R. I. P. Demos 5
Shaun Mullen writes the obit. A snippet:
This catastrophe has not occurred because of those events. Yes, the attacks, wars and election all have had enormous ramifications, but the death of American democracy, a slow-motion process that has taken years to become apparent, is a result of the corruption of capitalism by powerful oligarchs who have been enormously successful in milking the positive aspects of that once vaunted economic system for their own gain while not just allowing, but encouraging the negative aspects to run rampant.
Read the rest.
April 26, 2014 at 1:58 pm
Good essay. Question is, what is to be done? Cliven Bundy. That’s what you get. Anyway, seven years ago I bought a copy of James Galbraith’s The Predator State. That defined this story and much of what has solidified in other studies more recently. He suggested solid changes but absolutely nothing transpired. You can probably pick it up used cheap but then you’d have to do business with Amazon.
So what is to be done with WhiteManistan? Because that’s the central problem. WhiteManistan and its orthodoxies and rule brought this down on everybody, and it’s what continues to enforce it today.
You go out and try to talk to members of our tribe sometime who still have work and homes. Some of them may talk progressive and vote Democratic but, when you scratch away their veneer, they’re still not having any slices of the reality pie. You can’t get change out of a white American majority, will never happen under any circumstance. They’d rather take their chances on being able to hold onto decent-paying servant jobs.
April 26, 2014 at 11:08 pm
I have concluded that racism, America’s original sin, will bring about its downfall. America will be consumed from within. I see no other outcome.
Shaun writes good. He is a retired Philly Daily News editor.
April 27, 2014 at 3:36 am
Don’t leave out the role of corporate America. It has no use for anyone outside of two functions — ever more penurious servant labor and mass units to buy things. If one falls outside that category, corporate America has no use for human beings. In this country, the reality is that people are to be thrown away when they are no longer useful in this context.
You might be curious why I re-read the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It’s because of the psychological study. Lots of people think in stark terms of Nazism or Stalinist Communism. They have no cognitive ability when it comes to considering that like those two states, THIS COUNTRY would be its own unique example.
The US is uniquely undemocratic corporate business state, it’s virtually a corporate dictatorship, and it was always going to fail, or betray its own people in a way unique to its history, not only racial, but also in terms of organized money. You can read the Rise & Fall of the Third Reich over and over and see how an intelligent people were completely detached from reality by mass media and a charismatic leader. And how, as doom grew closer in the end period of WWII, they not only could not disengage from their system even though they knew the day of reckoning was upon them. The book is a study in humanity and I interpret it as a lesson that applies to us. Shirer remarked at length in the book how ordinary Germans he interviewed prior to having to leave were completely, astonishingly, detached from reality. He would find the same people in America today. They literally believed total nonsense, not only with regards to their country but also with regard to the rest of the world. And that nonsense was not benevolent, it was total animus. Animus also defines American character.
America has never had the kind of murderous leaders who made Nazi Germany. On the other hand, it has had quite some other things. Cultivation of widespread only -seemingly- white non-violent authoritarianism/fascism, subservience to a bipolar media of government propaganda or amplification of profoundly diseased fabrication and intolerance. The largest most frightening military power in world history — also as an export and trade proposition.
April 27, 2014 at 7:25 am
I’m with you on racism being the American drink of hemlock, although that will happen in more subtle ways (income disparity, minorities being shut out) than overt ways (Cliven Bundy, Donald Sterling). Then again, as more of us old white guys wake up and realize that we’re quickly becoming a minority, maybe there will be a gen-u-whine race war.
April 27, 2014 at 9:09 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/opinion/krugman-the-piketty-panic.html