by Denis A. Conroy for The Saker Blog
As secrecy, self-interest and corruption seem to be America's trinity of evils, we need to be wary of the hologram that is shoved in our faces suggesting that American corporate capitalism is a force for good. On taking a closer look at the hologram we may observe the full-frontal image of three characters who are joined at the hip doing a soft shoe shuffle through the corridors of Econ Inc. They are the three incarnations of corporate power, secrecy, self-interest and corruption. As they cross our line of vision, we observe how coordinated, intimate and choreographed this Siamese-triplet routine has become. And if we are astute enough, we may well perceive the workings of America's dark underbelly as bullish and asocial... a dynamo unto itself...a bull rampaging through a multi-polar China Shop.
Bill Clinton's campaign slogan of 1992 took corporate America out of the subliminal closet; "It's the economy, stupid", did wonders for America's unipolar constitution in suggesting that economics was the icing on the American cultural cake and therefore, in the hands of corporate America, capable of keeping the 'folk' immersed in the hee-haw hubris of hologrammatic exceptionalism forever. As the public had little knowledge of what Wall Street....et al...did, their role in the drama was to stand by and be available to support the emergence of the American Empire. In effect, an invocation to the so-called 'sheeple' people to place their trust in post-modern experts and bend a knee to economic patriotism.
Clearly, the masses mistook many glittering objects for gold in matters relating to the deregulated economy in 1992. However, sixteen years later came the 2008 financial crisis, the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression of 1929, where people soon discovered that their role as taxpayers was one which meant subsidizing the economic binge the latest experts were engaged in. To the great surprise of many, the shysters were bailed out, and irony of ironies, the foreclosed-upon masses were forced to grab their swag (their Matilda) and go find that elusive American dream under a bridge.
As the significance of the 2008 economic collapse was being ingested, Bill and Hillary Clinton had already established connections to Wall Street's economic souffle-shuffle where profit was deemed the nectar par excellence and where the kippah (a garland of honour for some) seemed to hold its ground against all odds...no matter the state of the economy... suggesting that these economic wizards were irreplaceable because they, and only they, as experts, possessed the secret to making the 'magic pudding.' But to become an expert, one had first to pass through the portals of the Wall Street Lodge before being endowed with keys that opened the gates to pecuniary paradise.
After the collapse of Wall Street's dicey economic scaffolding, came the realization that crooks were rewarded in America...the United Settlers of America... a nation of minions still in possession of Anglophilic notions of greatness (as witnessed when Donald Trump recently attended Fuckingham Palace for a round or two of ass-kissing) and as ass-kissing was more palatable an activity than storming the barricades, a bottom line (so to speak) was established to suit the needs of the minions...as storming the barricades was considered an unruly practice and one that less civilised people had recourse to... a home-grown Founding-Father apple-pie rule for the folk had to be adopted; "better the minion you know, than the minion you don't know," was spread about for the purpose of inoculating the public against the frippery of progressivism.
If Bill Clinton had still been president in 2008, and had one too many sups from the bottle, he might very well have said, "It's the bull (shit) that came on the Mayflower, stupid." Over time he became aware of the fact that the 'bull' arrived in North America along with the yeomanry force disembarking the Mayflower, and that Anglo-Zionist economics...a shared colonial dynamic... was best understood in terms of, "It's the fucking natives, stupid, they need a grilling."
The objective was to find other people's resources wherever they were available -gold, zinc, copper, coal, arable land, everything that could be converted into profit. The expanding patchwork of activities we mistakenly refer to as the economic system was myopic. It had a bad habit of exploding into unholy frenzies brought on by greed. The Clintons, on seeing the 'light', assumed that those who didn't, or couldn't, were stupid. Over time it would seek to develop rules that might enable it to project 'stupidity' onto China, Russia and Iran in matters of trade and culture.
