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Now
It's hard as hell to keep conspiracy
theories out of one's mind these days. And I'm not talking about
"Who really brought down the Twin Towers? or the "Are
Zionists behind the Iraq War?" kind of stuff. Both camps
are pretty clearly dug in into their hardened bunkers on those
issues. But the booger stalking my ragged old mind these days
puts both of those in the shade because of its sheer scale. And
it runs like this:
Is the consumerist totalization of this country and the world
really a conscious plot by a handful of powerful corporate and
financial masters? If we answer "yes" we find ourselves
trundled off toward the babbling ranks of the paranoid. Still
though, it's easy enough to name those who would piss themselves
with joy over the prospect of a One World corporate state, with
billions of people begging to work for their 1,500 calories a
day and an xBox chip in their necks. It's too bad our news media
quit hunting with live ammo decades ago, leaving us with no one
to track the activities and progress of what sure as hell seem
to be global elites, judging from the financial spoor we find
along every pathway of modern life.
In our saner moments we can also see that it does not take dark
super-centralized plotting to pull off what appears to have been
accomplished. Even without working in overt concert, a few thousands
of dedicated individual corporate and financial interests can
constitute a unified pathogenic whole, much the same as individual
cells create a viable dominant colony of malignant organisms
-- malignant simply by their anti-human, anti-societal nature.
We don't see GM, Halliburton, Burger King and CitiBank lobbying
the state for universal health or clean rivers, do we? But mention
unions or living wages, and the financial colony within our national
Petri dish shape shifts into a Gila monster and squirts venom
on the idea and shits money all over Capitol Hill. I looked at
all this as coincidence for years until the proposition finally
strained credulity so much that I threw in the towel and said,
"Fuck it. There is only so much coincidence to go around
in this world."
Put another way, the global decision makers, international planners,
financial institutions, political parties, media conglomerates,
corporations, banks, a hegemonic, accumulative bloc working in
concert to coordinate the extraction of wealth from first and
third world alike. A series of privately held international institutions
to which and from which money can be moved to leverage nations
and populations according to their needs is probably gonna do
just that because they can. National territory doesn't mean shit
to such people, and those who govern said territory mean even
less, except to the extent they can obstruct or incite resistance.
People like Castro and Chavez. But even they are they are just
the thorn in the lion's paw.
Consider this: The war in Iraq has been immensely profitable
for the people who make weapons and for the contractors who supposedly
rebuild what the weapons destroy. They profit in either case.
And the longer war goes on the more they will make.
Meanwhile, the money for both is obtained through extraction
practiced upon the world's laboring poor. But the big money,
the "juice" as street people used to say, comes from
squeezing the orange of American society for more work, more
production and tax money. Some of us older oranges are feeling
pretty wrung out these days and are getting hard as hell to get
along with. Yet, the squeeze doesn't seem to bother most Americans
at all. The pressure has been so great and so constant that no
one any longer feels it. It has become so pervasive as to be
incomprehensible to ordinary people. For example, seventy cents
of every income-tax dollar goes to pay for past, present, and
future wars. Education gets two cents. As Michael Parenti has
pointed out, the cost of military aircraft parts and ammunition
kept in storage by the Pentagon is greater than the combined
federal spending on pollution control, conservation, community
development, housing, occupational safety, and mass transportation
all put together. And the US Navy spends more money in its never
ending development of a submarine rescue vehicle than is spent
for public libraries, occupational safety, and daycare centers
combined.
Collectively, these financial super-elites, who either do or
do not exist, must be at least somewhat aware that they are managing
the world. Otherwise, why would we have Davos conferences and
such? Global financial conferences where the likes of Bill Clinton
and Al Gore and John Kerry are merely the entertainment, mere
proof of the attendants' prestige? Can it be true that the world's
real players practically yawned at Alan Greenspan's cryptic little
speeches while waiting for the backstage action with the real
movers and shakers from Goldman, Citibank and others, none of
whom we have ever heard of but never the less are said to account
for the drop in gas prices in the U.S. just prior to the 2006
mid-term elections? Word has it that they changed the index last
July so oil futures holders would be forced to dump in October
and November, creating a mild glut during the elections. If that
is true, then we can probably thank them for that Dow 12,000
last month too.
Meanwhile, back in Camp Davos, the lustful, pathologically approval
seeking, bright student teddy bear from Hope, Arkansas expounds
and entertains the new global elites. And everyone has Beluga
caviar and chopped hardboiled quail eggs afterward, even as more
than one billion people live on less than one dollar a day. "And
have you tried the unborn calf veal poached in Peruvian sheep's
milk at the Swisse Bank suite? It's to die for!" Nobody
is remotely worried about blowback from that billion people eating
moldy cassava or rat urine polluted rice, because poverty, well,
poverty is not threat, is it? Just a source of cheaper labor.
"Now, about the oil crude taps and NYMEX . . . "
Personally, I've decided they are real and that they constitute
an unseen class, and that they are mid-stage in becoming the
most powerful class the earth has ever seen. One that American
politicians not only refuse to publicly acknowledge, but when
pressed, flatly swear does not exist. Show me the Republican
or Democratic leader who says, "Politics is economics by
other means, and our own Federal Reserve Bank is a privately
held institution, not a governmental one, and is an interlocking
part of the global financial network which owes allegiance to
no country or ordinary citizens, regardless of nationality."
Or, "My corporate campaign contributions come from people
whose every action is directed at extracting two things from
you, my dear voter: Your money and the cheapest possible labor
you can be driven to provide. The absolute cheapest possible
payment to you for the hours of your life consumed by work, which,
depending upon the degree of your delusion, is called either
a job or an exciting career."
No American politician is going to admit that. You must go to
Venezuela or the smoldering dumps of Manilla or fields of Chiapas
to hear that sort of truth.
Admittedly, there is at least some reason for fear among these
elites. The US economy, the real material economy, is dreadfully
weak, having been so gutted by parasitic speculation. The only
source of strength left here is the military, which is currently
at play in an effort to gain control over the world's energy
supply, and make damned sure no one gets any funny ideas about
using anything but dollars in trading oil. But the real players
say, "Well then, let the Americans keep it if they can!
If the U.S. loses, then someone else wins. No matter. We can
leverage our position form any emerging market point on the globe.
And doesn't China look like a real comer, old boy! History is
long. The Chinese understand that." Thus we find the Chinese
creating joint American holding companies to buy up commercial
US real estate at bottom dollar after the crash. At some future
point it could neatly offset their current loans to US for more
consumption of Chinese goods. And if the Americans get too pissy,
the Chinese can always turn off the money spigot.
On the other hand, this monstrous class of parasites has not
yet won over the entire world. America seems to be their only
complete victory, and that one will hold only as long as superheated
consumption can be sustained. They have only been at it for maybe
forty years, and are still pouring the foundation for the global
gulag, setting the rules as they go. And they are hitting at
least a few speed bumps: "Why is Castro still stinking up
the joint, fer godzsake? And now we've got that friggin mexi-nigger
dwarf Evo Morales in his goddamned stinky little dime store sweater
strutting around like he was president or something. And why
inna hell hasn't somebody smoked these bastards? Doesn't the
CIA do anything for their paychecks anymore?"
Probably not. Last we heard the CIA was sidelined, sent to the
benches until they come up with those goddamned weapons of mass
destruction.
Meanwhile, a Chinese economist calculates the US trade deficit.
A Swisse Bank exec orders another bottle of wine, and a Shia
youth receives instruction in how to blow up an oil pipeline.
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