NONE DARE CRY TREASON: Political Corruption or Social Class Power, Profit and Privilege

What is at issue today is treason against the American political idea, democracy, republicanism and the primacy and integrity of the Constitution. Recent history demonstrates that the very existence of a social class, the new American Political Class, is, in its very way of being, a betrayal of the intent and achievements of the Founding Fathers. Conceivably such treason manifests and may in fact be prosecuted in the case of persons such as Governor Blagojevich. Possibly most of such treason however is the betrayal of the people, We the People, and all that implies in subverting the ideal and promise of America. The latter is not a matter of litigation but of a reform which requires revolutionary restructuring of the sociology of the political.

Meanwhile this New Class functions undetected behind the invisible wall of the daily systematic dynamics of social and political exclusion of the Client Class of workers, welfare dependents, the mass of unemployed students and military recruits . In the New Class's world of fuel-injected normalization nothing could ever really be seriously wrong with their worldview despite the aberrant dysfunction and degradation of the way of American life of a mass majority of the People. While their worldview automatically re-legitimates through the Orwellian language and thought of the corporatized mass media, now nihilistically reduced to virtual if not actual entertainment, our world crumbles. Our suffering, that of the atomized, mass Client Class, goes unthematized and improperly politicized, yet always and only in the ultimate interest of the New Class. Since the Civil War this new class of bureaucratic-technocratic managerial, power-mongering, militarist empire builders, has preponderated toward the crystallization of hegemony over the will of the people and the interests of global economy.

Is recent history, then, comfortably dismissable as inevitably political and democratic “business as usual?” Or is it the startling symptomatolgy of social class structure, if not class warfare, manifesting as (1)scandal, (2)corruption, (3)graft, (4)business “mistakes,” (5)partisan self-contradictions of politicians supposedly courageously “reaching across the isle,” (6)“pay to play” disguised as lobbying and compromise, (7)‘pork’ as payoff to swing votes, (8)“donations” to influence policy and interest-orientation, (9)“bailouts,” (10)golden parachutes, and finally (11)mathematically rationalized “acceptable risk” formulas for the “monetizing” scavengers of Wall Street who need pseudo-scientific cover for their gambling and theft.

Is such corruption not treason against the very foundations of political democracy and a nation governed under the rule of Law? Surely when considerations of “size” surpass any meaningful and convincing considerations of principle and quality, this is corruption of all values that flow from the constituting principle of “We the People.” When the (a)size of a business,(b)the prevalence of practices of financialization and (c)the exigencies of predictable socio-economic “crisis” occlude from consciousness the (1)inherent social ineffectiveness and incompetence of super-centralization of power and (2)the entrenched bureaucratization of government, education, business and defense, then surely the political and social interests of the people are no longer in play as a determining force in government and political process. Any pretense to an essential equality of all the people on a putative, yet obviously illusory, mass democratic basis is pure unadulterated ideology, doublespeak and effectively treasonous political violence.

In short we are a thoroughly class divided political culture, where institutionalized access and advantage is structurally pre-determined by predictable educational failure, financial “corruption” of political process and the mass moronization of the people by a mindless, spiritually debilitating culture. Covering this scherade is a giant,hapless, effete media that turns to journalistic comedy, voyeurism and gossip while sustained analysis, relevant information acquisition and critical historical reflection fail to materialize.

Normality, that is normative acceptableness and tolerance of corruption, is in fact systematic brainwashing and lulling the People into dull indifference to the loss of values, insensibility to meaning and blindness to the exploitable automatism of character and attitude. Corruption is traditionalized, turned into romanticized legends of what is a history of heinous political infamy. Corruption is the personalized and moralized cover and excuse for a class co-opted government’s unwillingness to represent the people and to strive to realize the potential abundance of culture and community that the American way promises.

