April 3, 2012
By Kurt Jacobsen & Sayeed Hasan Khan

“MADNESS in individuals is something rare,” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche noted, “but in groups, peoples, parties, ages it is the rule.”

Nietzsche, who himself went crazy from trying to look at life without illusions, had a point. Gaze at the deranged American scene today and it is starkly clear that what US elites most richly deserve as rewards for their recent activities is straitjackets.

American elites and not just the gibbering array of Republican presidential candidates demonstrate daily that they are as unmoored from common reality as the powdered wig French aristocracy before 1789.

Can sane human beings believe that this protracted and unnecessary recession can be remedied by picking the pockets of wage-earners through cuts in services, benefits and employment? Can one really solve the grotesque financial crimes that devastated western economies by rewarding Wall Street con artists such as Goldman Sachs with bailouts and appointing their minions to key government posts?

Can one truly improve democracy by encouraging billionaires to buy up the legislature? Can you create stability in the Middle East by turning a blind eye to Israeli behaviour and obsessively threaten military action against a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons capacity? Is repeating the Iraq catastrophe in Iran really such a good idea for the victim or the perpetrator?

Are escalating oil and food prices — which commodity index speculators relentlessly stoke — a welcome sign of growth, as mainstream media lamely assert? Can you call anything growth that raises stock prices for the wealthy who overwhelmingly own stocks, but depresses wages, degrades jobs and cuts the purchasing power of average consumers? Is a foreign policy stance truly cautious that views every imaginary threat by an independent oil-producing nation as a compulsory reason for war? Can you protect cherished American civil liberties by stripping them all away, as is the case with Bush’s Patriot Act and the new National Defence Authorisation Act.

It no longer seems to matter to the powerful people even to pretend to care about what the hard-pressed majority wants — which according to polls is single-payer national healthcare, jobs programmes, a return to free or low-cost public education, a restoration of taxes on the rich, the break-up and regulation of too-big-too-fail financial behemoths, and a sensible foreign policy.

The political game has been intricately rigged over many decades to produce outcomes the lofty one per cent desire. Indeed, virtually all the fruits of hard work (93 per cent of increased productivity) in the US flow into the pockets of the top one per cent — just like in a banana republic. Americans work harder and longer not to improve their own lives but to plump up the assets of
the super-wealthy. Don’t you have to be crazy not to see it?

The answer is ‘no’ if you own or work for American banks, Wall Street firms, arms industries, energy giants, insurance companies or the burgeoning homeland security racket who all benefit mightily from these short-term profit-boosting policies.

Short-term thinking is perfectly rational for the single-minded looters, but ultimately it is a flawed pursuit in a world full of other ‘players’ who are harmed and will react.

The answer also is ‘no’ if you are an ordinary American Tea Party fan — on the wane — believing in the outpour of neoliberal ‘free-market’ pieties and the anti-terrorist propaganda choking the air waves.

It wasn’t always this way in the US. President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s stated the credo that Americans embraced since the Second World War: “This nation is mighty enough, its society healthy enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the
world while still building a great society here at home.” During those war years US (mostly white) workers’ living standards rose 50 per cent, and industry profits, despite tough controls and steep taxation, shot up far faster.

The American middle class, and a regulated consumer society, was born in spite of industrial and financial tycoons who naturally launched a vast propaganda campaign after the war to grab all the credit for prosperity. Cold War arms spending kept
the economy rolling.

In the 1960s, poverty fell a bit but was not wiped out as President Johnson intended, because an expanding Vietnam War began hoovering up every spare federal cent. The Vietnam War did not bring as much prosperity. High-tech weapons require less
labour. Johnson had not made the right choice. Yet nothing seemed more apparent to US citizens than that elites, who detest welfare, are all too delighted to channel tax dollars to glut corporate coffers. So wars, until lately, augured full employment.

And for tycoons war still entails government-guaranteed profits, which is why there is such a belligerent foreign policy.

For higher circles, and those who aspire to join them, international relations is a theatrical game in which the players can prosper even when losing the match. The late John Kenneth Galbraith commented in the 1990s on the “recreational character of American foreign policy” for out-of-touch elites.

Choices between pursuing prosperity at home and grandiose goals abroad were made and they came out in favour of the former. Federal aid to cities, universities, and welfare uses fell, as did taxes on the rich.

No one has yet been indicted for Wall Street’s crimes, nor any Bush administration member prosecuted for the multitude of deceits that led to the Iraq invasion, while one Occupy Wall Street protester spent three weeks in jail just for scribbling on the
sidewalk.

The public is wising up. Two-thirds of Americans according to the Pew Research Centre recognise today that there is an outright conflict between the rich and poor. Obama has done nothing yet to show he is on the side of the so-called 99 per cent. This
spring the Occupy Wall Street movement promises to be very lively and interesting indeed.

The writers authored Parables of Permanent War.
-Dawn