It's Class

Since September 11th, so much has changed, or so the conventional wisdom goes. I beg to disagree: certainly, some significant changes have taken place, yet all in all, those changes are on the periphery and the drama continues to be the struggle between the ruling class and the ruled.

Don't believe me? Consider:

"Star Wars" missile defense -- so utterly useless against terrorism, yet so useful a pretext for shoveling Federal dollars at the military-industrial complex -- is being pursued with a renewed sense of vigor. [1]
The federal government that was so eager to shovel aid at airline corporations who encountered financial difficulties in the wake of the attacks has done nothing -- that's zilch, nada, zero, nil -- to aid the airline workers who have been laid off recently.
Massive corporate tax giveaways, like the repeal of the corporate alternative minimum tax, a move that will leave some Fortune 500 companies paying no income tax at all.
Nothing is being done to lessen our dependence on foreign oil[2], despite the well-documented connection between Saudi Arabia -- a US client state primarily because of the oil it has -- and those responsible for the atrocities of the 11th.
Speaking of Saudi Arabia's government, we continue to treat those bastards with kid gloves, even though Saudi Arabia harbored more of the bin Laden gang than Afghanistan.
Plans continue apace to privatize social security. Ever see what the administrative overhead of the much-touted Chilean retirement system[3], or how well it works for the poorest retirees? It ain't pretty.

Ponder those facts the next time our leaders say something about being "united". In reality, there is no unity! The rich and powerful, and the politicians they control, continue to want it all, at the expense of everyone else. Or to put it more eloquently, as Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's, writes in the January, 2002 issue of that magazine:

The country's corporate overlords don't associate the phrase "national security" with the health and well-being of the American public; they define the term as a means of acquiring wealth and as a reason for directing the country's diplomacy toward policies that return a handsome profit -- the bombing of caves in the Hindu Kush preferred to the building of houses in St. Louis or Detroit.

Am I being disrespectful to our government in a time of crisis by writing this? Yes! And so what? Crisis or no, respect is something that must be earned not given. Likewise, our government has earned my disrespect by the hypocritical and duplicitous actions it has taken in the name of "fighting terrorism".

"Uniting America behind a common goal" means realizing that this is a diverse nation, and the corporate overlords comprise only a tiny minority of the American public. It means forging a compromise between these diverse interests, not promoting the class interests of that tiny minority above everybody else. Why should anyone take this "uniting America" stuff seriously if our leaders, as demonstrated by their own actions, don't believe in it at all?

[1] The alternative, I suppose, is to believe that an intelligent person could think that our enemies, once they have found a cheap and effective means of attack, will voluntarily abandon it in favor of something that's a lot more expensive and for which we've developed a means of defending ourselves, just to be nice. back

[2] Don't even think of mentioning drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with a serious face. That's a joke of a policy that won't deliver any oil for years, and even when it does start moving through the pipe, it's going to be a piddling insignificance compared to the reduction in consumption we could achieve by even a modest measure like tightening automotive fuel efficiency standards. back

[3] One that was imposed by a murderous, right-wing dictatorship, by the way -- one can tell a lot about a crowd by the kind of regimes they consider as models. back

23 December 2001