As Gov. Blagojevich said: “I did nothing wrong.” And according to the values and tacitly accepted conditions of power, profit maximization and privilege assurances, he didn’t do anything wrong. It actually was business as usual essentially and for the most part. It’s just that it wasn’t in any way in conformity with the Spirit of the Law and probably with the Letter of the Law. But when Law is instrumentalized to promote and legitimate the interests of New Class dominated big business interests and motorized by ‘bought and paid for’ congressional legislation, then the Law has no meaning nor regulative let alone constitutive force. What is materially and effectively “right” is not a matter of Law but what can be assured by the political monitoring and regulatory participation of the people who live and suffer the decisions of insular professional politicos virtually hermetically sealed from the voice and will of the People.

In the present financial market crisis it has become clear that American industry has also been betrayed by a vitiating history of class policy that has opted for financialization at the expense of material industrial autonomy. Untold billions are shoveled into, at best, questionable “bailouts” with vague mechanisms of execution, unclarifed planning and unmeasureable outcomes. Yet when such conceivably related “bailing out” involves benefit directly to workers as in the Auto industry or to homeowners, suddenly Congress finds its “conscience,” its prudence, its concern about whether such money is even available, not to mention thereby wisely spent. Obviously, the right wing Republicans would love to destroy the UAW. No, they don’t hate workers. They hate organized and self-determining workers. They hate empowered workers. They hate informed and educated citizens who bring to light bald-faced contradictions, double standards and the stacked deck of the political process. They hate transparency of government and accountability to the people. While some $800 Billion has been funneled to failing banks through the US Treasury, another as yet publicly undisclosed $2 Trillion is surreptitiously shuffled off to other “players” in the finance game by the Federal Reserve Bank courtesy of the American taxpayer. We may never know to whom and why that money has been dispensed, what the collateral is and why the bailout should have been made. Courageously the Bloomberg news group has sued the Fed to force them to disclose to whom and how this bundle of billions will be disbursed.

Apparently at least part of the right wing crowd is still deluded by the belief that the “invisible hand” of free market forces will magically take care of all socio-economic problems, thus obviating reasonable regulation, oversight, historical self-reflection and social planning. The government, presumably having lost faith in the invisible hand, has taken the bull by the horns and expects a return on at least some of this bailout money but for fear of being called ‘socialist’ or caught in the act of ‘nationalization’ they refuse taking board positions and having a vote in what happens to these favored enterprises. Again we see government defending the interests of the CEO’s who got us into this mess but, in refusing to assume some executive power in the name of the peoples’ tax money, continue to provide evidence that there are no limits to which they see the Client Class as exploitable and expendable as an organized self-conscious socio-political class with needs and rights, especially the right to have their needs and interests defended. So socialistically tinged actions are permissible to support and further the interests of the New Class but taboo in protecting the interests of the Client Class.

Such preferential and prejudicial treatment highlights the fact that two quite opposed social worlds are being secured, the one nurtured the other denatured. All too predictable policy preferences of profit-determined privilege and special treatment further determine and are determined by class consitituting values, attitudes and assumptions. Financialization of the domestic product does not make for real industry even though the elites refer to it as the “financial industry.” Even though supposedly credible arguments are made for the new financial instruments creating value beyond skimming profit as a parasite on real industry, on the real economy, it seems that the evidence indicates otherwise. Although all big finance is too big to be LET to fail, it is not to big to in fact not succeed.

The New Class is a cancerous class wholly parasitic on the real value produced by real industry. Like a cancerous tumor, it feeds on the body until the body dies and it itself begins to die. The advantage the New Class has over cancerous tumors is it can find new bodies to suck the blood out of, at least so far. A pundit on CNN one evening scoffed at Obama’s pronouncement that he would fight waste and policies that promote waste. The pundit laughed that better men than Obama have tried this but never end up saving much more than a few trivial billion. Unabashedly, he implied, what was a few trivial billion wasted on wealthy farmers often paid not to farm when trillions more are at play and at stake alongside which these several billion are nothing. So in other words New Class subsidy is so unfathomably out of control of any reform, why bother at all. Only a being firmly rooted in class privilege and the virtual immoveable momentum of self-serving “class corruption” could scoff at saving a few measly billion when billions more are spent unnecessarily except of course to preserve the power and privilege of an entrenched way of life for a very limited group of elites. And whatever ‘trickle down’ should result from the ‘good times’ should be enough to satisfy the dependent masses. Or so say the New Class elite.

