Certainly, this brouhaha contains interesting economic underpinnings and impacts.  Equally so, the political meaning of the piece and its interpretation are noteworthy.  Finally, the social implications of the situation are especially interesting.  Although these three categories are actually inseparable, a brief examination that uses this economic-political-social rubric gives THC a chance to say his piece.

from Miley Cyrus Liberty Walk

           The overarching economic fact of the last forty years, more or less, has been that capital’s leadership has failed to deliver on its promises for most inhabitants of the planet.  This is to say that more and more marginalization of working people has occurred, while the so-called middle-class section of the laboring masses has found its toehold on decent living conditions increasingly tenuous.

            This economic quagmire has manifested in a variety of fascinating and important ways.  A few of these follow here:

• Only through the repeated expansion and monetization of credit have economic leaders averted total meltdown, and even this persistent reliance on a ‘bubble system’ appears now to be breaking down.
• While every civilian productive sector has confronted glut after glut, each sector—agriculture, energy, textiles, metals, everything—has also created massive productivity gains that could readily serve community purposes instead of existing exclusively for profit.
• This contradiction has necessitated, on the one hand, an ever-growing reliance on militarized spending, including the massive expansion of the ‘Prison-Industrial-Complex’ via the ‘War-on-Drugs,’ the ‘War-on-Sex,’ etc., and, on the other hand, a burgeoning focus on fetishized commodification, ranging from plastic surgery and Viagra to tanning beds and hyper-inbred pets, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
• Objectively, Ms. Cyrus’ slickly produced and fetchingly packaged music extravaganza fits into this second category of the ‘functioning’ economy of capitalism now.

from Miley Cyrus Liberty Walk

This précis of the contemporary moment, though condensed and capable of plenty of amplification, allows an observer to ponder an aspect of Miley’s most recent effort to ‘build her brand.’

            Meanwhile, the central political fact of the present period—again, the last four decades or so—has been a dismantling of ‘liberalism’ as constituted in ‘safety nets’ and ‘New Deals’ and a concomitant surge in repressive, even fascistic, laws and approaches to politics.  Inevitably, in inchoate ways here in Central North America and in more organized fashion in parts of the world less ‘liberated’ by the constraints of being the imperial center and the misled ‘bastion’ of ‘freedom and patriotism,’ resistance to this amped-up oppression has risen among the working folks for whom capitalism isn’t working very well anymore anyhow.

from Miley Cyrus Liberty Walk

 This subjugation to plutocracy has, as in the economic sphere above, shown-up in myriad ways of note and import.  A few of these follow here:

• Even as ‘information’ has proliferated and become one of the current, purported ‘freedoms,’ actual access to data and knowledge has suffered severe diminution, at the same time that various whistleblowers—and ‘Wiki-Blowers’ have sought to counteract this trend toward both secrecy and fee-based exclusion from facts.
• Even as international political norms have become ubiquitous in all areas of politics, so that on the surface all and sundry are subject to the rule of law, in actuality, imperial crimes occur with increasing impunity—ranging from the mundane frauds of everyday life—three hundred dollar seat-belt tickets to make people ‘safer’—to the most murderous plunder—mass carnage in Fallujah that served both to open new territory for capital’s untrammeled sway and to cover up capital’s complicity in creating what it saw fit to destroy there.
• Even as the celebration of ‘the blessings of liberty’ have advanced on every front, political participation and the forms of democracy have become ever more tenuous, especially in the ‘belly-of-the-imperial-beast’ here in the United States; what with mass disfranchisement, purposeful political paralysis, and decreasing legitimacy of dissent, even the façade of majority rule is at risk.
• Even as any promise in the Bill of Rights takes center stage in all established mediation of power and justice, progressively more draconian suppression of real rights—from the negative capacity to avoid ‘unreasonable’ searches and seizures to the positive autonomy to speak and organize for a better world—continues to manifest itself; the Patriot Act is only an ongoing explication of this long standing and now seemingly intractable trend.
• Even as capital has, in these varied ways, arrogated ever-greater legitimacy to its hegemony, protest to this arrogant disregard for human rights and social potential has increased, especially in recent years, as the economy has spiraled downward.
• Non-assaultive political and economic responses of bourgeoisie rulers to such outbursts of discontent has operated in tandem: the packaging of radical-chic and the lionizing of ‘liberty’s guardians’—especially those in places like Cuba and China and Egypt—has always proceeded in both the marketplace and in every arena of power politics.
• Objectively, Miley Cyrus’s work operates both as real dissension and as an easily-packaged deflection and cooptation of discord; to an extent, her own coming of age has made resistance to the machinations of domination unavoidable, simultaneously as her ‘brand’ had to seek to commoditize and neutralize this nevertheless honest disagreement with the powers-that-be.

Politics, like economics, proffers onlookers with a lens for examining “Liberty Walk” and those who would deconstruct it.

from Miley Cyrus Liberty Walk

 Just as what Marcuse called ‘one-dimensionality’ has taken over economics and politics, so too compression and limitation have come to characterize the social realm.  This process is all-the-more astounding in its delicious contradictions and luscious paradoxes.

• Thus maximum ‘diversity,’ ‘identity,’ and pluralistic mores coexist with straitjacketed uniformity and lack of individual capacitation.
• Entirely new, ‘revolutionary’ developments of community have led to diminished social contact and collectivity.
• Maximization of conformity has accompanied the most profound ‘desublimation’ of inhibition in every area of existence.
• At once, surreality passes for reality and alienation passes for compassion and empathy.
• Aggressive attacks on ‘depression’ and unhappiness yield the highest degree of cynicism and fatalism ever.

Wherever one looks, the processes of emiseration call forth countervailing tendencies, toward human fulfillment and the realization of the potential that exists in the combination of social labor and technique.  Yet, still, those in charge seek ways to subvert and divert these outpourings of social desire for justice and democracy.

            Once again, Miley Cyrus straddles both of these tendencies.  Hers are liberating tropes at the very same instant that they represent marketing fetishes and misleading triviality.

One cannot watch “Liberty Walk” without seeing the deepest challenge to capital’s sway.  Nevertheless, by itself, the effort therein is completely inadequate, since lacking a combination of dialogic capacity-building and conscious action-against-oppression, the song and its performance represent primarily another Walmart ledger entry, a further rationale for an i-Pod existence that lacks any creative or liberating outlet in the realm of the real.

The second feeling, on the other hand, concerned the Obama administration, which I wagered would follow the election, and about which I harbored profound skepticism.  I wrote somewhat extensively then about my concerns.  As prognostication goes, my worries now seem about as close to ‘batting a thousand’ as is possible:

• He has backed nukes to the hilt
• He has expanded, rather than contracted, the imperial mandate, even as he’s leaving Iraq a butchered mess
• The war-on-drugs continues, practically unabated, in some ways amped-up

The list continues, so that, with only a few exceptions, Barack Obama might easily be a ‘centrist’ member of the disastrous Bush coterie, maybe similar to General Colin Powell, more or less.

In the event, 2008 was the first time since 1976 that I voted for a Democrat.  That choice stemmed from a vow that I made, never again to cast my ballot for a Democratic Presidential candidate.  Jimmy Carter, when he threw his arm around the foot-taller Anastasio Somoza and declared him ‘one of our finest friends in Central America,’ so alienated me from the ‘liberal’ line that I swore never again to soil my soul with these cretins at the pinnacle of the national level.

I broke that promise once, three years ago.  Obama has been even worse than I feared.  Thus, I’m now having a ‘coming-back-to-Jesus moment;’ I’m renewing my vows.   Never again will I vote, for any national office, for Demopublicans or Republocrats(two more terms that I claim some credit for creating). This rejuvenated commitment is worthy of note because yesterday I received an e-mail from Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry.  She implored that I donate to Barack-the-Magnificent’s reelection.  In fact, every link in the e-mail took me to the ‘bucks page.’

The e-mail itself contained assertions that ranged from the paltry to the prevaricating.  They centered around the idea that Barack-the-Magnificent shares

“our vision of America as a land of opportunity for everyone.  We need a leader willing to fight for  the needs of the 99 percent, and stand with hard working families to say that the world’s wealthiest corporations must pay their fair share.”

As persuasive speech this is weak enough.  Analytically, with immigrants under attack everywhere, 99 out of 100 Federal ‘Bailout’ dollars going to the wealthy and the entitled, while people like my wife and me lose our homes to the banking establishments that cashed in on crisis, the words are insulting in their lopsided deviation from reality.

The rest of the text is little better, alleging baselessly that Obama’s jobs act would be much more than a sop to construction companies and large corporate outfits—teachers and a handful of others excepted, of course, though those provisions would likely end ‘on the cutting room floor,’ as the saying goes.  Equally ludicrous contentions appear about the beneficence of the U.S. Government under Obama toward immigrants, who still fear La Migra far more than the idiocy of Alabama or the open fascism of Arizona.

And of course, even after Barack-the-magnificent acceded to cutting the guts out of any possibility of a ‘single-payer’ system that at least had a credible chance, however miniscule, of really serving ‘the 99 per cent,’ the obeisance toward ‘health care reform’ still appears.  In reality, this largest-ever giveaway to the most monopolistic insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms is unparalleled, so touting this legislation would also be sickening were it not so formulaically boring.

And, as suggested above, of course not a word shows up about the murderous barbarity of American empire, the hypocritical breast-beating about nuclear annihilation’s pendency, the disastrous whore-fest with the nuclear power industry, or the continuing monstrosity of the war on drugs.  Instead, the e-mail celebrates continued decline of common dreams in the so-called ‘administration-of-hope,’ and asks for money four or five times.

I’ve written volumes about most of this.  What I say is, at least arguably, credibly supported, and indisputably joins an argument about what is necessary now to salvage anything even vaguely resembling “the American dream.”  I can and will compose further volumes.  For now, as a faithful union member for most of the past thirty years—sometimes, I couldn’t beg, borrow, or steal the dues, I will convey my continued trenchant critique of what passes for working class leadership.

The merest sip of what a reasonable analysis would be of the Barack-the-Magnificent, imperialist avatar, follows.  Yesterday, he spoke before the Australian Parliament.  In this self-congratulatory outpouring, he managed simultaneously several swell rhetorical tricks.

• He both nodded to and dismissed indigenous peoples and national minorities.
• He celebrated working peoples’ wartime sacrifices and promised an expansion of America’s Pacific empire.
• He bragged that Australia and the U.S. have ‘won the present round of wars,’ while promoting the need to continue the same fight that we haven’t even understood correctly in these actions.
• He at once spoke of cooperation with China and threatened that increasingly powerful nation, full of smart and hard-working people, with destruction if it failed to meet American hegemonistic mandates.

Folks who say that Barack-the-Magnificent ought to be President again are therefore saying ‘yes’ to empire, ‘yes’ to endless war, ‘yes’ to brutal oppression and economic marginality, and ‘yes’ to the untrammeled rule of the rich plutocratic thugs who are presently in command.  I for one am clear: ‘No, thank you.’

At this point in the game, I sure as heck don’t expect much validation.  On the other hand, history, should anyone survive the coming carnage, will judge the texts that remain behind.   In that court, I am confident of recognition as a voice for the reasoned effort that has to be a part of people-power.  Any other form of democracy is, at absolute best bullshit.

