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The lies employed to camouflage our economic decline have been in place for several decades. President Reagan included 1.5 million U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine service personnel with the civilian work force to magically reduce the nation's unemployment rate by 2%. President Clinton decided that those who had given up looking for work, or those who wanted full-time jobs but could find only part-time employment, were no longer to be counted as unemployed. His trick "disappeared' some 5 million unemployed from the official unemployment rolls. If you work more than twenty-one hours a week -- most low-wage workers at places like Walmart average twenty-eight hours a week -- you are counted as employed even though your real wages put you below the poverty line. Our actual unemployment rate, when you include those who have stopped looking for work and those who can find only very poorly paid part-time jobs, is not 8.5% but 15%. A sixth of the country was effectively unemployed in May of 2009. And we were shedding jobs at a faster rate than in the months after the 1929 crash.
Our elected officials base their decisions not on the public good but on the possibility of campaign contributions and lucrative employment on leaving office. Our corporate elite tell us government is part of the problem and the markets should regulate themselves -- and then that same elite plunders the U.S. Treasury when they trash the economy. We insist we are a market economy, one based on the principles of capitalism and free trade, and yet the single largest sectors of international trade are the armaments and weapons systems of empire. There is a vast and growing disconnect between what we say we believe and what we do. We are blinded, enchanted, and finally enslaved by illusion.
Financial collapses have always led to political extremism
It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the WeimarRepublic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. (See Hedges' book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America)
In former manufacturing towns, the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. Most who live there have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working classes into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian Right who offer a belief in magic, miracles, and the fantasy of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we rapidly re-enfranchise our dispossessed workers into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.
As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class; as the Democratic and Republican parties expose themselves as craven tools of our corporate state; as savings accounts, college funds, and retirement plans become worthless; as unemployment skyrockets and home values go up in smoke, we must prepare for the political resurgence of reinvigorated right-wing radicals including those within the Christian Right. The engine of the Christian Right -- as is true for all radical movements -- is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities.
Our collapse is more than an economic and political collapse
It is, at its core, a crisis of faith. The capitalist ideology of unlimited growth has failed us. It did not take into account the massive depletion of the world's resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to soil erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming, and climate change. It failed to understand that the huge, unregulated international flows of capital and its assault on American manufacturing would wreck the global financial system. An overvalued dollar (which could soon deflate); wild tech, stock, housing and financial bubbles; unchecked greed; the decimation of our manufacturing sector; the empowerment of an oligarchic class; the corruption of our political elite; the impoverishment of workers; a bloated military and defense budget; and unrestrained credit binges are essentially consequences of a failed ideology, and together combine to bring us down. Soon the financial crisis may very well become a currency crisis. And when it does, this second shock will threaten our country's financial viability. We let the market rule. Now we are paying for it.
In his book The Great Transformation, written in 1944, Karl Polanyi laid out the devastating consequences -- the depressions, wars, and totalitarianism -- that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, absent heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism -- and a Mafia political system -- which is a good description of our current power elite.
Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University, wrote that a self-regulating market turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market's assumption that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity.
We face an environmental meltdown as well as an economic meltdown
Russia's northern coastline has begun producing huge quantities of toxic methane gas. Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study describe what they saw along the coastline recently as "methane chimneys" reaching from the sea floor to the ocean's surface. Methane, locked in the permafrost of Arctic landmasses, is being released at an alarming rate as average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty-five times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The release of millions of tons of it will rapidly increase the rate of global warming. http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/news/news_detail.cfm?id=713
Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment as well as the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted (courtesy of the oil, gas, and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government) to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could asphyxiate the human species.
1. NASA climate scientist James Hansen has demonstrated that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with maintenance of the biosphere on the "planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." (The Earth's atmosphere now has an average concentration of 385 ppm.) To halt this self-immolation, Hansen has determined, the world must stop burning coal by 2030 -- and the industrialized world must do it well before that -- if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number. But in the United States coal supplies half of our electricity! And China opens up a new coal-fired power plant every day www.post-gazette.com/pg/07331/836960-28.stm
Democracy and capitalism are antagonistic entities
Democracy, like individualism, is based not on personal gain but on self-sacrifice. A functioning democracy must often defy the economic interests of elites on behalf of citizens. But this is no longer happening in America. The corporate managers and government officials trying to fix the economic meltdown are pouring money and resources into the financial sector because they are trained only to manage and sustain the established system, not change it, and the system has by this time evolved into a proto-fascist corpocracy.