But such corruption is merely the internecine warfare of the New Class players struggling for advantage and control. Despite its portrayal this is not about bad people. Of course neither is it about otherwise good people. It is about an intra-class war for which the People are the raw material and cannon fodder. It is not as if the government and economy would work well if there were not these several immoral people who end up making unwise political and business decisions. The Law as practiced is itself immoral and thus corrupt. It preserves and cloaks the immorality of law as practiced. It preserves entrenched interests while sacrificing justice, creativity and constitutive humanitarianism.

This soap opera of surface corruption is the smoke and mirrors that systematically dissolves real discourse, problem identification and universal social action. Corruption is entertainment for the masses that prevents most now from realizing that it’s not a matter of the banks, for instance, being nationalized but a matter of the whole of the Treasury being potentially privatized and the Fed investing in a shadow economy. This is not just the transfer of capital to industrious private citizens but a situationally legitimized expropriation of rights and capital by a social class to prop up the historically enervated ideology of that class. Failing to pass the test of democratic self-criticism by the People, it legislates false authority on the basis of the disproven expertise of the likes of such as Henry Paulson.

Possibly in the name of our own Constitution it is time to execute all the would-be Czars.

Time for Niagara Politicos to Seek Federal "Bailout"

Niagara County is an ecological and economic disaster. The wheels of state government are turning much too slowly and don’t seem to be turning in Niagara’s direction when it comes to caring for the health of our people, restoring the integrity of our environment and maximizing the potential of our location and natural resources for economic success. The time for patience and trust in state bureaucracy, which includes the elected officials, and especially the DEC, is over. The time is now and the time is ripe for any politician who dare calls him- or herself a leader to look beyond the provincial indifference, likely incompetence and stifling inertia of established representation in Niagara County and turn to Washington for help. The help we need is in restoring and creating an “infrastructure” that makes us maximally competitive as a world class tourist destination

Barack Obama has made it clear that he wants to “rebuild” the “infrastructure” of America. The heart of Niagara’s infrastructure as a potentially world class tourist destination is the Falls and the surrounding water and land. Surely included in Obama’s project could be work on restoring such contaminated land and waterways and terminally dysfunctional and decrepit cities such as Niagara Falls to healthily habitable space, safely utilizable resources and possibly most importantly aesthetically attractive and thus economically productive destinations. If someone could lead the local politicos to assess our needs in doing such a comprehensive restoration and document the number of jobs that could be created in cleaning up Niagara County’s dump sites totally and permanently and reinventing our geography as such a destination, this would serve as the data needed to acquire funding from the Obama administration.

Surely the legislature with the aid, let’s say, of the recently hired Public Information Officer, the County Manager and whomever else they must hire who might be required to carry out such a task, could create such a “grant proposal” and execute such a study post haste and have it on Obama’s doorstep the evening just after the inaugural. Surely they could do this. It’s time to forget that the good will and creative concern of NY State career politicians will ever turn in our favor.

Surely a case can be made that as a potentially major tourist destination, Niagara’s infrastructure must have a pristine environment and a properly integrated geography which at present is lacking. Only such an environment can rightly consider itself a world class destination if in fact it is going to “work” to its own greatest advantage economically. It seems to me there is little good reason for us to not be at the top of the list of those needing and deserving help from the Federal infrastructural restoration project if some such case can be made.

Whoever here might lead such a project probably cannot count on the backing of a demoralized and depoliticized populace which has lost its sense of entitlement to self-respect, good health and equal treatment by State government. Hopefully not all of our poltical “leaders” have also not fallen into the groupthink of such second class non-citizenship, victimization and pathological civic passivity. Someone must step forward and take our case to Washington.

Niagara should be the jewel resort area of the Great Lakes region and not the dump site of first "resort" of the Eastern Seaboard.