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The Democrats’ Burgfrieden
August 4th, an interesting date. On August 4th 1914 the German Sozial Demokratische Partei (SPD), the lefty social democrats, voted and agreed in the German parliament on Kaiser Wilhelm II’s request for war credits. Without that vote, World War I would likely not have happened.
"We will not abandon our own fatherland in a time of danger," the SPD leaders said. This was a ‘peace within the castle’ (Burgfrieden) compact with the conservatives the SPD did hold throughout that war. (In France something similar happened named Union sacrée.)
That led to an internal party split that was made official in 1917 with the foundation of the ‘independent social democratic party’ (USPD) in 1917. The parties reunited some 7 years later on a more left position.
(A quite similar split happened again during recent years over
neoliberal SPD policy and German participation in the war on the
Pashtuns. It was made official when ‘Die Linke’ (The Left) became an
official new German party this year. [Full disclosure – I am with
them.] According to every available poll, the new party will get over
10% in the next state and national elections. The general effect of
this, which will take some years, will hopefully be a considerable move
of the political spectrum to the left.)
On August 3rd the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, despite having a
controlling vote, gave the Bush/Cheney ‘unitary executive’ more rights
to spy on its people without any judiciary control.
This even though there was much public backing not to do so. The editors of the NYT and the LA Times had spoken out against changing the FISA law.
Every halfway lefty blog I read yesterday and today is heavily
criticizing that vote. Writing from The Yearly Kos meeting even
Greenwald reports and opines:
But
the only issue anyone in the room really wanted to discuss — including
us — was the outrage unfolding on Capitol Hill. And the anger was
almost universally directed where it belongs: on Congressional
Democrats, who increasingly bear more and more responsibility for the
assaults on our constitutional liberties and unparalleled abuses of
government power — many (probably most) of which, it should always be
emphasized, remain concealed rather than disclosed.
Examine virtually every Bush scandal and it increasingly bears the
mark not merely of Democratic capitulation, but Democratic
participation.
…
Suffice to say, craven fear, as usual, is the author of this debacle.
Well – it took only a few long years for Glenn and the DKos crowd to get the obvious …
The new law will of course be used for, now legally, to spy on the
Democrat politicians too, and to weaken their position in the next
election by using whatever is found listening to their calls and
reading their emails. Just as WWI was used by the conservatives (and
the all important military) to deminish the left in Germany.
On the positive side it may help to finally cause a much needed split
within the ‘left’ war-party. That’s about the only hope I have for the
U.S. An energized crowd that has the means to launch something new form
the wreak of the old.
But then, as Ioz says:
Unfortunately, this crowd has epiphanies like a whore has johns: often and not for long.
So it’s just hope, which is, of course, not a plan …
The 300 million hominids of the USA — who still charmingly refer to themselves as “We, the People” — have long since been surpassed and supplanted by America’s publicly traded corporations and ultra-rich investors, who are now the genuine citizens of the United States, able to vote with dollars, create votes with dollars, massage votes with dollars, manufacture public support for votes with dollars, write all the legislation to be voted upon, choose America’s legislators by means of donating dollars to favored campaigns and, of course, make plenty of dollars out of all of these efforts.
It is a closed system of government of, by and for corporate aims, and those corporate aims are a closed system as well, a system of aiming for short term profits, stablilized monopoly markets, and unregulated access to the resources of “lesser” nations.
What about you and me?
The role of hominids in our advanced capitalist system is to participate economically within the national platform, which is currently the 50 States but will soon become the entire North American continent — the North American Union. Whether the three governments of Canada, Mexico and the USA ever actually merge is utterly beside the point — a distraction. Once their business environment and regulatory, tax, and legal structures operate uniformly, allowing a larger national platform for these increasingly supra-national corporations to operate within, the goal is won.
Three uniformly corporatized governments sharing water, oil, cheap labor, and military defenses is just good old American cost cutting and efficiency.
If these super citizens cannot tell the difference between doing business in any of these three “sovereign nations” then there is no effective difference, to them. The difference will all be felt by the hominids of these three nations, who will then be thrice removed from the original intent of their former governments, which was the simple idea that the people would rule over themselves by representatives duly elected.
That’s right out, mate, in the corporatized system of government. In the new American century, hominids are debt-ridden consumers — or they are troublemakers.
The role they play is that of cattle. They are plants to be harvested. They are parts. They are either functioning parts or bad parts, destined for the dumpster. There is a bottom line to consider, after all.
The owners of the American government are the owners of 85% of America, and of virtually all of America’s capital. The operators of the American government are the selected representatives of its super citizens, and their career goal is to drive the nation in the corporate quest for resources, customers, growth, profits, and power all around the globe.
The notion of minding the nation’s infrastructure, culture, future, and taking care of the people as any kind of priority is quite literally insane under this system, wherein the people are not the people anymore — only business entities are people now. That’s who the government is here to serve.
There is only the need for PR, spin, and lip service to the hominids, who are encouraged to partake of staged horse races called elections, to blog, to write letters, to sign petitions and make phone calls, to gather in conventions to flex their non-existent political muscles, non-existent because political muscle is spelled d-o-l-l-a-r-s. If you cannot outright buy a political representative — including seeing to his comforts and status and perks throughout his lifetime — then you do not have a political representative.
Just as a lobbyist is someone who pushes a certain agenda for pay, a political representative is a lobbyist who pushes the agenda of those who pay for his election, and see to his needs after political retirement.
The need for lip service to keep the hominids apathetically participating creates War Party Left, and War Party Right, both of whom feel totally free to ignore hominids in any number at any time in favor of assiduously serving their paymasters — the super citizens we call corporations, and the super rich.
And why not? They actually, physically, own the whole place. It’s not our country anymore, financially. It’s theirs. They’ve earned it from us using the miracle of compound interest, and now they want it run to suit themselves, and expanded into overseas empire to suit themselves.
If the hominids of America want to rule themselves, they have to take their country back. That won’t be done by working within this closed system. The system has endless loops of wasted efforts and wasted words to contain the hopeful, the optimists, the dedicated, the wide awake fire breathing citizens who throw themselves into changing the system from within.
The Owners know to put such people into one or another of these endless loops, and burn them out in a few short years. In the past hundred years, there has not been one such creature seen to accomplish change from within. There have been many thousands of excellent people burnt, worn out, crushed within the system.
The system has one, and only one, Achilles heel. It cannot continue without hominid participation. No cooperation from the people, and the system gums up, breaks up, and falls down.
They can carry capital away to foreign shores. They can take what they can carry. They cannot take the physical nation away from 300 million hominids who are squatting on it, calling it their country.
When Americans take to the streets of their nation in millions upon millions, and say, “This nation does not belong to the bankers and billionaires, it belongs to us!” then the system will reboot, and people will be people once more.
It will not reboot itself.
I strongly suggest that everybody, everybody, get out of line.
Posted by: Antifa | Aug 5 2007 1:06 utc | 4
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