*
(This
is a six-part series – the story on which I have been at work since
mid-June – printed here in its totality. Due to the inexplicable failure
of my blog-server's software, I am unable to highlight text as
access-ports to URLs. Instead I have listed links for reference and
additional reading after each section, the URLs arranged alphabetically
by sub-topic. My apology for the inconvenience. –LB)
*
I. Capitalism in Action: Student Loan Debt as the New Slavery
THE
EVER-MORE-PROHIBITIVE COST of higher education is a perfect, perfectly
teachable example of how capitalism has slain the American Dream and
murdered the American Experiment in constitutional democracy.
But
the One Percent's hired liars and paid facilitators – Ruling Class
journalists, corporate-owned academics and Democrat/Republican
politicians – are doing their damnedest to keep us from learning its
bitter lessons.
By
now we all know how entire U.S. generations are enslaved by
skyrocketing student-loan debt – a sum that already tops a trillion
dollars and far exceeds our $804 billion credit-card debt.
As
most of us know, the debt is so huge because the politicians have let
the greedy Wall Street bankers turn formerly low-cost, non-profit
student loans into outrageously expensive, maximum-profit moneymakers.
Most
of us also know the One Percent's politicians have decreed that
student-loan debt – unlike mortgages or credit-card debt – cannot be
escaped by declaring bankruptcy. A substantial portion of student-loan
debt is not even escapable by death or suicide. The result is a
financial ball-and-chain that shackles students and their extended
families – spouses, parents, grandparents, even children – until the
loan is repaid.
Moreover,
in the global economy and its permanently downsized U.S. workplace,
repayment of such loans is difficult if not impossible. Student-loan
debtors are forced into a lifelong equivalent of medieval serfdom,
relentlessly victimized by creditors who – again thanks to the Dem/Reps –
can garnish all income (welfare stipends or Social Security pensions
included), even if the garnishment leaves you unable to feed your
children, pay for medical care or keep a roof over your head.
As
Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren noted in 2005, “student-loan
debt collectors have power that would make a mobster envious.”
But
not even Warren, now a Democratic candidate to represent Massachusetts
in the U.S. Senate, has dared acknowledge what actually happened: that
student lives were sold like slave futures by the Dem/Rep whores in
Congress and the White House – peddled to the Wall Street aristocrats
in return for campaign contributions.
Meanwhile, the same Dem/Rep harlots who granted the Ruling Class de facto
restoration of slavery have effectively abolished our (former)
constitutional right to petition the government for redress of
grievances. Now the One Percent's tyrants and their obscenely well-paid
enablers are protected by legions of thugs – the Gestapo-minded sadists
of the newly militarized state and local police – who stand ready to
pounce on anyone who dares muster in public protest.
What's
behind the so-called “student debt crisis” is the methodical conversion
of public education into yet another capitalist scam. What once was a
taxpayer-funded government service that benefited the entire nation is
fast becoming a profit-reaper that benefits only the One Percent.
The
process that has turned the former collegiate gateway to the American
Dream into the cell-door of an American Nightmare is called
“privatization.” It is a benign-sounding euphemism for the unapologetic
savagery behind the new U.S. paradigm of local, state and federal
governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class,
total subjugation and genocidal poverty for the rest of us.
Even
Suze Orman, formerly an irrepressibly optimistic spokeswoman for
capitalism and the Ayn Rand lifestyle in general, now admits that under
privatized student loans, “you do not have any rights whatsoever.”
Orman's remarks are reminiscent of Karl Marx's observation in Das Kapital:
a teacher, Marx wrote, “is a productive laborer (who) works like a
horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his
capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not
alter the relation.”
In
today's increasingly privatized higher education system, the school
proprietors and the bankers with whom the school is typically allied
extract their riches not by forcing teachers into intellectual
sweatshops but rather by the exploitation of students. The faculty
members – themselves dependent on money siphoned from students and their
families – function as the proprietor's surrogates.
As
always under capitalism, somebody – in this case the students – has to
be victimized for the system to work as intended. Now though the
victimization is so intensified – by the banks, by the schools, by the
permanently downsized economy – its brutality has become undeniable.
“So
you better think twice,” says Orman, “when you think an expensive
education is what's going to get you a job when there are no jobs out
there to be had.”
Such
is the one “change we can believe in”: obscene enrichment of the
privileged few, its irremediable result the relentless and permanent
impoverishment of all the rest of us, exactly as illustrated by the
financial lockout imposed by privatization on colleges and universities.
References and additional reading
***
II. Privatization as Capitalism's War on Government
GROVER
NORQUIST, FOUNDER and president of Americans for Tax Reform and one of
the most outspoken proponents of privatization, says “our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.”
Norquist
founded AFTF in 1985, purportedly at President Ronald Reagan's
request, to propagate the Reaganoid doctrine that “government is not
the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”
Since then, many of us have been duped into believing the downsizing of government is a good thing.
