If the American people continue to delude themselves that the regime in Washington represents the interests of a sovereign America, their world will continue to appear irrational and they will continue to feel powerlesss. As I began to argue in “Illegal Immigration and the End of America”(see below), it is not difficult to see the pattern of the dismantling of American sovereignty and national solidarity and integrity. Consider the following from Scott Thill’s article, “Over the Top Fed actions Feed Conspiracy Thinking,” at http://www.alternet.org/workplace/80501/?page=2:
"If you're one of the 2 million American families losing your house this year, it's a depression," argues Greg Palast, BBC investigative journalist, author of Armed Madhouse and onetime student of neoconservative privatization guru Milton Friedman. "If you're a mortgage shark, happy days are here again. The difference between the Great Depression and this one is that, back then, everyone was in it. Now, it's a selective mangling. Exxon's profit hit $40 billion, the highest of any corporation since the pharaohs. So how can you say the economy is going down? For whom?"
Palast's point is well taken, even as it is ignored by everyone from the Bush administration to the financial (which is to say, entertainment) media and all the way to homeowners who ignorantly refinance so they can buy that new Hummer: Your life may suck ass, but others around you are sucking you dry. And most importantly, they're crushing the dollar on their way out the door to Dubai, or wherever suits hide in the New World Order's afterlife.
"Regardless of what the Fed does, the dollar is going to keep going down," Schiff agrees. "If the Fed keeps doing what it is doing, it won't make it out of this as a functioning currency."
"I'm sorry to tell you this," Palast adds, "but higher oil prices and weak dollars is not a failure of policy. That is the policy. Clinton had a strong dollar policy and Bush hated it. The weak dollar is a way to temporarily hike exports to create short-term pretend juice for the economy. But the weak dollar also made it easier for foreigners to buy up U.S. assets. The capitalists are cashing out of America. They're keeping condos in New York, Palm Beach and Malibu, but their investments are where the returns are fatter: Malaysia, China, India. A weak dollar helps the transfer of capital ownership."
With respect to how we think about all this consider again whether all the fundamental categories of political thought help us understand and act. They do not. Left-Right, Republican-Democrat, Conservative-Liberal, Democracy-Republic all are obscurantist tools of rhetorical ranting, name-calling and marginalizing one another. In the political realm this is analogous to black on black crime in the social realm. We are parasitical on and destructive to one another intellectually and economically, while transnational capital is shifting the playing field out of our neighborhood.
The spectrum of political interests are clearly not conceptualizable as a horizontal paradigm but as a vertical one. The transnational capitalist class and their military-bureaucratic Army of international “stormtroopers,” call it the New Class, are at the very top of the pole. The rest of us are at the bottom of the pole.
The war on the middle-class is part of the strategy as is opening the flood gates to illegal and legal immigrants. The New Class of international capitalists have everything to gain by “third-worldizing” America. Why protect our standard of living, when those wages and benefits could be used to invest abroad where there’s real money to be made and resistant cultures to conquer? So as the wealth distribution becomes more painfully obviously divided top-heavy to bottom light, the class division becomes more clear. The mass of atomized, disenfranchised, discounted and impoverished pseudo-citizens, is the Client Class, a class unable to pay and at the mercy of what the Owners wish to give. We are systematically and strategically dumbed down in the schools and in the media. We are morally and spiritually numbed down by religious extremism on the one hand and on the other by a dissolved public sphere where a new social morality and civic virtue could be nurtured, but is not.
In short there is no horizontal playing field any longer in America. There is only the very narrow, horizontal dichotomous stratification of the few very rich and their maintainance “Army” at the top of the food chain, and the remaining anonymous mass of self-alienated laborers and servants at the bottom.
What “technical” and “educational” infrastructure remains will be progressively used, firstly, to police and indoctrinate the masses to accept this global reconfiguration of national/international socio-economic restructuration; secondly, fight the wars of those who resist in order to save their cultures, homes and local viability and integrity; and, finally, amuse the disenfranchised with the entertainment and advertising culture that keeps them pretending that they are happy and deluded that this is the best of all possible worlds, and reasonably enough, the only possible world.
Conspiracy? Not at all. Isn’t it interesting that any ideas which presume to explain the irrationality of the whole of our disastrous American domestic and international policy, of the context of globablization, or of failed government actions and fiscal policies, get labeled as conspiracy theory. In fact events, such as FEMA’s “failure” in Katrina and actions such as the exportation of jobs and capital, are not really “irrational” to the New Class. It makes a lot of sense to them. It is only irrational to those of us, the Client Class, who expect too much from the Capitalists, that is anything more than they are willing to finance.
As was said in the movie Network, ‘America doesn’t exist. Nothing exists but international monopoly capital.’
The crops are being plowed under, the hands are being let go and a new “crop” being planned. Politics as we have known it is a game for fools. Local and regional politics play a larger part than ever. As Western NY is written off as the new ‘Appalachia’ only we can unite and redefine ourselves on a neo-populist basis to reconfigure “political representation” and change the conversation that we have with the Capitalist lackeys in Washington who pretend to, but in fact do not, represent the interests of America as a self-sufficient nation and the greatest political idea in the history of Modernity.
Conspiracy or strategy? Old politics or new politics?
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