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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
14, 2006
New Head, Same Policy
The
Perishing Republic
By RON JACOBS
"While this America settles
in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire /
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs
out, and the mass hardens"
-from Shine, Perishing Republic,
by Robinson Jeffers
We live in dangerous (and interesting)
times. Yet, not since the 1960s has there been an opportunity
to change the direction that the powerful and greedy are leading
us like that which exists today. Of course, the converse of
this truth is that there hasn't been this degree of risk to the
very existence of the world since the 1960s, either. Massive
mobilizations of weaponry and bloody force have been used by
the forces of US capital in an attempt to dominate the world
and its people. Supplemented by trade agreements that are primarily
beneficial to the financial capitals of New York and London,
the capital of the world's richest cartels of finance and industry
flows like water without regard to borders to wherever the lowest
wages can be found. This race to the bottom precipitates corresponding
wage decreases in the powerful nations of the north and massive
migrations of people from the south towards the northern jobs
that offer better pay than those in the migrants' home countries.
The answer to this migration is racism and xenophobia from northern
workers that feel threatened. Of course, these twin phenomenon
are encouraged by most elements in the north's ruling elites
since it takes the heat off of their policy of free trade.
That is but one element of
the current imperial order. The other, more obvious and explosive
aspect are the wars precipitated by Washington, London and Israel,
with various supporting casts. In this scenario, Tel Aviv plays
the rabid pit bull, Washington the trained-to-kill Doberman,
and London the poodle that considers himself vicious, even though
the closest the poodle ever gets anymore is maybe a good hump
of the US shepherd's leg. These wars are part and parcel of
the neocon-neoliberal plan to dominate the world in the name
of US capital. Notice the countries that Washington threatens
Iraq, Iran, Northern Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, to name the first
that come to mind. All of these countries have (or had, in the
case of Iraq and Serbia), one thing in common. They refused
to go along with US capitol's designs for free trade, opting
instead to defy the trade agreements that suck the lifeblood
out of the majority of the people in the countries that sign
them. So they get the sword, instead of the pen.
The latter may certainly be
less painful, but the results are the same. After free trade
is agreed to by the elites in Washington and your home country,
there is certain death for many of those not considered part
of the program. For the US workers in the equation, there is
a certain change in your material standard of living. If you
were already poor, you're even poorer now.
In countries to the south,
the masses rebel at these agreements and take their anger to
the streets. Lately, they've even changed a few governments
so that they work a little more in their favor--Venezuela, Bolivia,
even Chile. But here in the US there is no recourse within the
political system. Yet, all we ever do is complain. Or get mad.
I just finished re-reading
Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. For those of you unfamiliar
with the work, it's nominally about the Salem witch trials in
Salem, Mass. back in the late 17th(?) century. There's a line
in the play that easily applies to any type of fundamentalism--religious
or political. That line goes like this: "cleave to no faith
when faith brings blood." Yet, that isn't what the play
is really about. It's about fear and intolerance. Indeed, Miller
wrote the work during the era of McCarthyism and hoped his audience
would draw a parallel between the testimony of the girls in Salem
that sent several women to their deaths because they were considered
to be witches and the testimony of those being called in front
of the McCarthy committee investigating communism in the US.
Like the reaning that informs today's fear of terrorism, no
woman accused of witchcraft was proven to be a witch--instead,
they had to prove that they weren't witches. Those who lied
and said they were witches had to then go along with the charges
provided by the prosecutor against other women or they would
be sent back to prison. Today, it's not enough to say you are
not a terrorist--you must support the policies and wars of those
who say they are fighting terrorism and thereby prove that you
aren't. That is what is meant by the phrase you're either with
them or against them.
I read a few different newspapers
every day. Most of them are from the US. One thing I notice
about their coverage of certain issues is how incredibly skewed
it is. A relevant example (besides the obvious one of Israel
and its sanctity) is the way in which most US papers present
the immigrant rights question. Despite the incredible numbers
of people that turned out demanding legalization of undocumented
workers' status, the continuing coverage of the issue presents
the activities of the much smaller (and I mean much smaller)
anti-immigrant groups as equal to the popular upsurge for immigrant
rights. Now, we all know that the mostly unsaid motivation behind
groups like the Minutemen is a fear of a non-white planet. More
specifically, it is a fear of a non-white United States. The
fact that newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington
Post spotlight the vigilante activities of the Minutemen
and its members is one thing. The fact that they present their
fears and racist reactions as rational and worthy of front page
coverage reveals something more insidious. By doing so, the
liberals prove themselves to be the tails to the neocons head
on the corporate capitalist coin. The sooner the movement truly
understands this, the better off it will be. Everything that
George Bush and his cronies have done and are doing was begun
or maintained during the Clinton years. There is a cartoon from
an old underground newspaper --1969 is when it appeared I think--where
LBJ is laying in a hospital bed awaiting surgery. The captions
are a paraphrase from the philosopher and writer Herbert Marcuse
and read like this:
"(Panel 1) The art of
holding on to power is our American system's know how. Given
their constitutional rights, dissenters help maintain the status
quo we call repressive tolerance. (Panel 2) It works this way:
you let dissidents say whatever they please in a system loaded
in favor of the powerful elites. The dissidents let off steam
in a controlled way and the controllers keep power. (Panel 3)
The trick is to make change look so tantalizingly close that
it dulls the edge of militancy and makes revolutionary reform
impossible. (Panel 4) Of course, every 4 to 8 years people will
start blaming you personally for the lack of change, so you change
your face."
Instead of LBJ's head being
on the body in the hospital bed, the last panel shows Richard
Nixon, who, of course, became president in 1969. One wonders
whose head will be in the White House in 2008 carrying on the
same policies as Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton before him? Does this
mean that elections are irrelevant or that Bush and Cheney shouldn't
be impeached? Of course not. What it means is that such efforts
are meaningful only when they are carried out with the understanding
that they are not cure all remedy, but just an opportunity to
educate people to the true nature of the system. Like the elections
held every couple of years, all adjustments to the current system
of government--a system based on the right of those with the
desire and cash to exploit the rest of us--are merely adjustments.
They will not solve the fundamental problems. Those problems
are more than political and more than economic. Indeed, they
are on the broad swath of human endeavor where politics and economics
collide and mingle. Political systems are designed to uphold
economic systems. The republican system of democracy we live
under is not a system where the people rule, but a system where
those with money rule the people. So, as long as the system
of monopoly capital rules our economy, than the political system
will mirror those capitalists' needs and desires, not ours.
That is the risk to the world. Our risk is to be found in attempting
to subvert this mechanism.
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