But let's look at some of privatization's alleged accomplishments.
It is privatization – corporate profit at the expense of student learning – that is destroying public school K-12
education. It is privatization that has turned U.S. prisons into
for-profit slave-pens. It is privatization that is wrecking our local,
state and national infrastructure. And it is privatization that is
robbing our cities of vital long-term revenue, reducing them to future
slums.
Privatization
is the hidden agenda behind the Democratic Party's final abandonment of
the New Deal, the ultimate betrayal of the poor via the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, the so-called welfare “reform” that hurled the nation's lower-income population under the capitalist steamroller.
Like the Dem/Pub “health care reform” enacted 14 years later, the
legislation was more than anything else a huge payoff to the
capitalists.
Privatization and Prayer: The Case of Charitable Choice,
an undated study (probably 2002) by Sheila Suess Kennedy, assistant
professor of law and public policy at Indiana University, acknowledges
that another (intentional) consequence of the privatization of social
services is that it frees providers from oversight – including
constitutional restraints against using federal funds to proselytize
Christian theocracy and/or discriminate against non-Christians.
“When
we refuse to recognize that contractors are government agents,” Kennedy
wrote, “we lose the right to hold them to constitutional standards.”
The
resultant brutality of privatized welfare is exposed in a new report by
the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its findings
are unequivocally damning: “In 1995, for every 100 families with
children living in poverty, 68 received cash assistance...to help meet
basic needs; by 2010, for every 100 families that were poor, only 27
families received such assistance. Moreover, for families still
receiving cash assistance, median benefit levels have plummeted —
falling 20 percent since (1996).”
As
noted, the most obvious motive behind privatization is Dem/Pub
pandering to capitalist greed – the malicious desire to turn public
services into profit centers – invariably at the expense of the users,
be they students, parents, motorists, transit riders, whomever.
But
the push to privatize is equally enabled by the intensifying Ayn Rand
selfishness of the entire U.S. population. Thanks to the widespread
dissemination of Rand's malignant ideology – required reading in many
(if not most) U.S. high schools – what was once exclusively the
philosophy of the One Percent has metastasized throughout the citizenry.
The
Randite metastases is an incalculably huge bonus to the
down-with-government cult because it has spawned a generation of
federal, state and local employees who are now nearly as likely as any
Wall Street executive to be self-centered sociopaths. The bitterness
engendered by the public's encounters with such officials, who
unfortunately include welfare workers, cops and even teachers,
intensifies the popular demand for dismantling government.
Meanwhile
Randism has destroyed the social contract that formerly united us –
citizens of all ages and castes and sometimes even of all races and
creeds – in communities that were at least marginally functional. But
we as a people have rejected such mutual interdependence and are now
reducing ourselves to Moron Nation anarchy.
Indeed we have adopted a vindictive, morally imbecilic ethos that can be summed up in two words: “fuck you.”
References and additional reading
Privatization:
***
III. Killing Pierce Transit: Privatization or Randite Rage?
THE
RUINOUS DEFEAT of a transit-preservation ballot measure in Tacoma and
its environs last year provides a disturbing look at how Randite
maliciousness trashes our communities.
It's
a classic example of how a government agency is discredited, downsized
and destroyed. The result – whether the destruction is a carefully
scripted precursor to privatization or merely a tantrum by voters goaded
to self-destructive rage by their own powerlessness – is invariably the
same: further deterioration of our already diminished quality of life.
Pierce
Transit, which operates in Tacoma and Pierce County, had sought a tiny
sales tax increase – three-tenths of a percent (a mere three pennies on a
ten-dollar purchase) – to maintain bus and van service on approximately
900 miles of city streets and county roads.
PT's
three most heavily traveled routes follow the main vehicular arteries
of the city and its adjacent municipalities. Before the anti-transit
vote, buses were scheduled on these routes every 15 minutes during peak
hours; they operated from 4:30 a.m. to 1 a.m. weekdays, 7:30 a.m. to
midnight Saturdays, and 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Sundays. Thirty-six other
routes ran from approximately 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., with maximum service
typically only twice an hour. Though these schedules were woefully
inadequate by East Coast standards, they were considered more than
sufficient, even generous, by notably miserly West Coast transit
criteria.
Barring
traffic jams (the primary obstacle to buses and their great
disadvantage compared to rail), PT had built an exceptionally good
record for running mostly on time.
The
system was – and remains – vital to the region's poor: surveys indicate
nearly 50 percent of its ridership has no other means of
transportation.
Fully
half of Tacoma's people were officially lower-income even before the
downsizing of the economy. Many are working poor. With their rotten or
missing teeth, crudely repaired eyeglasses, worn-out shoes and ragged
clothing, these miserably underpaid men and women give the buses a
distinctly Third World atmosphere that better-off persons typically
find repugnant. Nevertheless the era's soaring gasoline prices are
prompting substantial ridership increases, with many of the newcomers
clearly from higher-paid levels of the Working Class.