Princeton’s philosophy professor, Harry Frankfurt, has also spoken to this overall tendency toward falsity in service of deflection or hidden agendas.  In 2005, he wrote a delightfully brief and artful capsulization of the intellectual swamp that continues to predominate contemporary dialog.

“One of the salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.  Everyone knows this.  Each of us contributes his share.  But we tend to take the situation for granted.  Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and avoid being taken in by it.  So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern or attracted much sustained inquiry.”

Once more, I will close with a plea for engagement and a different path.  Miraculously, we still might achieve a decent world in which people can show their potency instead of spending their time whining about the bullies.

Now and again, off and on, everything in this essay consists of ideas and facts that I have been conveying and reporting for years.  The text here basically accomplishes two things.  It presents the information that I received about Troy Anthony Davis when I was a reporter in Savannah on another assignment, in 2003.  It summarizes the meaning of that data, in relation to the likely murder of Troy Davis tomorrow.  It suggests what a rational, powerful response to Mr. Davis’ lawful and stupid and evil execution would be.  As I noted to start, none of this is new.  The lack of a media that has the resources to communicate such material adequately is another item that I have long sought to proffer, something in fact that I’ve been reporting for thirty-odd years as I’ve talked repeatedly about the need for Peoples Information Networks and Popular Action Networks with which they conjoin, especially in relation to the Southern U.S.

Several times in the Winter and Spring of 2003, I found myself in Savannah to cover the unjust and ludicrously biased disbarment of a powerful and prominent local Black attorney, Joyce Marie Griggs.  As the saying goes, that “is another story.”  However, as a result of that process–with its components of color prejudice, bigotry, and the elimination of threats to the powers-that-be–I learned what the true definition of a mistake is, in the context of one of several conversations about Troy Anthony Davis.  “A man who says, ‘we made a mistake,’ almost always is asking you to overlook that he has just violated you in the most profound way, robbed you of your humanity, and that he hopes to escape any consequences for such brutality.”

The speaker, a promoter of a Black Holocaust Museum in Savannah, was comparing the lynch-mob justice that had caught Troy Davis in its web, with the vast crimes of slavery and Jim Crow, responsible for the deaths of millions of Africans and African Americans.  He affirmed what three other Savannah residents, as well as Attorney Griggs, testified to as common knowledge ‘in the ‘hood’ in the city.

•  First, Troy Davis did not kill Officer MacPhail.
•    Second, the police knew this and had employed strong-arm tactics to gather the necessary ‘evidence’ to convict an innocent man.
•  Third, the police, and many in the community, knew who had killed Officer MacPhail, one of the ‘witnesses’ against Davis.
•  Fourth, this man–occasionally an informant for the police–had terrorized and threatened and eliminated people who had suggested that they would rat him out.
•  Fifth, the Savannah police were notoriously brutal and corrupt, in the nature of an organized gang of thieves and dictators who operated rackets in the city for the upper classes.

As I have said, I have spoken and written about these matters before.  I have implored various individuals and agencies for help in investigating these allegations.  Even a hint of truth to most of them ought to exonerate Troy Davis, perhaps even extricate him from prison.  Nothing ever has come of these requests on my part; now and again, though, I have continued to write about this matter.

What these reported facts imply is clear.  The likely execution of Troy Davis tomorrow will be the most horrific sort of soulless, brutal, and evil act, a murder based on false witness and opportunism and hypocrisy and corruption.  Millions of Georgians, either through collusion or silence, will become accessories to a venal and vicious homicide.

Someday, within a couple of years at the most, Georgia will admit that it “made a ‘mistake,’” though unfortunately Mr. Davis will likely be dead.  If it manages the second time to nab the Black man–a career criminal, according to many witnesses–who did in fact gun down Officer MacPhail, then in a sense, this most bigoted of States will be getting ‘two-for-the-price-of-one’ in ridding itself of two African Americans.

That those who carry out this murder will argue that they were ‘mistaken’ cries out for a response.  What should people do about this murderous duplicity and criminal impunity on the part of constituted authorities?

Organizers of a ‘liberal’ bent have been beating the bushes to save Mr. Davis’ life.  They have, through a heroic effort, gathered 600,000 signatures calling for clemency, which the State Board of Pardons and Parole, predictably, ignored.  They have conducted vigils and marches and speaking tours.

Unfortunately, their tactical response otherwise has been tame.  ‘Write letters,’ they have advised.  ‘Make phone calls’ to complicit leaders, they have counseled.  ‘Quietly and peacefully protest,’ they have asked.  The time for such tactics has passed, in my estimation.  Here are some minimal ways that people should react, should Davis die by a ‘mistaken’ needle tomorrow.

•  Everyone, in and out of Georgia, should do the utmost to boycott Georgia businesses, unless they have explicitly contributed to and participated in the effort to commute Davis’ sentence.
•  No one except those who like to pal around with murderers should ever again go to college in Georgia, again unless an institution clearly fought for sparing Davis’ life.
•  No convention should ever again occur in Georgia, until reparations and justice have been provided, except of course that those organizations that support judicial murder of the innocent ought to come only to Georgia.
•  Everyone who can speak, write, and otherwise communicate should set aside time each year to continue condemning Georgia as in league with all that is satanic and wrong in the human condition.
• Anyone who works for the state of Georgia, or does business for the State of Georgia, should quit their employment, or quit providing services to the State of Georgia, unless they want to support judicial murder of the likely innocent.

Again, this is a minimalist response, one which I have on other occasions embedded in both text and conversation.

However, the likely murder of Troy Anthony Davis demands a more stringent response.  This is also something that I have said in the past.

Self-defense is the very essence of much that passes for “human rights.”  As a matter of self-defense, citizens must begin to organize to take action that goes well beyond any ‘hat-in-hand’ request for assistance.  We must in fact, begin to organize to be able to show up, en masse and in force, to participate in bringing democracy–majority rule–to fruition, in some ways for the first time in U.S. history.

 Joe Hill is another victim of judicial murder.  Only recently, have scholars demonstrated ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt,’ the way that corrupt criminals in power ‘made a mistake’ and shot Joe Hill to death by firing squad in Utah.  He might well have advised us to consider thinking along the following lines.  ‘If 100 people showed up to blockade a prison and demand the release of those held within, the ‘forces-of-disorder’ in charge of the world would arrest them and put them behind bars; if a thousand people showed up at such a blockade, the authorities would arrest or shoot them down; they might even mow down ten thousand; but would they so easily be able to subvert the popular will if 100,000 or a million citizens showed up at the prison gates and demanded, with Moses, “Let my people go!”?

In any event, until we have the capacity and the will to manifest such a potent expression of majority rule, then we will never be able to say, as Georgia’s most magnificent preacher did before he too was cut down, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last.”

From Dr. Boyce Watkins, "Facts You May Not Know About the Troy Davis Case"

A fascination with, aversion toward, and utter confusion about the United States are all paradoxically possible at the same point in time.  To an extent, these seemingly incompatible feelings accompany the imperial position of hegemony that the U.S.A. currently occupies.  In this context, what happens in the U.S., particularly when lives are at stake and oppression appears irresistible, deserves the world’s compassionate attention.  Legal matters, especially when capital punishment is at issue, are typical of this sort of important development that mandates a closer look.

Though I’m not an attorney, as a wordsmith I know that a fascination with language and meaning is a lawyer’s stock in trade.  A while back, contemplating the term ‘accessory,’ in its criminal legal sense, seemed particularly apt in regard to the State of Georgia, where until recently I resided in the Southern U.S.  A wide-ranging and authoritative definition of ‘accessory’ shows up  in Black’s Law Dictionary and multiple other sources: “one who is not the chief actor in the offense, nor present at its performance, but in some way concerned therein, either before or after the act committed; one who aids, abets, commands, or counsels another in the commission of a crime.  Accessory after the fact–person who, knowing a felony to have been committed by another, receives, relieves, comforts or assists the felon, in order to enable him to escape from punishment, or the like.   Accessory before the fact–one who orders, counsels, encourages, or otherwise aids and abets another to commit a felony and who is not present at the commission of the offense.   Accessory during the fact–one who stands by without interfering or giving such help as may be in his power to prevent the commission of a criminal offense.”

Inasmuch as any Georgia resident, who is not actively protesting the pending execution of Troy Anthony Davis, either is or ought to be aware of this coming killing, such a one is quite likely about to become every sort of accessory to this still young man’s judicial murder, which, if Davis is innocent, is at the very least a negligent homicide.  Let me be completely clear: this means that not only would Governor Nathan Deal and most of the State’s legislature be culpable for what is as likely as not a major felony, it would mean that the several million Peach State occupants who are doing nothing would also be chargeable, in that their silence and inattention, or, in far too many cases of misguided vengefulness, their active support and direction, provided aid and comfort to the actual executioners.

    Undoubtedly, someone viciously killed Mark Allen MacPhail on August 19, 1989.  Just as obviously, a Savannah, Georgia jury convicted Troy Davis of that brutal murder in August, 1991.  Lacking physical evidence that Mr. Davis was the killer, however, or any circumstantial evidence other than his presence at the scene, where off-duty officer MacPhail was attempting to break up a parking lot melee, Chatham County prosecutors relied on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses to make the charges against Troy Anthony Davis stick.

Today, seven of those nine observers take back their testimony, admitting that they cannot state with any certainty who pulled the trigger and slayed an honest cop doing good work.  Several recanting witnesses speak of blatant police misconduct, including threats of imprisonment if they did not implicate Troy Davis.

Mark Allen MacPhail’s death is a fact; that someone gutlessly murdered him is a fact; Troy Anthony Davis’ conviction for that soulless crime is a fact.  But we should make no mistake: given copious other facts that are now at hand, including and in addition to the recantation of over three quarters of the eyewitnesses who formed the sole basis for the State’s pinning this act on Mr. Davis in the first place, his actual guilt is at best one possibility among many others to account for the cretinous and hateful destruction of Officer MacPhail’s life.

Thus, at the very least, a significant possibility exists, a possibility that any reasonable person would acknowledge adds up to a “reasonable doubt” that was unavailable to jurors in Savannah in August, 1991, that Mr. Davis, an innocent man, has served over twenty years in prison, almost all 240 of those months on death row, for something that he did not do.  Moreover, of course, all Georgians who do not insist that he receive clemency are in one way or another playing a role in a murder of Troy Anthony Davis that will be, if he is guiltless, at least as sinister and cruel and stupid as the killing for which he may unjustly soon lose his life.

In a word, passively or actively, millions of Georgians are about to become accessories before, during, and after the fact to a homicide that even those who count themselves staunch advocates of capital punishment can only claim is possibly, or at most probably, a justifiable taking of human life.  Obviously, these millions of ‘accessories’ will never face justice for their acts.  Procedural layers of contemporary law protect them as seamlessly as a kevlar vest would fend off a BB gun.

  Perhaps those who bother to read this missive will take comfort in their legal blamelessness, even as Troy Anthony Davis suffocates on a ‘cocktail’ of lethal poisons administered by agents of the Georgia citizenry.  Nevertheless, to execute a blameless bystander for a horrifying homicide merely compounds the crime; not only does no one responsible face justice, but also all of those who impassively watch the new killing become morally bankrupt, whatever escape clauses permit them to evade proper criminal blame.

