Pulling a "Gorbachev in Reverse"

[arendt]

Pulling a "Gorbachev in Reverse"

"In the 1980s, capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s, it triumphed over democracy."

- David Korten, "When Corporations Rule the World"


George Bush's administration is nearing the end of its six-year-long attempt to shut the the U.S. Government away from its citizens, behind a wall of secrecy, war powers, and swiftboating. It is the mirror image of Mikhail Gorbachev's almost equally long perestroika campaign, which he claimed was going to open up the Soviet government to its citizens. In both cases, when you take a society, all of whose structures were created under one ideology, and try to move it to the diametrically opposite ideology without changing the underlying socio-political structure, at some point the whole effort just collapses into contradiction.

The US socio-political structure of middle class democracy is rapidly approaching such a contradction. It has been ruined beyond repair by the treason of the elites. The elite media today are propaganda outlets serving up fundamentalist agitprop, when not busy whitewashing the flood of genuine crimes by Bush appointees and right wing apparatchiks like Limbaugh. Both sides of the Congressional aisle are under the thumb of the defense industries and the Zionist lobby. Thanks to the spinelessness of the Congressional Democrats, the Federal courts are packed with fundamentalist fanatics of both the religious and the economic persuasions. Every supposed challenge to Bush's usurpations of the Constitution ends up turning into the death knell of the regulation, law, or treaty that was the source of the challenge. And the elites and their media acquiesce without a whimper. We are watching them suffocate our democracy before our eyes.

There is going to be a Boris Yeltsin moment in America soon. We are going to reach that moment of ideological contradiction that brings the tanks out into the street. Pretty soon, some other drunken jackass (this time one who can really ride a white horse) is going to be green-lighted into power by the corporations, so that the final plundering of US assets can proceed the same way it did in Russia after the fall of Communism. Later on, George Bush will be as reviled by Americans as Mikhail Gorbachev is by Russians, who feel that he sold out his country to foreign capitalists.

You think the looting so far has been tragic? You think that your children and their children will be paying the debts run up by tax giveaways to the idle rich and obscene profits to warmongering corporations and monopolistic energy companies? You think that all our productive assets have been stripped and sold to the Chinese? Well, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Get ready for a looting of the US on the scale of the looting of the USSR. The massive privatization of any real asset, the total collapse of the currency, the pauperization of all but the rich, the rise of our own lawless oligarchs - in short, a country that will make 1980s New York City look as corruption-free as modern-day Singapore.

Most Americans already expect the deliberate, and totally avoidable, destruction of Social Security, either by a last ditch legal maneuver in the corrupt mockery that is our Congress, or as part of a general collapse of the U.S. currency from massive deficit spending. The destruction of Medicare is proceeding on schedule, moving forward from the phony Prescription Drug Plan to a 20% cut in funding. We are already witnessing the destruction of all legitimate regulation, such as Bush's order to close the EPA library system. And we can expect the rich to be exempted from all taxes - not just the "death tax" - completing their transformation into a new class of inbred, international, aristocratic parasites, the likes of which hasn't been seen since before the French Revolution.

But the real crunch time will come when the traitorous elite repeals the mortgage tax exemption (already in the works), and starts foreclosing under the new, Draconian bankruptcy laws. (We can't have middle class tax exemptions, you see; only rich folks deserve tax cuts.) The other side of the assault on family finance is already in place, with rising mortgage rates, gas prices, and heating prices pushing people to the edge. The tipping point will come soon, and James Kuntsler will be proven to have been an optimist. (It will be a rather short emergency, followed by a very long silence of the grave.)

People will start to sell everything. But they will discover that the cheap Chinese junk they have been gorging on at WalMart has no asset value at all. Millions of Americans will be evicted from their houses, which will become worthless, unheatable gravestones in an abandoned suburban sprawl . School districts, funded primarily by real estate taxes, will be secondarily bankrupted, and education will collapse back to home schooling - delighting the whackos who tutor their children in the manner of Islamic madrassas.

