The War Against Civilization (Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque)

The War Against Civilization

Monday, 21 November 2005

Chris Floyd...

It's obvious now that we made a mistake here in coming up with our "War on the Poor" tag to describe the rapacious and ruinous policies of the Bush Regime, and the brutal corporate ethos it represents. For it's not just a war on the poor, of course. That war was won long ago; Bush and the boys grind the poor beneath their heels just for the hell of it these days, just for kicks, a sadistic thrill. No, it's also a war against working people, against the middle class, against the very idea that there is a common good beyond the raw bottom line, that individual human lives and human communities have any intrinsic value or meaning whatsoever, except as raw material to be squeezed for blood money and chump change.

It is a war that is destroying, very deliberately, a way of life that brought an unprecedented measure of security and stability and prosperity to millions of Americans across generations. It's being systematically destroyed because the business elite can reap even higher, more obscene profits than they already command by gutting America and "outsourcing" its jobs (and not just in the auto industry, of course) to places that pay slave wages to unprotected, unorganized workers and kick back secret sweeteners to keep the corporate lords fat and happy. And it's being systematically destroyed because the political elite prefer an atomized, terrorized, polarized rabble -- scrambling for survival, worn out with worry, broken down with untreated illness or bankrupted by medical costs, fighting each other for a dwindling number of ill-paid, going-nowhere jobs -- to a secure and confident citizenry that stands up for its rights.

So it's not just a war against the poor, although the poor are its greatest victims. It's a war against civilization itself, if we define civilization as the struggle to overcome the worst instincts of our human nature, as free people coming together in search of betterment and enlightenment -- "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," in other words. The War on Civilization being waged by Bush and the elite has been far more destructive of the "American way of life" than the not-dissimilar war on civilization being pursued by the pockets of violent religious extremists could ever hope to be.

SNIP

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=293&Itemid=1

does NOT mince words.

We might make good bio diesel, Hell, there out numbered, lets through the bums out!

Brazil poised to become biodiesel giant

Rio de Janeiro - Brazil could lead the world toward a revolution in biodiesel and become a world energy leader, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Friday.

"By year end, we will have 350 000 (people) working on biodiesel, which will be an energy revolution," Lula told reporters. "I am convinced that in the next 10 or 15 years, we will be proud to see Brazil be the country at the leading edge in biodiesel production," he said.

Lula has made biodiesel production a centerpiece of his presidency. In March, he inaugurated the first production facility in the state of Minas Gerais and on Thursday visited the first 10 businesses ready to produce the fuel. On Friday, Lula said that Brazil can produce biodiesel more cheaply than the United States can by using corn, or Europe by using sugar beets. Brazil would grow sunflowers, soy and other tropical plants.

"Few countries can compete with Brazil, because God gave us sun, land and hard-working people," Lula said. He also hoped that soon Brazil would produce cars that can use the fuel. Fuel self-sufficiency has been a long-term dream for Brazil, an oil importer, which embarked on a similar effort to produce ethanol from sugar cane decades ago.

SNIP

http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=143&art_id=qw1132383244997B624

but anyhow, one thing is for certain. They, including Cheney, do not give a shit.They have never considered this their country in the same way as the average citizen or the common man who bears the burden of pride and having to defend that pride. They were raised to not give a shit, to believe they are above the average person or the common man, even though they have the intellect of a baboon, and that includes Chenye--he is rather average in intelligence, and for that we can place the blame totally upon Poppy and Barbara Bush--they spawned monsters and the biggest of them all is George Bush.

They will not suffer a single pang of conscience. They will not suffer any legal consequences either. George will not suffer a whit and neither will Laura or the twins. George will never suffer for the killings and the murders he ordered up.

So where does that leave us? Hoping he will do himself and his party in politically and that by some stroke of luck or some twist of fate, we can take back some power in the congress in the next election?

Chris reads DU. But he doesn't have a lot of time to post here with his work at Oxford and gigs at the Moscow and St. Petersburg Times.

We have the DU breaking news RSS feed on the site - and I know for certain he often clicks on it.

Cheers

DD

Hi Chris. I love your writings.

I just made it 3.

I was just listening to a series on NPR about hunger in America. They were focusing in this installment on southwestern VA. A mother was talking about going without so that she could make sure the family has what it needs ....