I for one refuse to stand with the murderers, and I pray for an upwelling and outpouring of support to the same effect.  I’m not a particularly religious person, but if Troy Anthony Davis dies at the hands of Georgia’s criminal authorities on September 21 or the days that follow, then the vast majority of my former home-State’s citizenry deserve a common epithet delivered to the guilty: “May God have mercy on their souls.”

The equinox this year, in the event of Troy’s wanton execution, will portend an endless night of gruesome injustice.  What must result from that, sooner or later, is a fulfillment, whatever particular ‘war of attrition’ comes as

comeuppance for the arrogance of vicious murder by which Georgia operates, of Abraham Lincoln’s inquiry in his Second Inaugural.

“‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. If we shall suppose that American slavery(or Troy Davis’ murder by acts of omission and commission by Georgia’s people) is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives … this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?  Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash(or the hypodermic) shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

   Why should someone who is not a U.S. citizen care about this?  One might just as easily pose the question of a resident of Maine, or California, who looks askance on the bigotry and brutality so characteristic of oxymoronic “Southern justice.”  The answer depends on the individual in question.  Does he or she complain about imperious American actions?  Or does he or she long for a world with more of a balanced distribution of power?  For the resident of other states: do they ever deplore that a cretin like George Bush stole the Presidency?  Do they ever wish for fairer criminal justic policies, a rejection of fascistic laws such as the U.S.A. Patriot Act, or a general diminution of the power of the ‘prison-industrial-complex?’

For non U.S. citizens or non Georgia residents who never ponder issues such as these, or who feel in fact that everything is more or less hunky-dory on the planet earth, the answer to the initial question about why some should care is simple.  “They needn’t care a bit about Mr. Davis’ murder by the State and the accessory status of Georgia’s citizenry.”

But for anyone else, anyone who knows, with Hamlet, that “something is rotten” indeed in the State-of-Everything-on-Earth, the answer to the first interrogatory above is simple, but not quite so easy.  To them, a concerned observer might suggest, “people who want significant reform need viewpoints that proffer something to fight the powers-that-be.  Being able to note, with complete accuracy, that most Georgians are culpable for an innocent man’s murder, because they are too vicious, lazy, bigoted, or ignorant to be other than criminal accessories to such a crime, sounds to me like ammunition in the battle about what kind of future we hope to fashion for our progeny.”

When I investigated this story in 2004, I uncovered evidence that the Savannah Police know precisely what they’re doing.  Executing an innocent man, while the killer is on their payroll is part of Departmental protocol somehow.  In any event, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it, with an update that is more concerned with my work on the case, and actions available to those who oppose murdering innocent men, due out early next week.

Part Two, in investigating the 1945 Peace Treaty with Japan, proffered a ‘book-end’ for the period of time that 9/11 arguably closed; this assessment both cast an appraising eye back in time and recounted events that followed in the aftermath of WWII’s denouement, which effectively inaugurated the period that ranged to at least September 10, 2001.

Part Three contained two sections: the first utilized events in Santiago, Chile as a focal point for grappling with the second half of the period between 1945 and 2001, a time in which the contradictions and paradoxes of corporate, imperial imprimatur became increasingly difficult to manage, though the plutocrats did try; the second gave a lightning tour of the parameters of post-9/11 existence, a glum and grim decade that will surely appear like ‘the good old days’ unless working people manage to throw off corporate rule and bring something akin to participatory democracy to pass.

Today’s final piece of this little puzzle provides readers with conclusions to ponder and the nerdy reflections of this humble correspondent about what is most important in this material.  Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed ought to be universally mandatory reading, has contended that becoming fully human requires a dialogic nexus.  Whenever readers are ready would be a good time to start.

CONCLUSIONS–Rationale for Continuity, Inevitability of Karma, & Transformative Possibility

The upshot of this analysis ought to operate essentially as a no-brainer.  ‘What is going on?’  The USA is continuing on a path that has always been one aspect of its tendencies, from the theft of North America and the enslavement of Africans through the wholesale slaughter of civilians on every continent save Australia and Antarctica.  This, put simply, is the pathway of imperial imprimatur, dressed up as ‘development’ and assistance and ‘freedom.’

‘Why did 9/11 happen?’  The comeuppance of ‘what goes around comes around’ had to take place.  Sowing the wind cannot but reap the whirlwind; this humble correspondent’s wife, whose grandfather died in a hail of Pinochet-inspired bullets, understands this much more deeply than do most hyper-privileged ‘middle-class’ Americans.  But obviously, even the fantasy of this ‘middle-class’s’ existence is on the wane.

‘Why has the aftermath of 9/11 made the world even less secure and more prone to mass collective suicide?’  The fundamental contradictions of SOP political economy, the vicious suppression of democracy while purporting to support majority rule, and misguided and mistaken consciousness all portend ill.  Only the last of these, a grappling with consciousness, can yield the possibility of transformation however.

Such conclusions are obvious to anyone who can stand the storm of condemnation that attends speaking truth to power.  In the midst of imperial arrogance, truly, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

One might anticipate that, at least occasionally, intimations of such thinking would wend their way into the primary mediated expressions upon which most residents of the planet rely.  Not only has this been rarer than hen’s teeth, but the opposite is also manifestly the case: corporate views are practically universal in one form or another, from laudatory reporting on ‘tea-party’ fatuousness to superficial boosterism in regard to ‘Obama’s job initiative,’ from fetishistic accounts of individuated ‘art’ at Burning Man’s petty bourgeois celebration of nihilism to the latest Hollywood gossip, and on and on and on and on and on, apparently ad infinitum, world without end.

At the very least, one might hope that, confronted with crisis after crisis, with every indication that all the accepted nostrums are crashing and burning, organized contingents of citizens would begin to network with each other to contend for power.  Instead, through a combination of hypocrisy, bigotry, laziness, and willful ignorance, folks in the United States seem inclined to ‘worship false gods’ and rely on greedy, venal ‘leadership’ to rescue them from looming crises on every front.

One need not, thankfully, hope for a Western Hemisphere ‘Congress of Soviets’ to set things right.  On the contrary, homegrown models are readily available.  The Economic Bill of Rights is solid thinking for a transition in the direction of social justice and actual democracy.  Tens of thousands of individual initiatives to achieve justice and empower communities occur every day.  These have appeared in SERMCAP’s work and elsewhere that this humble correspondent has published.

As well, this humble correspondent is one of the many scattered grassroots thinkers who want to light a pathway toward something akin to sustainability and human flowering.  A “New Ten Commandments” is a recent example.  From number one, “The Golden Rule Reigns supreme,” to number four, “All Who Work Are Equal,” to number ten, “All Else Is Negotiable,” it represents a common-sensical, class conscious morality and ethics that might underlie democracy.

The epilogue to this hortatory set of ten rules serves as well as anything to close this brief section.  “The central task of the social reformer, or ‘progressive,’ as the first decades of the twenty-first century unfold, is to form relationships that are durable and pointed enough to begin, on the one hand, to dismantle the Imperial-Financial-Military-Prison-Pharaceutical-Industrial Complex, the various arms of which–the ‘War on Drugs, Homeland Security, Xenophobia-Incorporated, Operation Iraqi Liberation and similar exercises in military mass murder and social control, and so on and so forth–effect the enervation of the working class, both in terms of consciousness and in terms of action, and, on the other hand, to work to reconstitute the social and productive forces in that ‘Complex’–now turned to exploitation and repression and inanity–so that they can start to express humanity’s innate creative capacity to construct a human existence.”

As this series has hammered home, such a capacity to reform and resuscitate has to start with analysis and continue with conversation.  This humble correspondent is having his say herein.  He’d love to hear from folks.

AFTERWARD–The Dialogic Necessity of Exchanges That Deal with Ideology and Consciousness

W.E.B. Du Bois, genius that he was, estimated that “the great problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”  Perhaps the grand dilemma of the twenty-first century is the conundrum of false consciousness.

In saying this, as the final paragraphs of a series on ‘Understanding 9/11′ spin-out, this humble correspondent is remonstrating that we must either demonstrate a willingness to talk about all of these things together, holding fast to the standards of evidence and intellectual honesty of any debate that hopes to learn and teach something, or we face a more or less rapid decline as a species.  At the least, no ‘good life,’ as in an evolution of humans to include conscious agents who shape their lives and the world, can transpire if we refuse the mental labor that this series extols and proffers.

The title of one of William Appleman Williams volumes neatly summarizes the ideation and ideology of citizens of the United States in this regard, at least since the 1940′s.  The Great Evasion remains a timely manual for what Americans choose to ignore.  Survivors of the storm that is breaking upon us now may well recall the phrase and nod ruefully.

Williams was writing of the wisdom that Karl Marx evinced; he subtitled this slender volume, “an essay on the contemporary relevance of Karl Marx and on the wisdom of admitting the heretic into the dialogue about America’s future.”  Others who have followed the traditions of that thinking include, of course, this humble correspondent.  As well, readers not afraid of engaging the real, and its sexy cousin, the possible, may want to consult innumerable additional intellectuals.  Three will serve to close our interlude here.

**Jurgen Habermas has for decades sought the joining of art, science, and morality.  The conjunction depends, in the current context of rampant compartmentalization, on the only glue that can cause these things to stick together: honest and respectful conversation.

Against the opportunistic thugs of ‘neoconservatism’ and ‘neoliberalism,’ not to mention the hypocritical bourgeoisie who worship at the ‘cult of the expert,’ Habermas defends the modernist prospect: to comprehend reality, to work with others to shape that reality, to transform consciousness and reality in league with others so as to have a positive impact on the world.  He offers sage ideas to readers willing to listen.

“(W)ith the decisive confinement of science, morality, and art to autonomous spheres separated from the life-world and administered by experts,” precisely the protocols in place in all establishment government agencies and most Non-Governmental Organization granting agencies, “what remains from the project of cultural modernity”–learning so as to rescue ourselves from perdition–”is only what we would have if we were to give up the project of modernity altogether.”  And ‘to give up altogether’ is to invite, and to deserve, the long darkness that looms.

**Paulo Freire is another proponent and practitioner of mutual dialog in the service of empowerment and transformation.  In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, cited above, he sticks to the contention that only through mutual dialog is full humanity accessible.  He thus rejects the one-way manipulation of advertising, foreswears the ‘bank-deposit’ pretension of U.S. pedagogy, and overturns any reliance on the ‘cult of expertise’ that capital uses to hide its sins and justify its excesses.  Basically, in this view, we desperately need listening sessions in which the working class gets its chance to speak.

As one commentator summarized, “Freire’s life and work as an educator is optimistic in spite of poverty, imprisonment, and exile.  He is a world leader in the struggle for the liberation of the poorest of the poor: the marginalized classes who constitute the “cultures of silence” in many lands.  On a planet where more than half the people go hungry every day because nations are incapable of feeding all their citizens, where we cannot yet agree that every human being has a right to eat and to be housed, Paulo Freire toils to help men and women overcome their sense of powerlessness to act in their own behalf.”

