Opinion Editorials, June 2014

Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, June 19, 2014

“War is a bastard but the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
Berthold Brecht
 

The Warfare State of Capital
 
The destruction of Iraq, which began under the conservatively emotional Bush regime, continues under the liberally placid Obama administration. There are differences in style when an intelligent landscaper replaces a slack jawed gardener but the plantation they serve differs only in the cosmetic facade it sells the public, not the diseased crop it produces. The present political opposition is led by people who make pinheads and maniacs seem thoughtful, but our current CEO still acts the sibilant bully talking tough and selling weapons to stop violence his cabal helps start in Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, the Middle East and even the Middle West. It contrasts itself to its blood thirsty opposition as a peace-making arbiter among squabbling foreigners, but those squabbles often originate in our meddling foreign policy which looks like the rest of our economy; dangerously de-structuring.
 
While Obama rattles verbal sabers in the Far East by ordering China to behave better in the South China Sea - they act as though it’s on their border –his witless secretary of state barks about threats in the Ukraine, many of them financed by the USA. These all mean arms sales from our multi billion dollar military-industrial complex - unmentioned by Americans worried about personal gun ownership - for our Pacific puppets and NATO marionettes. That euro group was supposedly a bulwark against communism but it’s still around long after communism’s demise. Now it represents a bulwark against democracy and peace.
 
Meanwhile, the recovering (?) economy continues piling wealth into the coffers of a tiny minority who rent giant computers to stash their electronic loot because there’s so much of it, while the working people politicians call a middle class sink into greater debt to pay the rent or mortgage - if they have housing, the medical bills - if they have health care, and the education loans - if they have schooling.
 
This is accompanied by news about the recession having ended, again, and the economy bouncing back to new highs, again. As always only for the upper percentiles, with the middle sinking lower and poverty rising higher. But the place where god lives, unintelligent design prevails, and the big bang explodes all day every day – the market - is really booming for the 1% and its professional class servants. So there’s really nothing to worry about since we’ll soon have increased weapons spending to employ more robots and immigrants while killing more people. Wonderful.
 
We have moved from a policy of wars that send Americans to kill and die in other countries to one of financing of color-coded electoral “revolutions” and if necessary, civil wars with less need for invasions of anything but money, weapons and mechanized zombie warriors. Investments of dollars instead of lives are more profitable for warfare capital, especially as more American consumers threaten to become citizens by demanding peace and democracy. People still die but they are almost all foreigners. The profits that come from those deaths increase while the body count losses at capital central decline. Nice. Great economy. Sure.
 
The increasing bloodshed in the middle east, which may have its maps redrawn by Arabs who live there instead of Europeans who don’t, may fit Israeli plans to break up the Arab - Muslim world in as idiotic a way as American arming of ideological fanatics to fight communism has come back to haunt capital. Instead of a few Arab nations led by supporters of global capital’s new Zion there may be several ruled by those who will not tolerate a European apartheid state in their midst. The safety and future of the middle east is also the safety and future of the rest of the world, and if the warfare profit state rules much longer, our world may plunge into a bloody collapse of nature in all its substance. 
 
The Ukraine, Detroit, fracking, gmos, guns, abortions, Palestine, Israel, homeless people, sheltered pets and everything else that make up usually misunderstood reality are part of the private profit and public loss system that always means inequality. That word has recently been rediscovered because it has become so blatantly obvious that even academics have noticed.
 
Bulletin: profit on one side demands loss on the other and that makes inequality a component part of the system. Who knew?
 
Private minority control of a market where some always do well at the expense of most others is nothing new. It’s just that the system’s present crisis is more noticeable as the losses are being suffered by greater numbers of people while the fantastic profits increase for a much smaller group.
 
Liberals and conservatives are two sides of the political coin of this realm. While Americans are reduced to choosing from these lesser evils and calling it democracy, indigenous people the world over are rising to do battle with capitalism. Inspiring some real democracy in South America, they clearly see it as not only their enemy but also the enemy of the planet, or Mother Earth, as they unashamedly address our multi-cultural uni-racial home.
 
Whether ecological problems are seen a short-term environmental menace or a long-term climate disaster, they are the result of reducing earth and its people to private profit producing commodities that must be balanced by humanity’s loss. This demented economics has become a form of justifiable genocide, a war conducted on humanity itself. Minority rulers cannot help but care for anything but increasing private wealth in a system becoming more depraved with each creation of an individual with a billion dollars in a world where a billion individuals live in poverty. The warfare state must be transformed into a democratic state of peace, within and without its borders. If that seems too difficult for rich North Americans to achieve, maybe we should ask poor South Americans for advice.
 
 
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Frank Scott writes  political commentary and satire which is available online  at Legalienate

http://legalienate.blogspot.com

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