest economic crisis began. The real unemployment rate is over 20% with 30 million US citizens unemployed or underemployed. Deutsche Bank predicts that the number of ‘underwater' loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes by 2011. Every day 10,000 US homes enter into foreclosure. 60% of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck. << Assuming they don't stop with the immediate threats of tuition hikes, schools closing and programs disappearing.
And, of course, as the beginning quote made clear, we have a feudal corporocracy behind the entire situation. If the students can be lead to see the true enemy, rather than just the local by-products of the corporation/Wall Street/Big Banks kleptocracy on the national and international level; then we have a real rebellion brewing.
Perhaps, just perhaps, they might be willing to listen about these factors from older rebels. Perhaps they can figure out for themselves that a perverted form of capitalism is behind all the problems.
As for the rest of the article; pretty scary stuff, especially considering the broad brush the administration has already used to target for assassination an American radical. The detention, or let's call them what they are, concentration camps are beyond doubt a harbinger of the possibility of martial law being declared, should the masses promise to rise up and demand real change.
The students need to be warned about this, and other dangers they face. Kent State must be made familiar to them (it is unlikely many were taught about it in school). The head-banging and arrests they likely will be experiencing.
Then it is up to them, individually and as a movement, to decide how far they want to take this rebellion. Perhaps to the point of real revolution.
Gary
“Every generation needs a new revolution.”
-- Thomas Jefferson
If the students do become more involved to the point they cause concern to the oligarchs, I suspect the next move on the oligarchs part would be to stress the cost of the "Entitlements" that the gubmint is obligated to pay to the worthless old cruds, like most of us here, and "explain" that the only way the gubmint will ever be able to offer them a decent and affordable education is if it guts the Entitlement programs, setting up some form of distracting and useful inter-generational warfare.
I am not optimistic about finding any path out of this deadly swamp, but one course that might prove promising would consist of repeating the message as often and as ubiquitously as possible that corporations and those who run them, by law, must care only about profit, and thus it is impossible for them to be trusted to be good citizens or to work for the common good, to care about human rights or freedom, or to sacrifice for the general welfare. And this is doubly true for the most successful and powerful corporatists as they have achieved that power and wealth by only pursuing and caring about power and wealth (those with other concerns were at a serious disadvantage in the competition to reach the top of the corporate world).
Scary stuff and if people don't wake up soon it will be too late (and I pray that it isn't already).
Let's get back to 'we the people' - NOT 'we the corporations'.
The ultimate lesson that the American public should learn from the dismantling of the New Deal is that the elite cannot be restrained by law while still leaving them access to their wealth. They can break the law with impunity because: (i) they can afford to pay any fine; (ii) they can afford to hire the best legal defense; (iii) they can afford to have the law overturned. Until the blindfold is torn from the eyes of Justice and it is forced to recognize distinctions among rights to "property," absolutely nothing can be done to challenge the corporate dictatorship.
You must face up to the facts articulated by Karl Marx or end up as impotent failures.
"This new learning of yours amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes."
It would be bad enough if the elites just broke the law. The elites write the laws, thereby granting themselves a license to steal and murder.
The most recent example is the 2700 page (and growing) Obamacare Manifesto written by the insurance industry and includes the IRS fining any American who fails to buy medical insurance from a corporation and taxes employees who are in a high cost insurance pool.
Welcome to the realization of the nightmare depicted in the 1975 version of "Rollerball," a corporate feudal state with a deluded and distracted rabble not having the slightest clue as to who is really screwing them.
What an absolutely amazing last sentence.
The stunningly neofascist McCain/Lieberman statute calls upon the President set up criteria for determining who is a "high value detainee", but in operation it is a troika of unelected executive branch officials - the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Director of National Intelligence - who actually makes the decision about whether you or your neighbor gets swept off into a military brig for questioning.
Interesting. Had the McCain/Lieberman law been on the books back in the heyday of the Bush/Cheney era, it would have been Don Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft who made the call, with Condi Rice the tiebreaker. Today, it would be Robert Gates, Eric Holder, and Dennis Blair.