Caught
between the proverbial rock of recession-shrunken sales tax revenues
and the metaphorical hard place of fast-growing passenger loads, PT's
directors felt they had no choice but to ask local voters for more
money.
But
the same politicians – elected mayors and council members appointed
to the PT board to represent Tacoma, Pierce County and other
municipalities within the transit agency's service area – then ran a
campaign so astoundingly bad it seemed intended to guarantee defeat. Its
amateurish advertising, often marred by misspellings, was pegged to the
slogan “Save Our Buses” and its jeer-provoking acronym SOB.
Never
mind a “sob” is an outpouring of grief – the last thing you want in
association with even the smallest proposed tax hike. Never mind “SOB”
is the everyday acronym for “son of a bitch.” These and other vehement
objections voiced by an adamantly pro-transit former New York
advertising professional were ignored; his offer of voluntary assistance
was rejected. The ridicule-attracting initials – which could as easily
stand for “scrap our buses” or “suck our butts” – became the signature
of the doomed campaign.
Meanwhile, the entire nation seemed primed to reject any government endeavor. Despite overwhelming evidence the Wall Street criminals and their
political enablers are committing the greatest robbery in human history,
Ruling Class Media had manipulated Ayn Rand ideology and Moron Nation
ignorance into nationwide conviction the robbers were heroes not
villains.
According
to this newest and most brazen of capitalist Big Lies, the true
perpetrators of the ongoing economic collapse are those of us who are
unemployed, elderly, disabled or otherwise chronically needy.
The
nationwide frenzy thus provoked began well before 2011. It combines
Randite sadism with Teabagger bigotry to spawn an outpouring of malice
and contempt frighteningly reminiscent of how the Nazis slandered the
German Jews as a prelude to the Holocaust.
In
this volatile climate, PT's ballot measure touched off a firestorm of
bitter envy against unionized transit workers – people who still had
jobs that paid better than Wal-Mart wages – and unabashed hatred against
lower-income people, especially those of us dependent on PT buses.
Mass transit was denounced as welfare, municipal unions were condemned
as bands of thieves, bus riders were reviled as parasites – “takers not
makers” – and the minuscule tax increase that would have saved the
service was resoundingly defeated.
While
the presumably more enlightened Tacoma residents voted yes by six
percentage points, 56-44, Teabagger-influenced Pierce County
suburbanites turned out in sufficient numbers to veto the proposed tax
hike, in some obviously Randite precincts voting against it by as much
as 66 percent.
Paradoxically,
Pierce County and Tacoma each remain relatively strong domains of
unionism, with workforce representation at 26 and 28 percent
respectively. Washington itself reportedly ranks fourth nationally in
union membership per capita, with New York first, Alaska second and
Hawaii third.
At
least theoretically, the rabid anti-unionism of the transit measure's
opponents should have brought union voters out in force. But in the
recent Wisconsin recall election, 38 percent of the private-sector union
households voted against against public-sector unions. A similarly
vindictive betrayal – an expression of envious rage at workers who still
have adequate paychecks and dependable health insurance – might well
have occurred here also.
In any case the result has effectively destroyed Pierce Transit.
Though
after the election PT staffers estimated the forthcoming service
shutdown would amount to 35 percent, in truth the cutback has been
closer to 50 percent – 100 percent in some areas. Peak-hour service on
the three primary routes was reduced about 30 percent and is now
scheduled every 20 minutes, but the buses are often late. Ten routes
were eliminated entirely, severing an untold number of people from jobs,
health care and shopping. Service on all other routes was downsized
radically, typically to no more than one bus per hour.
Daytime
buses are now often impossibly overcrowded – standing-room-only
passengers jammed into body-to-body intimacy that would be intolerable
even by the mass-transport standards of Tokyo or New York City.
Wheelchair-bound disabled people cannot fit into the sardined mass and
are often left behind. Yet ridership is still increasing, once more
boosted by skyrocketing fuel prices inflicted by the petroleum
speculators on Wall Street.
In
an attempt to restore service to pre-cutback levels and avoid further
downsizing of operations, PT will try again in November to enact the
tiny, even-a-pauper-could-afford-it sales tax increase that was defeated
last year. But the odds for its passage remain notably poor.
Indeed
the agency itself may have already ensured the measure's defeat. The
opening paragraphs of the initial press releases, dated 30 May and 11
June 2012, say not one word about desperately needed service
restorations. Instead they announce PT's intent “to utilize (its)
remaining taxing authority” and raise “the final 0.3% sales tax” it is
allowed by state law – phrasing so inflammatory it probably guarantees
rejection by the voters.
As if it had been scripted well in advance, the kill-transit hatemongering resumed immediately. The News Tribune, the local Ruling Class daily – a typical McClatchy rag as venomously anti-labor as the old Voelkischer Beobachter – promptly
denounced the proposed increase as surrender to Amalgamated Transit
Union Local 758's rightful insistence on living wages.
