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WB: Leviathan
Billmon:
We can argue all we want that the deal is a sham, that any sense of security is an illusion, and that having gobbled up their privacy and some of their liberty, Leviathan will only come looking for more, because that’s all it knows how to do. But an awfully large number of our fellow citizens have already decided, or have been conditioned to believe, that it’s better to be subjects and let others make the hard decisions for them. After all, the organization must have its reasons.
Leviathan
Rocket Summer
It’s an interesting and inevitable dynamic playing out here. From their first day in office, the Bushistas have been giving away our Treasury to the wealthiest Americans, for the sole purpose of keeping them investing in American business, as opposed to moving all their money to more profitable climes.
The only thing that will keep that money here at home is high returns plus lower business and investment taxes. And looser regulations. Less restrictive standards. Lawsuit caps. Huge freebies to the oil, pharmaceutical, banking, and defense industries. Leaky pension plans, easily looted. Low minimum wage, lots of hungry immigrants, and a shattered and underfunded social safety net. All that, and unlimited, unimaginable debt, even unto the third or fourth generation.
They’ve been at this for five years now, and here we are, friend — nearly to the endgame of this mafia bustout, this interesting dynamic. The endgame, where even all of this lush and livid thievery proves lacking, though the nation staggers in its stride, dizzy and drained, a victim of vampires.
The endgame is coming.
It could never be enough, this thuggish thievery on behalf of the well heeled, and the Bushistas knew it always. The ventures and investments of the wealthy do, in the end, depend utterly upon the unwashed multitudes more or less going along with the marketing plan, more or less consuming at the required rate. All financial harvests do depend upon fatted calves in great numbers surrendering their freedom and lives both as they go and at the last. They depend upon steadily siphoning capital from working beasts.
Ask any cowboy from Texas; he’ll tell you — the money isn’t in the spreadsheets, it’s out there in the herd. Keeping them dogies moving until such time and place as you can cut their throats is the whole idea, pardner.
But now it appears that even the wholesale merger of corporate and government goals and power, with Congresscritters and Senators perennially out of town fundraising while corporate lawyers and lobbyists write new legislation for them to sponsor without reading — even this has proven insufficient.
The herd must be placed under tighter control, or the bottom line will suffer. When things get disorderly, profits decline. That cannot continue.
Lo, the wayward public grows restive and unrestrained. They return approval polls of 29%. They change brands unbidden. They openly discuss civil disobedience. They make embarrassing inquiries. They jump ship. They are not going quietly into the penstocks. The malls and auto showrooms and real estate offices grow quieter with every new morning. War does not distract the herd for long, nor does braying about bigotry, nor does the Bogey Man of the week work like it did in the day.
It’s coming. Put some rice and beans aside, Henry. It’s coming.
Now, when there is no more to give away, even on the backs of our indebted and enslaved descendants, it comes. Now, when businesses so lavishly fed at the public trough see shrinking profit margins, and look lustfully overseas for better opportunities, it comes. Now, when foreign owners of dollar bills start turning them down, and turning them in, it comes. Now, when fat and dumb American consumers can no longer afford to just jump in the family jalopy and drive over to the mall, nor buy anything there that isn’t canned or marked down, it comes.
The endgame of the Bush clan’s interesting dynamic was always a police state, where every consumer is constantly added up, and can always be subtracted from the political and economic pool when they get uncooperative. Clearly there comes a day when the imperial ambitions of the corporate and political masters of America require a much closer supervision of the citizenry if this interesting dynamic is to continue at its accustomed rate of profit. There is a whole world out there to conquer, in this New American Century. It must be one State over all other nations, or there will be hell to pay all around.
The endgame is clear. America must go down a totalitarian path if profits are to stay on track. If this means tightening the screws on non-cooperators, if this means restricting freedoms and dictating the details of individual lives, well it is all for the good of the nation. In the end, it is the State that must prosper, not the herd. The herd is for fattening, and for cutting up as needed. In America, the herd has had its day.
Or, the herd will have its day, if it rejects the political process being foisted upon it.
