They Believe in Greed

Disparity of class

  By Chris Floyd

This is the system, the creed, the extremist faith that "serious" players in all the "major" power factions on both sides of the Atlantic adhere to.

Their ideology is capitalism. Their god is greed. Both demand human sacrifices. So the poor must go to the wall. And to keep the system going, more and more people must be made poor.

First those in the "outer darkness" of faraway lands, then finally those in the sacred "Homelands" themselves. We have been watching the latter process play out slowly in the past few decades -- but it is accelerating now at dizzying speed.

News from the UK the disparity in death rates between the well-off and the poor in the UK is now greater than at any time since 1921.

The London Review of Books points to a new study by the British Medical Journal that shows that by 2997, "for every 100 people under the age of 65 dying in the best-off areas, 199 were dying in the poorest tenth of areas."

The Journal study said that the data suggest "it was only prolonged and enthusiastic state intervention" that kept the disparity from being greater.

On the other hand, the elite-coddling market jihadism of the Clintonian-Obamaish "New Labour" government helped stretch the yawning gap even further.

The few spare pence that the war criminals of the Labour government threw at the poor kept them from dying quite as fast as they would have done otherwise under the system of voracious corporate rapine that Labour entrenched and expanded after inheriting it from the Thatcherite Tories in 1997.

Now, even those few pence are being stripped away -- gleefully -- by what many say is the most extremist government Britain has ever seen, outstripping even Margaret Thatcher in the scope of its draconian cuts and the fervor of its market fundamentalism.

The savage cutbacks and vast, churning upheavals being pushed through, at breakneck speed, by the new Conservative government (and its truly pathetic coalition "partner," the lapdog Liberal Democrats) will send millions of people tumbling down into a permanent underclass.

Finally, after 60 years of trying, the Lib-Cons will gut the national health service with a stealth "Americanization" that will turn the operation of local doctors' offices over to private firms (many of them from the US) and privatize public hospitals.

They will be allowed them to "fail" if they don't produce enough cash for their elite shareholders.

Meanwhile, the schools are now in the hands of the arch-neocon Michael Gove. He's plotting with revisionist historian Niall Ferguson to impose a pro-Empire, pro-elite "national greatness" ideology on the young.

Gove is also using "emergency" legislative procedures to strip public schools away from the oversight of democratically elected local government and put them into the hands of unaccountable corporations, religious groups and wealthy elites.

This Revolution of the Rich is being justified by a carefully crafted, constantly stoked panic about budget deficits, pointing to the example of the perpetually weak government and economy of Greece as a horror story to be avoided at all costs.

Yet even if the Greek situation was as dire as the fear-mongers make out, the fact remains that the cuts which the Tory-LapDog coalition is making in the much stronger, much more stable UK are actually far in excess than those being imposed upon Greece.

As with the fear-mongering about "Iraqi WMDs," the "dangers of the deficit" are being exaggerated -- and manufactured -- in order to put into place a pre-existing (and transatlantic) ideological agenda: a neo-feudal oligarchy.

But in almost all of these measures, the Tory-LapDog government is only entrenching and expanding the "market-led reforms" imposed by New Labour. And "New Labour" was of course a close copy of the "New Democrats" of Bill Clinton and his clique of "triangulating" bagmen for Big Money.

Clinton, in turn, wasscarcely distinguishable from the Reagan-Bush faction that preceded them, and then succeeded them in the Bush dynasty's second turn in the White House.

And we all know that "continuity" is the byword of the Obama administration, which is chock-a-block with holdovers not only from strangulating triangulators of the Clinton era but also the imperial militarists from the two Bush reigns.

Thus for more than 30 years, the world-dominating Anglo-American alliance has been under the sway of factions which, for all their internal squabbling and hair-splitting, are strongly united in their steadfast, unshakable adherence to the perpetuation -- and expansion -- of elite power and privilege.

They have shown themselves willing and eager to degrade their own societies (and destroy many others) in the service of this brutal, barbaric, inhuman faith.