So
provoked, the paper's reliably Randite readers once more began churning
out predictably toxic screeds against impoverished people, PT, unions
and mass transit in general.
“They transport the poor at the expense of taxpayers,” complained taxedenoughintacoma, and they do it only “to keep the greedy union members over paid.”
“I say 'Close up Pierce Transit,'” wrote whitman411 in an exemplary demonstration of the Randite social conscience. “After all, when did mobility become a constitutional right?”
Meanwhile
a credible source says the influential Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of
Commerce will fight the measure – a surprise since most local chambers
of commerce are dominated by merchants who regard mass transit as a
welcome enhancer of profits. But Chamber President Tom Pierson did not
respond to a request he confirm or deny the report and explain the
chamber's stance, while his subordinates insisted no one else was
authorized to discuss the matter.
Local
advocates for elderly and disabled people say privately they fear the
system will be reduced to its three main routes – all the other routes
shut down – with potentially murderous impact on those who have no
alternative means of transport.
Which
leaves me wondering – as any investigative reporter should – if there
is some undiscovered Randite cabal working to destroy the transit agency
entirely, perhaps to clear the way for undisclosed profiteers to launch
an as-yet-unannounced, minimum-service, maximum-fare bus company.
References and additional reading
***
IV: Beyond Privatization: What's Really at Stake?
THOUGH
PRIVATIZATION is peddled as a means of cutting the costs of governance,
a recent study by the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight tells
us it does exactly the opposite.
Privatization
raises costs, reduces the availability of services and throws people
out of work. It lowers wages, and it invariably increases fees and
prices. At the same time it puts more money in the pockets of the One
Percent, who then use their expanded riches to buy more political favors
rather than to create more jobs.
In
other words, the pitch by which privatization is peddled is another of
the Big Lies that have become the defining characteristic of Dem/Rep
politics.
Hidden
behind this deception is a more subtle Big Lie – the spurious notion
the privatizers are somehow, beyond their profiteering, motivated by
public-spirited desire to ensure governmental efficiency and
accountability and thereby restore our ravaged quality of life.
Instead,
the result is (again) directly contrary to what is claimed: the
contractors take advantage of the system at the expense of the public
and create a shadow government of potentially despotic power. That such a
regime is unfettered by constitutional restraints has already been
noted in Part II.
Perhaps then we should label the privatizers what they truly are: modern-day privateers.
Much
as shopping malls have privatized formerly public space, banishing
protest and effectively nullifying our First Amendment right to free
speech and assembly, so does privatization insulate the privateers from
aggrieved citizens. Said a recent victim of privatized electrical
generation: before, “when something went wrong I had a political right
to go into the electricity office and demand you either do the right
thing or I will do a sit-in.” But today the office is owned by a
corporation. Protesters would be arrested for trespassing. Customers do
not even have a guaranteed right of access.
Applying
the biblical principle of “by their deeds shall we know them,” we
discover the purpose of privatization is not merely to shrink government
small enough to “drown it in a bathtub” but to disempower us – we the
people – to such an extent we are robbed of our former ability to
regulate the circumstances of our own lives.
Privatization
of government is thus disenfranchisement. Our reduction to the abject
powerlessness that defines slavery is its ultimate purpose. It is
literally the overthrow – usually by stealth, sometimes by violence –
of every humanitarian principle expressed by democratic governance. And
it is the newest, most cunning Ruling Class strategy to emerge from the
long and bloody history of class warfare and our we-the-people struggle
for democracy.
A
major factor in the privateers' success is the extent to which we have
been cleverly blinded to the purpose of government. This is a pernicious
byproduct of our dumbing-down – our methodical moron-ation into Moron
Nation – by the capitalist propaganda with which we are deluged in our
schools and through Ruling Class media. The preamble to our Constitution
makes it clear the founders regarded government as the means to
accomplish collectively what we cannot do as individuals. But
privatization is quickly making government the apparatus by which the
Ruling Class imposes and expands its power while reaping an
ever-more-oppressive profit from its subjects.
The
Canadian scholar John McMurtry recognizes better than most what is
being done to us. In 1998 he warned that corporations are being
deliberately “freed from accountability to any other interest,
government or citizen body” even as individuals, communities, entire
nations are being denied “their collective rights to protect their lives
and resources.”
All
of this unprecedented enslavement of peoples and seizure of property is
motivated by the Ayn Rand might-makes-right principle – the belief
those with the most money are entitled to rule the world whether we the
people accept it or not. It's the 21st Century equivalent of the divine
right of kings.
Privatization is therefore the equivalent of conquest: it reduces us to
the powerlessness of conquered peoples – think of the French beneath
the boot-heels of the Nazis – even as it elevates the privateers to the
omnipotence of conquerors: remember how Hitler's generals strutted
through the ruins they had made of Rotterdam.
