While everyone is engaged in the trench warfare of the primaries, the strategic campaign of big money is bombing the crap out of our democracy. I haven't made an exact count, but I would guess there are 100 posts about the primaries for every one post about strategic issues like:
1) the approaching Gavrilo Princip moment that Ergodan and the wet-behind-the-ears Saudi Prince are about to set off by invading Syria - Syrian war about to get catastrophically worse , The "Race to Raqqa" is Quickly Intensifying .
2) the approaching vote on the corporate coup d'etat known as TPP
3) the latest SCOTUS outrage destroying America's commitment to fixing climate change.
My shorthand for these strategic issues is "Shooters, LOoters, and Polluters". For short, "The Slop". It's reminiscent of the British slang for plainclothes cops, "the filth". And that is exactly what these crooks in suits who have been running America into the ground since 1980 are, filth.
Strategically, then, the 99% are losing a three front war. The fronts are: the economy, the encroaching military/police state, and the environment. The Slop are a system that fights in a coordinated way on all three fronts. This system creates an interlocking set of fields of fire designed to destroy the middle class and democracy by eliminating the infrastructure that supports it: quality public education, decent jobs with workers as stakeholders, home ownership, a clean environment, affordable healthcare, honest, non-punitive cops and courts, and retirement security. Without these things, the middle class does not reproduce. And that is what we see: 25% of schoolchildren living in poverty; massive youth unemployment; crooked for-profit colleges and unbearable college debt; crumbling infrastructure; industrial off-shoring; massive minority incarceration; kids living with parents; Flint, Michigan; the gouging, inferior health system; inadequate, depleted or stolen retirement savings. The statistics show, and the anecdotal news stories confirm, that the middle class is dying rapidly.
My contention is that the 99% have to fight on all three fronts simultaneously, or we will lose the war; although sometimes an attack on one front benefits another. For example, reducing the military budget will free up money for social purposes; but only if the economic front holds the line against giving the found money back to the "taxpayers" (i.e., the 1%).
1. Shooters
Violence is as American as cherry pie.
- H. Rap Brown
America has been marinating in vicarious violence for fifty years. From The Godfather to The Sopranos to "24" to "ultimate" fighting to the outright sadism of Game of Thrones. This desensitizes us to real violence from gun nuts, from rogue cops, from militarized police, from our bloated military establishment, from our unknowable black budget. We have been indoctrinated that violence is the solution to every problem. The Slop funds puppet legislators to push for the militarization of everything, starting with the police. Sports has been turned into a "patriotic" military spectacle (cf. the Super Bowl), subsidized by grants from the military to support "thanking our warriors". These days, The Slop won't pay good money for anything that doesn't include violence and men in rigid, often misogynistic, hierarchical organizations.
The Slop also promotes Open Carry and SYG - laws designed to degrade law enforcement and let murderous vigilantes justify themselves. So called militias and Sagebrush "Rebellions" would be laughable if not for the violence. Their arguments are self-serving, self-contradictory gibberish; but they have guns and are willing to use them. Basically, arming both sides (cops and militia nuts) is profitable and destabilizing. It's a twofer for The Slop. At the other end of the NRA's foodchain, we have "accidents". Tell me, when a three-year-old accidentally shoots his sibling or parent, is it because there was no good guy three-year-old in the room? Gun violence causes tens of billions of dollars of hospital and healthcare bills every year, not to mention paralyzing communities with fear by, for example, lockdown drills for grade schoolers.
At the national level, foreign policy has been completely militarized and is driven by the neocon worldview of total dominance. We have bases in over 150 countries, and a military bigger than the rest of the world combined. The FBI operates worldwide, and we regularly call for and execute "regime change". The CIA has been overthrowing "evil tyrants" with barely deniable violence since 1953. But, somehow, we always seem to wind up on the side of oligarchs, medieval sultans and kings, military dictatorships, kleptocrats like Mobutu and Marcos, or nasty, rightward-drifting democracies like Poland and Israel. We continue to train South American killers and torturers at the School of the Americas (or whatever new name it has).
I think the shooters are most dangerous Slop War front because coups happen fast and undemocratically. We have seen false flags all over the place, from the string of hapless, low-IQ mooks that have been entrapped by the FBI in the "war on terror" to the lies used to support neo-Nazis in the Ukraine and an international brigade of sadistic butchers in Syria. The game plan seems to be: create a social media infrastructure, find a grievance (if none exists, false flag one), pump it up on social media, start a riot, have a Color Revolution, sell out your country to the corporate mobsters.