It’s coming. The noose is near. The interesting dynamic reaches its endgame this summer.
America will either become a police state, or we will see a revolution in our relationship to our own government.
Either there will be no more free range Americans, or there will be.
Essential freedoms inherited from the Magna Carta and the English and French and American Revolutions will be eased out of our lives forever, or we the people will not be trod upon. We will tread on these rascals who represent us falsely. We who did not ask for any of this will accept none of it.
It’s coming. It will be one way or the other way, for it cannot be both.
Mothers, the unborn children within you are already debt slaves to these corporate cats, this aristocracy of the non-working. They have plans for the entire lifetimes of each of your beautiful children, and they do not involve the freedom to do as they please. They involve them entirely in the economic and military domination of planet Earth, here in this New American Century. Your children will be conquerors, or die in the attempt. That’s what they’re good for.
Fathers, the blood of your sons is needed in the sands of the oil countries. Whether they die in Arabia, Bolivia, Nigeria or Venezuela, neither you nor they will ever see any of the black gold their blood buys for Shell and Exxon. You and they will see only the flag of a great and free people held high over conquered lands. And you will wrap their crushed corpses in it, and you will spit on it afterwards, and you will wonder at the choice you made for them, back when the choice was still yours.
The endgame is coming this summer of Ought Six.
Rocket Summer, when missiles launch out of Israel to land upon Iran, and Iran launches in reply, and America’s Lord and Master Bush announces that he has no choice but to launch everything we have from the three carriers that will be so conveniently on station in the Persian Gulf in early June. They are on their way there as you read this.
Rocket Summer, when we launch our B-2’s hauling bunker buster nukes, and start what cannot be stopped, by anyone, anywhere.
Rocket Summer, when we start WWIII. When we do — that.
With those mushroom clouds in the Middle East our own American nation will go up in smoke, locked into the endless, unyielding, unwinnable war Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush have arranged for us. To survive such a war, our nation will have to be very tightly controlled from on high. Government from the top down, and not otherwise. Everyone must do their part, whether they like it or not. Everyone must show up and pull together. Everyone must stay in line.
Rocket Summer. The carriers Abraham Lincoln and Enterprise and are on their way to make war on Iran. The Ronald Reagan is already on station in the Gulf. Our boomers are already underwater in the region, testing their Tomahawk firing systems for their grand day out. Out in Omaha, our B-2’s are tooling up. Our B-52’s in Britain and Diego Garcia are squared away for combat runs. The end of our trail is near. All the cowboys are shouting, driving for the slaughterhouse. The herd is being hustled for the very last time.
Rocket Summer, right this way. Right this way.
How about it? Are you going to stay in line?
Posted by: Antifa | May 13 2006 12:09 utc | 4
In a sense, the corporations have taken over already. They run a big chunk of the economy (setting aside drugs and human trafficking). I can see this where I live – Geneva – to make a long story simple, two groups living side by side in the same territory. The Corps and their employees, and the others, who act in a moldering local economy (many like it that way) medieval, almost, some of it black; and provide the services needed for the first. The ‘social contract’, a limping but still effective direct democracy, and a consensus that this state of affairs must endure ensure a sort of cynical stasis. We (all ‘citizens’ and workers) are under no illusions. I know that my salary (state paid in education), and that of the President of Switzerland, which is not even double mine, is basically paid for by Marcel Ospel (dir. UBS), whose salary last year was 24 million francs. Trickle down and taxation work.
The corps and their employees do not vote (mostly.) They act through influence, wield the stick and carrot, shape and mold. The others use the traditional tools, from initiative to demonstration. An uneasy, oppositional alliance betwen the two groups sees to it that most events are muted, coded. The Gvmt. (at present a truly unified coalition Gvmt. that speaks with one voice) is lumbered with the job of negotiating beween the two groups. At present, no faction of any kind holds the upper hand. The plus point is that the situation is clear; and circumscribed; Geneva is a small Republic.