Meanwhile
we are taught – those of us who were granted higher education in the
vanished era of the American Dream or are wealthy enough (and thus
politically reliable enough) to be allowed such learning today – to look
for similarities between the last centuries of the Roman Empire and the
plight of our own world.
No doubt one of the reasons the Ruling Class favors the Roman example is its implicit hopefulness.
Though
it took more than a thousand years, the barbaric darkness that
descended on Western humanity after 476 C.E. eventually lifted. Within a
few more centuries, society returned to urban norms the Roman citizenry
would surely recognize as direct descendants of their own modes of
living, even unto the characteristic struggle between patrician (the One
Percent) and plebeian (the 99 Percent) and all the attendant violence,
graft and corruption.
The
message – terminal climate change not withstanding – is that life will
someday be good again. All we need do is obey our leaders – follow the
doctrinal hybrid of Ayn Rand, Rick Santorum and Rousas John Rushdoony
that has become ideology and creed of the quasi-official United States
Christian theocracy – and once more it will be “morning in America.”
But
the Jesu-Randites believe the smiley-faced American dollar-sign sun
will not rise again until the extermination of everyone tagged by those
labels that transform “the” into a prefix of banishment: “the
unemployed,” “the disabled,” “the elderly,” “the homeless,” “the
mentally ill” etcetera ad nauseam – all of us to be murdered
not in publicly embarrassing death camps but by the sorts of abandonment
that can readily be blamed on the victim. “He froze to death; she
starved; the children died of pneumonia.”
The
real killer will be genocidal termination of Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security, unemployment compensation and any other New Deal remnant that
helped us stay alive, the Pierce Transit bus system included.
Which
is the other purpose behind privatization. Steal Medicare or public
transport from us – we the taxpayers – then sell it to the capitalists,
let them add it to their profit-makers and price everybody but their
fellow One Percenters out of the market and into the graveyard.
That's already been done to higher education, and now it's being done everywhere else.
Just
as McMurtry says, “we face a turn of history in which
corporate-financed and publicized political parties serve corporate
masters in a fast-track replacement of the democratic rule of law across
the world.” “This new economic fascism,” he adds, “is the
international linchpin of what is in the end a totalitarian project for
world rule.”
References and additional reading
***
V. Hurricane Katrina and Nixon's Forgotten Declaration of War
THE
DELIBERATE ABANDONMENT of New Orleans and all its lower-income people
to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina shows us how unapologetically brutal
the United States has become in the 32 years since President Richard
Nixon's curiously unrecognized declaration of war against the 99
Percent.
Nixon
voiced his declaration in early 1973, no more than a week or two after his second inauguration. A decade of political murder had put
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and
Sen. Robert Kennedy in their graves, the rebellious Counterculture of
the 1960s was nearly suppressed, and William Randolph Hearst Jr.
believed Nixon would finally “bring us together,” fulfillment of the
slogan by which he won his first term.
But
when Hearst interviewed Nixon for the obligatory what-will-you-do-now
story, the president promised not reconciliation but revenge.
Nixon
said We the People had it much too good. He implied we had become like
spoiled children, that our rebelliousness was mere brattyness. And now
like some vindictive biblical patriarch, he would punish us accordingly.
His second term would restore national discipline by imposing policies
that would inflict maximum national hardship.
Months
later the first Arab oil crisis, which we now know was engineered by
Nixon and his henchmen, marked the beginning of the end of the American
Dream.
Though the Nixon interview appeared on page one of every Hearst newspaper in the nation, few understood its significance.
Schooled
in class struggle as I am, I recognized the importance of the story,
clipped it immediately and kept it for the next ten years in a
file-folder labeled “Nixon (Hearst interview)”with a growing collection
of relevant notes and supplemental articles. But it was destroyed by
the 1983 fire with all my other reference files.
Though
I later tried least a half dozen times to get a replacement copy of the
text, all these efforts failed. Even a search by the legendarily
skilled research department of the New York City Public Library was
unsuccessful. Seemingly the report has vanished down the Orwell hole.
Nevertheless,
if one seeks a public starting point for the transformation of the
United States into Sweatshop Nation – our forcible dumbing down to
Moron Nation ignorance and the Pavlovian reconditioning that has turned
so many into Randite fascists – Nixon's statement to Hearst is
undoubtedly the pivotal moment.
Which brings us back to New Orleans and the atrocities of August 2005.
Most
African-Americans properly view the abandonment of the city and
everyone in it who was not wealthy enough to purchase their own escape
as a new form of anti-Black, anti-poor genocide: death by deliberate
neglect rather than by the politically awkward mechanisms of death camps
and formal ethnic cleansing.
But
no more than a quarter of the Caucasian population acknowledged the
obvious racism in the fuck-you response of the federal government to the
city's plight. Many whites irrationally blamed its poor people, as if
the disaster were divine retribution for poverty, and said they deserved
not just abandonment but the harshest forms of coercion – clearly a
preview of the belief that now increasingly insulates the One Percent
from blame for the criminal downsizing of the economy.