Very interesting. A career spy and a career military man would be given the power to neuter the head of the Department of Justice. Absolutely amazing.....
Bill from Saginaw
Seiler and Hamburg: "For the first time in more than four decades, a militant student movement is taking shape across the country"
What bothers me is its unfocused nature. 'Mad as Hell' isn't going to cut it anymore, in fact, its absolutely what the power elite want. The students can't afford to demand everything, they can only afford to demand ONE thing: campaign finance reform. If students want education, banking reform, healthcare reform, debt reform, end to wars, etc, about 90% of the general population is going to disagree with one of their demands. By wanting everything, they ensure they get nothing. But the power elite, on the other hand, gets an opportunity the use the demonstrations as a propaganda tool justifying a tightening of the Fascist grip.
On almost every issue modern America gets wrong, corporate campaign financing figures centrally in that error:
1. Education - corporations WANT the education system to go down, and be replaced with a private system teaching skills and tool use, NOT the ability to think independently.
2. Banking reform - corporations are happy with the system as it is. WallStreet gambles on global control of capitalism, and the U.S. taxpayer covers their bets, if necessary. What's not to like?
3. Healthcare - corporations want the current system, only with Americans FORCED to buy into it, with jail if they don't.
4. Massive indebtedness - corporate power is only potentially reigned in by government power. Placing the gov't into debt muzzles it. Debt really is slavery.
5. End to Wars - corporations are only too happy to leverage the gigantic American war machine into corporate ownership of remaining oil fields. Next up... Iran.
Clearly, for American democracy to be getting THIS many things wrong, something must be wrong with American democracy. And something is: corporations and other large donors have found a way to take 'our' representatives hostage: campaign contributions. Hence, on issue after issue, these representatives do the corporations bidding, and hope the campaign coffers are big enough, come election time, to propagandize the public that they actually did the publics bidding. This strategy often works. Representatives get reelected, corporations get what they want. Only the public is left getting scr*wed. On issue, after issue, after issue.
Public financing of campaigns. Its the only thing worth fighting for. Its the only thing that will change our democracy, elevate the power of our votes, and throw the corporations out of DC. And from that one thing, everything else will flow, because right now everything wrong about DC is actually RIGHT from the perspective of global corporations. This government is just the way they like it.
fixcongressfirst.org
Well said!
I talk with an Armenian immigrant in her 60s. She naturally has a bad taste for communism, which fuels her fears of the state. But, she and her partner joined the fascists from the other side. She has hysterical fear of the state (e.g. thinking juvenile obesity prevention efforts will fund fancy health-food stores and "Whole Foods Markets in the inner city; So sad, so funny). But, Beck and Limbaugh poisoned this poor retard (e.g. The other day she said: "Corporations should have a right to spend their earnings as they see fit." So sad, and so god damned dagerous!).
"Corporations should have a right to spend their earnings as they see fit"
What if they spent their earnings robbing you? Would she have a problem with that? Yet, through campaign contributions, that's precisely what they are doing!!! They are literally approaching YOUR representative and saying, "don't listen to what trask wants, here's what I want. " How do you know that what they want isn't also what you want? Because they are paying for the priviledge. They are saying "I know you don't want to vote against trask, or he might vote against you in the next election. But, consider this, I'm going to give you millions of dollars to vote against trask. Just spend this money, next election, convincing him over the TV that you're still a 'patriot' and your opponent is a closet 'Islamist', and he'll reelect you anyway."
It's blatant 'money' over 'human beings'. Proper, perhaps, in our economy. But in our democracy: never!!! This corporation has every right to argue with your representative to see things their way, and not your way. But by offering millions of dollars? Thats just bribery. And it goes on every day, with EVERY one of our representatives. Its how they pay for their reelections. Thru bribery. Legally. And with tacit approval from our Armenian immigrants. Prostitution is illegal in this country. Except in Congress.
Your task, now, is to convince your immigrant friend that this is a crime perpetrated on the very idea of our 'one person, one vote' democracy. We already have a 'one dollar, one vote' capitalist economy. Lets not pollute our democracy the same way.