The poor have no place in this system, which is a retrograde, hi-tech, rhetorically sugarcoated revival of the laissez-faire fantasies of the past, as Jeremy Seabrook notes:

'Pauperism' long ago took on the colour of culpability. The distinction between the idle and improvident poor and the "deserving" goes back at least to the Elizabethan poor law. It took on a new force in the early industrial era, which saw an unprecedented growth in pauperism. The enthusiasts of laissez-faire capitalism concluded that the evil was compounded by efforts to relieve it, and helping the poor only increased their number.
Everything indicated that 'natural' processes should be allowed to take their course. In this version of the world, the market mechanism is as flawless a creation as the earth. It should remain untouched by the hand of meddlers, whose only effect is to upset its power to enrich us all.
It is remarkable that the establishment of laissez-faire itself in the early 19th century required an enormous amount of government intervention and regulation."

And so it is today. The "regulation" of the health care industry introduced by the Obama Administration is actually a gargantuan transfer of wealth, by force, from working people and the poor to a few huge corporations.

The financial "regulation" signed into law is yet another sham that will leave the rapacious fools and fraudsters who brought down the global economy -- and triggered the convenient "deficit crisis" by demanding massive bailouts of public money for their private businesses -- at large and in charge of the world's finances.

Meanwhile, more and more government regulations restrict the right of ordinary citizens to challenge the rich and powerful in court, or to register a public protest (herding them instead into the truly hideous "free speech zones").

Meanwhile, the state grants corporations extraordinary privileges to interfere with the political process with their vast resources and protects their leaders from personal accountability for the ravages they commit.

The government "intervention and regulation" on behalf of the industries and elites who service the endlessly expanding symbiosis of corporate, military and 'security' power -- stretching even to the countenancing and cover-up of torture and murder -- is one of the defining elements of our age.

As Glenn Ford writes,Obama is preparing to "regulate" the last tattered fragments of the social welfare system -- already decimated by the progressive's favorite good old boy, Bill Clinton -- right out of existence:

In April of this year, Obama once again reminded everyone that everything is and has always been 'on the table', as far as he's concerned, including Social Security. His so-called 'deficit commission' is stacked with rich sociopaths sharpening their knives to carve up, sell off or otherwise doom Social Security. It is a battle that safety net defenders thought they had won against George Bush.
Obama has picked up Bush's marbles and put them back into play. He is the right wing's most potent weapon, the one before which liberal Democrats throw up their hands in surrender without the dignity of a fight.
Obama, working in plain sight over the past 18 months, has constructed and rigged a deficit commission to render a kind of death sentence to the foundational program of Roosevelt's New Deal.

This is the system -- the creed, the extremist faith -- that all "serious" players in all the "major" power factions on both sides of the Atlantic adhere to.

Their god of greed demands human sacrifices: and so the poor must die. And to keep the system going, more and more people must be made poor.

First those in the "outer darkness" of faraway lands, then finally those in the sacred "Homelands" themselves. We have been watching the latter process play out slowly in the past few decades -- but it is accelerating now at dizzying speed.

Economic Darwinism

Free market ideology to the extreme

By Henry A. Giroux

The harsh values of this new social order can be seen in the increasing incarceration of young people, turning public schools into 'education prisons' and state policies that bail out investment bankers, leaving millions in poverty and insecurity.

With the advent of neoliberalism, or what some call free-market fundamentalism, we have witnessed the production and widespread adoption throughout society of what I want to call the politics of economic Darwinism.

As a theater of cruelty and a mode of public pedagogy, economic Darwinism undermines all forms of solidarity while simultaneously promoting the logic of unrestricted individual responsibility. But there is more at stake here than an unchecked ideology of privatization.

For example, as the welfare state is dismantled, it is being replaced by the harsh realities of the punishing state as social problems are increasingly criminalized and social protections are either eliminated or fatally weakened.

The harsh values of this new social order can be seen in the increasing incarceration of young people, the modeling of public schools after prisons and state policies that bail out investment bankers, but leave the middle and working classes in a state of poverty, despair and insecurity.

But it can also be seen in the practice of socialism for the rich. This is a practice in which government supports for the poor, unemployed, sick and elderly are derided.