Believing in white American exceptionality presupposes the fact that US Foreign Policy is without fault and therefore incapable of doing the horrendous crimes it's military are known to have done. The country where English settlers spent centuries decimating the indigenous people of the North American mainland prior to formal independence is unlikely to vacate the cocoon of ignorance anytime soon, as self-reflection hasn't made it into their DNA. Between 1513 and 1900, an indigenous population of fifteen million people was reduced to 250,000 to what now belongs to the United States and Canada. It appears that the commodious superiority of the settler mentality is overly imbued with racial biases. Inherently aggressive, they find themselves incapable of countenancing the shared values of the multi-polar world.
Therefore, it's not too difficult to imagine the source of hostility currently souring trade agreements with China...how dare they manufacture exceptional artefacts... they, the subaltern yellow horde should be contained...need to be put in their place...preferable under American jurisdiction. How dare they create a successful industrial policy. How dare they expose the inequities within our antisocial slip-slop-slap-stick-stop-start approach to resolving the subject of governance for all.
Consider for a moment what Paul Gewirtz, the Potter Steward Professor of Constitutional Law and Director of The China Centre at Yale Law School reports in his article entitled; CONSTITUTIONAL ENFORCEMENT; WHO SHOULD DO IT AND HOW?
"President Xi Jinping says not only that the Chinese Constitution is "law" but that it's "fundamental law." He repeatedly emphasizes the Constitutions "authority", and thus addresses the view of some people that China's Constitution is not "authoritative" but merely "nominal." He insists there must be "real efforts" to implement the Constitution, not just words on paper. He describes constitutional enforcement as inseparable from the broad project of advancing the rule of law in China and achieving the many instrumental benefits China sees in "governing the country according to law." And he emphasizes that actual enforcement of the Constitution is important not only to assure that government officials remain "loyal" to the Constitution but also to "strengthen" constitutional consciousness in the whole society."
Twenty-two years later, the American people appears to be ever more beguiled by experts who tell them that their recklessly faux currency and legal system have the right to claim jurisdiction anywhere in the world, simply because their system is one that manufactures 'greatness' and should be acknowledged for its leadership in all things technical. Unlike their ancestors who may have paid heed to the phrase "It's the afterlife, stupid," contemporary Americans seem smitten by delusions of grandeur in a system that puts inordinate focus on individualism in pursuit of celebrity status. As inequity increases, the collapsing face of democracy looks ever more like a decompressing balloon.
Meanwhile, the new players in the capitalist extravaganza are private equity firms, hedge funds, investment banks, insurers and once obscure entities known as "business development companies" plus whatever else exists in a casino swill devoid of oversight. As a new credit bubble gets ready to bust in the land of 'stupid', the band continues to play the unilateralist waltz...on-and-on-and-on...as the rest of the world veers toward multilateralism. As cheap Viagra-like credit continues to shore-up short-sighted economic interests, mad-cap innovations appear like mushrooms. In this climate, we find that the number of players lining up for a chance to consult stochastic oscillators that may improve their chance in casino-capitalist-economic-roller-coaster splurges, continues to swell.
The pervasive cheapness that corrupts western thinking is obviously the continuing belief that only the white race has the right to dominate. In the West, pursuit of power for power's sake has long created cultures (or vultures) where the art of negotiation loses its meaning and where the aesthetics of compromise are consigned to the wilderness. From within this vacuum, Donald Trump has stepped forward to assume the role of the preeminent expostulator of 'bullish' corporate interests seeking to hobble development where competitors are concerned. As of the present, he has done his best to hobble each-and-every economic system resisting America's bullish hegemonic might.
Meanwhile, the American public continues to do what it does best...look-on...observing in a very Anglo way the shenanigans of their born-to-rule betters. The hordes who came to destroy the indigenous population and steal Texas from Mexico were all along destined to remain mere ingredients sustaining the 'greatness' of the Imperial pudding. Has anything changed? Many were, from the beginning, Bible-carrying subalterns who believed in saviours...then along came Donald Trump, chef-supremo with his promise of recapturing the 'magic' of the nationalist 'pudding' to give the US even greater greatness...and bingo...!!!
