by Malooga
lifted from a comment
@Copeland:
BO’s qualities as a human being are irrelevant.
As Arthur Silber has pointed out numerous times, the office of the
Presidency — Commander-in-Chief of the greatest, fastest collapsing,
Empire in History — requires a level of pathological violence which no
one here would countenance in a family member, and which instantly
would land you in jail, or worse, if you were a member of the
underclass and stole one billionth of what any President does, or were
responsible for one billionth of the death, destruction, violence, and
mayhem.
It requires misstating, or perpetrating non-existent threats, in
Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Cuba,
Bolivia, North Korea, and a dozen other places around the globe, as BO
already has done, in the murderous interest of said Empire. It requires
terrorizing and subduing populations of those countries so that
ostensibly US-based corporations can appropriate the resources and
wealth of those lands. It requires the use of CIA, special-ops, death
squads, aerial bombing, remote bombing, drones and surveillance
aircraft, spraying of toxic chemicals, radiological poisoning, killing
of union leaders, economic suasion (starvation, destruction of critical
infrastructure, destruction of drug manufactories, economic embargos,
etc.), proxy wars, wars on drugs, wars with drugs, wars funded by
drugs, humanitarian wars, concentration camps (1 1/2 M in Gaza),
spying, data-mining, eavesdropping, propaganda, fear-mongering,
threats, lying, duplicity, fear, subversion, etc. in pursuit of those
goals.
It requires starving — and growing — the underclass of your own
country so that the wealthiest, most pathological, most environmentally
destructive, banksters can be rewarded with 700 Billion dollars — the
single largest transfer of wealth upwards in the history of this
country since the land grants the railroads received 140 years ago – a
program BO is in favor of. It requires telling the lower and middle
class of your country that there is no money for healthcare, social
security, infrastructure, etc. while we spend over one trillion dollars
(9% of GDP, 6th largest consumer of petroleum resources if it were its
own country, which in effect it is) — more than the rest of the world
combined — on offensive warfare. (Combined, warfare, its subsequent
amelioration, and corporate profits, account for close to 25% of GDP —
enough to wipe out all want and poverty in this and many other
countries)
It requires support for the planet-destroying nuclear energy
industry, for the use of DU weapons, for Uranium mining and radioactive
tailings blowing in the glowering western winds, for the irradiation of
our planet for hundreds of millions of years — which BO is in favor of.
It requires supporting the nefarious, deadly GMO conspiracy — ADM,
Cargill, Monsanto, Con-Agra, Syngenta, etc. — which together with
Buffett and Gates, seek to OWN and control the food supply of the
entire world, regardless of the murder that causes, or the health and
environmental effects of such a policy, and having already shamelessly
and criminally contaminated mankind’s several heritage crops – corn,
for one, while pushing peasants, through so-called “free-trade”
agricultural export policies, into starvation, undercutting and
destroying local producers in the name of corporate profits.
It requires support of a media system, educational system, and
cultural industry — a vast propaganda apparatus dwarfing any the
former Soviet Union ever had — which keeps the vast majority of our
country completely distracted and entertained, while completely
ignorant of the violence our country causes; of the ecological
consequences of our daily life; of how, where, and under what labor
conditions resources are extracted, and subsequently assembled into the
ephemeral consumer products of our capitalist existence; of basic
issues of cause and effect; of even the most elementary level of
critical thinking, all the while eternally testing (No Child Left
Behind) and forcing the rote memorization of trivia, lies, distortions,
and propaganda; and continuously instilling a pathologically
destructive belief in American Exceptionalism — a cultish religion
which is capable of excusing any level of violence, genocide (Iraq,
nuking Japan, firebombing Dresden) and destruction because "we mean
well." It requires vocal public support for the cult belief in endless
growth which is cutting out the support systems necessary for life on
this planet exponentially faster. It requires vocal public support for
the murderous ideology that people should service capital, rather than
capital servicing human needs, that is to say, Capitalism – an ideology
based upon individual greed and societal atomization, which even most
here on this blog believe COULD SOMEHOW (????) be properly regulated
and restrained before it consumes the entire planet, ouroboros-like,
including the proverbial final noose. All of the above, by definition,
is supported by BO categorically, wholeheartedly, and without
precondition.
It requires support for the continued socially unsustainable upward
redistribution of wealth — albeit, with a few Clintonite sops thrown
in to quell the masses (Almost one trillion in combined profits for the
energy giants — oil, coal, nuclear), while perhaps several billion
will be very publicly spread around (mostly to large corporations) for
"renewables" and coal gasification, etc. It requires support for
Insurance company based, privately afforded and purchased,
donut-riddled, safety-net catastrophic illness systems; no health care
system; uncritical support for the vampirish drug and cancer industry,
which encourages the upward redistribution of wealth and impoverishment
of the underclass by the creation of all manner of narrow-minded,
blindered, complicit specialists, often paid upwards of half a million
dollars a year (as if dispensing drugs were really more difficult than
fixing brakes on a car, both of which are “life-affecting”), to
dispense drugs, radiation, and surgery, to what has exploded from
one-in-thirteen to one-in-three, projected to reach one-in-two of our
population within my lifetime, all the while ostrich-like sticking
their educated, pampered heads in the sand to the obvious causes to
this epidemic, amelioration of which would be “politically
unacceptable.” It requires support for a universal soma-like national
medication system, involving up to one in three of the population, so
that they don’t completely freak-out by whatever small bits of actual
reality of our situation actually does creep in; so that they don’t
feel personal or collective pain, but can still feel jingoistic
national frenzy; while heedlessly polluting our waterways with their
drug-laden urine, causing havoc among fish and wildlife .