That's because they either contribute to an increase in the growing deficit or they undermine the market-driven notion of individual responsibility.

And yet, the same critics defend, without irony, government support for the rich, the bankers, the permanent war economy, or any number of subsidies for corporations as essential to the life of the nation, which is simply an argument that benefits the rich and powerful and legitimates the deregulated wild west of casino capitalism.

Of course, this form of economic Darwinism is not enforced simply through the use of the police and other repressive apparatuses.

It's endlessly reproduced through the cultural apparatuses of the new and old media, public and higher education, as well as through the thousands of messages and narratives we are exposed to daily in multiple commercial spheres.

In this discourse, the economic order is either sanctioned by God or exists simply as an extension of nature.

In other words, the tyranny and suffering that is produced through the neoliberal theater of cruelty is unquestionable, as unmovable as an urban skyscraper.

Long-term investments are now replaced by short-term gains and profits, while compassion is viewed as a weakness and democratic public values are scorned because they subordinate market considerations to the common good.

Morality in this instance becomes painless, stripped of any obligations to the other. As the language of privatization, deregulation and commodification replaces the discourse of the public good, all things public, including public schools, libraries and public services.

They are viewed either as a drain on the market or as a pathology. At the same time, inequality in wealth and income expands and spreads like a toxin through everyday life, poisoning democracy and relegating more and more individuals to a growing army of disposable human waste.

The embrace of a type of rabid individualism, anti-intellectualism and political illiteracy is also at work in the Tea Party movement.

As social protections disappear, jobs are lost, uncertainty grows and insecurity prevails, Tea Party members express anger over a weakened social state that represents one of the few institutions capable of providing the capital, policies and safety nets necessary to protect those who have been shaken by the economic recession.

And, yet, in light of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans, the Tea Party movement wants to abolish government and expand even more the deregulated capitalism that has unsettled the lives of so many of its members.

As the belief in the libertarian agent, free of all dependencies and social responsibilities blows up in the face of the current economic meltdown, anger replaces critique and ignorance informs politics.

Members of the Tea Party are angry because they have been jolted into recognizing how fragile their so-called individual freedom actually is and that it is the government that is somehow responsible for making them feel so vulnerable.

Maybe so, but there is also something else at work here, less metaphysical and more pedagogical - a kind of intellectual vacuum produced at different levels of American society that cultivates ignorance, limits choices, legitimizes political illiteracy and promotes violence.

Celebrity culture puts much of the population in a moral coma and perpetual state of ignorance. Coupled with a pedagogy of economic Darwinism that is spewed out daily in the mainstream media, large segments of the population are prevented from connecting the dots between their own personal troubles and larger social problems.

In this case, the larger structural elements of a corrupt economic system disappear, while the suffering and hardship continues and the bankers and other members of the financial criminal class run to the banks to deposit their obscene bonuses.

The commercial machinery and repressive apparatuses run by the neoliberal and right-wing zombies have undermined public space and condemned more and more people to the status of disposable populations.

It's all the more crucial that academics, artists, and other intellectuals mobilize their resources in order to fight the loss of vision and the exhaustion of politics that has paralyzed American society for decades.

The key is to link struggles that have for decades been seen as discrete, with a broad anti-capitalist project whose objective is the radical transformation of economic, political, personal and social relations.

Will There be An End to Capitalist Ideolgy?

Where's the revolution?

By Antony Lerman

The causes of the global crisis lie in corruption, financial manipulation and institutionalised fraud, market rigging, bankers' greed, illegal wealth appropriation exacerbated by the bank bailouts and the promotion of war as a means of generating profits for big corporations at the cost of the poor, the disadvantaged and socially destitute.

The consequences of The Great Recession will extend far into the future.

There's the human cost, the devastating impact on people's lives, whether for us personally, for already disadvantaged groups, the country as a whole, developing nations, or the more than 2 billion people already living on less than $2 per day.

Predictions about the consequences of the deficit-reduction measures proposed are already dire. And for many millions, the debilitating impact of financial retrenchment is a reality today.

