Saturday, April 24, 2010

I got your "Après moi, le déluge" right here, motherfucker.

Well, well, well. I had hardly even just spoken of the devil and it has to drop in to make sure I got it's fucking evil record totally straight.

If you've seen Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story," this particular leak from Sachs might seem in the same bitter flavor as the now-infamous Citibank Memo. (Which, of course, warrants its own discussion.) Or, if you've ever seen the documentary "The Corporation," which makes a brilliant case that corporations themselves are sociopathic in relation to humanity, you might remember the bit with the employees at Enron. (Incidentally I think "The Corporation" makes its case, and makes its case well. If you're not read up on corporate personhood and the 14th Amendment I suggest you do so quickly.)

It ought not come as any sort of surprise. If anything, it ought to come as a clear sign that the citizens of New Jersey should rally outside the Goldman Sachs building and not let any of those bloodsucking sonsofbitches work another day at their sad parasitic excuse for a job.

But then again the implications for this are immense. If one gigantic financial institution - and 6 such institutions have assets equaling 60% of our GNP, so you have to wonder what their influence is like - is parasitic and bloodsucking and essentially a danger to humanity, how many of the other 500 biggest corporations issue memos like this on a daily basis?

You know that the profit you make for your boss at work is just used to invest in machinery that eventually will replace you. Your boss - not the dude just above you making a buck more an hour but the celestial tool in some office a thousand miles away making decisions that will make or break your life - knows it too. It's an idea behind every word and phrase that bastard issues "to" you (more like "at" you) but is hideously clear in the internal correspondence that is passed to and fro from day to day without ever seeing the light of the public.

Such is the insulation that private (read: undemocratic) corporations provide their scheming bureaucratic despots.

This is an age in which Capitalism is king. In which money buys and sells us on a labor market. In which loans and interest rates make or break families. This is a system whose highest echelons are so removed from reality that humanity appears to them only as red ink in the expenses columns of their accounting books. These are the tyrants we allow to set policy and buy and sell entire neighborhoods, if not whole counties and states.

What this leads me to ask of you is precisely this: Question the free market.

Question who it defends, and who defends it. Question the logic of selling your power to work on a market. Question our basis of ownership in this society. Question your conceptions of the people, past and present, who have stood up against this system. But most of all: Question your complacency with it.

Because it's all well and good that The Establishment is beating the war-drums and going after Gold Man-Sacks. The Establishment always finds someone to call naughty and slap on the wrist just to alleviate public discontent. It has to maintain some facade of objectivity or the whole goddamn thing goes to pot, right?

Sure The Establishment will pursue, from time to time, the occasional torture case, or some specific member of the CIA. And the media will call attention to it for a little while, and somebody might get fired, but the whole intent is to Restore Credibility. (Which, let's face it, our government today lacks - whether you're looking from the left or the right.) The United States government has always walked an insanely thin line. And to boot, it's always kept a really firm heel over all its discontent. But increasingly, it's running out of wiggle-room. The late twentieth-century showed some incredibly deft maneuvers. Obama himself was from the outset a wondrously smart choice to nudge towards Presidency.

But reviling Golddigger Sacks to rile support for the financial reform bill (standing at 80% polled support as of this afternoon, I believe) is only going to do so much. The retail property market continues to look shaky, unemployment isn't poised to shrink, and even in the best-case economic scenario climate change is going to render our best laid plans awry.

This is just The Establishment giving the masses another installment of Justice Theater.

How much longer will we suffer it?

EDIT: "Dresden," some of you have asked me, "don't you have a position on SB1070 to share with us?"

"My brothers and sisters and siblings," I have said, "I know nothing better to say than those who have gotten up in the ugly face of capitalist power and spoken themselves."

1 comment:

comrade x said...

My comrade just raised the rudeness bar, but I'm pretty sure I can top " motherfucker". We might have to register as an adult site, Drez.
;^)