The Raw Truth Of The Political Economy: A Wake Up Call For Everyone...

I thought about calling this a wake up call for America, but that isn't really fair. Most of the problems asphyxiating your own country are having a similar effect within my own shores. It is the problem of power. There is no need within a civilised society for any one individual to have power over any other. It is simply an animalistic throwback to living in the jungle competing for mates. Yes, we must have laws, but since it is everybody's society, it is everybody's responsibility to formulate and enforce those laws. That requires solidarity, not power. Anyway, I'm digressing already, so I'll move on.

The glue binding society together is consumerism. Once upon a time, the economy was built around production, but the industrial revolution reversed that. No longer do we worry about how much can be produced, but rather how much can be consumed. How can we keep people buying things? How can we keep them wanting the latest gizmo or gadget? How can we keep them giving us their power? And when I say power, I mean money. Money is how power is ultimately measured and defined in our world. You might have political power, but who financed your campaign? You might be a rock star and have social power, but who pays you to make records? Thus, when you break the cycle down to its bare essentials, society is a hierarchy of power formed by the people on the bottom (consumers) giving their power to the people on top (shareholders of major corporations, and of course banks, who profit from every financial transaction that occurs).

But there is a problem. People will only keep giving you their power if they think they're getting something in return. Therefore, corporations must keep selling people goods and banks must keep selling people money. So how is it possible to never run out of things to sell? Even when your people are obese from all the different foods they've been stuffing down their throats for the past 30 years, and are still screaming for more food? More fuel for their sports cars? More cheap labour for their call centres and shiny new Nike trainers? Well, that requires expansion of the hierarchy. Other people's resources must then be brought into the equation to balance the deficit, and of course it is only ever a temporary fix. It is the tax bailout for the banks; it is the new trade route for Persian Gulf fuel running through Afghanistan and Iraq; it is the Afghan and Iraq national energy contracts being owned by American companies and it is the expansion of MacDonalds and similar companies into the Middle East and other areas of the world.

So, this is supposed to be a post about politics, right? How is the above made palatable to society by politicians? Those people whose job it is to defend this system of poor people giving their power to rich people. Well, they use all sorts of genius methods of spin of course, and largely control much of the content which appears in traditional media to some extent or another, but the reality is much simpler: total indoctrination. From the time you're dribbling in front of the TV watching your first advert for toys, you're already, unaware to you, being indoctrinated into the same trap your parents fell into, at the same age, possibly via the same medium. You don't question because nobody else questions.

Now, an interesting thing happened in 1991, and that was the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Even more interesting, were the potential opportunities it opened up to the respective Russian and American societies which had both been under incredible financial pressure from an arms race lasting nearly half a century. Of course, many Russian weapons were sold on the black market in the 1990s, because Russian ideological solidarity was done for and the country lay in economic ruin. Thus emerged a new breed of Russian capitalist more comparable with a 1930s Chicago gangster than a New York stockbroker. Nevertheless, many Russians were able to profit from their own country's collapse and these are now its present-day bourgeoisie. I think the Russian example is extreme, because this process of greedy, unscrupulous men and women grabbing power wherever and however they can is usually a much subtler, progressive process. However, my point is that these are the people who rise to the top because they are the people who understand how the system truly works. To be successful you must convince other people to give their power to you. You must convince them you can give them something they want. One of the most tried-and-true methods of achieving this end is to make them afraid and then sell them security.

But what of the US in the aftermath of the Cold War? They won, right? Surely they should be the ones getting rich, instead of the new breed of Russian capitalist shark? Well, one thing became certain, and that's that Russia no longer stood in the way of the Middle East. Not even the gutsiest American president would have launched a direct military incursion into that territory at the height of the Cold War because he'd have been risking all-out nuclear war. Post-1991 however, that area became absolutely free and up for grabs. Not only is it very rich in oil, but more importantly, contains few trade routes which can viably be used to transport that oil to the west. In fact I believe there are only two. The first is through Iran, and the second through Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Well, I think it's quite obvious why America went into Afghanistan and Iraq, and it didn't have anything to do with the people of those countries or helping them. In fact, this belief actually makes me angry because most of Iraq's population were kept without electricity, running water, or sanitary facilities for 6 months following the invasion. It is all about keeping things palatable to the people who are being convinced to give away all their power to just a few men. Thus, absurdly, humanitarian reasons are given for an invasion which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children. Incidentally, in the ten years prior to 2003, the UK and the US were the only nations not in favour of ending UN economic sanctions upon Iraq which ended up killing over a million Iraqis.

I did originally plan to go on, but I feel that I've waffled on for far too long. I feel narcissistic whenever I write a long post. I'll leave it there. The rantings of an insane madman who thinks he's sane and everyone else is crazy.

Peace.