So socialism is apparently not concerned with people, who are advised to put their faith in "liberals"/ radical centrists/ extreme fullbacks/ whatever. This bandying about and repackaging of ideological catchwords is the bane of our "postmodern" world, where there are no longer any truths, only interpretations. What we are left with are the Santorums on the "right" and the Obamas on the "left" fighting over divisive social issues , such as gay marriage, abortion, anti-piracy copyright laws, and just how minimal should be state support for health and education, where no candidate (except the court jester Paul) is allowed to question the fundamentals of the system.
And what is this
playing field really? Karl Polyani in the 1950s clearly saw that capitalism, by
turning labour, land and money itself into commodities, was creating a soulless
system which would need strong state control to prevent its inhuman nature from
destroying the world. This advice was irretrievably lost over the past two
decades with the fusion of left and right in the oxymoronic "extreme centre", extreme in its implicit embrace of neoliberalism (which has
very little to do with Clegg's idol John Stuart Mills), where traditional
solutions such as socialism or paternalistic conservatism are excluded.
Foreign (read: military) policy is also excluded, as the
empire requires strict obedience by both its postmodern NATO halfbacks and its
neocolonial goalkeepers, so that its market authoritarian team wins. The
game has proved to be lethal for all concerned, with a change of strategy no
longer possible via the electoral process, now the plaything of the so-called
radical centre. According to Tariq Ali, democracy "is being hollowed out" in
the West under neoliberalism, which is hostile to "even social democratic
parties".
Whether the Obamas
and Santorums, both supporters of the spectacularly failing tactics of Team
Empire, are "deeply" bad to begin with or merely corrupted by the lure of power
and money is moot. They are blinkered by cheerleader Thatcher's "TINA!" (There Is
No Alternative). She meant "no alternative to capitalism" -- bad enough -- but to
make matters worse, AIPAC et al have made sure that "and Israel" was added to
the equation, making the enemy teams all those who
protest the rigged game in the Middle East .
The Republican
strategy to attack a Teflon Obama (besides gay/abortion charges) has been to
suggest, as did Romney after New Hampshire, that Obama doesn't believe in
American greatness, and that of course Mitt et al do. That cheerleading is as
close as a US
politician gets to foreign policy these days. But that has been the tired
Republican cheer since Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter.
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