Stupid Like A Fox

    When it was first announced that the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war would mandate a military response by the U.S., I immediately knew it was a virtual guarantee that chemical weapons would be used. As expected, in the reports offered by the unquestioned, unquestioning media arm of government the facts are murky, the perpetrators can’t be definitively identified, and reflexively the crime is charged to a predetermined enemy who has been carefully and progressively demonized.

  Why if your military situation is so perilous would you resort to a tactic and weapon that would bring other more powerful, relatively invulnerable combatants on to the field against you? You wouldn’t.

    If I accept the reports on the use of chemical weapons, I still must ask myself who would be the greatest beneficiary of their use.  How would the brutal deaths of civilians benefit the regime? How will it enhance its tactical position or win the support of the people. It won’t.

    But what does it do? It is an outright request to be bombed into oblivion. It is sawing the rope suspending the Sword of Damocles.

    And we Americans have been prepared to be righteously upset over the crossing of the “red line” that we drew on the situation. We’ve been conditioned to demand military action from our ‘reluctant’ government. What other strategic or diplomatic purpose does a publically announced “red line” serve than to preposition a justification for war?

    And what could possibly be the attraction of another conflict for a nation awash in debt, whose vast military is so stretched by necessities of empire that it is unable to protect the homeland without the establishment of a secondary military arm, Homeland Security? Well, Iraq is effectively a colony, Libya has been brought around to ‘right thinking’, Egypt has been neutralized by turmoil, Syria is about to experience regime change, and the dictators of Saudi Arabia are the money-addicted sluts of big petroleum. Iran is increasingly surrounded and isolated. And Israel can now steal all of Palestine with impunity. Oh how accidentally wonderful. On this grand chessboard, in a stealth crusade waged by a stealth empire, God  gets what he supposedly wants, and we get control of the oil. American know-how at its best.

   Yes, it was guaranteed chemical weapons would be used – and it doesn’t really matter who actually deployed them. It’s all good for the empire.

   

Peasantry Redux

    “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy” –James Madison.

    I used that quote in another blog discussing my view on the trampling of The Fourth Amendment and the rise of the omnipresent surveillance/security state. Mr. Madison was particularly prescient in his fear as evidenced by the subject matter I chose to address. But later it occurred to me that not only should he have cited the quiescent reversion to submission to overbearing authority and dominance of the state which the distraction of events and disturbances might engender; but he should have also recognized the danger of an even more ancient and insidious foe supposedly excised by the exodus from the Old World – the peasant mentality.

    For a brief shining moment this nation boasted as its best virtue the fact it had a large prosperous middle class. It was a level of social egalitarianism attributed not just to capitalism, but to the ability of the people to exercise an unalienable right to craft their culture to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. To my mind this process reached its best expression when the labor movement finally forced acknowledgement of labor’s partnership in any economic enterprise, and caused the distribution of profits to reflect labor’s integral role in the triumvirate of investment that brought profit into being –intellectual capital, financial capital, and labor. Eliminate any of the three and there is no economic enterprise. And I contend it was this enlightened recognition that created our dynamic economic engine and egalitarian sociological transformation, leading to what was once an unparalleled standard of living across a broad society.  The creation of the middle class as the jewel and identity of our society was a studied intellectual and attitudinal process [not the fortuitous benefice of an indifferent “Invisible Hand”] which revoked the old class-based rectitude and socioeconomic order of stratified, predetermined superior economic rights and privileges once imposed by the political and martial power of the ruling class, which traditionally sandwiched an insignificant middle class between an ascendant upper class and a massive powerless peasantry. It could be said the expansive and inclusive U.S.  middle class represented “a more perfect economic union”.

    When did our middle class begin to decline in size and prosperity? I believe it began when capitalism was redefined and misunderstood as “good greed”, and opposition to that extreme hypothesis was mislabeled as “socialism”. That these errors gained cultural acceptance I attribute to anti-intellectualism now seen as a practical virtue, even in institutions of higher learning which have refashioned themselves as corporate trainers rather than as classical educators,  and the ubiquitous corpo-social “message” portraying the growing disparity of wealth distribution as a “natural” phenomena rather than a process significantly directed by selfish human calculation and systemic manipulation.

    But what is capitalism?

          “Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.

