Vichy America

[Daveparts still]

Vichy America
By David Glenn Cox


Were it not all so real it would make a great book; Dan Brown could add another hundred million dollars to his collection. Perhaps he could call it "The Bhagwan Code," while I prefer to think of it as “Vichy America.” Our synthetic, middle class, pseudo nazis, protesting for their gun rights or tax rights, a smiling, flag-waving, picture-mugging, minivan-driving collection of the dumbest individuals ever to stand up on two legs.

It's like a sort of reverse evolution where mankind evolves back into a creature that moves on three legs while leaving one hand free to carry the Bible or a cell phone. They are too dumb to even understand the herd mentality, too dumb to know the difference between predator and prey. The gun nuts rally to show off their machismo to each other thinking that they might somehow intimidate the government with their show of force like a baby shaking its rattle at a rattlesnake.

Do the Taliban march through Kandahar to show how tough they are? Do the Greeks wave tea bags and shout, "Don't tread on me"? The herd shouts, “Restore the Constitution!” but they don’t have a clue as to what that really means, unaware that the Constitution that they imagine is miles from what they want. The herds are out protesting in favor of the predators and against themselves.

The Walton family fortune is worth some $90 billion and was made primarily on imported goods and exploitive labor practices. The Bush tax cuts saves the Walton family millions of dollars a year in taxes and saves the average worker $240 per year. The right wing government that they want to protect them has eliminated trade tariffs and a tariff is a tax on a foreign good that you don’t pay. Are they protesting for an end to the Bush tax cuts yet?

If there is a tariff on bananas you don’t pay it unless you buy bananas, and even if you do the cost per banana is miniscule. It is a tax on companies which import bananas into the United States and most of those companies are owned by Americans. Right now the US Congress is mulling over the idea of a value-added tax or a national sales tax. Leaving aside that sales taxes are the most regressive and unfair taxes on the working poor. Look at it this way: they have taken the taxes off the multinational corporations' incomes in the name of free trade, and now, to make up the deficit, they want to put the tax on to you.

I used the example of bananas because I thought it might strike a chord with these knuckle-dragging baboons. Imagine you and I share a toll bridge on the border and I charge a nickel for each person crossing the bridge my way and you charge a nickel for each person crossing your way. Five thousand people cross each day going your way while ten million people cross each day going my way. You earn $250 per day and I earn $50,000 a day.

Free trade argues that if you eliminate that nickel tax more people will want to cross the bridge. That it will create jobs and industry on both sides of the bridge, except the people on my side of the bridge earn $20.00 an hour and the people on your side earn $5 per day. The benefit goes to the guy that owns the banana trees; the loss goes to the workers in the country earning $20.00 per hour. It's true that traffic on the bridge has increased, but since there are no longer any tolls collected, what does it matter?

To me that is a far greater threat to national sovereignty than any of the made up reasons of the gun nuts and teabaggers. Because now they want you to pay the taxes to make up for the lost bridge tolls and even to buy them a new bridge! We live in an America under a two party system, those with money and those without money, and for those without money it's no party. Take, for example, our Treasury Secretary Mr. Geithner.

He began his early career at Kissinger and Associates; then he was a senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations before moving on to the Federal Reserve. He served in the Clinton administration under Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin. Their names came up recently when Bill Clinton commented that he had been given bad advice about derivative trading by Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin. Before Geithner joined the Obama administration his take home pay was around $7,000 per week, just like yours. What? You don’t take home $28,000 per month?

I know, most of us don’t, but I use that figure because many of us have no concept of wealth. None of the teabaggers and gun nuts have any concept of wealth. Geithner is a hamburger flipper in a red paper hat and nylon jump suit when compared with his predecessor. Hank Paulson was worth over $700 million and just the interest on $700 million in a bad year is $35 million dollars. Hank could buy a new $10 million yacht and a $25 million estate in the South of France every year and never touch the principle.