Or their actions can be tracked through their Facebook and Twitter activity; their participation noted through face recognition software...and their hopes of corporate careers torn away from them.
Not being burdened by families or mortgages is one thing, but almost every modern college student is on a path towards a career as a corporate functionary.
We should not put all our hopes for revolutionary change on their backs. Rather, we should be making revolutionary change so that they have more choices in their future.
There is a concern here that America (and by extension the rest of the world) is descending into feudalism. We should be so lucky.
I've noticed that the word "feudalism", like the other F-word (fascism), tends to be thrown around to mean nothing more than "something very bad that we should have left behind". In the process the true meaning of both words is discarded. In the present case, feudalism is exactly the wrong analogy.
The feudal system was a system of greatly DECENTRALIZED power and wealth. The royal office was intended to be not much more than ceremonial, and any king who tried to centralize power would run into a wall of opposition from the more powerfull lords. (It was just such an incident that gave us the Magna Carta.) In the feudal theory, the various ranks within society were interconnected by mutual obligations (usually in the form of service exchanged for protection). Society as a whole was divided into three orders: the knight, who fought for all; the priest, who prayed for all; and the peasant, who worked for all. However often these ideals were honoured in the breach rather than the observance, the fact remains that (a) workers were acknowledged to be human beings, and (b) power was given a moral justification rather than resting on sheer force. (It is noteworthy that slavery, although not legally abolished, was very little practiced in feudal Europe.) The political history of Renaissance and early modern Europe can be seen as a struggle between the autocratic tendencies of increasingly centralized governments and popular movements demanding the fulfilment of the feudal bargain.
The danger we face is something considerably worse than feudalism: classical despotism. Classical societies were divided essentially into two castes: those who produced, and were subsequently deprived of, wealth; and those who appropriated and enjoyed wealth. In between, there existed a small number of craftsmen and artisans, who had some autonomy but were largely dependent on ruling-class patrongae. In short, I call this a plantation economy. This form of economy is not good at producing wealth, but does an excellent job of gratifying primitive desires for power and dominance.
The fantasy of a plantation economy continually haunts the Anglo-Saxon oligarchies. In our time they have become impatient with the restraints imposed on them by democracy (even though this was their own, highly effective, invention) and are grasping directly at their heart's desire -- a society in which they have unchecked power justified only by itself. This is the future they intend for us: not life in the shadow of a castle, but life in an ergastulum (slave barracks) under the despotic rule of moral infants.
Our deliverance from this future may lie in the collapse of the institution that, ironically, liberals and progressives believe in and regressives profess to despise: the State. The irony in the right-wing bedlam against "the gubmint" is that the power of corporations is exercised through the State. It is the State that passes laws useful to them and enforces these; that recruits, trains, and dispatches armies; that provides money and maintains the value of money. If the US government were to collapse -- a possibility which, ironically, is being made ever more likely by the actions of the corporations themselves -- annual profits in the tens of billions of US dollars would suddenly become worthless, and the corporations would have to do without the essentially free provision and enforcement services provided by the State. What happens after that depends on the nature of society locally. Places with a strong communitarian ethos will form functional local governments that provide peace and justice; places with little or no such ethos will descend into a patchwork of local despotisms. Interesting times, indeed!
Thats a really useful history lesson: good post.
However, I don't relish the 'collapse of the state' in any way; and would do almost anything to avoid it. You said: "the power of corporations is exercised through the State." And I think, through campaign finance reform, we have an 11th hour opportunity to perhaps cut the strings of corporate power being exercised through the state. And maybe enough time, after that, to derive a democracy that actually functions as the founders intended, and can stave off a total collapse.
fixcongressfirst.org is promoting public financing of campaigns. It has bipartisan support, and support of over 130 congressmen in the house. I think if we all stood behind this one issue, right now, we could enforce a beneficial change to our democracy EVEN before the next election (when corporate financing will become unbound). I think not much time is left to do this, and cut the backdoor corporate control of our representatives, before they become wholely owned by the power elite. Because if that happens, which might happen by the next election, in 6 months, then I fear you may be right, and State dissolution may be the inevitable result.