Trouble was, the Clintons and Obama... predecessors...had staked-out a claim for the position of curator of the 'pudding' too, and in losing to Donald Trump in a most acrimonious campaign, inadvertently managed to unmask the demons that plague America's constitutional corpus. Secrecy, self-interest and corruption...Siamese triplets doing it for US corporations, exploded from capitalism's Pandora's box. It is no longer possible to ignore the fact that the real deplorables were within the system all along, the Democratic Party Elite, the Republican Party Elite and the Wall Street mavericks. It doesn't require the brain of an Albert Einstein to figure out who the real deplorables are.
It was partly due to the operations of a maverick Australian whiz-kid and a conscionable transgender American whistle-blower that the world heard about the insidious war crimes committed by the American military in Iraq. But as disturbing as that may have been in the so-called liberal West, the naming of persons involved in corruption, particularly within the pantheon of political correctness, naming names as such proved to be a bridge-too-far...hence the spleen directed at the whiz-kid. In America the hoi polloi, unable to interpret the constitution, left the gate open for opportunists to emerge from within the interstices of the American subconscious to come out and muddy the waters. With the passing of time, the media became complicit in muddying the waters too.
The fact that whiz-kid revelations viv-a-vis WWW could disclose the fact that Hillary Clinton's husband Bill supported right-wing death squads to help engineer the second coup of Haitian President Jean Paul Aristide in 2004 was perceived as juridical apostasy. And through the Clinton Foundation, Bill and Hillary Clinton accumulated billions of dollars-worth in donations that were siphoned to billionaire investors who built hotels and other profitable ventures at the expense of poor Haitians, again violated their notion of code of secrecy privilege. That a whiz-kid (especially a foreigner) found out that it was Hillary Clinton's State Department that prevented a minimum wage increase in Haiti, or information concerning the dark underbelly of toxic US military's tantrums that inflicted death and destruction on innocent Iraq citizens, as caught on camera as unlawful, is nothing more than brutality waxing precious about privacy. An outrage indeed, tantamount to Guy Fawkes shoving a cracker up the arse of the hegemon, perhaps?
But on closer examination, we may rightly conclude that our conscience and our constitution have been hijacked by the nefarious rules of US state law as it embraces the globe with a long jurisdictional arm, while its other arm reaches out to secure its allies in a NATO like encirclement. Using reductionist prisms to wield jurisdiction over an individual's conscience is equivalent to replacing humanistic values with trite and sentimental obeisance for the purpose of giving American patriotism a face lift...the kind that is taught in primary schools. Meanwhile, the activities of the Australian whiz-kid must be erased from view...lest the world remembers!
To the American psyche, the idea of an Australian whiz-kid divulging evidence of their military's brutality and indifference to life and limb while rampaging across the globe is unacceptable. Conditioned to regard the military as sacrosanct, many Americans would consider putting this foreigner in leg-irons, or worse, as criticism of their values is considered a crime as such...you can well imagine their venom..."if Australia wasn't a nation of white Anglo settlers, we would bomb the shit out of them."
We live in muscular times; we may ask ourselves the question; what will it take for the US to realize that they are not the sole occupants of planet Earth and to take their place in a multi-polar world, because they will not be allowed to be a single hegemonic player for much longer. The US in its current incarnation is not agreement capable, its current bully-posturing is evidence of a regressive constitution, indicating that quantity has Trumped quality.
But back to the real world, America, an outcrop of Anglo comeuppance built on the splintered bones of Cherokee, Sioux Apache and African slave labour extolling the virtues of its bullish mission while careening across the globe trying to contain China's Belt and Road Initiative comes across as yet another campaign slogan for 2020, "It's the stupidity, stupid."
Denis A. Conroy
Freelance
Australia