John McCain’s wealth is between $20 and $25 million. Diane Feinstein's, $40 to $100 million. John Kerry, $167 million and Georgia Senator Johnny Isackson, $23 million. So who do these people have more in common with, you or each other? That’s why John McCain and John Kerry can wholeheartedly agree that it is important to send $1.5 billion a year to Pakistan to build schools and infrastructure. Last week Defense Secretary Gates was out advocating for a free trade agreement with Colombia. Apparently Mr. Gates has enough time on his hands to fill in at the Commerce Department, but what do we need from Columbia that we can’t get now?

It's just another chance for the American wealthy to sell toothpaste made in China or Fords made in Mexico or hire workers in a country where half live below the poverty line. You see, the United States market already accounts for 40% of Colombia’s exports and the US accounts for less than 30% of Columbia’s imports. So a free trade agreement would be a net 10% loss for a trade deficit which last month grew to over $38 billion. The winners? Multinational corporations. The losers? You!

Try and understand, the tea partiers and gun nuts aren’t wrong. They’re just stupid. The herd senses danger and closes up but doesn’t know the difference between lions and giraffes. They’re smart enough to know that something is wrong but not smart enough to figure out what it is, so they follow the leader. Their leader who makes ten times as much money as Tim Geithner and who tells them, “They’re destroying your Constitution.”

What was it that George W. Bush called it? “Just a goddamned piece of paper!” Are you sitting down? Bush was right. A constitution that doesn’t protect you from exploitation or rapacious greed, that allows your life and prospects for prosperity to be sold down the river in the name of corporate good is just that, “a goddamned piece of paper!” You might think that it’s superman standing on top of the Empire State Building, cape and flag waving in the breeze behind him, but the rich folks is having monkey stew tonight and you’re invited!

I look into my poor man’s crystal ball and I can tell you what the future will bring: income for banks and corporations will rise while unemployment will remain unchanged and wages will remain flat. The President’s committee on deficit reduction will recommend cuts and tax hikes to Social Security and Medicaid but only to “Save” them. Those hikes and cuts won’t be recommended until after the November elections. Then as the presidential election season is upon us the Republicans will again put up a weak challenger and maybe the teabaggers will hoist some clown as their standard bearer thus making sure that Obama is re-elected.

Then the Mr. Burnses of this country will lament, “Oh, fiddle dee dee, now I didn’t want that to happen.” What you see happening in Greece today will come to America. “Gosh, we really hate it that we have to cut spending and social programs but the revenue just isn’t there.” No, of course it’s not, it's all been shipped overseas, but the profits still have a place to call home.

Capitalism is like a jackass pulling a plow; the jackass will do a good job for you if you put him in a harness and let him know what will happen if he doesn’t do as he’s told. If, however, you don’t show that jackass who's boss, he’s going to sit on his backside and laugh at you!

There will be blood; not because I want it or advocate it. There will be blood because “power never takes a back step - only in the face of more power.” There will be blood when people begin to realize that prosperity and jobs are not coming back and when their extended benefits begin to run out. The blood won’t come from gun nuts or teabaggers but from the same place it always comes. Students didn’t shoot National Guardsmen at Kent State and protesters didn’t beat up policemen in Chicago. The groundwork is already being laid.

April 20 (Bloomberg) -- Al-Qaeda and its ideological allies are using English-language Web sites and forums to encourage non-Arabic speakers to make war on the West as terrorists seek the next Ft. Hood shooters and “Jihad Janes.”

“Their goal to widen the pool of prospective terrorists beyond traditional Middle East and Asia sources is part of a search for 'white al-Qaeda' activists who could foil racial profiling and initiate attacks, according to Evan Kohlmann, a consultant with FlashPoint Partners, a New York-based security research company. "The effort is consistent with the gradual decentralization of Islamic-inspired holy war," he said in a telephone interview.

This, coupled with the President’s unilateral decision that he can extra-judiciously kill Americans, means that you are the terrorists and the terrorists are you. That after you’ve lost your home, your job, your family and your future, it is Al-Qaeda that you’re fighting for and not your dignity and the teabaggers and gun nuts will probably believe them if Glenn Beck says it's so.

“Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?" (Fahrenheit 451)

[secondwind]

1. pretty sobering stuff......

[Newest Reality]

2. That is an

excellent synopsis and assessment of some important and salient details that are of major concern these days.