Only
a few Caucasians – self included – recognized the genocidal component
in what was done to New Orleans. Blacks however saw it clearly. They
viewed the city's abandonment as the expression of a terrible new norm
of increasingly brazen racism and socioeconomic hatefulness – another
wrenching example of the moral imbecility that increasingly defines U.S.
domestic policy.
Frighteningly,
most of the U.S. population remains indifferent to – or unaware of –
the dire implications of the deployment of for-profit Blackwater
mercenaries in New Orleans. These men, probably the most feared
professional killers on the planet, were hired by the federal government
to forcibly disarm the New Orleans citizenry because – as private
employees of a for-profit company – the Blackwater thugs were exempt
from Second Amendment restraints against the confiscation of legally
owned firearms.
Blackwater's
effort to subjugate New Orleans residents into mandatory pacifism and
compulsory victimhood – the true circumstances of a disarmed and
therefore defenseless population – is an especially egregious example of
the privatization motives discussed in Part I and Part IV. Here again
we see privatization's darker purpose: the deliberate nullification of
constitutional rights that amounts not just to methodical
disenfranchisement but to invasion and conquest.
The
Blackwater troops are thus revealed to be the modern U.S. equivalent of
the Nazi SS, the private army of the German Nazi Party, precisely as
Blackwater – since renamed Xe – is the private army of the capitalist
Ruling Class. This role is brought into sharp focus by the fact a major
part of Blackwater's New Orleans mission was disbanding local efforts
at collective survival and reconstruction, typically by terrorizing
communities and arresting any activists who might have inspired
collective awakening and consciousness. The purpose underlying these
Blackwater tactics is obvious: community solidarity is anathema to
capitalist exploitation.
Another
parallel between the Nazi SS and Blackwater/Xe is the latter's close
relationships with the Department of Defense and the eerily Nazi-like
Department of Homeland Security – a disturbing echo of SS affiliation
with the Reich Security Department (SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt) and the German General Staff (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht).
Given
how Blackwater operated in New Orleans beyond all legal and
constitutional restraints, activists have no doubt this American SS will
be unleashed against anyone who dares participate in organized
resistance to capitalism.
References and additional reading
***
VI. Maybe the Best Government in Human History
“It was ever thus” – or so we are rebuked by the capitalists whenever we protest their tyrannosauric behavior.
But
the ancient civilization and culture we label Minoan reveals the
capitalist claim as a Big Lie and – more importantly – has left us
undeniable proof of a collective act of mercy that stands in
breathtaking contrast to the abandonment of New Orleans.
Minoan
society was destroyed by a combination of natural disaster and invasion
approximately 3600 years ago, beset by so much cumulative ruin the
exact dates of its downfall remain controversial. Nevertheless its
people – we have yet to discover the names by which they knew themselves
– left us a compelling example of society and government that seems to
have combined remarkable efficiency with unapologetic humanitarianism
and done so effectively enough to prevail for at least 1500 years –
nearly three times longer than any other nation or empire since.
The
most startling proof of how the Minoans combined efficiency and
altruism comes from evidence unearthed by archaeologists on the Greek
island of Santorini. The Minoans built a seaport there – a thriving
metropolis that, like other Minoan cities, contained neither slums nor
mansions. Its residents enjoyed the allegedly “modern” conveniences of
multi-storey housing, central heating, indoor plumbing and hot water on
demand.
Carefully
paved streets and brilliantly engineered water and sewerage systems
suggest, as do the well-maintained road networks on adjacent islands, a
level of governmental responsiveness we in the Ayn Rand/Grover
Norquist era can only imagine.
We
do not know what the Minoans called their island. Early Greek sources
imply it might have been Callisté, “most beautiful,” after a goddess of
the same name – surely appropriate given the goddess-centered character
of Minoan society. Classical Greeks and Romans knew the island as Thera
(“untamed”). The present-day Santorini, a reference to Saint Irene,
comes from the Middle Ages.
The
Minoan seaport is adjacent the modern town of Akrotiri and is so named,
but what its inhabitants called it has yet to be discovered. Apparently
it is the remnant of a much larger city that was obliterated when the
volcano vaporized the original island, leaving a seven-mile-wide crater
in the Mediterranean Sea. At the outer edge of the blast – geologists
now regard the explosion as the worst such disaster in
our species' 100,000-year history – the Akrotiri site was deeply buried
in ash and, like Pompey, preserved in nearly original condition.
But
it was the obvious evacuation of this city – the fact it had been
emptied of its inhabitants and most of their movable belongings – that
provides the most telling evidence of the unique quality of Minoan
governance.
W. Sheppard Baird, who writes extensively and with
refreshing skepticism about Minoan archaeology, notes that
“apparently all of the people and their valuables were transported
elsewhere before the main eruption.” Other sources concur: the
evacuation was obviously well organized and included not just the people
but all their pets, livestock and even houseplants.
