Unlike Marx, Michael Moore is not a revolutionary, or even proactive, but he is a dedicated and concerned citizen, with a tripod and a camera. And I respect that because I believe he is a patriot at heart. Although I agree with his statements that any decent society is based on democratic decision making and a good deal of ethics, I think his explanation for how the financial crisis happened is entirely simplistic, and even downright stupid. His critique of America's political economy does not nearly go far enough because he is on the wrong trail, and telling the story from a confused point of view. His criticism of Wall St., in short, completely misses the mark.
Moore, along with many liberals, still sticks to the myth that the free market created this crisis, and that the deregulation frenzy that preceded the crisis is the main reason why we are where we are. These critics, who are unable to flex their minds, don't bother to take a look at the Federal Reserve and its role in the economic crisis. Moore criticizes voodoo economists Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, but he still unquestionably accepts their participation in the Obama administration, believing in good faith that they will fix the mess that they helped create. He thinks they are like children who will clean up after themselves, and the dramatic irony in that nonsensical logic is alone worth another Oscar nomination.
Besides his humor, Moore's commentary on politics and economics is incredibly painful to watch. He naively assumes that America's hijacked economy falls under the normal operating procedure of capitalism, but what actually exists in America is a highly subverted form of capitalism. Despite his intellectual deficiencies and child-like faith in the current President, I still must praise Michael Moore for being even half-aware and half-active. In our depoliticized culture it is a high accomplishment to speak anything political and be heard, let alone consistently for twenty years, which Moore has done.
To tell the truth, I am not completely sold on the libertarian idea that regulation should be avoided at all costs. But installing new regulations is not imperative to a sound economic system. The laws on the books were not followed, and that is the main problem. I think some areas of economic life needs to be regulated and some areas should be left alone, but before all of that is decided, power needs to be placed back in the appropriate hands, which is the people. As German philosopher Theodor Adorno said, it all depends on "who regulates whom." In our lost world, private banks and corporations control the regulatory powers of the State and use it for their own further enrichment. To view them as capitalists is the gravest mistake the Left can make at this point in history.
Moreover, commentators who attribute the collapse of the American banking system last fall to capitalism's internal logic ignore the fact that capitalism has not existed in America for many, many years. Modern leftists argue that socialism wasn't truly practiced by the former Soviet system, and they are right, so why do they make the mistake in believing the United States propaganda that its economic system is capitalistic? They claim that those who put aside free enterprise as the culprit for the crisis are apologists for the status quo. But they fail to correctly identify the economic model of the status quo. Since the 1930's America's economic model has taken on the worst aspects of capitalism and communism, or what is known as economic fascism. Fascism, the marriage between the Corporation and the State, was ordained in hell, otherwise known as World War II, and was never meant to be a brief engagement. Defeating Hitler's Army was the first act for America's fascist regime, but the story didn't end with Hiroshima.
II.
Before going any more forward, a clear definition of economic fascism is needed. Historian Thomas DiLorenzo sums up the whole affair of economic fascism pretty clearly, writing: "The whole idea behind collectivism in general and fascism in particular is to make citizens subservient to the state and to place power over resource allocation in the hands of a small elite." It doesn't matter who made the initial political proposal, because both sectors of power have lived happily ever after. In the past sixty years, a perfect world for the elite has been created, and a lost world for the stuttering people, whose loyalty to party politics can be compared with a child's loyalty to his favorite wrestler. The made for TV politicians appear to persuade the public that the election system still retains a democratic character, all the while the electoral process has been circumvented by what professor Bertram Gross called "faceless oligarchs." In his excellent and illuminating book, "Friendly Fascism," Gross writes:
The more that people are encouraged to "throw the rascals out," the more their attention is diverted from other rascals that are not up for election: the leaders of macrobusiness, the ultra-rich, and the industrial-military-police-communications-health-welfare complex. Protests channeled completely into electoral processes tend to be narrowed down, filtered, sterilized, and simplified so that they challenge neither empire nor oligarchy. (1).
An anti-Establishment coalition, called for by Gross, has yet to emerge, but there are inklings that the alienated majority can come together at last, rehabilitate the Constitution, and change the current regime in power. As it is now, national villains still occupy the minds of most citizens, whose engagement with the world of ideas consists very little of reading history, philosophy or classical literature, areas of knowledge that can help readjust a person's conception of reality and give them an intellectual maturity, which is badly needed before any revolutionary middle can be fully realized.