Hello! "Classical despotism" (rule by a tyrant, king or other ruler with absolute, unlimited power) IS a pretty good description of feudalism! Your argument is contradictory. For my money, Sheldon Wolin's analysis is more convincing. He describes the US today "inverted totalitarianism". There are plenty of reasons to see the US as totalitarian, but it differs from the classical totalitarian regimes of Stalinism, Nazism and Italian fascism. I encourage reading his book "Democracy Inc."
Incidentally, the corporately funded Creationist movement, seems set on creating a new theocracy, where "truth" is defined by a new orthodox (state) church. This seems particularly reminiscent of the feudal era, giving the appellation "corporate feudalism", (while inaccurate) some currency.
I thought feudalism was an economic structure, like communism or capitalism. Most people are landed serfs: they go with the land when it changes hands. It's been a long time...
I just want to cry.
Puffin, please feel free to use my shoulder.
I live in a university town. Students, faculty and supporters came out in large numbers on 3/4. The typical reaction among townies and in letters to the editor was, "Stop whining and grow up you spoiled punks. We don't owe you an education!". Underlying this kind of spite and misplaced class hatred, I think is the peculiar all-American notion that the economy is some sort of natural, immutable act of god, like a passing storm or a drought, under no influence other than its own incomprehensible and inexorable "laws". And that we should "get over it".
Americans are pathologically resistant to asking "why?". We don't care, because we think it's "impractical" and therefore pointless. "How?" seems more to our liking, as if you could answer the second without at least some understanding of the first. We are encouraged in this inanity by popular organs of the media, entertainment, government and the corporatocracy in general. We pride ourselves in being "practical". We think it's the "key" to our "success". And if anything goes wrong with any of that we can always blame the Mexicans, the blacks, the "terrorists" or now, the "spoiled students".
The whole nation is sleeping and tossing and turning, dreaming a bitter nightmare, ever ready to wake up and clobber anybody but the pirates who are actually holding us in servitude.
We have been abandoned and left to slide into a hopeless future, which we have no power to influence. Is it any surprise that up to 25% of us are taking some kind of psychoactive drug, prozac, xanax, etc at any given time?
If it's only 25% it's down considerably. At one time in he 1970's, over 50% of the adult population had a prescription for valium alone.
People who marched got this kind of reaction before. It's only decades after the fact that folks like King and Ellsberg get canonized, and then mostly for the purpose of co-opting their heroism as though it were somehow integral to the system they fought and, in Ellsberg's case, fight.
An educated citizenry is critical to a nation. Better democracies everywhere know this and support higher education. Alas, in this country, our children must emegrate to fulfill their destinies.
>>>>Unburdened by mortgages and families, young people have the LEAST TO LOSE and the most to gain by overcoming a trend that is turning the majority of U.S. citizens into modern day serfs.
That's why it's critical to get these potential troublemakers shackled to at least a half-dozen Sallie-Mae student loans before they graduate. It would be in the best interests of the The Powers-That-Be to make these loans as convenient to get as the infamous NINJA homes loans of a few years back. This accomplishes two things:
1. It quells the rising voices of discontent with the "system" that are erupting on campuses all over the country and threatening to upset the status quo.
2. (and most important) It gives graduates "something to lose" by tying their entire futures to the repayment of student loans that cannot possibly be paid off, thereby fastening the chains of debt (serfdom, if you like) around their necks the moment they graduate, making them "property of the state". If they start to howl, a yank of the chain (threat of being ruined financially for life) quickly shuts them up----for good, I might add.
Very good point re/ Sally Mae. With 19,000 teachers holding fresh pink slips in CA alone, a few of those may go South, though.
The City of New York is looking at closing some 60 fire departments and letting go over 1000 firefighters.
No doubt the holes can be filled by a "Privatized" force.
You are being drowned in the bathtub just as Norquist wanted.
Bush created two things, both of which come with totalitarian planning, and both are being furthered by Obama.
