What's at the bottom of the bailout? Wall Street greed ain't the half of it. Here's what the fine print reads: "How to continue to withhold 21st-century social services from a frustrated public in one easy step." Period.
You will have noticed that in each of the Presidential debates thus far the question of how the "rescue plan" will affect the candidates' health care, education, infrastructure and energy proposals has been raised repeatedly by the well-groomed moderators. What will you have to cut? What are your priorities?
After a little bit of "Everything we need to do is really important," they all reluctantly concede: There will have to be some painful cuts; to pay for the bail-out, to pay for the war, to pay down the debt.
The Republicrats make a virtue of this "necessity" by rightly, if only rhetorically, decrying public waste. McCain the war hero has even spoken of freezing defense spending! Obama speaks of our "right" to some form of health care, God bless his heart. But all must bow, (they are each so sorry to say) to the impending calamity: A new debt bomb which will explode over the heads of our children. Naomi Klein put it that way on the Bill Maher show, and she is right.
But what Klein has identified as "The Shock Doctrine," the late political historian Walter Karp would simply have called "Bi-partisan Domestic Policy".
For while the disastrous extremes of fraud and calamity committed or countenanced by the corporatist wing of the American Ruling Class are surely at a post-war high, the technique (manufacture a disaster--usually a war--then rob the budget blind, divert the country's attention, demand sacrifice, destabilize a restive citizenry) dates at least to the Spanish-American War.
Back then it was the Populist's patriotic warnings against a growing Big Business-Big Government monstrosity, a beast that would devour American liberty and fairness, which needed to be smothered without a public hearing.
So the McKinley Administration, with the active support of the Demublicans, threw a war down in Cuba and the Phillipines(!), under the pretense of liberating the natives from Spanish rule. Of course the Powers That Be took the colonies for themselves, but the American people, in the doldrums of economic and social depression, welcomed the parades and the heroic reports of Teddy Roosevelt's "Rough Riders." Public demands for reform? Diverted, forgotten, buried. Have we ever really remembered the Maine?
I have dealt elsewhere with what happens next, the growing concentration of wealth and power, the social movements which rise to meet them, the reaction as the movements are put down by war and economic depression and outright police action. Decade after decade this has been the pattern in our country, as parallel tendencies develop: on the one hand, our ever-more sophisticated consciousness of the State's misdeeds; on the other, the State's ever-more sophisticated ability to fool us.
And so we have the so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the subsequent bail out. The public record shows that it was the government, under both parites, that encouraged banks to make risky loans to people who couldn't afford them. Why couldn't they afford them? Because all their jobs have been run out of the country (once again and infamously with the active support and encouragement of the Federal Government).
We no longer make what we use: China does. That fundamental economic principal which Henry Ford understood as the basis of sustained growth--Pay people such that they can afford to buy what they make--was long ago violated.
Why? Because such people become economically secure, they unionize, they have time to think about politics, they start to own homes and raise children who go to college... who then begin to question a consumerist lifestyle and perpetual war, who feel the stirrings for something more from themselves and their government, something finer...
Well, you get the picture. If you are the Ruling Class, this is a development to be avoided at all costs. A citizenry consisting of economically secure, educated thinkers has to be destabilized, or the State looses its power.
And so the educational infrastructure was deliberately weakened, such that you'll be hard pressed to find a Harvard graduate who can tell you the first thing about the Civil War, let alone an inner-city high-schooler who's heard the word "revolution" anywhere outside of an ad for high-tops.
Concurrently, both parents were sent to work, for longer hours and less pay, and the only way to afford the advertised life became a handful of credit cards at usurious, impossible rates. The American Dream at 13 and a half percent!
So when you're offered a house of your own for no money down? Well, you grab at the chance, don't you? Personal responsibility be damned!
This latest economic war on the people of the United States isn't the brainchild of our mindless business class. They are merely pigs let loose at the trough. The bail out is the scheme of men of power who aim to get us on our knees and keep us there.
For more on economic warfare, Goldman Sachs, and getting "nickel and dimed," see John Kirby's film The American Ruling Class, now available on DVD, www.alivemind.net, and showing on the Sundance Channel, October 20th at 6:30PM nationally.