The reality of life currently presented by the facade that is called News, which has come to stand for "Never Entertain the Wrong Story," can be accurately visualized as a matrix of lies and propaganda. There isn't a better metaphor than the Matrix to help explain to brainwashed people what is real and what is fake in politics, and because it is a popular cultural reference rather than another example of academic jargon, people immediately identify with their own previous situation and adjust to the new version of events. Nightly News, and every other kind, has kept the public from seeing the bigger picture, only providing them with little tidbits of information, which is not enough for people to make a thoughtful decision about political matters. This type of intellectual neglect leaves them stranded in their homes, without understanding the real story at the end of the night.
I don't consider myself a storyteller, but simply a young man with confused thoughts and a blog, however, from reading history and present day commentary about the state of our troubled world, I can say confidently what I think the real story is today. In sum, the entire push for Fascism by the ruling elite was their political revenge against the victories achieved by the lower and middle classes in the nineteenth and twentieth century, which were largely aided by technological and scientific advancements, and some social justice legislation. The fact that the Earth has undergone severe changes is giving these oligarchs a cause to fight for; the Environment. And they regard the peasants of the world as undeserving trespassers.
Most Americans have missed the story of Fascism in America because the seminal events that brought this new structure of power into being happened without any interruption in their daily lives. In Nazi Germany, Hitler's arrival signaled a fascist turn, and the same was true for Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain, but America's grand architects have been far less visible. In fact, the financial elite's very existence is questioned to this day, after so much pillaging of the American public's wealth. Cultural historian Paul Fussell describes the invisibility of 'top-out-of-sights' in the American class landscape, comparing them with the bottom poor, who are invisible for other reasons. In his book "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System" Fussell highlights the similarities between the underclass and the ultra elite in America:
Just as the tops are hidden away on their islands or behind the peek-a-boo walls of their distant estates, the bottoms are equally invisible, when not put away in institutions or claustrated in monasteries, lamaseries, or communes, then hiding from creditors, deceived bail-bondsmen, and gulled merchants intent on repossessing cars and furniture. (2).
Fussell tackles the customs and appearances of class differences, avoiding analysis of the economic warfare in American politics. Any mention of class war and you're immediately tagged with a Marxist or communist label, but as intellectuals we must overcome this historical hurdle and call a spade a spade, regardless of our class orientation. To be frank, I don't view myself as part of any class, but I consider that way of looking at myself as a poetic delusion, because both of my parents have each worked two jobs for most of their lives, and we live from paycheck to paycheck, like millions of other people.
Cultural critic Benjamin DeMott, author of Whitewash as public service: How The 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation, wrote in his book The Imperial Middle that we need to clear up the long-sustained myth that America is a classless society, and address inequality with purpose. Demott says:
Commitment to the legend of the average American as unfettered chooser makes it impossible for the state to take adequate account of the complex actualities of a class society. More than once in recent times the resulting state-administered class injustice has been not less than appalling in its human cost." (3).
Two current examples that reveal state-administered class injustice are the poverty draft for the Wars overseas, and the effects of the financial crisis. According to Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad, the Bank mortgage swindle is bankrupting the Black middle class. In their article, they write:
Black unemployment is now at 14.7%, compared to 8.7% for whites. In New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that of whites. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that 40% of African Americans will have experienced unemployment or underemployment by 2010, and this will increase child poverty from one-third of African-American children to slightly over half.
The decline of the Black middle class is part of the overall collapse of the American middle class. Elizabeth Warren, who serves on the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bailouts, warns in her presentation "The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class"( available on youtube) that American society is going from a three-tier society to a largely two-tier society, consisting of the very rich and the very poor, who will find it harder to get out of debt. Although I fault the Fascist State's economic and foreign policy for this development, the American people have not been totally wholesome either. Edward Harrison of the website Credit Writedowns sums up the illusions ordinary Americans held in the country's recurring booms and busts in the last thirty years:
Even though the gulf between rich and poor was widening and the rich were getting richer, we thought we too were getting richer as well. We thought that we too were profiting from all of this “productivity.” In the 1980s, we came out of a steep double dip recession and stagflation and we won the cold war. This inflated our sense of well-being. In the 1990s, there was the tech bubble to inflate our assets. In this decade, there was the housing bubble. So, we thought we were getting rich too. We didn’t mind that the ruling class was benefiting disproportionately as long as we too appeared to be benefiting.
