Clearly, the Cockburn-St. Clair relationship was special and has made the muckraking at CounterPunch over the years rejuvenating for their writers and readers alike. It's fun to dunk the clown at the state fair into a vat of his bullshit. And there seems to be no end to clowns. An Orgy of Thieves works as an effective dunking booth and as a pleasant remembrance of Cockburn, who would have been in his 50th glorious year of taking the piss out of the Yankee Empire. And it's just as well that St. Clair provides some lightness of being before plunging the reader into the grave morass America has become and leading one to conclude that, in the lyrics of the late great Jim Carroll, "Nothing Is True ( It's All Permitted)."
The collection opens with St. Clair's "An Orgy of Thieves," an essay that compares and contrasts the words that the growing underclass are forced to live by and accept and learn, while the elites of America corrupt the value of language, as they maraud the System and steal its jewels. Remember, he writes, how we had to put up with rightwing blowhards spouting drivel like pathology of poverty, the teen predators, the collapse of morals, their responsibility of teen moms. St. Cloud writes:
There was indeed a vast criminal class coming to full vicious potential in the 1990s: a group utterly vacant of the most elementary instincts of social propriety, devoid of moral fiber, selfish to an almost unfathomable degree. This class appeared in the form of our corporate elite.
Welcome to the private world of trickle-downers with their 'voodoo economics' that had all of the mobile middle class on pins and needles throughout the 80s. Reagan, who resembled a Howdy Doody doll himself, was pushing zombies, in a faith-based economic system. Of voodoo, Zora Neale Hurston, a novelist and early cultural anthropologist, once said: 'If you want to understand [it]: believe.' That was Reaganomics. It morphed into neoliberalism. And, like The Blob, took over the world, one auto mechanic at a time.
Liberal Education, designed to instill critical thinking and to partially alleviate the parochial view most Americans had about the rest of the world, took a major hit. St. Clair partially sums up the new simplified divide:
A street kid in Oakland is in the police database by the time he's 10. There are no "criminal propensity" profiles for grads of the Wharton or Harvard business schools. You have to go back to Marx and Balzac to get a truly vivid sense of the rich as criminal elites"The result was that a Goldman Sachs trader could come to maturity without ever once hearing an admonitory word about it being wrong to lie, cheat and steal, sell out your co-workers and defraud your customers.
The new divide was cruel, racist, and pathological. And St. Clair sees it as the direct pathway to the collapse of 2008. "What exploded in the late summer of 2008 was an economic credo that has been rolling along since the early 1970s: neoliberalism," writes St. Clair. "By all rights, this last crisis has brought us to the crossroads where neoliberalism should be buried with a stake through its heart." Indeed, the System is a vampire. One recalls the wild office sex scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, or you could go further, if your taste permits, and recall the wild abandonment of sexual propriety from a similar scene in Bob Guccione's TripleX-rated Caligula.
Having set the scene, so to speak, we can now feast on Cockburn and St. Clair's smorgasbord of deconstruction, beginning with the economy and the redistribution of commonwealth. NAFTA, for instance. And Hillary Clinton's long relationship with Goldman Sachs. The neoliberal war on the poor. The Death Penalty. The War on Drugs. Abortion politics. The economics of contempt. The crash of AIG and its aftermath. All of these pieces combine with the book's other major concerns about the anthropocentric indifference to the environment, the hegemonic hubris that pronounces pathological behavior of mad elites as the operating force in the world, and the banana republicanisation of American culture and mores ("from this day on everyone will wear their underwear on the outside, so we can check. Silence!" Woody Allen, Bananas), add up to a forceful and compelling vision of a nation-state in steep decline, with other nation-states rejecting, for the first time, America's privileged position in the world; the medicine man of Pax Americana now hooted at; Manifest Destiny feared, its ethic battled by any means necessary.
In "The NAFTA Saga," Alexander Cockburn, erstwhile defender of the common man in his Beat the Devil column, expands on the comment about Bill Clinton's corporate whoredom he made to St. Clair on the phone years before, citing the president's role in implementing NAFTA, the secretive trade agreement that enriched investors and undermined unions and failed to protect the environment. The piece begins with a familiar-seeming statement:
Really big decisions about the nation's economic destiny are considered much too important to run the risk of any popular, democratic input. When you see the word bipartisan, know that the fix is in and democracy is out of the loop.
This sounds an awful lot like Henry Kissinger's doctrinaire sentiments purportedly expressed in the lead up to the Chilean coup d'e'tat of September 11, 1973:
I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
A nation's destiny is much too important to be decided by the plebs. It's not much considered anymore, but that is also the credo of our sacred property-protecting forefathers who wrote a Constitution that could not be ratified until the plebs had squeezed their blue balls for some amendments that became known as the Bill of Rights. The elites laughed about the amendments; ordinary Americans gathered 400,000,000 guns to show how serious they were in defending the only thing unique about the Constitution.
Cockburn notes that the NAFTA legislation was ratified virtually without any review by the American citizenry, although its effects were far-reaching to the average Joe:
The unions' Labor Advisory Committee, which has a congressional mandate to review [my emphasis] trade matters, was only given a complete draft of the [NAFTA] provisions on Sept. 8; nearly a month after agreement was announced.
The legislation was signed into law on January 1, 1994 after a highly controversial "fast track" review ('which permits no amendment, merely an up-or-down simple majority vote by both houses of Congress within 90 days of the introduction of enabling legislation') that left little time for review. Jobs were lost, wages went down, and the environment suffered. As far as Cockburn is concerned, "Clinton is the ultimate distillation of neoliberalism." And Clinton is from a state where still waters run deep in the backwoods. An' purdy men squeal like pigs when they pants are down an' fine 'emseves over a pork barrel.
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