Too bad it takes quite a bit of time and effort to wade through the raging river of information out there in order to ascertain even a modicum of clarity and express it succinctly and cogently for others. However, Mr. Cox is doing a fine job at sorting through the miasma of specters and distractions to bring insights for those willing to bear witness to unbearable, yet necessary, genuflections to truth and clear comprehension.

In the past, many, including myself, have labored to delineate essential facts in the media-soiled brothel of modern American culture without making much of a dent as only a small sample of people, (even those who profess to be open-minded or liberal) recognize well-honed sagacity based on research. The question then on the minds of cyber-town criers was, is there even a point to opening eyes and minds by laying out what are only cookie crumbs on the trail to a rather terrible awakening for many?

Now, perhaps, more people will be more open and brave and willing to entertain the undercurrents of this breve new reality unfolding before us like no time before. While words are merely mediators in themselves in a realm of abstract relations that always signify "about", we could hope that truth will become self-evident again and the missives that the archivists of veracity present will become a spark that ignites a blaze to warm us and illuminate these cold, dark days of the Empire.

[WCGreen]

4. The media views itself as being part of the elite.

They travel with those in power, spread their propaganda and sneer at the people on the outside who question what they are doing. Well, unless you are being manipulated by one of their own. Then it's balls to the walls support and coverage.

They are like that little creature that exists in one of Jabba the Hut's fat folds.

Nothing more and nothing less.

The media has established this idea of every issue has two sides. It's a game. No sense of looking for the truth. Look how they gleefully aided and abetted the destruction of an advocacy group working only for the poorest of the poor in out country.

It's the curse of living in interesting times.

Brother, we are cursed.

[proudohioan]

3. Mr. Cox, you see what we should all be seeing...

and speak of that which we should all be speaking. You see a truth and bittersweet beauty in this fucked up country of ours that most will not see.

Thank you for your most eloquent and thought provoking Journals. I look forward to them each and every day.

T.

[jotsy]

5. +1

[proudohioan]

6. I find it sad that more folks here on DU aren't reading his stuff......

Maybe it's too harsh for most?

T.

[jotsy]

10. As a big fan, it's kind of like the parent thing, I just can't be objective.

I for one, appreciate the depth of candor and the open window to workings of a more genuine era when the stakes were high and our actions defined us. I also identify with the disdain, because much of what ails us is as a result of what lessons we should have already learned.

A wise journalism program adviser from a community college who taught me that a newspaper must scold its audience ever so carefully so as not to be shunned before being heard. I would like to think the crowd at DU is a more aware group, prepared to view itself with more of a critical eye, but perhaps not. Then again, some DUers can be a little disingenuous about the purpose in their presence.

As I write my response, this thread has had 475 viewers. Mr. Dave's byline can also be found at Op Ed News. I look forward to the day he gets picked up by some well paying venue like Mother Jones, The Nation, or HuffPo, and that the well deserved opportunity to reward himself in whatever manner he sees fit is taken.

[DemReadingDU]

7. There will be blood

Wasn't that a movie?
********************

Yeh, the blood will be flowing. I'll probably already be in the grave.
It's frightening to think of the future of my toddler grandbabies, if they survive.

[proudohioan]

8. Damn, that is so true

Thank you for that eloquent and on-point post. We now have a yard sign in the front yard: Vote For Our Euclid Public Library. Why? The state of Ohio, home of the best library system in the country, has cut the library budget by a third. It would have been half, but there was simply too much public protest, and need, for that. Still, a THIRD? They're laying off at least 500 teachers in Cleveland Public Schools, while almost half the federal budget goes to "defense" spending. Defense? Against what? Against whom? Who is threatening us? The Chinese? Please. The Islamic terrorists? When the best they can throw against us is a postadolescent with a bomb that doesn't work in his underwear?