Commentators of all political stripes are falling over each other to tell us that state social programmes will collapse. Unemployment will rise massively. Millions will be impoverished.

Health services will be curtailed, pensions reduced, infrastructure projects cut, educational opportunities diminished. Worldwide living standards will deteriorate. And things won't get better any time soon.

The last comparable global economic crisis gave a boost to all-encompassing, radical ideologies that claimed to provide a comprehensive analysis of what the problem was and a complete solution: communism and fascism.

Whatever you think of them – for me, both were disastrous – there is no doubting the immensity of each one's aspiration to remake society.

If, as many claim, "humanity is at the crossroads of the most serious economic and social crisis in modern history", where is today's big answer, or bold ideological analysis and recipe for transformation, the movement that's taking the masses by storm? It's not that I want it.

It's just that the circumstances seem so ripe for such a response and yet, unless I'm missing something, nothing comparable has emerged and I'm struggling to understand why.

Perhaps it's because politicians in all countries affected have successfully framed the crisis not only in terms of economic errors but also but also moral deficiencies.

They have offered a sop to the anger of the public, but dampened down speculation about the need for revolutionary change by proposing solutions that are almost exclusively managerial.

Evil may have infected the system and a few bankers' knuckles may have been rapped, but the holy grail will be reached by cutting the deficit. The cuts may get ever more radical, but they're just cuts – what any accountant would tell you to do to get your personal finances in order.

Rebalancing the economy effectively means letting free market forces take care of growth, then incomes and spending can recover. Endure the pain, take the medicine and all will be well.

The global consensus among political leaders sees this is the right approach, with variations as to how far and how fast to go.

It may be keeping dissent in check for now, but it looks to me fragile and was achieved with no little sleight of hand. Can it really be the case that, in effect, a bunch of accountants will solve all our problems?

You don't have to look far to find powerful arguments being made that what happened is not merely natural to the economic cycle and therefore won't simply adjust itself in time.

This approach locates the cause of the global crisis in corruption, financial manipulation and institutionalised fraud, market rigging, bankers' greed, illegal wealth appropriation exacerbated by the bank bailouts and the promotion of war as a means of generating profits for big corporations at the cost of the poor, the disadvantaged and socially destitute.

If economic growth falters, and many are warning that it will, the appeal of an analysis that says the system is fundamentally broken and the economists have been revealed as emperors without any clothes, may dramatically increase.

If then pressure mounts for more radical, root-and-branch solutions, is there anything on offer that may seriously challenge the neoliberal consensus and mobilise the masses?

I have no special command of the landscape, so correct me if I'm wrong, but fully-grown, intellectually coherent political-economic solutions, ready for instant harvesting, look to me to be nonexistent.

Despite claims that Marxism is undergoing a revival, memory of the barbarous uses to which it was put by communist regimes is still too fresh to make it anything more than of minority interest.

And when a radical populist like President Lula da Silva produces 9% growth in Brazil in first quarter 2010, within a basically capitalist economic framework, what thinking revolutionary will see the appeal of Marxism?

So, too, with the anti-globalisation movement directed at G8s and G20s, which anyway seems to have run out of steam.

Green economic and political theories seem far too weak and underdeveloped to gain serious traction and the deficit-reduction bandwagon will only, and almost certainly unfairly, make green solutions look unaffordable.

It may be wrong to rule out something radically new coming from more establishment sources, like the new Soros-funded Institute for New Economic Thinking, but don't hold your breath.

Perhaps there are other ideologies in formation, which even now are generating great excitement among those keen to find a new global answer to the global crisis.

Equally, such ideologies will generate deep scepticism and possibly fear in many who distrust wholesale social engineering.

It's true that our current politics are too crude to cope with either satisfactorily, explaining the causes of our current problems or devising and implementing an intellectually coherent and fair set of solutions.

So some new thinking is desperately needed. Nevertheless, for all its inadequacies, I favour a more fox-like, piecemeal, generalist approach to this task, rather than the widespread adoption of a hedgehog-like, all-encompassing ideology.

And yet I fear that we may not escape a deeply damaging bout of the latter at some point over the next 10 years.