Obama's Generational Problem

I listened to the president’s Syria speech the other night where he attempted to convince the nation that we Americans are morally burdened with still another violent duty in the service of righteousness. The symptomatological cascade that Mr. Obama has succumbed to the pathology of imperial power, proffered by the permanent military-industrial bureaucracy, was confirmed by the encapsulation of his banal reasoning in a plethora of discreditable clichés glued together by the rhetorical excrement of empire – right down to the foolishness that some unique gift of “exceptionalism” justly enfranchises all the expedient, violent, and hypocritical activities this nation undertakes.

According to the unchanged opinions of the majority of Americans, even The Great Orator couldn’t re-legitimize our sham notion of “exceptionalism” which has been rendered intellectually and factually dubious to the ascending, culturally dominant generation geo-politically matured and edified by our brutal, blatant, and unapologetic Real politik fraud in Iraq. The demagoguery and rose-tinted lenses which for so long nullified the color of blood have been displaced by a new willingness to view impulsive militarism with the cynicism fitting to its nature and bequeaths to progressive, peaceful civilization. And that's a good thing!

Will There Be War?

Considering the continued murkiness of the facts and evidence, I don’t believe this nation should elect to war based primarily on a ‘prime time’ Presidential monologue. A serious and comprehensive national dialogue is required. If I were to ask the President some questions they would be -

1.    If violence is the answer to our grievance, why wouldn’t violence be the answer to someone else’s grievances a month from now or a year from now? Or is this war projected to be the war to end all grievances?

2.    If we bomb them, why shouldn’t we expect to be bombed? Americans have coasted too long on the anomaly of WWII and our recent conflicts where we engage in war and all the death and destruction happens “over there”. But war is not just us ‘doing them’; it is also them ‘doing us’. That’s war! And if bombs go off in their cities, we must expect they will go off in ours; exploded under the same construction of “justice” that supposedly informs our actions. Unless the President, in asking for authorization to go to war, is prepared to place this real possibility before the people, to make the people understand and appreciate the real consequences of war; that we must expect to see the blood of our children flowing down the storm drains in our streets, then his request would be less than his full moral duty. It would be an omission closely related to deception.

But there are other aspects equally pertinent to our national security and domestic tranquility to consider. We are not only debating a foreign war, we are debating a class war.

Over the course of the past weeks, right up to today, there haven’t been any other or new arguments presented differing from those generated on ‘day one’. No new evidence or proof has surfaced to sway adopted opinions. All of the originally held, various, and respective speculations are intact, in place, and unchanged. And the entire population is exposed to the same corporate media.  But I submit for consideration my admittedly unscientific conclusion derived from anecdotal evidence and my personal interpretation of the polls, that it appears that the economic top ten percent of the society is for the war, and the bottom 90% is against it. Why this is the case is another debate for another time. But “IF” I am correct I don’t believe it is possible for the President to lay out a case, lacking some as yet un-communicated, overwhelmingly compelling and believable arguments and proven facts that may have only emerged in the past hours, to change this calculus. So, although it is another discomfort in an uncomfortable and complex situation for a serially embattled president, a choice must be made. The President not only has a military decision to make, he has a political decision to make as well. His most vital and meaningful decision in this scenario doesn’t involve which weapons systems to employ, designating high value targets, or proving to the world how much of a badass he can be. What will have the greatest impact on our security and domestic tranquility is his decision on which constituency to appease. The historic and social trajectory of our nation awaits his choice.

Facts Americanus

It is time for the people of the United States to cease being herded to war like sheep. It is time to question our leaders and not simply follow where they lead. It is time to stop enjoying the arrogance that we are the most powerful nation on earth while simultaneously having our “security” threatened by every event in every backwater of the world. How does the recent tragedy which occurred in the Syrian civil war affect our “security”? We hear that mantra constantly repeated, but I haven’t heard an articulation of the nature of the threat that is so massive and imminent that it justifies us going to war against a minor regime already in the throes of civil war. I find it difficult to credit the horror our leaders express over the deaths of the Syrians caused by an alleged chemical weapon, when we killed many more civilians, women and children in the first hour of “shock and awe” in Iraq in an extra-legal attack over imaginary WMD. No, they are not motivated by regret over senseless death. Any intervention by the U.S. will not be motivated by humanitarian concern or defense of the integrity of an ancient convention. It will be motivated by the reward of regime change to our on-going strategy to eliminate any challenges to our hegemonic geo-political scheme to establish suzerainty over the region and its precious oil.

Of course there will be those who will claim my allegation is “anti-American”, but I request they measure the tempo and volume of the rhetoric of our warmongers against the information in the following articles.

                     

                      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23947149

                      http://thebulletin.org/multimedia/chemical-weapons-syria

Does it seem strange to anyone that according to the first article, dated 9/3/13, that samples from the site are just now reaching the laboratories where they will be examined to determine what actually caused the deaths of the victims?  But our President has already drawn his conclusions and apparently thinks retaliation is so urgently needed that waiting for the results of the investigation is dangerous to OUR “security”. It is worth noting that some aspects of the forensic investigation will be to determine if the weapon was “improvised or designed for military use”, “possibly indicate the type delivery device used”, and ascertain the nature of the agent used.  From all that we’ve heard from official channels you’d believe all these questions had been resolved. But today we see they’re still open and haven’t even begun to be examined for actionable fact.  As “peaceful Americans” you’d think the answer to these questions would have a bearing on the grave decision to wage war. But following our imperial pattern it looks as if the President believes it is urgent to attack ‘before’ the facts are known, an urgency that is obviously tactical rather than altruistic.

The second article offers some perspective on chemical weapons and chemical weapons as WMD. The content of the two articles seem to require an intellectual and moral hesitancy that belies the rabid surety our leaders express by foreordained dismissal even in advance of the result of investigation and without a decent measure of certainty that should be required for war.

The farce of Congressional approval is meaningless unless there is someone in Congress, anyone, who will question how and why the Syrian civil war need become another American war. It is meaningless if any independent operator, any paid sociopath, any demented imperialist, any revenge seeker can compel this nation to war because of impolitic rhetoric that obligates us to act without facts or rationality. We, the President, and the Congress are too “for” war and too little “against’ it to be the positive force in the world we claim to be.

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.