         “The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve ‘the common good.’ It is true that capitalism does—if that catch-phrase has any meaning—but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in   the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.” — AYN RAND

         “Capitalism is a social system based on the principle of individual rights. Politically, it is the system of laissez-faire (freedom). Legally it is a system of objective laws (rule of law as opposed to rule of man). Economically, when such freedom is applied to the sphere of production its’ result is the free-market.”

    Now I ask you, how does collective bargaining, or compensation which includes health benefits and pension funds etc. conflict with capitalism? Nowhere in the theory of capitalism, to my knowledge, is there a prescription mandating how profits must be distributed. If as The Supreme Court says, “Corporations are people”, then one corporation is one person. And if capitalism is a social system based on the principle of individual rights, why cannot a Union, a similar collective of people organized to advance an economic goal, as is a corporation, be considered a “person”, and why shouldn’t that ”person”, “consonant with man’s rational nature” negotiate with the other “person”, the corporation, for more equitable distribution of the proceeds of the economic enterprise to which his contribution is as necessary and valuable as any other contribution? Such a negotiation is not “socialism” in either form or substance. It is not contrary to principles of the free market. It is, in fact, a noble part of the free market.  It is capitalism bought into with different currency.

    Consider these scenarios. If an “individual” actor paid $400,000 stars in a movie that grosses $500 million dollars, is it “socialism” to demand $10 million from the “person”, the corporate studio, to act in the sequel? If a baseball player arrives on a team that usually fills a third of available seats at home games, and his production causes the team to start winning and filling the stadium, is it “socialism” to bargain for a new contract that reflects his contribution to increased team profit? Why then would the “person” of a union negotiating with the “person” of Walmart Inc. for a living wage from “his” $409 billion dollars of profit be either “socialism” or an affront to capitalism? By definition it wouldn’t be.  Why then do so many now think it is “wrong” and dangerous to negotiate their rightful interests with Walmart?

    Further, why would middle class people, say of the Tea Party, demonstrate against their own interests by serving as commandos to break their natural ally, Unions, when corporate profits are soaring, the cost of living is increasing while wage levels remain stagnant for thirty-plus years, and volunteer to serve as a firewall to protect the wealthy from a small tax increase when there is well publicized documentation that the wealthy, under the current tax scheme, are getting richer and the middle class poorer? Do they know what socialism actually is? Do they know the correct definition of capitalism? Or have they been brow-beaten with false definitions, false equivalencies, and a false sense of their place in the economic design to finally submit and remount the peasant’s mentality and accept it as their economic fate to simply endure what they’re given – and like it? Why would Walmart’s hundreds of thousands of $8.00 per hour employees resign themselves to the fact that a few people break off billion dollar chunks of profit culled from the comingled efforts of many, others break off tens of millions, others millions, others hundreds of thousands, and others distribution of unearned dividends, while they, the Walmart employee’s most incongruous return for their labor is poverty? If this acquiescence to economic futility isn’t classic peasant mentality, I don’t know what is.

Remembering Rights

                                                                                                                                                      
 

     Somehow, like a hormonal pimple on the nose of naivete, the convenient emergence and imminence of our security establishment’s discovery of “the most credible terrorist threat in years”,  is more predictable than surprising, coming as it does on the heels of the troubling revelation of the NSA’s steadily mounting litany of abrogation of our Constitutional Rights. Their typical defense is they were only dutifully acting to save us from freedom’s unintended mischief to “security”. Even if one is inclined to put the best possible spin on this bureaucratic malfeasance, it is required of mature citizens to remember that manufactured fear has historically been the bulwark justifying fascist conveniences, which always include revised premises of unalienable rights. And history also shows that when clever, industrial-scale propaganda, in service of war (real or illusory), induces the trance in which civil rights are inimical to victory, you can in the end, only have victory that is inimical to civil rights.

    It may be the transference of cultural hegemony to the Millennials who in utero psychologically ingested technological intrusion into formally private and sacrosanct realms beginning with ultrasound examinations that revealed them even before ‘legal’ personhood, and who have subsequently even relinquished interior privacy by way of vacuous “Tweets” and “Selfies”, which informs the government of a new, faux sophistication among the populace that devalues and diminishes the ancient temenos of privacy. But, even if the lascivious temptations of technology loosen restraints individuals should impose upon themselves, the proper, official, legal use of technology is the duty, responsibility and vicarious liability of a constitutionally constrained government.