1. War on Terror. Watch the movie: http://salem-news.com/articles/march092010/loose-change-tk.php
2. Pandemic Terror. Read the charges. http://www.naturalnews.com/026503_pandemic_swine_flu_bioterrorism.html
Those behind it? http://www.rense.com/general7/gw.htm
Fairly frequently, I casually engage total strangers I come across in the course of daily life - bank tellers, waitresses, convenience store clerks, department store salespersons, basketball players, politicians, movie production types - in conversation about the real state of the American union, viz the 'health' care racket, the financial bailout, the 'wars', the home foreclosures, the brutal rape of education, etc.
I do this in an effort to plumb the depths of American ignorance of the nature and extent of the Emergency, the Crisis, the Horror, the Crimes Against Humanity, and to clue a few people in to resources and platforms such as CD, Truthdig, etc., etc., etc.
The American people never fail to disappoint. The depths of the ignorance and apathy and tail-tucking are breathtakingly UNFATHOMABLE. And I do mean UNFATHOMABLE. As in, unable to determine how many fathoms deep. So goddamn deep that you give up imagining a measurement and conclude, 'BOTTOMLESS'.
We may shoot our faces off here on common dreams and other sites and pride ourselves on our alleged 'progressiveness', giving a shit and trying to help others give a shit, but it seems quite clear that most Americans couldn't actually give a shit, because there's not enough hours in the day to take care of yourself and your family in the neo-mediaeval shithole of America, while contemplating the sheer scale of the Big Fucking Betrayal that your country has become. Never mind goddamn Disneyland, literally or metaphorically. Never mind the space program or even jazz and blues - which latter artforms will remain at least for me a high-water mark of human civilization and American achievement. I can still enjoy a good recording or concert, or cheer for the genius of America's real artists and intellectuals and distract myself from the Steadily- Mounting Horror, but make no mistake: the Horror is Steadily Mounting, and I personally believe that Mr Obama and his fellow governing types are at best only dimly aware of this, or couldn't give a monkey's fuck, as they help their puppet-masters amass greater wealth while deliberately destroying democracy and the very people they are shafting.
Duh.
So it's perfectly clear, as was strongly intimated if not outright demanded in Chris Hedges article about the concept of the rebel and rebellion here of a couple of days ago: unless the Great Unwashed get their heads out of their fat asses and take to the streets and Force The Issue, on every score including, predominantly, health care and education, they can kiss the United States goodbye.
This isn't radicalism. This is goddamn no-holds barred REALITY. The recent 'Supreme' Court ruling handing the government to the corporations wasn't enough of a two-by-four to the head for ya??? The 32% hike in California tuition rates and the generally appalling state of American education, the mind- and thought-control deliberately and steadily enforced by the corporate media, the continuing and Obama-endorsed profit-care in the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance rackets, the garbage masquerading as 90% of the food supply, the continued threat coming from those goddamn evil 'Christian' fundamentalists and the pathetically nation-defining, filthily cock-sure, hyper-militarization of America and the American mind aren't enough of a two-by-four to the head for ya???
Welcome to the conservative's Nirvana. Ronald Reagan's America.
To change things, you need to repudiate conservative economic and political thinking.
You know... while I have had a good number of exchanges with people who seem bent on growing their particular brand of ignorance into a national fetish for self destruction I am almost as often surprised at the number of people whose complaints and anger echo my own... and have some echo of Hedges'. I speak of these things in crowded waiting rooms, lines at the grocery and at the coffee shop. I usually start off with a joke.
Even when there are points of departure, sometimes thorny, many of the "unwashed" are surprising insightful and well informed, if not from their TV sets and what passes for print journalism, then from their understanding of how things have always gone for them. Generally these are working people, men and women in the trades and service industries, the retired and their children and their children’s' children.
I am sometimes an embarrassment to those who prefer to talk about everything BUT politics; however they generally do not get the chance without me to meet some fascinating characters.