Yawning cracks, of course, have appeared in the last 10-15 years. The first victims were, are, lowly workers and their families. The second victim is the public education system. The Corps. and the rich want to get rid of it. (Big news, sorry!) The third, even more intangible victim is honor and propriety in both public and private life. Corp mores have sept into every corner, substituting power and influence and threat/agression for a decent espousal of an ascribed role in a system which was designed to maintain the public good. Here, the first victims are the weakest of all: children.
This is loong; I post it because I presume some ppl at least are interested in from-the-ground international povs. (?)
To come to my point. The Corps thrive in and expand in a landscape of Nation States. They count on the ‘state’ (failed in some places!) to provide the stability they need to act. (Oil companies are a good example.) They outsource what they want – protection, school lunches, roads, medical care, etc. So, on the one hand, they want to destroy organisms that limit, curtail, tax their activity. On the other, they need ‘the state’ and know they can’t go too far on some points. Their main fear, always, is the military; their main beef against countries/pols that appear determined to resist.
They know that they can lock ppl in for the 8 hour day but more than that is…moot for the moment.
The interest in ‘security’ and ‘information gathering’ in Western countries is a Gvmental reflex, and does not spring from the Corps. themselves (except insofar as in some instances they can make money out of it.) Gvmts. see their role dwindling and seek to enforce it with control. In the US, as the Gvmt. has been tied to corps. since forever, things are a quite confused. Wire tapping (as if we were in the 1950’s!) veers between market research, interesting data, spying on opponents, a measure to scare the sheeples and keep em feeling Big Brother is watching, a money making scheme (one can sell those records), providing employment and kudos for Gvmt. employees (they are not useless), etc. Business as usual!
Posted by: Noisette | May 13 2006 15:32 utc | 7
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”
Prodhone
Posted by: ed | May 14 2006 0:53 utc | 16
Here’s a small attempt to counter the hopelessness that this Leviathan discussion engenders. Joseph Newman—Paul Newman’s uncle—ran a sporting goods store in Cleveland, and he contributed poems to the Plain Dealer in the 1940s and 50s. His poem “Leviathan” appeared in his compiled book titled It Could Be Verse. I thought of this poem, and pictured Billmon as Captain Medford:
The shrewdest whaler that ever whaled
Since the earliest days that whalers sailed
Was Captain Medford
Of old New Bedford.
Hard as a brick…
Keen, slick…
Master of ships for half a century,
Bold as a pirate and fond of adventure, he
Knew every hiding place,
Secret residing place,
Ever Leviathan used as a biding place.
I won’t spoil the fun of the nautical detail and the outrageous rhymes and meter. But one night Medford’s ship finds itself right atop Leviathan:
The Captain picked himself from the floor,
Took one jump thru the cabin door
And raced on deck, where the crew at the rail,
With their eyes popped out and their eyeballs pale,
Were staring at, what I mean, a WHALE!
Stretching as far as the eye could sight
Was a giant carcass, as black as night,
Save here and there where the eerie light
Planted a glistening patch of white.
A waving fluke, some miles at sea,
Gave hint as to where its tail should be,
And over the ocean rolled a swell
As its giant midriff rose and fell!
So what did Billmon, er, Medford do? Lifting his harpoon high and wide, he sent it whizzing over the side. And…
What a sight to see,
What a place to be!
Afloat on a flea
In a frightful sea,
Attached to the whoopingest, whoppingest whale
That ever made seaman reef a sail!
Hang on for your lives! Hang on for your lives!
Hang on for your…OOPS!…The monster dives!
Ten thousand barrels of boiling sea
Roll wildly over the General Lee
As the big whale struggles to get him free!
The brine was lashed to a foaming spume;
The cable twanged like the cry of doom;
The crew stood rooted as by a weld;
The blood in the Captain’s arteries jelled,
But, wonder of wonders, the harpoon HELD!
Leviathan is tamed. I’ll let you read how. Do read the book though it is out of print. You can find Newman’s poem “Black Cross”, about lynching, here. His poem about the evolution of sexual reproduction is a knockout (can’t recall the title). A wonderful source during his hard times, and ours.
Posted by: Browning | May 14 2006 1:43 utc | 17
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