The aggressive wars overseas also serve a domestic purpose, which is to funnel the remaining unemployed to the military sector. Military recruits target neighborhoods where job unemployment and the high school dropout rate are both high, and make promises of future opportunities to hopeless young people. But they skip over the fact that less than 20% of soldiers who complete four years of military duty ever receive funding for education, or that the job training offered in the military does not provide the required skills to become successful in the workforce. Unless you decide to become a youth-bashing fascist policeman. The Fascist State is constantly in need of more drones so there is always an opening in that line of work. "Tyrants," said Murray Rothbard, "live in constant and perpetual fear of the well-deserved hatred they know is borne them by every one of their subjects."
III.
Modern totalitarianism feeds on fabricated military threats from abroad and a large pool of labor at home. The fascist's revenge would not have been possible without the military. In fact, the military and security personnel are one of the principal characters in this revenge story. Professor of economics, Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, writes in his book The Political Economy of U.S Militarism:
Higgs, again, says: "military-economic fascism, by empowering and enriching wealthy, intelligent, and influential members of the public, removes them from the ranks of potential opponents and resisters of the state and thereby helps to perpetuate the state's existence and its intrinsic class exploitation of people outside the state." The unclassified characters who appear in the background of this revenge story are the slaves, most of whom believe they are intrinsically free human beings, and the unwilling slaves who make up an army but are without generals to lead them. And it is unfortunate because Americans are not a cowardly people; they were once liberty's most dedicated warriors. Indeed, America's lower classes have not always been this frozen and quiet, the country's labor history is the most violent of any country in the world.
In the past sixty years, however, our political world has become very rigid. Any sort of political spontaneity, with the exception of Ron Paul's presidential campaign in 2008 and George McGovern's run in 1972, has been missing in the people. German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno captured the sense of powerlessness in people in modern totalitarian states in his essay on the ideas of the historian Oswald Spengler. Adorno writes, "Spengler's prophecy for the smaller states is beginning to be fulfilled in men themselves, even in the citizens of the largest and most powerful states. Thus, history seems to have been extinguished. All events are things that happen to men, not things they bring about themselves, " (5). Adorno's analysis was right on the mark, but the ongoing political awakening is beginning to change things, hopefully, for the better. Despite my hopes, however, I know we are still limited in our fight against tyranny, because of the massive propaganda crusades organized through the corporate media and the government. In the so called green revolution in Iran, the discontent of the Iranian people was converted into political capital for the former prime minister Mousavi, whose affiliation with Western intelligence agencies is suspect. Likewise, the hijacked tea party movement in America is transforming unsuspecting conservatives once more into political pawns, and turning their post-bailout rage into controlled political energy for the corporate titans.
In both cases, the essential thing to know is not so much who is telling the story, although that is important, but how the story is being told in the public arena. With the advent of twitter and cell phones, the first man to hit the button literally tells the story, and whoever does, can manipulate future events pretty shockingly. We live in a historical epoch in which political lies can get inside the public mind with exceptional ease, and the advancements of propaganda techniques allow for lies to even time travel and change the past version of events. (Okay, I may have exaggerated a bit in that last part, but it is not far-fetched to suggest that modern states use history as a political weapon.)
Political manipulation of events is, of course, not a unique phenomenon in history, but in our lost world, lies have become so successful that people call any alternative version of events a conspiracy theory. The Soros and Rockefellers of the world are cast aside as generous statesmen who fund various charities and organizations without a political agenda. These characters are mere drop-ins in the story; they are guest stars who have no political weight on the set. But the exact opposite is true. In fact, these characters essentially own the set. To poison-fed intellectuals, however, the shadowy Bilderberg Group doesn’t have any social or political influence. No, not at all, how could they? And the idea that they may have a class interest and protect it rigorously in their field of work is not even broached.
That political and economic events are orchestrated, or at least shaped, by a ruling, fascist elite, should not be a bitter bill to swallow for anyone, since throughout history there has existed a struggle between the very, very wealthy and the rest of society. "Events," as Adorno writes, "are the private affairs of the oligarchs and their assassins," (6). So to regard the developments in our day as new revelations is not entirely right, but it is true that the unveiling of modern politics has pushed the world into uncharted territory. Although this is a good sign, ignorance is still very rampant in every corner of the organized political spectrum. Conservatives, along with their liberal counterparts, have surrendered their political spontaneity without knowing it, each to their separate propaganda channels on the radio and television, and unfaithful party machines.
