- The gathering momentum of protest in the US is charting
new old territory. It is time to reflect on how we got here, says Eric
Walberg...
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- The current crisis of capitalism is textbook Marx. Greedy
capitalists, craven politicians, scheming bankers, dispossessed masses.
It is also textbook Lenin. Imperial wars awakening the masses to revolt
though the days of Lenin's competing empires are over. Rather, we
are all one big happy family, with the exception of a few blaggards who
will soon be "wiped off the map" to misquote a particularly blag
blaggard.
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- Stop! Children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's
goin' down.
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- Yes, we are witnessing a flashback to the heroic days
of real protest in the US , as immortalised by Stephen Stills. A remix
of "For What It's Worth" , which Stills wrote in response to
a Los Angeles Police Department assault on hippies in 1966.
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- We have come a long way since. Long hair and peace signs
have been replaced by pierced tongues and ipads. Looking back from a half
century on, the 1960-70s were the zenith of Western capitalism, a time
of unprecedented freedom and opportunity for young people, a time of liberation
for black Americans, a time when ideas of socialism were discussed heatedly
as a way to move towards a more just world order. And at the same time,
a time of employment and full stomachs. Protesters never had it so good.
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- The ones who set up camp on Wall Street last month have
bleak job prospects, massive debts and empty stomachs. As the culprits,
they are pointing to stockbrokers, with their wild speculative plunges
and surges, orchestrated each day to reap ever heftier commissions, and
bankers, with their trillion-dollar bail-outs and million-dollar bonuses,
as unemployment and economic inequality across the nation skyrocket. One
of the main slogans is "We are the 99%", in contrast to the wealthiest
1% of Americans whose spiritual home is Wall Street. They have already
become a tourist attraction, and have been joined by students, workers
and celebrities in increasing numbers.
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- There's a man with a gun over there tellin' me I got
to beware.
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- Stills was addressing police who wielded batons and arrested
peaceful youth for not conforming to middle class norms. How quaint. Back
then, there were no electric prods and tasers. The smiling Jimmy Carter
had yet to sign off on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, set up
to maintain "the continuity of government" (COG) during a national
security emergency, inspired by his National Security Council members
Samuel ("clash of civilizations") Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Protesters didn't face Bush-Obama era state-sponsored torture and even
assassination if they called for revolution or an end to empire.
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- There's battle lines bein' drawn.
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- After the hysteria of McCarthyism, suddenly in the early
1960s there were sane voices like Linus Pauling -- even a president (till
he was assassinated) -- calling for the dismantling of the Cold War paranoia.
1966 witnessed Johnson's "Great Society" welfare programme. The
youth of the 1960-70s were empowered, drew a line and engaged in battle
for peace, finally bringing an end to the hated Vietnam nonwar (OK, the
Vietnamese resistance, the Soviet Union and China may have had some role).
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- It was from then on that things went downhill in America
. By the late 1970s, along with FEMA, the policy of using Islamists to
fight the Communists was put into high gear in Pakistan/ Afghanistan, a
policy which indeed succeeded in bringing the Soviet Union down, and just
as important for the empire quashed the dreams of those youth intent on
fighting capitalism, with its inevitable according to that dusty
old Lenin drive for empire.
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- All such thoughts have long been banished in today's
Brave New World. Conventional economic wisdom today reads like a self-congratulatory
textbook written by neoliberals, who came to prominence in the 1980s and
morphed into neocons in the 1990s. But then came 2008 and the new old Wall
Street crash.
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- The textbook for today is an angry, polemical one that
must pay tribute to Marx's Kapital, which insisted "dogmatically"
that all along capitalism was fated to continue its march towards greater
and greater crises, grasping at war and state terror as the best way to
destroy excess production and keep the wage-slaves in line.
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- It confirms Marx's insight that pseudo-democracy could
never address the endemic underlying crises of capitalism effectively.
The February 2003 protest in Rome against the impending invasion of Iraq
even made the 2004 Guinness Book of World Records as the largest anti-war
rally in history (three million). Ninety per cent of Italians were against
it. The result? Italian troops were dutifully sent to help the US occupy
Iraq. Meanwhile, Italian politics continued its descent into a moral cesspool,
prompting the Vatican to denounce Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's orgies
with teenage girls as "not only contrary to public decorum but also
intrinsically wretched and empty".
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- Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
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- The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, taking their inspiration
from the Arab Spring, erupted after it became clear that the entire edifice
pasted together by Carter-Reagan-Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama is a fraud.
These politicians cover the entire spectrum of US politics today, from
liberal and neoliberal to neoconservative, and they are all equally helpless
to change the trajectory of a system out of control.
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- Perhaps the fatal step that sealed the its fate was a
seemingly innocuous reform bill signed by Bill Clinton in 2000, the Commodities
Futures Modernization Act, deregulating the derivatives markets and credit-default
swaps, a parting gift to his banker friends. But, we can dust off Lenin's
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalist and read there that international
banks naturally become a supranational force under imperialism, and strive
to control all politics.
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- Fast forward a century, and Enron would go on to become
the largest corporate fraud in history. Washington would become unashamedly
captive to Wall Street. The era of "casino capitalism" and the
new old war against Islam unfolded, with no effective voice of opposition,
despite all the democratic claptrap. The banks made their grab for total
economic (and political) control, moving from 2.4% of the 1950 GNP, when
Truman campaigned against them as "bloodsuckers", to 8.5% by
2010, when Obama bailed them out to the tune of trillions of dollars. Remember,
they essentially produce nothing, and if nationalised, would get 0.01%
of GNP.
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- The result was that by 2010 America 's richest 20% had
amassed 87 per cent of the nation's wealth. Imagine five people; one gets
almost 90% of the pie, three get about 3% each, and one gets 1%. How big
is one per cent of a pie? How long can that unfortunate 20%-guy survive
on a crumb?
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- Young people speaking their minds.
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- A thousand people in the street singin' songs and carrying
signs.
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- Hence, Occupy Wall Street, which has spread like wildfire
to a 1,400 cities across the US and hundreds more around the world, and
still counting. On 15 October, millions of newly energised citizens around
the world will be out on the streets. After all, in the era of globalisation,
"we are all Americans now", or rather "all shafted now".
While Obama is surely the brightest of the presidential lot since Stills
wrote his classic, whatever textbook he is reading from belongs in the
shredder.
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- It's time we stop.
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- ***
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- Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/
You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/ His new old economic primer
Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games is available at
http://claritypress.com/Walberg.html
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