The biggest risk point involving "Shooters" right now is the mess in Syria - funded by the Saudis, operated by the Turks, and greenlighted by the US. The Russians have exposed the lie that the U.S. coalition was fighting ISIS by revealing Turkish direct support of ISIS, including fencing the stolen Syrian oil. The Russians have come to the support of the legitimately elected (not necessarily nice, but no less legitimate than the Ukranian thugs we embrace) government and stopped "regime change" by a foreign mercenary army funded to fuel the Sunni assault against all things Shia. In response to their failure, the megalomaniac Turkish leader and the wet-behind-the-ears Saudi princelet are threatening an invasion of Syria. If Kerry were not SoS, we would already have been shooting. Thank dog that at least Obama and Kerry understand the Russians are not bluffing.
----
Just so you see the three fronts are interconnected, I will point out that the MIC fights on the economic front as well. It's feeding at the public trough makes Eisenhower's "every ship that is built…" speech seem like nickel and dime stuff. We are talking about the trillion dollar boondoggle that is the deeply flawed F-35:
Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning Program cost increases and delays
the needless nonsense of the LRSB:
The Air Force plans to purchase 80–100 LRS-B aircraft at a cost of $550 million each (2010 dollars).
- Wikipedia Long Range Strike Bomber
and the quotidian corruption of stockpiling twenty years of Hummer front suspensions:
In one example, the DLA had stockpiled 15,000 Humvee front suspensions as of 2008, which is the equivalent of a 14 year supply. Yet somehow between 2010-2012, defying both logic and prudence entirely, the agency purchased 7,437 more of those same parts—at significantly higher cost than those already gathering dust on warehouse shelves—at a time when demand had been cut in half.
As of September 2012, the DLA and military had already ordered $733 million in duplicates of existing supernumerary supplies, which was a 21% increase from the $609 million it spent on the same asinine duplication the previous year.
Wikipedia - The Pentagon doesn't know what it spent 8.5 Trillion dollars on
In summary, the Shooters are one of the cancers The Slop has inflicted on America.
2. Looters
"One man with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns."
- Don Corleone
While Shooters can kill democracy overnight, Looters strangle it slowly, but relentlessly. The Slop has been strangling the American middle class since 1975, when they weaponized Oil Weapon-driven stagflation to unjustifiably destroy Keynesian economics and "inefficient" government regulation, not ten years after the Bank of Sweden launched the phony "Nobel" prize for economics. In the following forty years, The Slop have stolen just about every economic asset that isn't nailed down, but it isn't enough. They want to privatize(I.e., destroy) the government; and they have already launched assaults against public education (charter schools), the military (mercenaries and logistics companies), and the justice system (private prisons, corporate arbitration). They want negative interest rates and bail-ins to literally pick your pocket because the conventional ways of looting the productive classes just don't buy as much as they used to.
Wal Mart is the quintessential retail Looter, offering shoddy goods while underpaying its workers to the tune of $80B worth of welfare and food stamp subsidies. Libertarians are another promoter of looting, with crooks like Uber and AirBnB trashing laws, operating illegally, promoting neighborhood-busting gentrification for profit. City governments, captured by Slop money, fund stadiums instead of jobs, prisons instead of schools and rehabs.
The poorer you are, the more The Slop oppresses you. If you are a POC, you are doubly screwed. Here are two black commentators statements:
“As the movement grows, the conversation on the war on Blacks lives (is expanding) to talk about all the ways this is a war on Black lives including economic violence, physical violence, psychological violence and educational violence,” said Cat Brooks, co-chair of the Onyx Organizing Committee.
Ferguson BLM
The reason why black folks die younger in Ferguson is not just because of cops like Darren Wilson, but because of a systematic, interlocking network of economic violence and environmental poisoning; quite effectively, this network makes sure that those with darker skin spend less time on this earth.
Robbie Clark, a member of the Black Friday 14, said: “We have to be clear about what it means when we’re talking about Black Lives Matter. We’re talking about all Black lives – Black women, queer lives and formerly incarcerated lives.”
“When we talk about state-sanctioned violence, it’s also about what (violence) looks like economically, state-sanctioned economic violence.”
Ferguson commission won't bring social change
Notice the addition of economics and the environment to the police and administrative (courts as profit centers) violence. I want to emphasize that the concept of "economic violence" was, I believe, coined by Jesse Jackson:
"We have to put the focus on Kenosha, Wisconsin, as the place, here and now, where we draw the line to end economic violence!"