**David Graeber is brilliant American anthropologist, teaching in Ireland, who reveals indelible connections among morality, money, debt, and governments, connections that ‘free-market’ flacks would have us believe are ‘theoretically’ unnecessary.  Ranging incisively through historical and anthropological evidence, he proves his negative case–that the ‘free market’ is a fraud–decisively, and makes a good start on supporting his positive point, that humans have long cycles defined by alternating uptake of commodity and debt monetary relationships.

Perhaps more in tune with the specific undertaking of this series, he has also written Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams.  Therein, he insists on multidisciplinary analytical tools as the essential accompaniment of addressing the multiple, intersecting crises that our planet full of cousins faces.

Such nerdy fellows as these, and the multitudes of other men and women who refuse to compartmentalize and insist on wide-ranging analysis and honest political economy, can contribute to the capability to discuss the world intelligently.  But ultimately, much larger groups of folks are going to have to jump into the game, if we’re to have a prayer to rescue something for our progeny.  That, above all else, is the lesson of 9/11: Learn and Participate, or die.

Truly, the working people of all the Earth must find a basis for unity–winning a world and losing our chains simultaneously.  Otherwise, we will merit nothing less than the carnage that is already happening and will, more or less steadily, worsen during this period of darkness that could portend a new dawn or might preface a long and possibly endless night for the lucky fuckers here who are busy pissing away our birthright–consciousness and reason–out of a perverse combination of greed and fear and wanton self-righteous indulgence in infantile narcissism.

As was the case in Part Two, this humble correspondent’s lens chooses not to home-in on what members of the British general-staff first labeled the ‘Mid-East’.  That John Foster Dulles, not yet head of the State Department, and his brother, Allen Dulles, not yet head of the CIA were crucial to the popularization of the term in the U.S., is useful info.  But such bon mots, and the analysis which flows from them, are not present here.  This does not stem from lack of capacity to tell that part of the tale, nor from a belief that such narrative is unimportant.

Others, however, have covered that ground, as has this humble correspondent in a different context.  In fact, reviewing ‘leftist’ and ‘progressive’ attempts to tell the tale of 9/11, the focus is often more or less exclusively on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and so forth.  This direly imperils the attempt to know what is happening in relation to 9/11; the American empire spans the globe, and ‘changing Mid-East policy,’ reducing our ‘greed for oil,’ and other laudable reforms are no more enough to forestall future carnage than cutting out a lung cancer is an adequate response to a tumorous invasion that has metastasized to brain and liver and bones.

Thus, today, readers will encounter another pair of summations.  The first investigates, again with lightning speed, a significant ‘bump-in-the-road’ that followed by a few decades the ‘ides-of-September’ beginning of our age.  Miraculously enough, this occurrence also took place on September eleventh, though the vast majority of Americans are as ignorant of this dual conjunction of late Summer tragedy as they are of the Federalist Papers, the history of World War One, or any other matter, no matter how crucially relevant to their lives, that is unlikely to be popular in People Magazine, Facebook, or the sports and fashion newscape.

The second element of today’s posting confronts readers with the here-and-now.  As noted in Part One, Earth’s sojourners are headed toward dock at a definable bend of the river, a passage that does not have a pretty ending.  This portion of the series looks at those ends, dealing with plausible, arguably likely, results that will become increasingly inevitable in the lee of 9/11–which, in turn, represents the unfolding of a new chapter in world history–results that might manifest very differently were engaged and capacitated groups of citizens to show up to contend for power.

BODY #2–Adjusting to Contrariety and Contraction, Trying to Finance Miracles on the Installment Plan, Falling Back on the Old Standard–’Divide & Conquer’

As noted on Sunday, USA elites’ expectations of an extended reign went smoothly enough for a quarter century.  As the Vietnamese intervention unraveled, however, at a cost of plus-or-minus a million butchered Asians, challenges to unilateral imposition of United States proclivities cropped up on every continent.

As one might expect in looking into any complicated phenomenon, this ‘falling-apart’ of one way of doing business had many components.  One could pick and choose among dozens of eventualities, or more, that help to explicate how things worked out as they did, why certain choices seemed attractive or even inevitable.  For purposes of this series, the focus falls on events in the Western hemisphere early in September, 1973.

Imperial Impunity in a State of Denial

Rebellions in Central America had long been heating up, regardless of the self-congratulation that typified U.S. agents’ beliefs about ‘successes’ in undercover operations–murder and mayhem, incorporated–in Guatemala and elsewhere over the years.  At the same time, further South, Chile had evinced the temerity to elect a socialist, Salvador Allende, who preached that he needn’t overthrow capitalism since he had won an election that allowed him to establish a constitutional socialist agenda.

Financiers and industrialists found the idea nauseating that, not only could a daring and savvy revolutionary fighter, such as Fidel Castro, once in a while win a bout with the mightiest nation on earth, but that elections themselves–which were so firmly under control stateside–might soon produce similar effects as had emanated from armed conflict.  In the course of 1973, these upper-crust malcontents made common cause with the higher strata of Chile’s military, which felt similar discontent at the developing radicalism of Chilean society.

In the event, roughly twenty-eight years after the conclusion of the slaughter of WWII, which in turn left the U.S. master of the whole world, the boards of directors and top bureaucrats of government secretariats–who, by the way, were almost to a man(or an occasional woman)exactly the same people–had little choice, in their view of the priorities in play, but to unleash a brutal unhinging of Salvador Allende and his companeras y companeros.   Senor Allende and many others faced summary execution on that day, 9/11/1973.

This gruesome torture and homicidal mania ultimately killed in excess of ten thousand, possibly many more, solidifying the idea in popular thinking  of the ‘desaparicidos,’ those who have simply vanished from the world.  Alberto Bolano, the masterful Chilean novelist and poet, writes about them, pushed from planes, taken on terminal jaunts into deserts and jungles, bundled up and trundled away to eliminate messy evidence of murder.  Thus, the ‘masters-of-the-universe’ in charge of America began a new chapter with thuggish killing many times greater than what took place a decade ago in New York and Washington.

The same sort of scenario, though stretched over more years, happened in relation to Iran–which rid itself of Reza Pahlavi, the storied psycho whom Dulles and Dulles and BP put into place in Persia in ’54–ten years in the aftermath of Chile’s descent into the inferno.  This Southwest Asia imbroglio involved an equally obvious criminal conspiracy, in which President-elect Ronald Reagan–the ‘gipper’ himself–played a formative, “October Surprise,” role.

The Iran-Contra chicanery, a vile and vicious hoax that supplied drug-financed ordnance for the decimation of tens of thousands of Nicaraguans who had demonstrated the insolence of seeking a democracy to replace U.S. corporate henchmen and killers like Anastasio Somoza, involved the highest levels of multiple executive departments of the U.S. Government.  A few, like Oliver North, were convicted of felonies–though North’s ‘sentence’ was “a fine, community service, and probation, and some spent time in prison, though they now reap thousands per appearance on a lecture circuit that celebrates criminal conspiracy in the name of anti-communism.

The invasion of Panama continued this trend, albeit in a slightly different vein.  The removal of Manuel Noriega from power occurred after he threatened to unleash torrents of information about the hypocrisy, venality, and misrepresentation that underpinned both the War on Drugs and our relations with Latin America generally, without doubt clouded now by “corruptions of memory”.

While imperial servants thus throttled one monster of our own making, whose vision in some ways paralleled that of another favorite Frankenstein–Saddam Hussein–U.S. money and policy, funneled as usual through the CIA, gave birth to the slimy upper-class cabal that would inflict the poison of 9/11 twenty-two years later.  Of course, anyone who looks into the matter discerns the facts, yet Americans remain almost utterly ignorant: Osama Bin Laden was a highly-paid contract employee of the U.S., to spread depredation and death against Russia.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” is farcically evil in many of its conveyances, at the same time that the film does ‘spin’ a tale that makes self-serving selections of reality a part of the narrative.  Bin Laden was ‘our guy’ before he was the ‘bad guy.’  For his multi-billion dollar wages, this scion of a Bush-connected oil family saw fit to plot attacks on the house of the ‘hand that fed him.’

This quick accounting deserves a much deeper attention and a complete unveiling of the as-yet ‘classified’ materials that continue to hide big sections of what actually makes up our past.  And many other cases remain to tell, so soon as citizens insist on the real story of their lives.  Finding new ways to practice death-worship and new techniques for perfecting theft and corruption, however, could not forestall the economic wreckage of the 1970′s, which is another characteristic of the new phase of things, for which Salvador Allende and countless others paid with their lives.

Falling Profits, Rising Debts, Declining Fortunes, Increasing Joblessness, Oh My!

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting States, naturally, was in significant part a creature of corporate capital and imperial convenience, in which ‘developing countries’ like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia get far more credit for ‘independence’ than is their due.  Its oil-shock and the fiscal precipice that loomed ahead of what Americans received due encouragement to blame OPEC for, both followed from and furthered a deconstruction of many elements of the famed, and critically important  Bretton Woods agreements, among them Nixon’s ending of the gold standard.

This linking of economic decline and energy politics and massive deficit-spending has proved an unshakeable connection.  M. King Hubbert, ‘Mr. Peak Oil’ himself, early on saw this, although very few commentators, this humble correspondent excepted, note that he ended his life a devoted proponent of solar-energy and other legitimately renewable technologies.

The imposition of nuclear energy–and the continued budgeting of nuclear megadeath–thus has also shown up as a never-to-end aspect of this new age, never mind popular opposition, the potential for the end of human life on Earth as a result, and the unbearable expense of atomic technologies.  Anti-nuclear activists simply cannot explain such ‘nonsense’, since they eschew analyzing the historical and political-economic underpinnings of what they deplore; in similar fashion, they also fail to connect such matters with 9/11, preferring insularity and a narrow focus, no matter how impotent.

In the past forty years, every new ‘creation of wealth,’ about which stock-brokers and other financial accessories of a flailing capitalism crow constantly– the second half of the Reagan reign, under Bill Clinton until the dot.com implosion, and so on–has ineluctably caused a bursting bubble more nauseating and horrifying than the last one.  ‘Tea-Partiers’ and other reactionaries, Ron Paul included, importune about debt and ‘fiat currency’ and the evils of the Federal Reserve, completely missing that their parties and policies and leadership in the past has been at least equally as responsible as any Democrat has been for all such developments.

Capital’s travails extend to every single sector of the economy, from the most stolid to the most ‘innovative’.  Citizens intuit such contradictions and misrepresentation that are everywhere apparent.  Yet they have yet to develop their own capacity, as the working Americans who create all the wealth of the nation, to insist that a worker-friendly policy come to the fore.

As Pete Seeger and millions of adherents have intoned, in Ralph Chaplin’s International Workers of the World song of class solidarity, “It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade, Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid.  Now we stand outcast and starving ‘mid the wonders we have made, But the union makes us strong.” In place of ‘solidarity forever,’ however, an initial chipping away at the rights of workers and the poor became an avalanche of crushing blows to workers’ perquisite.  The social effects of such developments were, of course, quite predictable.

Unraveling the Social Safety Net and Promoting Internecine Uproar

The War on Drugs is arguably the most successful criminal fraud  in history.  Quite logically, its initiation was exactly congruent both with the open decimation of popular politics in Chile and elsewhere and with the crashing of the vaunted ‘free market’ into repeated implosions of despondency, debt, and decline.

