Our political class, full of optimism, themselves, and tipping the next election or poll in their favor, has been on the Mother of All Campaign Trails to assure us the economy is on the mend, has dodged the bullet, has rounded the corner, is showing signs of revitalization ... you've heard it ad nauseum. Maybe you are encouraged by it. Maybe you are knowing more and more people who just got laid off.
It's probably an article of faith that the political class speak with such optimism. It keeps us from getting anxious. It can also forestall the revolution.
But what did the Romans say as their empire withered away? What pronouncements did the Egyptians utter as they went from being a mighty, African empire to a ward of Rome? What of the Spanish, whose power and wealth pinnacled until England blew its armada into the channel. The British Empire colored a fourth of the globe in red, the sun never setting, and Churchill swore he did not become the king's first minister to dismantle the empire.
For all Winston's bluster, he lost; the empire won ... its independence, that is. India started the dominoes. Vietnam kicked the French, then the United States of America, out. And Fidel still lives.
None of them admitted that the sun was setting on their reigns and rules. None.
So why should the US in particular and the West in general be any different?
What if the promised jobs weren't coming back? What if the economy we have now is the new "normal," the new baseline?
The US economy is not, after all, like the seasons, where a brutal summer folds into a gentle fall, then a turbulent winter, but spring is around the corner. The globe is littered with the artifacts of civilizations risen and fallen and buried under the foliage.
Rather that look back soberly at these fallen, our tenured moralists in high academe whisper that sodomites brought down Rome. Egypt, Spain, France, the United Kingdom are rarely assessed at all, which may be because they are too close for comfort.
The thesis that this is as good as it gets comes not from what is plain as the nose on your face, as well as the state of our neighborhoods, cities, and public services, but also from the busy ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.
According to the $ multi-billion port, its top imports include crude oil, electronics, plastic goods, furniture, and clothing.
Fine.
According to the port, its main exports include petroleum coke, refined petroleum, waste paper, foods, chemicals.
Now, this port along with Los Angeles, is one of the busiest in the world: top five. It clearly shows what is happening to our economy. We are importing billions in manufactured goods - stuff we enjoy, our toys, our comforts, our beds, desks, computers, iPhones; while we are exporting our trash and agri-business produce.
Does a country tending to this really need legions of inner-city kids to go to college, let alone complete high school? Do we need so many managers and white collars except to manage and discipline wage-slaves?
No.
The sun will have reached its pinnacle and began its steady descent with this awesome trend, which flies in the face of our political optimism about the next fiscal quarter.
So we must re-organize if we are to save our civilization. The catastrophes in Haiti and Chile should demonstrate that we are loathe to dismantle any of our public services and infrastructure: Monsanto will not warm us, and Archer Daniels Midland will not feed us if some natural or supernatural disaster befalls us. They aren't now.
This re-organization can only be orchestrated and directed by government, accountable to the public and not shareholders. This re-organization points to that bogeyman of the Reagan revolutionists: central planning. And this dismisses to the trash pile of history their magic of the marketplace with its water torturing trickle-down economics.
Civilization is at stake, not just the cause of socialism, which I firmly believe is the way. I am not so full of Churchillian bluster as to think we are exceptional, we are unique in not being buried by history. And I know the examples of our economic system do not find or wage-slaves exceptional but expendable and will, at the downturn of a fiscal quarter, bury us in the present!
No comments:
Post a Comment