Just so you know, I am Proudohian's husband in all but name. Why? Because if we actually got married, student loans would zap me for over $700/month. Our rent is $500, and we've got two teenage boy eating machines to support. And I am the lucky one with a job. A government job that pays less than $18 an hour. I know, that's better than a lot of folks get, but I am by no means rich, or even middle class in the terms my parents knew. We're being screwed in the names of profit and greed. By ignorant hicks who dream of somehow getting rich themselves some day by screwing other people when they have absolutely no chance of actually doing so. The same ignorant assholes who vote for people like John Boner(ahem, Boehner)and cheer on the antics of Justice Scalia and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck because they suffer from the delusion that somehow, some day, they will be in the same position if they just work hard enough and kiss ass enough. Never mind that taxes on the super-rich are at the lowest rates since the 1920's(and look what happened in 1929), never mind that miners and offshore oil rig workers are dying by the dozen in the relentless quest for profit, never mind that crazy whacked out psychos are being employed as mercenaries in Afghanistan and Iraq by our oh-so-enlightened, dare I say socialist(my ass!) President while regular Army veterans roam the streets in search of shelter, never mind that our oh-so-Liberal president's administration sanctions assassination of American citizens, THERE'S A BLACK GUY IN THE WHITE HOUSE!! ROAR!!!!

We need to learn from the French. It's time to bring back the guillotine. In Central Park. New York. Wall Street. Beg, Geitner, beg.

[dotymed]

11. We have to unite against the enemy, They are among us

And wealthy.
America has the worst distribution of wealth than any country in the world.

:kick:

[silversol]

9. Testify!

Kick

[lib2DaBone]

12. Wonderful article. This sums up day-to-day life in America...

Well written. I envy people that have the talent to write from the heart, to use metaphors that flow effortlessly while eliciting the emotions that we all feel. Emotions that stem from an awareness of finding ourselves in this dire state of affairs called Predatory Capitalism.

While dire straights in and of themselves are not so bad.. the real problem is when the building is on fire, we look around, and there are no exits. Or if we do find an exit, when we push on the door, we find that it has been chained shut.

Keep up the good work.

[olegramps]

13. The issues that David Cox addresses have a simple solution:

UNIONIZE! The American worker bought the Corporate propaganda hook, line and sinker. Tariffs and unions are your enemy and the corporation will protect the worker. When they were able to reduce union membership from a high of 36% to a miserable 6% of workers they had little opposition to having the jobs out-sourced, pensions cut and health insurance canceled. The stupid ass workers in several state went as far as endorsing "Right to Work Laws" that were not designed to protect their right to work, but for the company to lock out unions with stupid ass workers approval.

Sorry, but the workers are their very own worst enemy.

Every measure that will protect the future of the nation can be achieve through organization of the working classes. This include return of manufacturing jobs through tariffs and cancellation of unfair trade agreements that were designed sole to benefit corporations. Taxes should be dramatically increased on the wealthy and inheritance taxes escalated to seize the wealth that has been ripped off by greedy CEOs and their henchmen. I will agree that it will be a dead tax. It would be the welcome death of the Plutocracy that is strangling the working class.

You want universal health care, then organize. Putting every person on medicare would dramatically reduced the price of our goods further increasing employment. Organized labor could elect those representatives that actually represent their interest and throw out the immoral bastards that are nothing more than shills for corporations that are bilking the American workers.

Every thing that is wrong with the country can be achieve through a revolution. A totally bloodless revolution that will indeed be a shot heard around the world leading to universal organization of workers.

[proudohioan]

15. K&R to you! nt

[bertman]

14. I am deeply sorry that I missed the deadline to REC this OP. It is magnificent in its

simplicity and eloquence. Thank you again, David, for sharing your perceptions with us. They are invaluable.

[Greyhound]

16. "Try and understand, the tea partiers and gun nuts aren’t wrong. They’re just stupid."

That is about the most accurate thing I've read on DU in a long time.

Sorry I couldn't rec this.
:thumbsup:

[ShortnFiery]

17. Yes, those words encapsulate our dire situation in the USA.

I'm not so afraid for myself, but for our youth who have this horrid mess to overcome.

Remember that the super-rich rule our Nation through FEAR, distraction, disinformation and the #1 tried and true tactic of *divide and conquer.* We need to reach out and make THE FEW somewhat sane GOPers of average intelligence SMART.

[Greyhound]

18. Damn news dump Friday. n/t