It requires all of this, and more — infinitely more than I care to
detail in this short post — and none of the corporations which
invested over half a billion dollars in BO’s selection have any doubt
in his (or his running mates, should he falter as JFK did) ability to
continue to perpetrate these crimes against humanity and life itself.
(Strange how little interest in voting irregularities the left suddenly
has now that their side has won.)
Pravda recently stated that compared to the Bush regime, only the devil could be worse. Perhaps they are right. But there is a remarkable continuity of violence in support of the perpetration of empire ("Our way of life," if you will) from Presidency to Presidency. Every single President has supported all of what I have described above, unwaveringly, as will BO.
All of them have worked ceaselessly to expand economic influence, kill
off peasants and natives, and spread around the girdle of the globe as
fast as possible — like some sort of out-of-control human yeast
infection, laying claim to every thing, concept, and idea they have
come across. All of them have come up with pitifully puerile, and
pathologically violent, "Doctrines," excusing or justifying all of this
for State Historians and Public Intellectuals to analyze, normalize,
natter over on talk shows, and otherwise drool over for the edification
of the masses.
Not even the most hysterical person I have encountered has expected
BO to continue, or exceed, Bush’s level of overt confrontation. But not
even the most optimistic, most Kool-Aid-inebriated groupie expects BO
to reverse all of the damage done by Bush — to be able to miraculously
bring us back to the exalted, whistfully reminisced year, 2000, when
only two-thirds of Iraq was being bombed daily.
The "Ratchet Effect" is the operative metaphor here. We will get a
troop drawdown in Iraq, and the closing of Gitmo. (These items are
elite planner consensus, and would have happened even if McCain had
magically been selected won. We will not get a
cessation of violence world-wide, in any way. The Empire is a shark
which consumes all in its path and it will continue to be so. We will
not get the closing of the many other Gulags of Empire beside Gitmo,
many in other "friendly" countries, most unknown to all but a few who
monitor CIA plane landings world-wide, and unpublicized. We will not
get a redefinition of torture, nor will we get a restoration of the
constitutional rights taken away from us. Instead, we will get another
faux-terrorist 9-11, a further crack-down on our freedoms (small as
they are), further monitoring of all behavior, the introduction and
normalization of a new family of offensive weapons: so-called
"non-violent" crowd control technologies, of which tasers are merely
the first public launching, continued spying, filming, data-mining of
all of our actions, resulting in the public culling of a vocal few to
great calmative effect upon the many. Under Holbrooke, Albright, Ross,
Powers, and Rice (and Soros), we will get fewer "offensive" wars, and
more "humanitarian" ones, and, of course, a huge ratcheting up of
economic ones (begun already by the IMF and commodities price
manipulation). (Yugoslavia and Rwanda have been adequately discussed
here. The violence inflicted upon civilian life and structure is
identical regardless of the justifications of Empire.) We will get more
NGO intervention (read your Arundhati Roy on this pernicious weapon) to
"aid" the afflicted.
The style of this administration will be much better, easier on the
eye and the ear: We will be treated to the intelligent (if equally
deceitful) disquisitions of a Clinton, along with the now ubiquitous
(hollow) national self-congratulatory Afro-American, Horatio Alger
story — four years from State Senator to President — and to the
Kennedy-like Camelot cult fairy tale of a young couple steering a
nation towards a new, even greater, America. We’ll feast our eyes on
better clothes, savor over better meals being prepared in the White
House, and proudly watch as all manner of liberal Public Intellectuals
fawn over the new power couple at Affairs of State. Perhaps Maya
Angelou will even write a poem:
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.
(She wrote those lines before NAFTA, before welfare reform, before
the US abetted bloody coups in Rwanda, and Haiti, and before the half
million dead children in Iraq — which not a single member of the
ruling elite sought to contradict the bi-partisan sentiment that it was
all, somehow, in Albright’s dark wording, “worth it.”)
And the symbolizism will be much softer. We will hear talk about
humanity’s needs, and nation’s struggles against bad leaders and
violent renegade movements, who must be overthrown for the welfare of
the people. But nothing I’ve detailed above will change in the least.
The vast bi-partisan death juggernaut will miss nary a beat. If our
President appears less extreme, the climate (in more ways than one)
will become even more extreme. And yet, perhaps the Cubs will finally
go all the way one of these next four years. So we do have hope and
there is much to look forward too.
But, seriously: In light of the vast, bi-partisan, undiscussed but
universally accepted narrative and agenda, and the monstrous
destruction it causes world-wide, focusing on BO’s purported,
public-image manipulated, personality traits – his “decency as a human
being”; or as NPR does in support of the cult-of-personality of the
President, eternally filling dead air time with endless chipper-voiced
stories of BO’s poker playing aptitude and strategy, his version of
manhood compared to the hip-hop model, and anything else that the
thirty-something, well-adjusted, metrosexual, young producers can mine
from the cartoon-addled recesses of their normalized imaginations –
imaginations which can dream up anything imbued with diaphanous “hope,”
but are repulsed by “downers” like death and destruction – is, as I
said above – completely irrelevant.