'Wall Street is poised for a Great Offensive against political and social infrastructure of the US.'

seafan

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Sun Aug-29-10 10:45 AM
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'Wall Street is poised for a Great Offensive against political and social infrastructure of the US.'

Edited on Sun Aug-29-10 11:13 AM by seafan

Glen Ford highlights the bitter truth now facing us in We Are Cornered: There's No Way Out Without A Fight.

August 25, 2010

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Obama and finance capital began an early, thoroughly vetted, and white hot love affair that was anchored in mutual contempt for those who would challenge the rule of money. He has delivered the highest return on corporate campaign investment in the history of bourgeois democracy, allowing Wall Street to pocket at least $12 trillion in return for contributions of less than $1 million per investment house. (Goldman Sachs was top giver, at $994,795.) Obama was BP’s biggest political campaign recipient: $71,000, an investment that boosted the corporation’s value by billions – albeit temporarily – when the president opened up offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Obviously, Goldman Sachs and BP considered Obama a “greater good,” in terms of their interests, than John McCain. And they made out like bandits, confirming their assessment of Obama’s immense value to their side in the class war. The question is, how in the hell did lefties conclude that Big Capital’s and Big Oil’s “greater good” candidate was also the progressive side’s fountain of Hope – or even a “lesser evil” – in 2008? Both camps placed their bets on Obama, but only one side could possibly win.

It is the Left that wound up trapped in the cul-de-sac, with every major item on its 2008 political wish list betrayed, sidetracked, mangled or spat upon by Obama and his friends – although, to be fair to the Devil, the Left had often simply imagined they had Obama’s ear or support when such was not even remotely true. On war, for example.

Most devastatingly, Obama and his Democratic legislative allies have successfully shielded their Wall Street masters from anything worthy of the name financial reform. This means finance capital and its “shadow,” derivatives-based economy (nominally, ten times bigger than the “real” global economy) remain beyond the reach of meaningful public intervention by conventional methods. With the air knocked out of mainstream reformers’ bony chests, Wall Street is poised for a Great Offensive against the political and social infrastructure of the United States.

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Ford then makes a crucial point: Now that Capitalism can no longer sustain itself in its ever-increasing hunt for profit, it must devour the resources of The State and all of its remaining parts. Like Social Security. Pensions. Everything that is inside locked vaults. Like a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Matt Taibbi was right.

This is no different than the mass looting of Iraq's economic resources and treasured historical artifacts, thus denying the Iraqis the precious evidence of their country's history. The illegal acts by George W. Bush and his war criminals, waged relentlessly for extreme profit, are entirely responsible for these atrocities against innocent people.

How does the president think history will judge him for going to war in Iraq?

“After the second interview with him on Dec. 11, we got up and walked over to one of the doors. There are all of these doors in the Oval Office that lead outside. And he had his hands in his pocket, and I just asked, ‘Well, how is history likely to judge your Iraq war,’” says Woodward.

“And he said, ‘History,’ and then he took his hands out of his pocket and kind of shrugged and extended his hands as if this is a way off. And then he said, ‘History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.’” ----As recounted by Bob Woodward, April 18, 2004

George W. Bush violated international law and ordered death for 4,000+ troops and an untold number of Iraqi innocents, documented to be more than one million. And then there's Afghanistan.

And the war criminals still walk free.

I didn't digress. It's all part of the same sordid story.

Back to the crucial point that Ford makes about The Capitalists' next meal:

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Producing nothing of real value, fatally hooked on ever-mounting rates of return, simultaneously divorced from and a parasite on the “real” economy, and with the executive and legislative branches in their pockets, the Lords of Capital are set to devour the entirety of the public sector – while forcing the public to finance the feast. The rallying cry is “austerity,” but the motivation is not, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman maintains, ideological. Rather, it is hunger.

Finance capital is, at this stage of the system’s decline, incapable of reproducing itself through productive investment, and so must feed on existing producers or on the State. Since Wall Street over the decades has already broken up, consumed and exported much of the U.S. productive economy, that leaves the State and all of its parts. Far from acting as a brake on his vampire friends, Obama leads the charge on corporate hijacking of public education, and signaled in January 2009 that all elements of the safety net, including Social Security, should be “on the table” – which can only mean some form of privatization.

The pace of finance capital deterioration quickens, accelerating the timetable of the Right’s offensive. As the hunger grows, Wall Street’s servants become more aggressive and demanding, and there is nothing in the Democratic Party, as presently constituted, to stop them.

One truth remains: only a massed people can defeat massed capital. If the American Left is capable of bearing that in mind in the critical times ahead, it might just escape the cul-de-sac and make some modest contribution to the world.

That is, indeed, the one truth that remains.