Like the time waiting in line in Zion National Park when I started joking about Bush and crew and catalyzed a long conversation with some people from South Africa who breathed a sigh a relief to be able to talk about American politics with Americans who, up until then, were rather spookily silent about such things in spite of the stuff that was swirling around them (this was in 2004 or 5 I think)
Take the risk. Do not make assumptions. Make someone else and yourself feel a little less alone... and if you run into one of Ionesco's rhinoceroses... just back away slowly shouting "I fart in your general direction!!!"
"This isn't radicalism. This is goddamn no-holds barred REALITY."
I hear ya. I remember marching in Portland, OR. when we were trying to stop the war from happening all those years ago in 2003. And I remember when people would yell in approval of some point a speaker had made, that yell would bounce back and forth and echo between the downtown buildings, and you could feel the power.
We need to multiply 2003 by at least 100.
Cogent! Thank you.
For a Canadian perspective on the same ideas - What Happened? http://www.rudemacedon.ca/what-happened.html .
This article lists two authors, but reads like a pastiche from their wastepaper baskets. We are treated to throw-away lines regarding angry students, economic hardship, and repressive plans from hack politicians. The authors' attempt to paste the label "feudalist" upon the evils of capitalism--presumably an attempt at thematic unification--is as cogent as denouncing as "cholera" the evils of cancer.
The utter shallowness of analysis is exemplified by the article's conclusion, "All we can say is that we the people better wake up fast, before there's nothing worth waking up for."
If that's all they had to say, they have nothing to say. Too bad they didn't realize this until they inflicted their rubbish upon the rest of us.
A participant in the Labor, Civil Rights, Back-to-the-Land, alternative press and anti-Vietnam War movements, I also witnessed how each was defeated, co-opted or otherwise neutralized.
Hence I know it was not campaigns of violent oppression, psychological warfare and/or socioeconomic manipulation that destroyed these bold expressions of legitimate revolutionary anger.
Instead -- and in every instance -- it was the methodical suppression of a single all-important historical truth.
Cases in point include the murder of the New Deal (the Kennedy assassinations); the extermination of the Civil Rights Movement (the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton and the massacre of Jackson State College students); and the slaying of the anti-Vietnam War Movement (the massacre of students at Kent State University).
Tragically, the legacies of all such movements and martyrs are quickly lost without the clarity and understanding fostered by the historical truth of class struggle, which explains how the events in question are episodes in the age-old resistance we the people forever wage against the greedy malevolence of the tyrants who oppress us.
It is no accident the truth of class struggle has been stolen from us – looted from our mental toolkit by those who methodically purged the United States of its Marxians, socialists and intellectuals.
The purge began the moment World War II ended, intensified with the absorption of Nazi motivational experts into government and industry, and triumphed when fear-mongering made the terms "Marxian," "socialist" and "intellectual" all synonymous with "subversive" -- and therefore psycholinguistic equivalents of "evil."
Next came the elimination of the real and potential leaders of resistance, whether within the Ruling Class (JFK, RFK), or within the Working Class (Malcolm X, MLK Jr., Hampton, Karen Silkwood).
Thus 40 years after MLK's slaying, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency was ecstatically applauded as a revolution in race relations.
But Obama's post-election behavior -- his subsequent tightening of the Big Business aristocracy's stranglehold on everyone else -- is now proving that "change we can believe in" was never more than a Big Lie.
Which suggests the victory of Barack the Betrayer is really nothing more than propaganda to convince racial and ethnic minorities they themselves can become members of the Ruling Class – if they will embrace not just the superficial ethos of capitalism but all of the savage tyranny at its core.
Meanwhile (and thanks to that post-World War II purge), if you dare mention “class struggle” today, so-called “progressives” belittle you as a conspiracy theorist and the Teabaggers assail you with shouts and fists.
But there is good news here too. Though the reduction of the U.S. Working Class to Moron Nation has succeeded beyond the wildest Ruling Class dreams – the reason Sarah Palin will no doubt be the next U.S. president – a surprisingly large number of us still know how to read.