As
the abandonment of New Orleans and its residents to Hurricane Katrina
so vividly demonstrates, such a feat is beyond our ability today. It is
also far beyond our post-Nixon instincts and inclinations – never mind
we smugly think of ourselves as infinitely better than the Minoans not
just in technology but in every other possible way as well.
Yet
the evidence at Akrotiri suggests the allegedly “primitive” Minoans
were our moral superiors, which is no doubt why their accomplishments
are not more widely known or discussed.
There's
also the fact the archaeologists of Western Europe and North America,
financed as they are by the capitalist One Percent, are quietly but
forcefully forbidden to speculate on how the Minoan commonwealth was
governed. Even so, the evacuation of untold thousands of people with
all their animals and most of their possessions in boats propelled only
by wind and human muscle is undeniable proof of a humanitarian-minded
administration acting in solidarity with an organized community –
evidence of a consensus-based society that has no peer on Planet Earth
today.
Hence
the growing belief – hotly contested of course (but ever more plausible
as our species confronts extinction by terminal climate change) – that
Minoan civilization represents the apex of human achievement.
Drawing
on multiple sources, Baird gives us a haunting glimpse of the possible
magnitude of the Minoan economy and the society it supported. “If the
hypothesis that the Los Millares culture ('Culture of the Thousands') in
Spain which has been radiocarbon dated to well before 3000 B.C. was
actually an Aegean Minoan gold and silver mining colony is
validated...(the Minoan commonwealth) was really a vast Mediterranean
maritime empire...much more like Plato's description of Atlantis.”
Vast
indeed: there is evidence, vehemently rejected by U.S. academics but
nevertheless compelling, the ancient copper mines on Michigan's Isle
Royale were a Minoan operation.
It
is difficult, save in works of fiction, for us to imagine a single
event so apocalyptic it would destroy an entire civilization. But bear
in mind that even in the 1970s, the force of the volcanic explosion was
estimated as equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of 25 or 30
hydrogen bombs – an attack that would wipe out any nation so targeted.
Though the H-bomb comparison seems to have vanished from the literature,
each new recalculation thrusts the explosion's magnitude ever higher.
And there's no question the debris flung into the upper atmosphere was a
preview of nuclear winter, altering the global climate for at least a
decade, perhaps a hundred years, possibly – based on evidence of
persistent famine throughout the Mediterranean – for several centuries.
Most
of the more widespread damage was inflicted not by the blast itself,
but by the resultant tsunami, a wave that by many estimates may have
been as much as 400 feet high and destroyed coastal cities throughout
the Mediterranean. As Baird argues, the explosion may also have
produced a pyroclastic fireball of genuinely thermonuclear size and
intensity. Like an incalculably huge napalm burst – as if the very air
had turned to flame – it seems to have flashed across 90 miles of open
ocean and set all of western Crete ablaze. The death toll is scarcely
imaginable; the psychological trauma inconceivable save perhaps to those
who survived Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Such were the wounds from which
the Minoan commonwealth never recovered.
So perished the most long-lived economic and political system in human history.
The
Minoans did not surrender; they were conquered, enslaved and
exterminated. The destruction of their culture took the conquering
Mycenaean bandits another two or three centuries to complete – an
approximate time-frame that, indicatively, coincides with the end of
mining operations on Isle Royale. Then descended an epoch of violence
and starvation that lasted nearly 600 years, the Greek Dark Age.
But
heartrending as it is to imagine a people at least as civilized as
ourselves hurled suddenly into inescapable barbarism, what has this
distant tragedy to do with present-day privatization and its relentless
thrust toward global tyranny?
Routinely
suppressed here in the capitalist world is the fact a majority of
Eastern European archaeologists believe Minoan society governed itself
by an early form of communism – as Marija Gimbutas described it,
“communism in the best sense of the word.” Its core principle –
apparently a prototype of “from each according to ability, to each
according to need” – produced what was possibly the most universally
prosperous economy our species has ever built.
Nor
was primitive communism unique to the Minoans. It was the original
economic and political ethos of tribal governance everywhere on Earth:
note the example of our own First Nations peoples, particularly the
Iroquois, whose communistic principles are the (forgotten) cornerstone
of the U.S. Constitution.
Apparently
the Minoans retained their own distinctly similar tribal ideals as they
evolved into an urban nation, refining them – probably deliberately –
to accommodate their society's increasing complexity as the head of a
trade network at least as large as the Roman Empire and probably
spanning the seven seas.
The
same archaeologists who believe the Minoans were pre-Marxian communists
– “community-ists” would surely be a more descriptive term – reject the
capitalist-mandated labeling of surviving Minoan structures as
“palaces” and instead identify them as administrative offices and
food-distribution centers. Their conclusions are strongly supported by
the ruins of Minoan cities – ruins that, as noted, show neither slums
nor mansions and therefore suggest both economic democracy and
egalitarian society.