Additionally , the creation of a ‘black market’ that overwhelmingly victimized Blacks  and other poor and minority folks paralleled one case after another of attacking and beginning to dismantle FDR’s ‘New Deal’ policies.  Of course, some of them, for example labor’s right to organize, had already received death sentences, during the prior decades, in the form of ‘right-to-work’ amendments and so forth.

Liberal unemployment benefits and easily obtainable workmen’s compensation became increasingly dicey for many workers in many states.  America, more and more, began to resemble a debtor’s prison .

Moreover, welfare programs came under unparalleled attacks during each of the three Presidencies preceding 9/11.  In many ways, Bill Clinton’s handling of ‘welfare reform’ ended up being the most draconian.

These varied assaults on the viability of working class life–what many folks wrongheadedly and erroneously label ‘middle-class’ existence, which had remained a sine qua non of U.S. politics for four decades after the bruising battles of the 1930′s had occurred–picked up steam and began to eviscerate political support for the socially vulnerable.  At the same time, regulatory responses to structural problems of corporate profiteering–environmental agencies, ‘fairness’ laws of all types for ‘consumers,’ and ‘equal opportunity’ approaches to built-in inequality, became the norm.  Title VI, Title IX, and so forth helped to fuel an inescapable swamp of growing resentment between men and women, White and Black, immigrant and ‘native.’

Despite this threefold ruling-class response to the crises of the 1970′s, however, a return to Kennedy’s ‘Camelot’ or Ike’s ‘good old days’ never transpired.  Instead, as one crisis made way for a new inflationary miracle, each sickening pop of each new bubble led to precipices that apparently verged on unfathomable abysses.  And the people, rather than regularly and compliantly either shutting up or turning on each other, looked like they might find a basis for unity in a new sort of politics –spirituality, technology, and plain old class consciousness played a role here.

As the second millennium of the ‘current era’ came to a close, prospects had rarely appeared bleaker for the captain’s of capital and their cohorts in the manipulation of mass consciousness.  Of course, then the ‘unimaginable’ came to pass, just like in a movie of ‘evildoer terrorists’ who dared to assault the nicest folks on the planet.

Thus, a new groove seemed accessible to big business and its minions–the ‘homeland security’ spigot, a never-ending ‘war-on-terror,’ a blacklist flexible enough to encompass almost anybody who argued.  Those who refuse to recognize these actualities will have only themselves to blame if sufficient numbers survive to the new ‘dark ages’ that could easily loom ahead.  In many ways, such an imposed brutality might resemble Chile in the late 1970′s.

BODY #3–Revealing the iron Fist Inside the Velvet Glove, Preparing for a Dark Eternity

Interestingly enough, twenty-eight years to the day following one of history’s most-ignored mass-murders–carnage in the ‘Southern Cone’, American and United jets purportedly brought down the Twin Towers.  This heart-stopping drama, paradoxically and yet irresistibly, laid the basis for a reassertion of the most nakedly imperialistic elements of U.S. rule.

One can “deal in conspiracy facts,” in the vein of a Michael Ruppert.  His Crossing the Rubicon makes a prosecutor’s case for the notion that everything that transpired ten years ago was the result of a careful and well-thought out criminal enterprise.  ‘Malice aforethought’ is everywhere, in this view.

Or one can merely note how conveniently the prod–of planes that flew into buildings–”fit to a ‘t’” the needs and plans  of a ruling plutocracy steeped in blood and convinced of its own righteous omnipotence.  And people shouted their demands that the government respond to the victimization of Americans with a policy of retributive vengeance.  Either way, the track that ran on after 9/11 followed perfectly the course that the imperialists had long advocated.

Never mind that millions upon millions also protested the drive toward a ‘war without end.’  Corporate media, corporate government, and corporate enterprise blithely turned a mostly blind eye toward all who complained that ‘justice’ ought not to include serial killing of millions of innocents in the name of Americans who would never profit from the process like the capitalists who had designed and sought to implement such a program from the 1970′s on.  The components of this programmatic state-terror are starkly easy to view.

**National Security States and the Termination of ‘Freedom’**

The so-called Patriot Act just stands out as the easiest-to-see example of fascism in America resplendent.  ‘Homeland Security,’ the war on immigrants, and more have become a part of the log-rolling, money-making operations that defenestrate all pretense of ‘liberal’ bourgeois democracy.

**Instant Access to the National Treasury for Militarists, and Their Imprisonment-and-Pharmaceutical-Pacification Allies, and a Disenfranchisement of all Other Constituencies**

Operation Iraqi Liberation(O.I.L.)was too transparent even for an administration as filled with apparent morons as was that of Yale’s stupidest-ever graduate.  However, as the ‘hope’ that Barack-the-Magnificent embodied has proven to be the facade that thinkers such as this humble correspondent promised, anyone who cares to contemplate the matter can see that this dual process–everything for the ‘merchants of death,’ penury for everybody else–has continued and promises to be the sine qua non for many years to come, but for the rise of America’s ‘missing’ working class.

**Endless War and Guaranteed Bad Guys**

The ‘fall’ of communism, even as Hugo and Evo and Lula and Daniel joined Fidel in this hemisphere, and the Chinese showed themselves more astute as bourgeois producers than perhaps they had ever been as ‘Red’ levelers, necessitated a new locus of ‘evil.’  That Osama was ‘our creature’ from the get-go mattered not at all.  That the Iraqis were at odds with the Bin Laden racket was immaterial.  The ‘fix was in,’ and only a populist uprising that seemed like a worse wager than a drunken lotto-pick could turn the tide.

That this long-odds potential is real fits with many facts.  For the most part, though, all of these eventualities stand alone, alienated and isolated from each other.

Post-9/11/2001, Augusto Pinochet, another American darling mass-murderer, finally faced justice at the behest of Spain, which had undergone its own bout of bloodletting–For Whom the Bell Tolls anyone?–in a furious civil war that had at its heart the fascistic notion that pursuit of social democracy deserved a death-sentence.  Pinochet died before he had to confront a final accounting for the crimes that he committed as an accessory to the USA’s empire of blood.

Many Chileans do not remember 9/11 as do a likely majority of U.S. citizens.  One difference between the two groups is that the Chileanas and Chileanos are cognizant of what went down in 2001.  Would that we could say that even a significant fraction of North Americans were similarly aware about the ‘terrorist’ shit-storm, which the United States of America unleashed on thousands upon untold thousands of innocents, for the ‘crime’ of believing in social democracy.

Hundreds of cases like these exist.  Innumerable thousands of such stories go without adequate mediation.  Literally billions of residents of our lovely planet would be on the right side of a choice, were the dialog and democratic process to make such a choice in place.

The list of hopeful signs, separate and generally unconnected, is practically infinite.   Uniting them, in a mass movement for democracy and social justice, is the missing ingredient.  But that’s like saying when we have the butter and eggs and sugar and fixings to create the sweetest feed ever, flour is the missing ingredient for a cake.

Can we stand up, as in the song?  “They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn.  We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn That the union makes us strong.”

An organized solidarity, based on thorough and persistent analyses of the realities of this Earth, beckons citizen-workers to save their own lives, the futures of their children, and the possibility of a human community.  Truly, we have only to lose the chains of false consciousness that our ‘superiors’ yank with such legerdemain in enslaving us.

While this humble correspondent is fully capable of accomplishing such a project in an exhaustively thorough fashion, present-day ‘attention-deficit’ readers howl at such a prospect.  “Just stick with the basics, keep it simple, and give us ‘the executive summary.’”  Therefore, what follows remains in every sense a brief, a precis, an overview.

Nevertheless, because the delving here will never fit in a Facebook quip, or prove congruent with Twitter protocols, many readers–the vast majority, in fact–will still cavil that what follows wallows in too much detail and expects folks to partake of too much complexity.  As my mother was fond of saying, “More’s the pity:” such readers deserve the crushing cretins whom their willful ignorance and cavalier inattention bring forth.

Paradoxically, and hilariously really, some of the same critics who moan about the difficulty of engaging this topic in anything other than an utterly superficial way, will look at bits and pieces of what unfolds below and they will shout righteously, “This is way too simplistic!  The reality is a lot more complex.”

To this sort of critique, one can only reply, “Well, duh.”  The present process seeks to walk the line between complete over-simplification and paralyzing analytical detail.  It will thus suffer the conundrums of trying to dig through too much, too quickly.

Other commentators might grumble, “There’s not much about the Palestinians or the Saudis or Afghanistan here; you just can’t leave those things out!”  This humble correspondent begs to differ.  He asks that would-be pupils like him, who insist on a thorough capacity to apprehend our world, read on and see for themselves if the explanatory nexus provided below seems reasonable.

To those happy readers who welcome the challenge that always attends grappling with reality–whether they find my thinking totally off-base, mainly wrong-headed, often insightful, or generally correct–the next step ought to be easy.  Let us continue talking about these matters, with the notion uppermost that citizen participation can only emanate from the learning curve that accompanies dialog.

So saying, the first of three analytical sections appears below. Today’s element deals with the broader historical context and immediate aftermath of what this humble correspondent argues was, sixty-six years ago, the onset of the modern period of time.  It consists of two sub-sections, one looking backward and the other forward, from 1945.

BODY #1–The Genesis and Early Functioning of America’s Plutocratic Predominance

The ides of September, 1945, in some real sense centered on the deck of the Battleship Missouri, marking there both a culmination and an outset.  The Japanese surrender, a version of which the country’s leadership had proffered through the Soviet Union earlier in the Summer, had not precluded the U.S. decision, five weeks earlier, to vaporize plus or minus 200,000 civilians–with many more tens of thousands long-term casualties–at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  However, excluding the Soviets from the peace process, learning operationally how a new weapon performed, and demonstrating far and wide precisely the extent of American potency and ruthlessness were apparently adequate counterweights to the murder of several hundred thousand civilians.

Through a Glass Darkly

This event acts as a window on several previous periods of history.  Through its panes, the observer sees a clear ‘chain-of-title’ that connects this single greatest-act-of-homicide-ever with the origination of one version of the United States.  This is true even though such a development was, at the start, a future, domineering in design and imperious in attitude, about which George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and many others had warned.

“Conquest is not in our principles.  It is inconsistent with government,” Jefferson wrote to a diplomat in Spain in 1790.  Perhaps naive, clearly  not spoken in the context of a modern-day peacenik, this thinking nevertheless repeatedly typified the nation’s second President.  That this vision now appears nonsensical does not negate the actuality that a program based on peace and mutuality was once the stated goal of leading Americans, who in these thoughts reflected common people.

Through the contradictions inherent in these thinkers’ ideation, and to fulfill the needs of a slaveocracy and merchant elite that equated trade with territorial expansion and military capacity, not to mention that the entire national prospectus depended on a continental-sized theft, the USA embarked on a different course from that highlighted in the ideas of high-minded ‘founding fathers.  The War With Mexico and the extermination of indigenous Americans allowed the nascent ‘manifest destiny’ of the U.S. to flex muscles as yet unable to rule the globe.

Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience was merely one piece of a significant anti-war and anti-slavery dissent that confronted the move to dominate North America.  This is a tension from which today’s polarization around issues of war and peace is a lineal descendant.

In turn, the Civil War gave the first opportunity to join total war with industry and finance and government, as the North spilled theretofore unparalleled buckets of blood to quash secession and change the platform upon which White supremacy operated, from slavery to Jim-Crow-apartheid.  This iron-triangle–business, money, and the State–has reemerged again and again following the War Between the States, to become the underlying SOP of the U.S. economy and polity for the past seventy years or so.

This dynamic industrial capacity, seeking outlets around the world, countered a depressed economy in the 1890′s by ‘liberating’ Cuba and the Philippines and more, only to inaugurate tyrannical butchery with an American flavor that rivaled or surpassed Spain’s repression.  All of this transpired in the name of ‘opening doors’ to trade and helping benighted populations develop.

World War One, after the next period of fiscal panic, served as the fulcrum point for the supremacy of American industry and finance, as the European bloodletting, financed and supplied by the USA, left the continent in a shambles of upheaval and revolution.  The invasion of the Soviet Union in its infancy was a part of this process too, a “secret war against Bolshevism” precisely aligned with our present day ‘war on terror.’  Though Wilson booted any potential for U.S. world leadership, as J.M. Keynes documents in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and the League of Nations did not fit with an ever arrogant and exceptionalist ruling-class political culture here, the war and many American leaders then did foresee the coming ‘American Century’ and more.

This is an excellent point in the flow of this series to make an important analytical point.  This essay has not presented much at all about the so-called ‘Mid-East.’  Surely the early U.S. interest in the “shores of Tripoli;” the consistent identification with the way that England’s empire filled the ‘void’ caused by the complete collapse of Ottoman rule, particularly in Iraq, but also in Egypt and elsewhere; the way that the ‘House of Bush’ and the ‘House of Saud’ have relational roots over eighty years old; and multiple other events and developments in and around the Eastern Mediterranean are of crucial consequence in explaining 9/11.

Well, of course that is true.  However, the nearly exclusive emphasis on such aspects of anglo-American and capitalist colonialism, ‘neo-colonialism,’ and so forth is a dangerous mistake, or worse.  The most thorough telling of these tales will never account for the phenomenon of imperialism as a whole; nor or they essential to an accounting of that complex reality of empire.

Instead, they are in the nature of a fetish.  Since those who would look only at these matters–too much ‘favoritism’ for Israel, too much ‘greed’ about oil, not enough ‘balance’ in relation to Palestine and democratic nationalism, and on and on and on–cannot, or do not desire to, explicate a robust account of U.S. imperialism, they substitute what seems a tasty treat in place of the intellectually nutritious diet that is actually essential to conceptual health and fitness about an event like 9/11.

For a robust understanding, one needs a broader view, a more honestly political-economic and world-historical assessment.  A two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, who rose to become the general who headed the United States Marine Corps for nearly a decade, offers citizens grist for folks who desire a deeper and broader concept.

Smedley Butler left the Marine Corps as the Great Depression unfolded.  The narrative that defined his life ensued.  And War Is a Racket shows the sort of depth and breadth that analysts desperately need, though Butler’s story remains one of the little-known keys to American history.

In the book, he spoke what had become his watchwords: “I Was a Gangster for Capitalism.”  Not coincidentally, he spent the last years of his life promoting a wide-ranging and thorough comprehension of capitalist empire, as he watched and spoke about the coming conflagration of 1939-1945.

In this vein, World War Two consolidated  the ‘wasted opportunities’ for totalitarian plutocracy that had evaporated at Versailles.  The ‘Science State,’ in which megadeath and technical knowhow wed, came to a triumphant and ecocidal fruition in the Manhattan Project, which has served as a model ever since for what Dwight Eisenhower warned could easily become a dictatorial “military industrial complex.”

Giving Birth to the Current Context

In addition to its function as a way of revealing the past, the end of WWII also operated as a midwife which assisted in the birth of the modern age, which America’s rulers saw as the beginning of their own ‘thousand year Reich.’  Eric Barnouw, whose Tube of Plenty examines the origins of television in part as an exercise in empire, is one of dozens of thinkers who review and explicate the connection between WWII’s completion and the rise of a USA ‘superpower’ bent on world domination.

As in the previous section, this humble correspondent is not focusing on Southwest Asia and Northern Africa.  The formation of the State of Israel, in which the U.S. played critical parts, the Suez-war, the invasion of Lebanon, and the ‘strategic partnership’ with Israel all contain important information about U.S. empire.

But they are no more the a satisfactory causal and investigative background for comprehending 9/11 than seeing a tumorous mass is a usefully comprehensive way to understand cancer.  The remainder of this section and this series seeks to proffer that adequate analytical background for understanding 9/11 as a natural expression of a ‘racket,’ run by the USA, in which occasional ‘gangland wars’ exact tragic tolls on the majority of citizens, whose lives in a sense depend on their manifesting a fuller knowledge of their world and its causes.

To begin, therefore, the centrality of secrecy in an erstwhile ‘open’ society over and over again showed up as a clear component of this hegemonic America.  In the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the execution of the Rosenbergs for the crime of assisting the inevitable rise of the Soviets as a nuclear force, for example, the arrogation of knowledge to those with ‘clearance‘ became de rigeur.

The suppression of protest and any ideological deviation from the falsely-labeled ‘free market,’ especially if such dissent or divergence honestly supported social democracy, appeared repeatedly as well.  From the vicious depredations of the House Un-American Activities Committee to the crimes of impunity committed by the FBI in its Cointelpro operations to the totalitarian machinations of the ‘Patriot’ Act, an overarching, invasive attack against dissent has transpired in which subterfuge, subversion, and sabotage have been hallmarks of ‘the American way’ of government.

The deployment of innumerable agencies of murder in the guise of ‘foreign aid,’ ‘free information,’ and sophisticated ‘dirty tricks,’ hidden behind various covers, also characterized this period of time.  While any honest study must admit to this American inclination, what William Appleman Williams called The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, the overall ignorance about this palpable proclivity continues to astound those with even a sliver of knowledge.

Guatemala was one of the first to fall to American hit-men and thuggery. ‘Sanitized’ versions of original ‘intelligence’ plans are now accessible.  That such blithe employment of homicidal conspiracy to advance the interests of business, for example United Fruit, led to tens or hundreds of thousands of later killings, seldom becomes a part of the ongoing discussion.

Practically simultaneous with the skullduggery on the Central American isthmus, British Petroleum and the CIA joined hands to install a psychotic killer in Tehran, in place of an elected President who believed Iran’s border with Russia made economic ties useful and necessary.  Of course, any critique of contemporary Iran makes zero sense without the contextualization of this point.  Equally obvious should be the connection between condemnations of ‘terrorism’ so steeped in hypocrisy that they would be laughable if attempted by a child.

Among the dozens of additional instances of such murderous, yet hidden, imperial trickery, none caused more carnage or involved greater complications than did the quagmire of death that the United States plowed into in Southeast Asia.  The Pentagon Papers, as voluminous in its day as Wikileaks is now, is merely the tip of a large iceberg that demonstrates the imperial purpose of U.S. mayhem(v) inflicted on the Vietnamese.

In what might well have been the piece de resistance of cloak-and-dagger politics, had Fidel Castro been more like Salvador Allende, whom this series will discuss on the morrow, the U.S.’s ongoing attempts to unseat socialism in Cuba might have been another ‘masterful’ lesson in the art of mass homicide, instead of representing a prime failing of U.S. policy.  In passing, the fanatical obsession with ridding the world of one of its heroes has also suggested the threat-level that American business perceives in any attempt to brook its gaming of the Earth.

The tiny slice presented here of the evil and terror that have typified U.S. foreign policy makes a point about a period of time.  After WWII, the U.S. conducted such operations with an aplomb that befitted a nation with no rival that could even begin to demonstrate the same resources and reach.

A comprehensive examination of like cases would provide a litany of death and destruction that would make the consequences of a pair of jets’ flying into a couple of skyscrapers seem like a drop of blood in a lake of gore.  This is a harsh assessment.  However, it is a conclusion well-supported by a truthful accounting of what began with the end of the last worldwide bloodbath, from which the United States of America emerged as global kingpin.

Thus, MacArthur’s triumph aboard the Missouri offers a way of looking backward to the origins of the military industrial complex, the national security state, and the Uranium economy, among other things.  These roots flourished in the soil of the British empire and matured in the identification of capital with “open-door” trade policies and a complete accession to the development of the maximum industrial-war-making capacity imaginable.

As well, the treaty provides a way of tracing the development of the terroristic subterfuge that came to mark U.S. policy for the next several decades. The formation of the CIA, the overthrow of multiple legitimate governments, the promotion of war and terror as part of the enterprise of freedom, these and other ‘dirty tricks’ flow ineluctably from the ink on the peace treaty with Japan.

For two decades or so, U.S. leaders seemed almost as “untouchable” as the lawmen in the T.V. show, whose ‘whatever-it-takes’ methodology for derailing bad guys also rationalized the anti-communist, pro-imperialist, faux-free-market, profiteering ventures of U.S. rulers.  As the 1960′s yielded the ’70′s, however, and defeats such as in Vietnam, assassinations and upheaval exploded in the streets, troubling signs of economic stagnation affected most economic enterprise, and challenges to U.S. supremacy seemingly emerged from every direction, a transition became irresistible.

A note on process may be apt.  For the most part, readers will view here thinking and scope unlike what they’ve encountered elsewhere.  This is not ‘liberal.’  It is not ‘leftist.’  It is committed to democracy and social justice.

As such, it does not focus narrowly on such topics as the Middle East, discrimination against Muslims or other forms of bigotry, or on the ‘greed’ of U.S. elites for money and oil.  What it does do is provide a focus that actually explains the world now, proffering explanations, moreover, that suggest the possibility of doing something more about our problems than writing a check for another donation or voting for another hopeless electoral candidate.

Anyone with whom such articulation resonates should definitely read on.

PREFACE–Laying a Groundwork for Comprehension

Seven billion cousins share the Earth with each other, in aggregate a human race that has the knowledge, resources, and talents to fashion a peaceful, creative, sustainable existence on definitely the coolest planet for mammals within several light years in any direction.  This happy outcome, lasting creativity and peace, does not seem like a safe bet, however, as the tenth anniversary of the inception of the present period approaches amid memorialization and appeals to patriotism that make not the slightest attempt to comprehend either what happened a decade ago, or why vicious, suicidal madness unfolded as it did on a brilliant September day in 2001.

Such a lack of rigorous assessment–lightweight farces like the 9/11 Commission notwithstanding–an inability or unwillingness to ponder cause and effect, action and reaction, culpability and responsibility, portends a repetition, only on a much wider scale and with much more catastrophic impacts, of the brutal spectacle–the collapse of a pair of buildings that might easily symbolize modern civilization–that seemingly everyone recalls but very few are willing to analyze.  In fact, a reasonable observer, who is willing to investigate and dissect this matter, could frankly posit  that a calamitous human decline in the next few days or the next few decades is almost certain, unless policies and practices are forthcoming that differ in essence from what has been coming down the pike for a decade following nine-eleven and for many, many decades prior to that.