Which suggests a simple, direct means of effective consciousness raising:
Download the Communist Manifesto – it's available free online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ – then print it and leave copies everywhere you go: on buses, subways and trolley cars; in restaurants, cafes and taxicabs; in places of worship; in senior centers and union halls; in malls and mall shopping carts; at dentists, hairdressers and medical clinics; even in saloons, libraries and classrooms.
For non-readers, you can download it as a CD.
While there are legitimate questions about the workability of Marxism in general, there is no doubt about the usefulness of its core principle – the recognition of class struggle.
Why else is such an obvious historical truth so relentlessly tabooed?
As to the burgeoning student movement, another Kent State would end it forever, just as the original Kent State ended the resistance to the Vietnam War – unless of course today's students are united in the enduring solidarity of class struggle.
Very well said, lorenbliss. Much of these "incremental" changes over the years have been done quietly and without much notice. Having lived through Vietnam and all the rest, we are in a better position to have noted these transitions and small steps into Fascism. It was painfully obvious that Barack Obama is just the new face, the new deception to fool us once again. I revisited Eric Hoffer's book, "The True Believer" (1955) awhile back during Obama's ascent. Page 15 discusses the hope and change stuff of mass movements. You already know whatever else I could say here. The "Shock Doctrine" is now being enacted upon America. Marx was so right about so much.
Excellent post.
Your suggestion to distriubute the Manifesto is good but,ironically, it's anarchistic rather than marxist.
A Marxist would say join or form a working class organization and take collective action against the capitalist state. With this I agree. While it can be effective, decentralized subversive action cannot achieve the magnitude of successful coordinated collective action.
Don't mourn, organize.
"Then one day I looked up from the keyboard and realized that I was home alone...
Dreamjoehill, you are paradoxically right and wrong at the same time. Please let me explain why:
What you characterize as "decentralized subversive action" is indeed anarchistic.
But it is the only alternative for creating the circumstances from which true organization – and thus genuine change – might ever again arise.
As I noted in my initial post, the core obstacle to change is Moron Nation -- the fact we have been "dumbed down" (actually de-educated and mentally robbed) – so severely we no longer have the tools essential to function as citizens of a constitutional democracy.
By deliberately denying us these tools, the Ruling Class guarantees our dis-empowerment.
As a result of this dis-empowerment – via the mentally pillaged submissiveness of Moron Nation -- we are reduced to the degradation of slavery.
We are indentured by credit-card debt to bondage in the sweatshops of Big Business or -- cast off in the name of Ruling Class profiteering -- we suffer eviction, foreclosure, homelessness and all the other slave-pen/will-work-for-food-and-shelter horrors of joblessness.
Meanwhile, we are monitored 24/7 by the total-surveillance state – the modern, high-tech equivalent of the antebellum South's notorious slave patrols.
Whether conducted by government agents or death-squad mercenaries, these de facto slave patrols operate everywhere and at every level -- federal, state and local – the most obvious proof our once-promising system of governance has been corrupted beyond recognition.
Indeed, governance in the United States now serves only to perpetuate capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us.
How then do we fight back?
While organizing is the essential building-block of resistance, the essential building-block of organizing is grievance -- the individual's sense of victimization.
The feminists of the 1960s expressed this principle perhaps better than anyone else in history: “the personal is political.”
But even that assertion becomes meaningless in the zombified mentality imposed by Moron Nation, where the term “grievance” has been deliberately reduced to another synonym for selfish yearning.
Hence the potential value of individually distributing copies of Manifesto: by giving ourselves a common vocabulary to express the truth of our circumstances, we might actually begin the process of re-awakening.
That we re-awaken without visible structure – without hierarchy or chain-of-command – makes us that much more difficult to suppress.
Re-awakened, we achieve solidarity.
(“I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as he could be...”)
And in solidarity we begin the far more deadly dangerous task of organizing.
Quoth Peter Gabriel, singing of Steven Biko:
“You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flame begins to catch
The wind will blow it higher”
Dan Hamburg is showing the best way to resist corporate feudalism: by running as a Green Party candidate.
http://votehamburg5.org/
Both as an elected official and citizen activist, Dan Hamburg has consistently sided with the people and the earth against the forces of corporatism and militarism.