   Being an unreconstructed 9/11 Truther and a Warren Report/Vietnam era American, my impelled conception of intellectual honesty and self-respect prevents me from denying blatant anomalies in the fabric of physical and moral reality our government often weaves to advance its agenda or quell controversy; even to the point of the “big lie”. The “big lie”, Hitler noted, is a scenario that is beyond the capacity of “the simple minds of the people to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation… yes, even when enlightened on the subject”.  For example, no amount of reference to the laws of physics, the Conservation of Energy, basic engineering and architecture etc. will sway our supposedly educated population from acceptance of the ludicrous “official” explanation of building collapses on 9/11. The Fuehrer’s observation is seemingly further reinforced when the mere prophesy of events, rather than concrete occurrences, is enough to cause pliant, unquestioning surrender of percentages of personal freedom, thought, and privacy that would make modern America so distinctly unrecognizable to previous generations, that those infected with the psychosis of power have no compelling incentive to re-burden the unopposed exercise of Orwellian authority with the sheepishly abandoned whimsy of unalienable constitutional rights.

      The newly received cultural narrative is that owing to some bizarre metaphysical equation, the citizens of the most powerful nation on earth cannot be simultaneously ‘free’ and ‘safe’. We’re given to believe the existence of some nebulous über-threat necessitates both a large, magnificently equipped standing military force AND a supplemental ‘domestic army’, Homeland Security, which recently supplied itself with 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition. Nonetheless, behind this bristling armed barrier whose raison d’être is protection of our 

freedom, we are obliged us to reposit our still insecure and inconvenient freedoms with a paternal government until some future decade or century when the apparatus of “security”, all its technologies and processes, including such constitutionally dubious applications as  “Parallel Construction”, will be dismantled and our manifestly ‘alienable’ civil rights will then supposedly revert to their Constitutional defaults.  Considering the statistic that terrorism has endangered ordinary Americans to the same degree as one may be prey to furniture falling from high rise buildings, it may be questioned if such a prophylactic abrogation of the people’s protections in the Bill of Rights, together with the establishment of the Praetorian Guard of Homeland Security, indicates that the government, for some reason, fears its citizens as much or more than offshore enemies, and has come to consider the protection of itself and imperial policies, and not the freedom of the people, as its primary duty.

    Government, in the course of its public duties assumes, no, takes an absolute entitlement to secrecy. But, when one of those secrets is the abridging of supposedly unalienable rights, THAT illegal behavior offers validation of the primordial fear that for entities of government, even ours, “rights” are only aleatory analects, and will ever be treated as such unless given incontrovertible substance by perpetual vigorous attention and forceful, and if necessary violent demand of the people.

    If it becomes acceptable in a society experiencing largely unrent day to day normalcy that unalienable rights are in fact provisional, and statutory parameters may be redefined and/or disrespected by government ‘in secret’, then it must be concluded that the people tacitly authorize the dismantling of even the façade of freedom and government by the people. Then it may be expected that tyranny will ascend the throne as it most often does – by way of demotic acquiescence or indifference to the “gradual and silent usurpation” of once believed indefeasible civil rights.

    Where once I would have considered this opinion I now possess ’fantastic’, the litany of illegal wars, The Patriot Act, the NDAA, torture, rendition, the drone killings of American citizens without any publicly scrutinized ‘due process’, indefinite imprisonment of un-indicted individuals, Congressional rubber stamping of every call to war, and of course the massive warrantless spying on the citizenry, forces me into a sort of paranoia regarding the true nature of the society I inhabit. Too many things, once propagandized as the provinces of autocratic foreign despots and fascist dictators, are practices now justified domestically under the old reliable rubrics of ‘safety and security’, where the 'more' valuable product ‘security’ can only be purchased with the deflated coin of ‘freedom’.

    I only hope my fear is wanton and this communication is just the excess of an uninhibited and ludicrous keyboard operated by too small an understanding of the complexities of the modern geo-political world.  And I hope to be argued back to a more comfortable sensibility by those who expect to be ‘more free’ in the coming decades.