However, different policies and practices, axiomatically, cannot be the program of those who have been calling the tune for the past couple of centuries, the banking and industrial and royal families who have exercised effective hegemony since at least the days of Mssr. Bonaparte.  Standing in for any sort of transformative reflection, at the behest of this ruling class, is the overwhelming plethora of breast-beating, woe-is-me, vengeful, blaming, facile nonsense that fills the World Wide Web to bursting and even rivals the volume of solicitations in advertiser-driven media.

Suspicious citizens, of whom many more than a tiny few exist, are prone merely to grit their teeth and shrug at such thoughts.  “What can I do?” they respond, grimly determined to continue trying to make ends meet and hope for the best.

In the alternative, a small number of activists make cases for an accounting about the almost unbelievable phenomenon: two huge jets that succeed in flying into and knocking down two even more gargantuan skyscrapers.  Along with Joseph Conrad, who based his novel The Secret Agent on an actual instance of British/German cooperation in an agent provocateur’s ‘terrorist’ act in London, these ‘doubting Thomases’ suspect that rulers are fully capable of murder and deception in the service of their continued reign.  Thus, this cohort contends that a conspiracy underlay the events of ten year’s back.

On the other hand, a more substantial but still-small contingent contend, whether anyone can prove that purportedly friendly criminal masterminds orchestrated this mayhem, that simple opportunism can also account for the response of elites to this situation.  After all, everything that they had wanted for a quarter century or more–a strengthened ‘national-security state, with untrammeled access to anyone’s communication or other private matters; a free hand to assassinate, or to go to war against, ‘evil-doers’(never mind that many of these are current or former contract agents and employees); automatic increases in spending on death-technologies, all in the name of ‘defense’ and ‘anti-terrorism,’ when they and their fellow rulers are the only competent promulgators of war and organized horror; and so on and so forth, ad nauseum–suddenly became not just politically plausible but sociopolitically irresistible.  ‘How convenient!’

Whatever the case may be, though, in regard to the actualities of a few hours of hideous tragedy ten years ago, these stances–both ‘It’s a conspiracy,’ and ‘our rulers are opportunistic thugs’–cannot of themselves facilitate much progress away from the political results of the planes and the buildings that fell that day.  In fact, the only plausible source of that sort of transformation–from imperial plutocracy and its attendant carnage to something akin to a negotiated manifestation of social justice and social peace–is an activated democratic upsurge that replaces the powers that be.  In other words, the U.S. and the rest of the world have no choice, if we want human life to have a decent prospect of survival, but to become the democracies that we have often bragged that we already are.

While such a prospect clearly appears at best fantastical at this juncture–the legions of folk who are conscientious and principled and synchronized are nowhere on the horizon, except for perhaps in parts of India, Russia, Germany, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.–no other pathway is available that does not end in humanity’s likely decimation, or even elimination from the planet that we inhabit together, like a group of fractious children who have lethal toys with which to slaughter each other.  Every other route, save an empowered majority-rule, leads to dead ends and evisceration.

One rule of politics is to seek only what is possible.  Therefore, to pursue such a long-odds pathway, praying that a series of ‘get-a-clue’ moments will lead folks to stand up and take matters into their collective hands, seems to violate this maxim.

An equally important rule, however, is to recognize that necessity establishes the boundaries of possibility.  If only one method holds the slightest promise of fruition, then all thinking, agitation, and action must emphasize that approach, presuming the premise that matters will coalesce so as to make further steps down a democratic ‘yellow-brick-road’ tenable.

Without a grassroots resurgence, a coming to pass of people power on a global scale, humanity’s wreckage is practically a guaranteed development: thus, necessity dictates that such leadership from below occur, or we will richly deserve the horrors that are already in the pipeline, headed our way.  We have all the tools either to destroy or sustain this sacred orb that we occupy: our individual consciousnesses, and consciences, and our willingness to undertake collective negotiation and responsibility, will determine whether, on the one hand, a lovely future is plausible for our progeny, or, on the other hand, a wasteland is the inheritance that we leave to them.

INTRODUCTION–Joining Knowledge to Mass Participation

While no simple program or process will make popular democracy “as easy as one, two, three,” a three step-engagement tango is discernible that permits any citizen to think, creatively, analytically, and actively, about having a positive impact on the present pass that we face, of mayhem and misery at every turn.  Though merely a skeletal outline, a precis of a brief for how to proceed, this description nonetheless proffers an initial ground from which to embark in the direction of participatory practice.

The three steps are pretty simple to state, albeit much more difficult to carry out.  First, all citizens ought to ask what in the world is going on and find a way to begin to answer that question with satisfactory accuracy, insight, and acuity.  Second, each of the plus or minus five billion adult stakeholders alive now, should seek to puzzle out an explanation as to why things are transpiring as they are, explicating the current status of things with analysis and deduction that matches the known reality and relates the various pieces of the puzzle.  Third, as might characterize a family whose members give a damn about each other, this aggregation of scattered and disorganized citizen-owners of the Earth will have to begin to turn to each other, asking, “Given where things are, and why, what can we do together to alter the ecocidal course that lies ahead?”

Truly, Earth’s people are like passengers on a ferry, which, as many of the travelers surmise, is headed toward a gigantic waterfall, the attempt to navigate which will certainly destroy most of the folks on the boat.  If together we ticket-holders cannot avert our ferry’s course, to a different channel or across the stream to the opposite bank, then the boat, from which few or none of us will have the option to exit and survive, will arrive at its catastrophic destination.

These thoughts seem particularly apt as the tenth anniversary of the present period of empire Is upon us.  The crashing conflagration of that September morning, seemingly at once yesterday and part of some immeasurably distant past, crushed under the weight of a billion pounds of falling steel and concrete the hopes and dreams of all the years.

The infernos that victimized 2973 Americans on 9/11/2001  have yielded wars of attrition that, in sum, have killed easily as many as a million cousins.  And the scope and pace of this fiercely vengeful slaughter show little signs of slowing.  Even if this disproportion does not fairly quickly elicit a massive acceleration of the murderous chaos, something for which so many of us wait with bated breath–not, like our former President, in anticipation of a long expected apocalypse, but in trepidation and mortal terror of the point of no return for our species–in such a climate of righteous recrimination, no possibility will ever emerge for us to address any of the other half-dozen crises–including the climate crisis–that could drastically shorten or even eliminate the viability of Earth as our collective home.

What has been corporate media’s response  to this frightening series of cataclysms?  Have more than a tiny fraction of people sought to learn about and understand what has come to pass?  Professor Douglas Kellner is one who has addressed the propaganda nexus that predominates now.  His assessment that manipulation through a focus on the ‘spectacular,’ in service to preordained policy and ideological goals, meshes seamlessly with commercial media’s main output, both over the past ten years and for this anniversary.

Princeton’s philosophy professor, Harry Frankfurt has also spoken to this overall tendency toward falsity in service of deflection or hidden agendas.  In 2005, he wrote a delightfully brief and artful capsulization  of the intellectual swamp that continues to predominate contemporary dialog.

“One of the salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.  Everyone knows this.  Each of us contributes his share.  But we tend to take the situation for granted.  Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and avoid being taken in by it.  So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern or attracted much sustained inquiry.”

So saying, ”what in the world is going on?”  While any attempt to answer such a query must either seem a religious undertaking or the work of one deranged, delusional, over his head, I intend to paint a picture that presents a portrait of the current moment that is neither primarily ‘spiritual’ nor utterly cracked.

To do this, I ask that readers think about three important dates: September 15, 1945; September 11, 1973; and September 11, 2001.  I might have chosen other interludes, either to add to or replace these three.  However, a rich tapestry is possible to weave from these three exemplars of Septembers past.

MAKING SENSE OF THE ECONOMIC MORASS

A Citizen’s Synopsis

Every SPIN Report proceeds from the assumption that a revitalization of democracy—meaning, readers might recall, citizen rule—is a sine qua non not only of solving present problems but also of giving people generally their best shot at collective survival.  Thus, in place of an ‘Executive Summary,’ intended to give busy rulers a bottom-line peek at important data, the SPIN Report begins with a Citizen’s Synopsis, meant to break out overarching elements for the overburdened believer in majority rule.  This introductory overview provides a précis of the SPIN Report in its entirety.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

Every SPIN Report follows a similar format, although each initial summation may vary in its organization.  A useful way to begin today’s examination of ‘dollars and sense,’ in this first of what SPIN intends to be an ongoing series covering all aspects of contemporary life, is to note that a fairly extensive bibliography and set of further citations accompanies this and every other SPIN Report.  As SPIN readers will come to understand, almost all of these works originate in corporate sources.  Overwhelmingly, they exist in order to distract and mislead average people, or to provide false and irrelevant information to them, or for some combination of these purposes.

The absolute best that one can expect from such materials is extremely partial coverage.  This partiality includes both senses of the word.  On the one hand, they are exceedingly incomplete, especially in regard to historical and political economic components of the issue at hand.  On the other hand, often while propounding a fatuous ‘neutrality,’ or ‘objectivity,’ they lean over backwards to develop arguments and ideas, and to choose facts, that support the current rulers of the world, the financiers and industrialists and other money-bags that ‘pay the piper’ nearly everywhere on Earth today.

Of course, SPIN has its own biases.  However, it does not ever seek to cover them up.  It stands squarely behind perspectives and tactics that provide succor to wage-earners, to people whose only or primary equity in the economy is their labor and their brains and whose only or primary stake in the polity is their citizenship and their capacity to act collectively.

Just as obviously, SPIN can advance no credible claim of comprehensiveness.  Still, one clear purpose of every SPIN Report is a narrative as complete as possible without writing a book or a series of volumes on a topic.  Deep background, recent history, varied political and economic interconnections, all this and more appear in every presentation that SPIN promulgates.  This means that these texts are vastly more extensive than most of what readers see.  At plus-or-minus ten-to-twenty thousand words, a SPIN Report contains as much information as a week’s worth of business sections, or a week’s worth of national news, and so on.

The point of this intellectually forthright, in-depth evaluation is simple.  Citizen empowerment, or more purposefully a strategy for gaining democratic power in the hands of working people, is impossible without knowledge and analysis to back up potential strategy.  SPIN intends to act as a counterweight, no matter how minimal in comparison, to the vast moneyed behemoth of capitalist media that currently predominates around the planet.

CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND

Every SPIN Report contains central ideas necessary to figuring out the driving forces behind a big issue.  This ‘dollars and sense’ investigation posits five such hub concepts.

•  The budgetary and debt morass on the radar screen now reflects the millennia-old life-cycle of ruling elites, which began in the foggy prehistory of the agricultural, metallic, and military revolutions that led to class societies in the first place.

• More recently, in the five centuries or so that the bourgeoisie has vied for dominance, its agenda has revolved around budgeting debt for purposes of conquest or other forms of military expansion and control.

•  This manifestation of military imperialism especially characterized the North American colonies of Britain and the early United States, although always countercurrents more democratic and socially kind competed with the itinerary of empire.

• At the heart of these relatively recent expressions of imperial hegemony have always stood questions of commodity production, access to raw materials and markets, and trade.

