Afghanistan and Iraq did not cause people to pause enough. After the 1990s and the dissociative intervention of the Clinton years, after the fall of the Soviet Union, after the rag-tag effort to shut down the WTO in Seattle in 1999, after 9/11, people just finally decided it wasn’t so bad that corporations owned everything. People just finally believed that their government was the only thing keeping us safe, that it had our best interests, and the interests of global democracy and trade at heart. Panama and Chile and Nicaragua and Cuba and – Haiti – were years ago. What mattered were the ter’rists. What mattered was the new shopping mall opening where orange groves used to be. Where wetland used to be. Some of us really believed that Muslim Arabs were just “jealous of our freedom,” jealous of our Nikes and 24-hour McDonalds and this would be enough for them to want to cause us harm – so steeped were we at interpreting the world from a consumer standpoint that we reduced our understanding of foreign policy to a soccer mom’s Black Friday mindset. We were, in essence, blinded by the propaganda: the $1 trillion corporations were spending annually to brainwash us – $1 trillion in cash that could not have been theirs without our labor. While the government on behalf of business interests dismantled our unions and our mass transit and our public schools and libraries, we as a working class set our heads down and went to sleep.
So even when people had the knee-jerk reflex left of them to stand up against Bush’s second war, it wasn’t enough; the Cowboy didn’t even blink. And the people didn’t have the foresight to fortify the struggle. It fizzled out, creating a negative feedback loop, “proving” that “people don’t want to struggle.” In a sense, that’s true. Of all the people I speak to about politics, the spirit behind their words is why bother.
Yes; why bother? Why bother when Haiti looks like Iraq looks like Afghanistan might someday look like Yemen might someday look like Somalia might someday look like Detroit? Why bother when our own country has become SUCH a wasteland of the unemployed that illegal immigrants, virtually nothing more than at-will corporate slaves, decide to move BACK to Mexico to try their chances there? Ask yourself, when was the last time you went to a union meeting? When was the last time you stood out with people picketing for higher wages?
When was the last time your individual effort to fix your problems – problems with work, with bills, with acquiring goods – when was the last time, “I have problems of my own” actually fucking fixed that problem? Remember the ole American addage, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall”? Well, the mindset has divided us as much as humanly possible by this point. It’s divided us all the way down into post-modern drivel, a toddler version of Truth that yells and kicks and screams that nobody can understand anybody, least of all me understand you. It hearkens the hollow liberal value of “diversity,” mindlessly celebrated everywhere, which of itself means virtually nothing, has no intrinsic utility. Where diversity is important is in collaboration. Where individual truths are cherished is when using them to find and create consensus. The flower of your unique and special problems are an outgrowth of a root, of capitalism, and you find if you keep your ears and your eyes open that everyone’s plant is the same.
Last night, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to essentially end restrictions on corporate donations. On the ground of the First Amendment. On the presumption that corporations are people. Not even liberal capitalist Obama had anything good to say about it
So I suggest people start thinking about what’s the what. Some of you can’t get jobs. Why do you think we can’t get jobs? Because there isn’t enough work to be done in the world – or because corporations are set on making profit? There is plenty of work to be done and it won’t get done until we challenge corporate domination of our economy, from the retail stores through the trucking and shipping right down to the factories. It may take several elections for this Supreme Court case to unfold its first stage of development. This is an election year; I don’t know yet what we can expect to see, but the mid-term elections are probably going to be dominated by populist Republican rhetoric. Anti-immigrant, patriotic, pro-business, anti-regulation, privatizing, anti-Federal Reserve, flat taxers.
Without a working class alternative to the Democrats and Republicans, there is nowhere to take your dissatisfaction. Enough people are confused that the Republicans could conceivably take control of parts of the government again.
Whatever the case, the corporate heyday of the last twenty years, aka “the Age of America” and “the end of history,” are total bunk. If we don’t take action, alternative, independent action, we are only going to keep losing. We will be in debt for the rest of our lives, paying for everything. Even the small comforts and refuges of life as we know it will be in peril.
So the way I see it, y’all can clamp your hands over your eyes and just keep screaming “no no no” or you can get together with the people around you and start planning on how to fight back. Naturally I think the best way is with Socialist Alternative, so if you ever want to know more about that, hell, you know where to find me.
01/23/2010