The neutered Left's messiah fully supports the Too Big to Jail program, which bails out banks whose history of insider trading and manipulation of markets is rarely brought up. Obama's administration has proposed to bail out Wall St. at every turn. This is the same one way street that has robbed the country blind. The heist was literally done at gun point. Former CEO of Goldman Sachs Henry Paulson managed to get Congress to hand over any power they thought they still had. Today, after stealing billions of dollars from the American people, Goldman Sachs is paying just $14 million in taxes.
For all his Messiah persona, Obama is not messianic about anything that matters to the majority of the people. His fist bumps with the insiders of Washington and Wall St. will forever taint his post-Washington career. But we should not be surprised if he falls as rapidly as he climbed. He is meant to be the disappointed one rather than the appointed one. Although his administration will use Bush as a scapegoat, as Bush used Bin Laden, to avoid any overt criticism for his economic and foreign policy, his downfall will be his own doing, because he has personally endorsed the bailout of the private thieves and the militarism of the war corporations and the Pentagon.
Obama is the model-home of presidents, he's very presentable and proper, but he's not the real thing, and inside is where all the dirt is. And he is not the most powerful man in the free world, rather, he is the front man for the sideshow. His appearance at the model UN the other day is supposed to raise his profile as the model citizen of the world, but rather than accomplishing that, it cemented more clearly what world government is really about; political dress-up to cover the hypocrisy and pillage. Obama, like any other model, has designers behind him who tell him what to do and what to say. His empty suit fits him perfectly. His empty promises to end the wars and institute a just health care system were even more cynical and depraved than Bush's promises to curtail the military overseas and cut down the size of the federal government. In the last eight months Obama has extended olive trees to the Republicans because he comes from the same political tree. If he was for real reform, he would have broken a few Republican twigs by now.
IV.
Inside the Federal Reserve's whirlpool of fraud and deception, economic and moral laws are makeshift notions, secrecy is a virtue, and political baggage is checked at the door. Outside, it is viewed as the epicenter of corruption, and the main cause for the economic crisis.
All roads lead to the Fed. It is the holy church of paper money and profit. And it is the checkpoint to end all checkpoints in the road to economic recovery. It is also the running thread in this story of revenge. The American nation was bought off at the Fed checkout line. This Frankenstein creature belongs in the realm of fiction rather than reality, and so on first hearing about it, its activities are not believed to be real. The magnitude of the corruption surrounding the Fed is beyond belief. People become paralyzed after being told that a large portion of their tax dollars go to unelected bankers, who have amassed enough wealth to buy up entire governments. Such wickedness is unimaginable. The horror! The terror!
The Fed's destructive monetary policies are indefensible. It is a huge weight on the productivity of the economy, and due to the secret nature of its influence, the American people are forced to carry a burden that is not acknowledged by society. Regular slaves know their heavy workload is for their master but uncommon slaves are worked to death without truly knowing who the work is for, they mistakenly believe it is for their children but their children are burdened with even more unjustified debt. It may seem like a cruel and unjust punishment, but that is the cost of ignorance.
A sound mind, after researching the origins and history of the Federal Reserve Bank, comes to the conclusion that America's economic system is not based on a free market, but a controlled market. A possessed market. A market owned by the greediest characters of mankind. So, contrary to popular misconceptions, the private Federal Reserve Bank was not designed by venture capitalists but by fascist vultures, to be the ultimate money machine, used to seize the American people's wealth, fund unceasing wars overseas, and pay off treasonous whores at home to keep the country under siege.
V.
I don't know how this story will end, or even if this story is the right one. I am never sure of myself, but one thing I am sure about is that we cannot stand by and watch the poor of the world play the character that dies at the end of this revenge story.
What is required in the face of such titanic terrors is a new heroic age, an age in which a person's life is not measured by how long it is lived but to what end it aims for; greatness. Will we determine or undermine our future? Sooner, or later, we must find our voice, interject into world history and peacefully play our independent parts. If not, then doom is certain.
Notes:
2. Fussell, P. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. (New York: Summit Books), p. 30.
3. Demott, B. The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Class. (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.), p. 174.
4. Hossein-zadeh, I. The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 240.
5. Adorno, T. Prisms. (London: Neville Spearman), p. 59.
6. Adorno, T. Prisms. (London: Neville Spearman), p. 59.