The secondary unemployment from the massive dislocations involved in the ruin of suburbia will create Great Depression levels of unemployed; but they won't be the docile, law-abiding folk of the 1930s. They will be entitled yahoos with guns and bad attitude.

With massive internal refugee populations and a defunded government, law and order will be at a premium. Privatization of the police will be rammed through, and we will live under corporate-controlled police state feudalism, which, by definition, will not enforce any workplace safety regulations and will actively and brutally break any unionizing activity. With private police forces, assassination will become a business practice, just as it did in 1990s Russia.

None of this has to happen, but it is going to, because the US elites have sold out their own country. The corporate media spins and smears and lies, betraying its duty to democracy. The behavior of both the elites and their media can be understood in terms of the old African proverb: "you can't wake a man who is pretending to be asleep."

Frank Rich captures the total apathy that the current gang of thugs have for genuine government in his phrase "virtual government", which he defines as "substituting publicity stunts for substance... (and)...concocting sham legislation...". In place of accountability and honesty, we have the "I'll do as I please" administration. It has demonstrated that is has absolutely no intention of obeying domestic or international laws or standards.

Words, and laws made up of simple, plainspoken words, like torture or freedom, have become meaningless gabble in the hands of these anti-intellectual pirates. Any American who wants to stay alive had better learn to pay no attention to what the elite corporate media report. Their only chance is to keenly observe whom the elites are hurting and whom they are helping, and act accordingly.

Even a casual observer will notice that the Bush Gang has declared open war on American democracy and the middle class. (The next stage of the war on the middle class was outlined above.) The war on democracy is being fought with crooked, partisan election officials, rigged e-voting machines, massive campaign finance akin to bribery, the illegal mobilization and un-Constitutional faith-based financing of the most anti-democratic religious denominations in the country, the consistent refusal of the Justice Department to investigate or to enforce the law when it goes against Bush or one of his corporate enablers, and the frantic media campaign to trash or bury anyone who exposes this war to the light of day. Case in point, RFK, Jr.

As we move into the 2006 elections, with the robbed Mexican left as an example of what needs to be done to regain our democracy, the Bush regime is using the Israeli military (or being used by them - a distinction without a difference in that incestuous relationship) to get what it could not with trumped up lies about Iranian nukes - yet another Mideast war just in time for election season. Too bad, that it might get a lot of American soldiers killed; but its worth their sacrifice to keep the GOP in power.

The polls show Americans are fed up with Bush, but think the Democrats are only of value as "anybody but Bush". (And who can blame them with everyone from Hillary Clinton to Russ Feingold defending the collective punishment the IDF is inflicting on even anti-Hezbollah areas of Lebanon. ) The forms of government in the U.S. verge on total irrelevance. The politicians are largely corporate puppets. The only distinguishing feature is that the GOP are rabid looters and religious fruitcakes, abetting the denial of reality and the miscarriage of justice on a massive scale.

All we need to complete the Gorby in Reverse scenario is our version of Boris Yeltsin, some pliant but charismatic hack that the coprorate media can pass off as a "hero" just long enough to permanently murder the Constitution. (Paging John McCain! Paging John McCain!) Being unbelievably ignorant of recent history, the huge minority of suckers in America will cheer their hero right up to the point where he robs them blind. I'm sure the corporate media will hire Mikhail to do the coverage of the coup.

[Old and In the Way]

1. Wow, very powerful stuff.

Depressingly insiteful....I'm totally convinced that it is going down this way. They are all in. They've gone too far to cede power now. I think we are in for a world of hurt and too many Americans are clueless or know it but can't/won't confront it.

This is so good, I'm keeping this thread linked for future reference.

[Vidar]

2. Makes way too much sense.

[KKKarl is an idiot]

3. Excellent post

Sounds like a movie. But it is a sad reality. People did not give the Clinton government half a chance to start a surplus. But he did. I thought all was lost at the point he took over. But the good his administration did has all been lost.