• At the same time that all of these issues intertwine with one version or other of monetary crisis, the issue of money itself is generally poorly understood or hidden, even though comprehending it clearly is critical to any useful apprehension of the main components of the issues at hand.

Half a hundred more points might further flesh out this provision of a basis for deep thinking about budgets and debts.  Later Reports will undoubtedly generate some of these; others will be welcome as links through SPIN’s portals of one sort or another.

RECENT HISTORICAL & POLITICAL-ECONOMIC BACKGROUND

Every SPIN Report presents a century or more of historical and political economic underpinnings to an issue.  Three of these appear in starring roles in the present Report.

• The United States Civil War served as a benchmark for initiating core components of the Federal Government’s monetary, banking, debt, and military practices that continue into the current phase of things.

• The so-called ‘Progressive Era,’ in response to a legitimate Populist upsurge, stands as the consolidating point for the ‘Executive Budget’ management and other accounting practices that remain the undergirding of government spending to this day.

•  The policy face of these elements of ‘scientific management,’ the point of which was centralizing control of all political and economic decisions in a plutocracy of corporate governance, was the extension of the Fourteenth Amendment to include corporate persons, the formation of the Federal Reserve, the inauguration of a national income tax, and the general promulgation of an ‘open-door’ approach to trade.

Again, a detailing of the plus-or-minus hundred years of capitalism that formulated the present era would encompass dozens or scores-of-dozens more ideas.  However, these few are especially pertinent for what is transpiring today and might stretch adequately to include many of the notions nominally missing in action at this particular juncture.

THE NEW DEAL, KEYNSIAN METHODS, & REACTIONARIES CRAZY LIKE FOXES

While every SPIN Report has one or more body sections that dissect and consider the nature of the problems under review as a contemporary, day-to-day matter, different Reports will organize this in different ways.  Today’s ‘dollars and sense’ material begins with the apparent inescapable slipping and sliding of capital into periodic crisis, from which a series of especially relevant observations follow.

• The first is that FDR ‘saved’ capitalism in America from itself and thereby inaugurated the modern period of financial capital’s predominance.

• The second is that the thinking of John Maynard Keynes, whose The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money is nearly as little read, and as widely misread, as is the work of Karl Marx, has underpinned eight decades of economic policy but is under challenge now as unworkable, inadequate, and generally ill-advised.

• The third is that the militarization of American society that occurred in World War Two has consistently acted as the locus of Keynesian constructs, through the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and otherwise.

• The fourth is that behind every manifestation of world economic operations has lurked a cabal of American Federal and corporate leaders, whose ‘revolving door’ interchange remains the guiding infrastructure of overall world political economic management.

• The fifth is that, from the outset of this definable big-business program, angry reaction has characterized the response of major elements of American capital; these naysayers have long planned and recently succeeded in beginning to operationalize a demolition of social components of the New Deal paradigm.

• The final element of this recent background is that, since the 1940’s no cohesive coalition has come to the fore to represent the interests of American workers, who remain the least organized, the most divided, and the generally closest to powerless working class anywhere in the world.

FOUR DECADES OF LIFE ON THE VERGE OF COLLAPSE

The second section of this assessment examines particularly the present unfolding of things.  It too consists of a series of pertinent contentions.

• The formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the seeming centrality of an energy crisis, both at the initiation of this period of crisis, and throughout the nearly forty years of its existence, is a twofold dodge: first, in that the causes and results of the problems had little to do with energy as such and everything to do with monopoly control and profitability, and second, in that the prime mover of much of this brouhaha was the already decided primacy of a Uranium economy for the 21^st Century.

•  The ‘Reagan Revolution’ was merely the first stage of bubble-and-credit economics as a rescue plan for Keynesian capitalism, one that always sought further militarization and centralization at the expense of social expenditure and popular control; Clinton, ‘W,’ and Obama represent further expressions of this process.

• The savings-and-loan collapse, the dot.com bubble, and the present slippery slope toward depression were merely major steppingstones on a single political economic path, at each juncture of which similar controversies emerged over debt, deficit, and Federal spending.

• Behind all of these surface controversies lie the actual polarities engendered by ‘neoliberalism,’ empire, war, and trade disparities, among other social, political, and economic factors.

The depth and intractability of this forty years of chaos and catastrophe, shot through with what stockbrokers celebrate as “the largest creation of wealth in history,” means that any mere compilation, such as this Report, will include only smatterings of all that comprise the problems that we face.  However, that ninety-five per cent or more of ‘established’ media outlets—which is to say for-profit and most not-for-profit media today(and those in-between, like Huffington Post)—have literally zero to say about the factors listed above attests to the poverty of the current conversation and the degree of both fatuousness and concerted misguidance ubiquitous at the present time.

THOUGHTS ABOUT WHAT TO EXPECT THIS TIME AROUND

The final piece of this middle portion of today’s SPIN Report investigates the basis for thinking either that the present pass will end up as more of the same fiscal machinations that have characterized a continuing crisis since the early 1970’s, or that the situation now will lead to a fundamental amping up of the possibility for cataclysm and devolution.  The extant narrative looks at both possibilities—in other words, that things might continue as before, or that some fundamental shift must soon, as in the next few years, take place.

The Southern Peoples Information Network has regularly and stringently argued that nothing in the past decade has evinced any demonstrably new development of class conflict, whether in budgetary or other forms.  However, the deductions now most persuasive about what is likely to happen in the immediate future may indeed be one sort or other of ‘doomsayer.’  The capacity of capital to create another bubble and, through the legerdemain of fixed investments and credit, keep the logrolling and pork-barrel policies in motion, seems at the very least highly suspect.

CONCLUSIONS SUPPORTIVE OF A PEOPLE’S FISCAL POLICY

Every SPIN Report offers its readers a minimum of four or more pragmatic, eminently practicable conclusions.  These often center around, and always include, participatory and grassroots mechanisms for addressing difficulties that represent innovative and little discussed or unmentioned approaches to defusing crisis.  So too, today’s Report proffers the following points, which themselves revolve around the fact that no ‘mainstream’ organization that purports to support the needs and strengthening of working people—not the AFL-CIO, any of its component unions, or any other trade union; not any church that calls itself ‘progressive;’ not any agglomeration of identity politics, non-profit NGO’s, or other manifestation of ‘protest politics’—has anything akin to a strategy, let alone a plan, to vault U.S. average citizens toward a powerful role in the political arena that will determine the nature of their lives, or even whether they live or die.

•  Popular Education about these issues—money, credit, the corporate/Federal economic colossus, etc.—is a past-due priority; failure to accomplish a raising of the level of citizen comprehension about these matters means that horrifying results will ensue.

• The only way to enable such grassroots learning initiatives is through a ground-up engagement process, one that both starts with asking community leaders for input and encourages an open-ended agenda that communities help to shape.

• Politically, the ‘two-party-system’ is a fraud, with both major formations financed by and representative of corporate capital’s primacy; thus popular political organization, one way or another, will happen, the only issue whether a further fraud—in the form of such fanciful celebration of the false as the ‘Tea Party Movement’—or a genuinely community-based politics emerges.

• Amazingly enough, substantial elements of the capitalist class could also be primary beneficiaries of the sort of popular upsurge as the nation, and the world with it, needs; a huge basis for much of the present bitter invective about debts and budgets is that present power relations absolutely prohibit creative and viable solutions.

FINAL WORDS ON THE NUB OF THIS ISSUE

Every SPIN Report finishes with a key indicator, which a political participant might reasonably expect to play a central role in how an issue continues to develop.  In this Report about budgets and debt, this mainstage production concerns the likely political victory of either such so-called Libertarian ideas of a leader like Ron Paul, or the total evisceration of the remaining New Deal social welfare aspects of the Federalized economy.

In either case(and these two reactionary ideologies are by no means mutually exclusive), a reiteration of nationalism and protectionism will become politically irresistible.  Whether such cretinist chants are potent or to a degree paltry, they will unravel the basis for the world’s economic operation according to the Bretton Woods and subsequent protocols.

In such circumstances, the warnings of those who formed the United Nations, the World Bank, and so forth will prove not only likely, but in all probability also inevitable.  These spokesmen were, clearly, the denizens of finance and those sections of industry that foresaw a continued unfolding of ‘the American Century’ under bourgeois auspices.  Nevertheless, the whirlpool of social calamity that they predicted if ‘free-market’ economics continued untrammeled—cascading unemployment, trade wars, uncontrolled migration, and armed conflict, culminating in a worldwide war of one kind or another—are as clearly persuasive now as they were in the 1940’s.

Like World War One, World War Three “can’t happen.”  But it will come to pass unless certain conditions prevail.  The only things that can avert it are a further castration of working class power, with the concomitant enslavement of untold generations of poor people to a monopolistic monstrosity, on the one hand, or a renaissance of working class organization and consciousness, on the other hand, accompanied by a strategic popular program for the planetary enactment of the strongest possible forms of democratic engagement, power, and policy.

This Report, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, exists to support the latter potential.  These sorts of choices are the hidden agendas and buried possibilities of the contemporary façade of debate about budget reform, debt ceilings, and corporate socialism of the economy today.  Nowhere else does a reader have a chance to contemplate this, which is the purpose of both this précis and the larger Report that it introduces.

SOUTHERN PEOPLES INFORMATION NETWORK WEEKLY REPORTS

An Overall Description

            Each week, spindoctorjimbo will delve deeply into some critical problem of the current moment.  Each such ‘Priority Probe’ will provide a comprehensive big-picture assessment of a particular issue, or, in the case of ongoing series, a follow-up to a previous installment on a topic.  Every item will weigh in at roughly ten thousand words.

The reasons for limiting weekly output to a single focus are twofold.  First, it is manageable given the Southern Peoples Information Network’s current miniscule operating staff and budget.  Second, it guarantees a depth-reportage that, in the SPIN view, is the only way to develop useful understanding of anything, news or otherwise.  In a sense, in any case, the actual textual product of a ‘Priority Probe’ may end up being about the same number of words that appear in an average local newspaper’s daily “news hole.”  However, the level of insight and the amount of practical data present will far exceed what such a standard source of news generally provides over the course of a decade, or even a lifetime.

Every article will begin with a Citizen Synopsis, similar in form to the Executive Summary so popular for communications with the present ruling elite, whom regular people need to replace if they want to have a prayer that present problems have a community friendly resolution.  In addition each piece as such will contain five sections.  The Preface gives a conceptual and analytical background.  The Introduction examines the overarching historical facts and issues from which a particular probe springs.  One or more Body sections look at the issue itself, in historical and political-economic detail.  A set of Conclusions summarizes why citizens might find the probe useful and how they might act on what they have learned.  An Afterword discusses whatever material from the probe might be of central import in the present unfolding of human existence.

         Finally, each probe will proffer a general bibliography of sources that will allow intrepid readers to continue their own education on a matter.  Moreover, recent corporate-media links will always be present here.  As well, additional ‘progressive’ and other normally non-commercial citations will show up at this juncture, again giving SPIN-Priority-Report subscribers further chances to broaden and deepen their own understanding of critical issues.

One source for SPIN’s work is the democratic vision of Thomas Jefferson.  His was always a thoroughly practical take on democracy.  As much as any other’s, his is the thinking at the root of a SPIN manifestation of journalism.  “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.”