I realized that that is us. My wife and I have been putting off medical and dental care most of our marriage so that our kids could have their braces or whatever ... thinking that now that the kids are away from home that maybe we will get that crown or whatever. But its never going to happen. . . . we were fortunate enough to qualify for food stamps today, and that will get us food through the rest of the year ... we are selling our place here - the place that was we got, in part so the kids would always have a home place to come to - rather than loose it to forclosure. . . with the proceeds we will have a little to put up, but not a lot.

We have always had jobs or done work for programs to help others - it was hard to ask for help ourselves.

But that is just where the Bushies want you and me.

an egalitarian society in which a decent if modest quality of life is available to the masses is not in the interests of the socioeconomic ruling stratum, because a captive population is needed to engage in the productive activity which supplies money (capital flows) into the system where it moves upward to that stratum. So shut up and get back to work, slave !

Old Templar families turning to piracy, later the slave trade, the Bushes and the Fords trading with the Nazi enemy in WWII, or what have you, it's all the same sh!t all the time. The preservation of the (quite pragmatic, tangible socioeconomic) status quo is paramount, and structures ranging from social hierarchies to norms which encourage a male-female child-producing couple with a wage earner controlled by normative forces like the church and a whispering society are all established with the aim to keep the masses under control (hence the popularization of affect-laden phrases like Under Control, Trust, Pay the Price, Connected, Positive, Confident, Reality, Natural Law, Character, etc.) so that they will be willing to produce for the socioeconomic superstructure (now globalized). Add cajoling forces like flatulent advocacy of the universal advantage of the free market (with the concomitant denial of the fact that it fails when engaged to supply needs as opposed to wants), and patronizing messages from the doyennes and gray eminences of good society that, if you only play by the rules, have a positive-enough attitude, and some luck (with misfortune on the other hand either being genuinely random, or manufactured by your peers), that you, or maybe more likely your descendants, may one day be as rich, powerful, and important as they are. This is most blatantly visible in the "Freedom"/"Liberal" parties of western Europe, where the old eminences are frequently in fact members of nobility or old high society, and do their best to enforce adherence to the rule of not disturbing the socioeconomic order and coopt/neutralize those who threaten to disobey (see Mr. Haider's adventures with the doyenne of the Austrian Freedom party (I think, maybe the People's party) - "can he be made a useful idiot and turned to our purposes ?" (just like Hitler was, though he came equipped with plentiful raw material to work with in the form of his psychopathology)), but we have the same problem here, and in fact the suspects are the same - cheerily liberal regarding "opportunity" (what you can beat out of others), and brutally conservative regarding dissent and nonparticipation. Neoliberal, neoconservative, I have to take a dump. (Here in the US this took the form of Bush 1's administration setting a tone that everything was OK, even gays and environmentalism, as long as the socioeconomic power status quo was not questioned - dissent against the system was not tolerated, and if it couldn't be made palatable enough for the usual malcontents, then they were no longer quite so OK, and at the least were lacking in Character, Confidence, and Commitment to use Doober/Dick lingo. Kinder and gentler as long as you don't fuck with my profits. Like father, like son ?)

What we have here is another phase in the attempted demolition of the product of thousands of years of enlightened and emancipated thinking, and hard work (in many cases at the cost of death) by those who pursued the notion that self-interest needs to be enlightened, and accompanied by concern for collective interest, and that above all action needs to be governed by what reality (with a small 'r') is, as opposed to what the self-serving side of our imagination might want it to be. Instead we are fed a poisonous pablum of self-censorship on the one hand, where we are supposed to deny our own good judgement about what works and what doesn't, and vigorous actvity on the other which will allegedly produce "win-win solutions", by which we supposedly get something, and the other guy does too, which may convince him to remove the knife from your throat. Concretely we see the demolition of labor rights, the inability of the nation to establish minimal social programs which work for all the people (e.g. health care), the unconstrained gorging of the hogs at the corporate slop trough, and the replacement of education with consumerism. This is a corruption of capitalism among other things, and would certainly be unrecognizable to the Founders, products of the secular humanist Enlightenment that they were, as anything resembling the America they gave their lives to creating.

It is worth noting that the system the cultural vandals and conservative verminocracy are establishing is blatantly unsustainable, more so than what their predecessors produced, and will fail. However, apocalypse, or even just the demolition of the meager successes the species has had at creating social structures which move beyond the instinct brain and instead provide a minimal framework for successful coexistence, are too high a cost for that end. I prefer to retire the Bush league, the Bush dynasty, and all their lackeys and exploiters, and get on with the planet's business. With any luck, they will "stay the course" and make themselves unelectable for the next 60 years, and thus do the job for us.