COASTAL POST (415)868 1600 FAX (415) 868 0502 P.O. Box 31 Bolinas CA 94924 http://www.coastalpost.com email: editor at coastalpost.com August 2002
Another World is Necessary by Frank Scott
In America , God fearing patriotism - the kind that supports war -has always dominated god loving patriotism - the kind that supports peace - and recent hysteria over pledging allegiance to the god of fear only indicates once again that we have big problems. Unfortunately, they aren’t simply our rituals of regimentation, but more the actions of our disabled political economy . The rituals serve to take our minds off that reality, and aid controllers of consciousness who rely on a confused public unable to think critically, or act democratically.
Episodes of market scheming and book juggling are treated as individual crimes by accountants and executives, but they are further evidence of the degenerate quality of political economics, especially as they have become in the conservative romance with fundamentalist marketeering. This is not to exonerate liberalism; its more elitist and refined form of capitalism was also a failure, just not quite as blatantly obvious as the more overt greed of conservatives which is currently straining all faith in the economic church. But both these groups devoutly believe that “markets ‘r god”, only differing on how much adjustment of this commercial deity is acceptable.
Conservatives believe all interference with market-god is heresy , while liberals believe it is divine, if done in moderation, and only to protect the investors who are their employers. The investor class is seen by both factions of the ruling party as the most important segment of society, despite rhetoric about common people and democracy. In fact, both sects pledge and pray to the market god of capital and its corporate commissars. They do so with bipartisan fervor, to dull public consciousness while filling the bank accounts of their corporate bosses, who in turn finance their campaigns.
This cabal presides over a system of unregulated capital that has lost tens of thousands of jobs , hundreds of millions of stock holder dollars and billions in pension fund money. It threatens the security of what was once the working class, but has been renamed the middle class. Some of that middle has entered the stock market casino,through mutual funds and pension plans, but it lacks any control over its money, which is managed by finance capital. It was duped into accepting glorified pyramid clubs , financial paper castles built on gambling, greed and gullibility, all sold as a new form of economic prosperity and security. Sure.
Slick accountants and their gambling casino employers have almost totally destroyed confidence in the fundamentalist fiction of guaranteed stock market wealth . This religion of commerce has no basis in the morality idealized in accepted western scriptures , but only in market speculation, human exploitation and planet devastation.
This earth is rich enough in resources and humanity to provide material security to all its inhabitants, but Instead, corporate monopolies threaten the security of all people and the planet itself. With zealous belief in free markets exclusively controlled by private capital, they destroy social and natural environments and jeopardize our collective future.
Market forces under private domination create incredible wealth for minorities , while billions of people live in poverty or under the burden of staggering debt, which they owe to the very forces that create our common problems . We need to create another world, and it is possible, but not while corporate capitalism monopolizes markets, under the fiction of competing in them.
Globalization is a buzz-name for the modern international force of capital, and it isn’t transgressed by the latest group of book cookers and hustlers , but practiced by them to its logical conclusions. Individual criminals are not the problem, though their number - possibly including members of the executive branch of government - should be prosecuted. It is the giant ponzi scheme of a corporate system that is wasting the lives, dollars and futures of a majority of humanity, all in pursuit of an impossible dream of progress that brings incredible wealth, security and pleasure to some, but staggering debt, poverty and pain to most.
As if planetary warming and fossil fuel pollution weren’t enough, we have the rhetorical pollution of gas-bag patriotic politicians, filled with love for flags and prayers, but complete disregard for democracy, peace and freedom. They are stealing civil liberties from an often terrorized public under the guise of protecting us from an outside menace, which is kept in our consciousness by repeated warnings of pending attacks on America. This means billions more squandered on weaponry, more loss of life and the creation of more hatred for america among those we threaten . We need to to deal with problems that are far more serious than terrorist threats, which exist at least partly, if not totally, because of the demands of the corporate system to maintain its control of global resources.
Citizens turn away from the political process in understandable disgust, or participate with only some idea of material conditions, given their control by corporate media that sells them everything they buy, including their political overseers. The totalitarian practices of public pledges to flags and prayers to god, indulged in by no other democracies, and in the past only by fascist regimes, are twisted into our minds to become immaterial symbols of the liberties which we are losing in the material world.
But no amount of mind management and defamation of democracy can mask the material evidence of a system that is failing. It is taking hard working people’s jobs and money, and threatens the future of all the earth’s inhabitants. We need more than prayers and pledges to survive. We need another kind of world, free of the the tyranny of the market gods and liberated from the domination of capital. It becomes clearer that we cannot have such a world, until we confront minority power with the force of a critically thinking, organized democratic majority.
Copyright (c) 2002 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
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frank scott email: frank at marin.cc.ca.us 225 laurel place, san rafael ca. 94901 (415)457 2415 fax(415)457 4791