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The State and Imperialism in 2009

by I. Langalibalele

Please take a look at the powerful observation from writer Matt Taibbi that I’ve posted below. Especially take note of the sentence within the *stars*. I've added the "stars" to show emphasis and to highlight that section.

"As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. *There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.* In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below."

~ Matt Taibbi

The Big Takeover
Mar 19, 2009

Courtesy, Jawanza Diame

What is going on with President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan? If we can take the word of economists like Paul Krugman and others, the government needs to wait out this period of “financial crisis” because it will stabilize over the next nine months or so. However, Obama continues to push for the so-called bank bail outs, which are nothing more than massive giveaways to the already filthy rich financial sector.

The US government want absolute authority. It seeks absolute authority under the cover of democracy to carry out the most inhuman agenda in history. It wants the ability to implement its agenda under the cover of law, based upon the assumption that elected lawmakers can pass legislation that supports the most extreme goals of international finance.

This is apparent from watching trends over the last thirty years. Over this period, leaders from Reagan on thru Obama have raped public assets to fill the pockets of international bankers and other corporate financiers.

In the effort to strip down the State to its basic, fundamental soulless shell, US presidents have auctioned off, sold, or outright given the banks trillions of dollars. They are depleting the public coffers to enrich the already wealthy. Meantime, the educational system suffers, no plan for children’s health care exists, and the State wants more prisons. Because prisoners can be put to work for three hots and a cot, and fascism functions on that principle.

They have used the excuse that there is a banking crisis. Simultaneously, the banks line their pockets, the pockets of their investors, and buy up other financial assets. The banks also line their pockets with the money looted from homeowners. No consumer protection laws have shielded the working class -- the middle class has enuf education to understand fine print, or to hire a lawyer to do it for them -- from the bloodsucking banks. No laws have protected the workers stock-based retirement plans. And with the State giving money to the banks, there will be nothing left for workers who reach retirement age in this country. After all, who will be foolish enuf to invest in the financial schemes that have ripped off workers across this country?

If the bankers were operating honestly, the banks would never have sunk. It is because of their rapine greed and thirst for power that the banks have collapsed. It is not because credit has dried up, but because so much money has become concentrated in so few hands that this situation exists. Without the banks and the culture of bloodsucking greed, society might have a chance to discover its humanity. Yet the State anticipates everything necessary to prevent that.

Anytime real wages have not kept pace with inflation, anytime the US worker labors for more hours than his counterpart in other industrial workers, anytime that worker recedes into debt to maintain a house, automobile and the regular things in life, that is because cash has dried up on the street. It has dried up because the financiers have concentrated 80% of it in their own hands. Seven or eight percent of all people control 80% of all the money. Which means that the remaining 83% of the population must fight over the few dollars left.

So while Obama has joked about bailing out the auto industry, he continues to push the argument that society cannot survive without the banks. He may as well deride joblessness, which hits double digits in the African community. But the auto industry produces a product. The banks do not. Paper money is not a product with any intrinsic value whatsoever.

Why is the State giving even more money to the banks, when the government owes the banks over $10 trillion? The State can seize the banks and liquidate the debt. That makes more sense.

That is what the State did with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It wanted to control the oil and the opium, so it invaded those countries. Seventy-five percent of Iraqi oil ends up on the black market; opium production has skyrocketed since the US occupation of Afghanistan. The dope ends up here. Profits from the blackmarket oil ends up in the hands of the CIA and the international financiers. These monies are used to destabilize governments and societies, including US society.

So the State ought to invade Wall Street and take it over completely. However, the State seeks to strip away all the benefits US workers have provided for this society. The State aims to strip down Social Security, pensions, health care and transform this country into a backwater of reaction. It can only achieve this by supporting the banks. In doing so, the strategy has been to give away public sector assets from cash grants to public lands.

The international financiers control the most reactionary sector of capitalism. They fuel wars all over the globe. They finance wars; they finance coups d’etat; they finance assassinations of men like Salvador Allende and Maurice Bishop. They want to transform revolutionary Cuba into a whorehouse and a den of vice. They want the world for their playground while creating misery and instability for billions of people in every single country.

The United States is rapidly moving towards fascism. It is repeating all the steps and turns that Germany and Italia made in the years preceding World War II. The marginalized right-wing has become more shrill and obstructionist, and the Obama Administration appears like the Weimar Republic, granting concessions to the enemies of the people, international finance. If this trend continues, in four more years there will be a firestorm in this country. People need to take the war to the financiers. We do not have time to wait.