- Jesse Jackson, 1988 campaign
All of the above are the effects of what Big Money can buy. But it is the buying itself that is the problem. The buying of the media and turning it into a propaganda machine; the buying of the government and turning it into legalized bribery and crony capitalism; the buying of junk science to disappear the growing environmental crisis. The buying of international bodies like the WTO to gut our sovereignty. And finally, the buying of the Constitution itself. Over the last five years, as The Slop has bought state government after state government, we are perilously close to these right wing assholes calling a constitutional convention that would be, together with the heinous TPP deal, the death of our democracy.
I'm not certain how my categories of Looters and Shooters aligns with the more technical analysis of the Deep State. But, you have to be fairly sophisticated to be aware of the Deep State. The benefit of The Slop is that you can explain it to normal people.
3. Polluters
If the Shooters are the teeth and claws of The Slop, and the Looters are its mouth and stomach, the Polluters are its asshole. The Slop is a beast that is perfectly OK with fouling it's own nest, because it will just up and move to Paraguay or wherever. After turning China into a toxic hell, they have decided it's time to frack America and send the oil on bomb trains to export terminals, newly bribed into legality.
Our military uses massive amounts of DU, spewing teratogenic radioactive pollution all over the ME and creating toxic moonscapes like the Hanaford reservation at home. Oil companies and coal companies pollute the crap out of our country, poisoning people and the environment, and if caught at all, get slap on the wrist fines. The Koch Brothers fund ALEC to get laws passed to harm the conversion to alternative energy and to deny climate change.
The Koch Brothers are a pathological case. Born rich, they have always felt oppressed by government. It is in the way of their preventing people from abandoning the dangerous fossil fuels that made the Koch Brothers' fortune. It is in the way of their running their factories like open sewers. Starting with their father, the family has spent over 75 years trying to overthrow legitimate government regulation in the name of pie in the sky libertarianism.
If they were just garden variety science deniers and polluters, the Kochs would have gone under by now; but as one of the key organizers of The Slop, they have politicized their politics of pollution. Politicized it to the point where Climate Change denialism has mutated into a generalized anti-science trend among the population. They are literally dismantling the intellectual foundations of our industrial civilization. So, as the old saying goes, it seems that "you don't have to be the brains to be the boss; you just have to be an asshole".
4. What is to be done?
First, there is no sense taking on the Shooters with actual weapons. It simply validates their worldview and forces us to fight on their turf, where we are completely outgunned. Second, it is clear that pollution is an outcome of the Looters being in charge. That is despite the fact that the polluters-in-chief are one of the most powerful cells of the conservative guerilla war against legitimate government.
That leaves us with the Looters. The problem is there is no "president" of the Looters. There is no "heart" in their digestive system. As Andrew Young said, "Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it." However, the purest and worst Looters are the financial crooks on Wall St. - the too-big-to-fail/jail banks. In today's economy, they are completely parasitical, taking a bite of everyone's income. They are a class of rentiers, installed over the last forty years by The Slop's engineering of the financial laws, regulations, and regulators. They are the leadership class of The Slop.
The international financial economy seems to be headed for another bust. The latest high-profit bubbles - Chinese manufacturing and fracking - are rapidly deflating. The former because China overbuilt massively and because the 99% simply have no money to buy anything. The latter because the Saudis are intent on destroying the industry; and the banks who loaned the frackers the junk bonds are going under with them.
Here is the opportunity: Instead of being Greece, and waiting for the Shock Doctrine to be imposed, we need to be prepared to break up the big banks, the sooner, the better. But, if there is another crash, it is imperative not to bail these crooks out again. It is imperative to put them in jail and strip them of their ill-gotten assets and their control over our country. On the Shooting and Polluting fronts, we need to fight holding actions: opposing all our foreign interventions, opposing bloated military waste, defending environmental laws, suing polluters, and taking direct action to block pipelines.
5. The bottom line
If you can put aside bludgeoning each other with swiftboats and endorsements in the primaries, the deeper analysis you have just read leads you inexorably to Bernie Sanders as the candidate that has already expounded the conclusion I just stated. OTOH, HRC is pro-Shooter (neocon lite), pro-Looter (Wall St. cheerleader), and pro-Polluter(as SoS, she pushed franking overseas and supported the Keystone pipeline for years, until it became a political liability). In fact, Bill and Hill are charter members of the Democratic wing (DLC/DNC/Third Way) of The Slop.
The choice is simple, if you are willing to think.