Here, one of my favorite authors argues that in a traditional democracy, the liberal class serves as a safety value for slowly releasing the tensions that build up from the pressures of maintaining the status quo of the power elite. In point of fact, as he rightly contends, it is liberals that actually give much needed legitimacy to the power elite. However today, the relentless assault by the corporate state on the democratic values of our democracy has all but rendered our democratic process irrelevant: We have all become pawns and serfs in a game of pseudo-democracy rigged by the corporate state: All due in part thanks to weak-kneed and limp-wristed liberals, who have now become the corporate class' most recent victim.
With their heads forever in the sand, liberals continue to live in the nether-nether world of passe democratic rhetoric and reveling in hollow acts of "democratic political theater, pretending that the "rigged game" does not exist. But more than this, all our political institutions are now being either overrun by, or co-opted by the dictates of the corporate and national security state.
As but one example, today we have begun to take globalization as an article of faith -- with only sporadic dissent, and only whimpering critiques. But more important even than this fact, is the fact that all U.S. values, liberal or otherwise, have begun to fall by the wayside when the time comes to stand up to mean-spirited, shallow and always greedy (and often anti-American) corporate dictates. Today it is this corporate narrative (and their lackeys in the liberal class that has usurped religious, patriotic as well as moral messages, values and language. We now live in a Corporatocracy, with only the liberals standing between complete corporate rule and an America awaking up to the living danger of an impending Fascist take over of the nation. And now the liberals have finally committed suicide and have been completely co-opted by corporate interests and the corporate message.
Recent democrats, such as both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are rightly taken to task by the author. Bill Clinton is lambasted, for instance, for having consciously sold out the working class for corporate money: He passed NAFTA, and destroyed welfare, both of which, arguably, betrayed the working and poorer classes. And even more importantly, he along with the help of key conservative Republicans, ripped down the firewalls between commercial and investment banks. An act that effectively turned the banking system over to Wall Street speculators and led to the financial mess that the U.S. has today, and from which the nation may never completely recover from.
Similarly, Barack Obama raised more than $600 million to run for president (the most ever raised in U.S. history by a single candidate running for a U.S. office), most of it from the very corporations engaged in the recent financial meltdown. Like the Cheney/Bush administration before him, Obama too has run interference for the continued looting of the U.S. Treasury by corporations. He has done this at the same time that he made a conscious calculation not to help the millions of Americans who have lost their homes because of bank repossessions or foreclosures. Not only has Obama failed to address the misery of our permanent class of unemployed, he has thumbed his nose at blacks too and especially those in the inner city underclass of his own tribe - the one group that just coincidentally voted for him at the rate of 93%. Also he has keep in place all of the much hated Bush measures from the Patriot Act to fighting dumb wars, and is now poised to again pre-emtively give in to the Republicans on extending the tax cuts to the upper 2%. It seems that the only difference between a liberal and a conservative, is that a conservative has values worth fighting for. As a result, the liberals have effectively conspired in their own demise. The proper term for this normally is called suicide.
In short, the author argues rather persuasively that the liberal class has become a useless and despised appendage of corporate power. I could not agree with him more. Easily five Stars
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