If you're wealthy enough, or a large and greedy enough capitalist, this
government and society are quite willing to openly help you out of your debts, even if they are entirely of your own making. That Bush, a person whose entire business career was formulated on failed companies that were bailed out by government connected friends, should choose a rescue of the wealthy while ignoring the very real plight of the workers in this country is no surprise to me.
Even now the government is planning to transfer yet another $700 billion or
more in bad debt from the wealthy onto the general public. This is after
opening cash drawers at the federal reserve so that the wealthy could steal
hundreds of billions directly below the inflation rate, essentially giving
money to the wealthy for free, now, for many months. This is after taking on Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, already a multi-trillion dollar swap of bad investments placed onto all current and future citizens.
I think what we are seeing is not a "financial crisis" as such, so much as an
organized effort to unload the bad debts of capitalism's failures onto the
American population at large, or what has been famously called "socializing
debt," while the wealthy, cut loose from their "mistakes," celebrate their
past, present, and future gains, like robbers sneaking off in the night.
These gains, of course, were produced on the backs of everyone's labor.
Certainly it does not help in any way the millions now each year who continue to fall into foreclosure. It does nothing at all for those about to lose their homes or their livelihoods. One thing it does accomplish is to assure that what little they are able to earn will be worth even less. It will
continue to assure that the wealthy can run up another trillion or more in new debts, unencumbered and safe in the knowledge they can again socialize their losses while the economy continues to collapse for most people who have no bailouts, no rescue from crushing debts and income worth less each day.
For most people, the economy is about being able to feed their families, to pay for housing, for medical costs, being able to pay for the very goods and
services that actually do keep the American economy afloat. This action
assures these very people, and their children, will find themselves living in
very real poverty while paying off the failures of the wealthy of this nation.
There are actually two things that could be done that would lead us out of this crisis. The first, is rather than rescuing the sociopathic wealthy, the
government could choose instead to rescue those who have these defective
morgages. This would free the economy, the people who ARE the economy, from crushing debts. Letting Wall Street collapse, while protecting workers from their greed, rather than blaming the victim, is one possible solution.
A government- based approach, however, is only short term, and in any case not viable in the current political organization of this thing called "America." No electorial choices offer a government of the people, and all lead to socialism for the wealthy at present. Even if choices were offered, they would not be permitted, and this is why withdrawing from participation in the false exercise of phony democracy is needed. The solution is not to be found withgovernment, cerntainly not as it is presently constituted, and will continue to be regardless of the elections in November, but rather must begin by active withdrawl of consent, and must start with saying "No" in November.
Another, better solution, especially long term, is for us all to simply
withdraw from their economy entirely, or as much as possible. Each small step taken, whether we engage in barter with our friends and neighbors, whether we engage in direct economic activity with local farmers rather than through the corporate grocer, each step brings us closer to economic independence, individually and collectivily, and thereby to true freedom. Each small bond that is broken between the free citizen and the sociopathic institutions of the economy of the wealthy should be thought of as a revolutionary action.
Larger, collective actions, are also worth considering. Complete work
stoppage, refusing our labor to the capitalist, is worth considering. I do not
mean strikes, which are used to extract limited consessions from these
sociopaths. I mean completely withdrawing from work and participation in their businesses, complete refusal to participate in their economy.
Some have hailed the current round of collapses and bailouts for the wealthy as a repudiation of laissez faire capitalism, or have even claimed this is the death of capitalism itself. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think some people misunderstand what is actually happening here. This is not a repudiation of capitalism, nor do I believe it is even a failed market being “rescued”. These events I see as the formal introduction of the institutional economics of fascism, much like what happened in Europe in the early 20th century in response to that previous crisis in capitalism. Indeed, Mussolini would be cheering the U.S. government’s actions if he were alive today.
The traditional form of fascism is often defined in part as a fusion of public
and private interests, by incorporating or co-opting private ownership into the state. This is very much in tune with wealthy interests who then use the
compulsory power of the state as a way to insulate their own economic power from competition to maximize private profits while simultaneously socializing their debts and business failures to the general population. This of course now all but completes the transformation, socially, politically, and now economically, of the United States into a fully fascist nation.
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