Re: SC74

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20461.htm

The Fire This Time?

...............We stole from indentured servants from the beginning. We stole from Native Americans within minutes of landing here, and never stopped until we’d grabbed all the land and resources we wanted, leaving them casinos and poverty in return. We harnessed yokes around Africans and imported them as if they were agricultural beasts of burden, and continued to do so for centuries. We built our economic accomplishments on the backs of near-slave immigrant laborers, from Chinese coolies to Mexican wetbacks, along with Irish, Italian, German, Jewish and a whole lot of other nationalities in-between. We stole fully half of Mexico following a trumped-up war no less bogus than the current one in Iraq, then we did the same for Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines and more. We broke the backs of labor movements in order to enrich a few owners while grinding ‘human resources’ into impoverishment and early death. We exploited the entire continent-and-a-half of Latin America, installing local dictators in country after country who got personally wealthy by doing the oppressive and murderous dirty work for American resource extraction corporations. We assigned to women endless domestic chores without the slightest compensation, nor political power, nor even ownership of family wealth.

These are the obvious thefts — and there is no more accurate word for it — by which we’ve massively enhanced our wealth over a period of centuries. But there are less obvious ones as well. We have raped the environment for precisely the same purposes. You can get a lot wealthier a lot faster by not concerning yourself (or even paying compensation for) the environmental destruction caused by manufacturing, mining, drilling and more, than you would by having to be responsible for those very real costs of your enterprise. Economists like to gently refer to such factors as ‘externalities.’ That’s a polite way to describe a process by which the rich get even richer through offloading the costs of their business to you and me, and keeping the profits for themselves.

Not content with any of that, however, we’ve also lately been engaged in other, new and improved, more subtle forms of national wealth theft. Rampant consumerism based on little plastic cards is quite effective, leaving costs to others, like our children. So is — as exhausted consumerism now heads for the ditch — turning our houses into piggy banks to keep an economy artificially afloat, until that can no longer be sustained either. Or running incredible trade deficits, or radically deflating the value of our currency to keep sales of American goods abroad halfway viable. Another nice trick you can do is run up the national debt and leave that to your kids as well. You can also ignore your infrastructural repair and development needs so people can party on now, instead of paying the taxes necessary to keep the economy strong for the next generation. Talk about eating your young. One of the best of all these games over last decades has been the uninhibited agenda of economic globalization which has now managed to successfully export American white collar jobs to India, right behind the blue collar ones that previously went to China. That was supposed to make us all richer, remember? Some people indeed are. Those without jobs, or working for half what they used to make, aren’t in that small group however.

What all of these ploys have in common is that they are all methods allowing one to live larger than we’re rightfully entitled to. Slavery is the most obvious example. You wanna live the good life? The most basic formula ain’t that hard to figure out. Kidnap some dude from a less technologically developed part of the world, terrorize him with overwhelming force and psychological violence to go along with the real kind, then watch as he plows your field while you sit on the porch sipping Mint Juleps. Then, repeat. This is the most obvious example, yes, but really no different in principle from ripping off your own kids with tax ‘cuts’ unaccompanied by spending cuts, which drive up the national debt and hand the next generation the bill. Plus interest. Or stealing in the form of externalizing costs for remediating environmental destruction while the eco-evildoers go off scot-free with grossly inflated profits (indeed, in some cases, these would be non-existent profits, were the real costs to have been factored in). And so on, and so on.

The work of Reaganism-Bushism is nowadays finally beginning to be recognized for what it is. Americans have not felt such economic insecurity since the Great Depression. Whether the epiphany will come in time for them to finally recognize and give leave to the kind folks who dismantled the Good Times of previous generations, is unclear. A very possible scenario is that McCain barely wins in November — on the strength of fear, racism and the usual Rovian smear tactics — literally just months before economic anxiety finally crests over into newfound consciousness and rage. That would feel like a giant version of 2005, when Americans were frightened into re-electing the Little Tyrant, and almost immediately began to regret their choice. This was truly another paradigmatic moment, as Bush did his usual blustering performance, bragging about his mandate and the political capital he now planned to start spending. As he quickly found out when he tried to rip-off the Social Security system, and as his job approval ratings continued to sink until just about nobody other than a few crackers in the Texas Hill Country still thought he was doing a good job, the only mandate he had actually garnered was to be someone other than the cartoon caricature of a would-be president that Rove had turned John Kerry into (with the latter’s ample assistance).

If McCain once again drags the spent and stinking carcass of kleptocratic robber baron public policy across the finish line in November, while the economy continues to deteriorate, he’ll have only two choices on coming to office. One would be to abandon his party once and for all in a sort of reverse version of the U-turn François Mitterrand famously executed, moving from socialism to mixed economy capitalism during the 1980s. McCain might actually relish that notion. He probably hates the crap he’s had to take from the bastards who rule his party nearly as much as the rest of us do. Plus he may know he’s a one-term president no matter what, so what’s he got to lose? And we know that he admires Teddy Roosevelt most of all the former presidents, and such a move would be right out of TR’s playbook.

His other choice would be to continue to hew closely to right-wing orthodoxy while the ground disintegrates below our feet. This would surely please Grover Norquist and all the billionaires whose massive earnings are maybe off by ten percent lately (boo-hoo, fellas), but if he did this my guess is that the rest of the country might well turn on him with some caged-animal ferocity raging behind bared teeth. For reasons which still entirely elude me (though which nowadays probably have a lot to do with simply waiting it all out), the public massively disapproves of the Bush administration, but does nothing about it. My gut tells me, however, that having their hopes quashed once again as things get worse, and the guy they’ve just reluctantly chosen president continues the same destructive policies of doing nothing but making the rich richer, is a bridge too far. At the risk of mixing metaphors, I wouldn’t want to be John McCain on the day that particular dam breaks.

But the bigger point is simply this. Americans historically did well by working hard, educating themselves and bringing clever innovation to the table. But for just as long they got really rich by stealing the extra wealth, whether from someone else’s labor, from their neighbors, from the environment in which we live, or from the future.

What if there are no more piggy banks from which to steal? What happens if the US economy has finally hit the wall of remorseless reality, and can only produce what it can honestly produce? What happens to the American economy and American standards of living if all the gimmicks have been exhausted?.............