Combined
with the mass evacuation evidenced at Akrotiri, all available data
points to government that served the highest human purpose: enabling
people to do collectively what they could not accomplish as
individuals.
In
this context the centuries of tyranny that followed the Minoan collapse
can be viewed as an ultimate form of privatization – collectively owned
public property and community rights of self-governance forcibly seized
by individual warlords whose regimes were the prototypes of today's
criminal gangs and corporations.
Then
as now, the seizures were motivated by greed. The reward was land and
loot: profit whether measured in gold, silver, precious stones and
foodstuffs or labor extracted from newly enslaved peoples.
Thus
– in the solidarity of selflessness evidenced by the evacuation of
Akrotiri compared to the later suppression of such values in the violent
darkness that descended after the Minoan collapse – we see a microcosm
of the struggle between the humanitarianism of democracy and the Randite
savagery of despotism whether kingly or corporate, feudal or fascist.
Such
is the primary conflict of our time. Marx and Engels called it
class-struggle, increasingly desperate Have-nothings oppressed by
increasingly greedy, increasingly malevolent Have-everythings.
The
Occupy Movement described it as the tragically broken 99 Percent ever
more brutally tyrannized by the ever-more-ruthless One Percent.
Ultimately it is the clash between freedom and slavery – the former the
maximum assertion of our species' potential, the latter its utter
negation.
As
it was with the Mycenaean gangsters whose blades reduced
disaster-weakened Minoan society to bones and artifacts, so it is with
today's Ruling Class. Government
– once an agency for our collective betterment and nurturing of our
entire society – is being shrunk to a goon squad exclusively for the
protection of the conquerers.
We
the people are the modern equivalent of the women and children and men
of the Minoan commonwealth. We are flung into poverty and homelessness,
and the destruction of everything on which we formerly relied makes our
circumstances not only irremediable but unspeakably traumatic.
Ours
has become a nation of children who have no expectations beyond misery.
It is a realm of men and women whose souls have been wounded by war and
scarred by the insatiable greed of their bosses. It is a domain of food
banks and lines of tattered women who used to be teachers and civil
engineers and social workers and clerks and librarians and cops who have
not worked since 2008 or 2009 and because there are no jobs now four
years after the great capitalist downsizing are beginning to realize
there will never be jobs again. Their despair is palpable. You can see
in their eyes the silent secret terror they will soon have to sell their
bodies merely to feed their children. They are the modern sisters of
the proud independent women we see on the ancient Minoan frescoes – free
women who imagined they would live at least as comfortably as their
mothers and grandmothers but after the volcanic debacle and the
Mycenaean invasion were forced to beggary and prostitution.
Privatization
– the betrayal and disenfranchisement of the people by the politicians
who sell our assets to capitalist overlords – is the modern equivalent
of the Mycenaean onslaught. Each expresses the same dynamic: infinite
greed elevated to maximum virtue.
Here
again we see the ultimate purpose behind shrinking government so small
it can be "drowned in a bathtub." It is not just to make money for the
capitalists and their Dem/Pub co-conspirators. It is to ensure the One
Percent a comfortable survival, to guarantee its self-protection by
limitless power and bottomless hoards of wealth before terminal climate
change turns most of our planet to wasteland – the rest of us be damned.
In
other words, the purpose of privatization is to replace government as
we knew it; to rule the world with the same zero-tolerance despotism
that now rules the workplace; to forever abolish government by, for and
of the people – and above all else to make certain it perishes from the
earth.
That's why the privateers – the conquerors – are as relentless as cancer.
Give
them another 50 years – probably less – the state as we know it will
have withered away, but not into the democracy foreseen by Karl Marx.
Not even Marx with all his prophetic wisdom could imagine how evil
capitalism would become – how it would spawn a slave-world maintained by
the most mercilessly zero-tolerance system of surveillance and coercion
ever devised, the Nazi-like helmets of its soldiers and police a subtle
tribute to Hitler as the father of modern technologically imposed
tyranny.
While
the post-disaster Minoans had the possibility, however small, of
escaping their slavemasters, today's enslavement offers no such exit.
There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The American Dream is dead;
the corporate aristocracy now imagines itself the real-time equivalent
of the fictional Borg: already we are conditioned to believe resistance
is futile.
The
hour is late; darkness encroaches. Let us raise our fists in
declaration of our solidarity and rise up in humanitarian defiance.
References and additional reading
Minoan civilization:
Google “Thera,” “Santorini,” “Akrotiri” and “Minoan Civilization” (without quotation marks) for additional information.
Marxist
archive (the best English translations of ever Marxian document ever
written, a priceless gift uploaded by the dying Soviet Union as a final
gesture of revolutionary defiance): http://www.marxists.org/
©Loren Bliss 2012: permission to quote or reproduce is conditional upon attribution to the author and link to Outside Agitator's Notebook.
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