Opinion Editorials, February 2017

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Stop Worrying Only About Trump and Start Worrying About How Capitalism Is Destroying Us By Frank Scott Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, February 3, 2017

The Only Thing Dumber Than Trump Is the Reaction to Trump

“Capitalism develops the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original source of all wealth: the soil and the worker”
Karl Marx

 
The attack on mass consciousness by America’s ruling powers that began with a campaign to assure Trump’s candidacy so that their wholly owned subsidiary could win failed miserably but continues at greater excess and with dangerously traumatic success since his victory. Every ignorant, undiplomatic or semi-stupid action or utterance by the new CEO of corporate America is met by imbecilic, bigoted and near moronic reaction from capital’s billionaire central through its professional upper class political/media servants. While conservative America has long been accused, often justifiably, of waving the banner of reactionary politics and narrow thinking, a failing economic system is helping reduce liberals and progressives to those who are simply not members of the American Nazi Party. Yet.
 
It has reached a point at which if Trump were to pass wind in public the NY Times  - followed by the rest of American media - would charge him with conducting a gas attack on America’s children, pets, immigrants, gays, women, epileptics, dyspeptics, people of color, people of no color, Jews, agnostics, republicans, democrats, and other alleged minorities depending on which fake-media outlet was carrying its owner’s message.
 
After a shocking Trump victory, assured by our ruler’s destruction of the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the reaction has been to whip large segments of the public into a frenzy of often well meant if tending toward lynch mob behavior that focuses on one or another appointment of a business-as-usual figure to the corporate board while remaining nearly comatose to the ever more deadly dangerous commercial endeavors of the firm.
 
Global capitalism has been ruining earth and destroying humanity at an even faster rate than the national form of the past, and Trump, a nationalist economic numbskull as opposed to the global numbskulls recently in charge, could even mean buying some time by continuing to damage the essence of life mentioned in the opening quote, but perhaps at a slightly slower rate. And maybe without a nuclear war.
 
The old conservative anti-Soviet anti-communist madness of the past is being replaced by a liberal-progressive anti-Russia of the present with alleged intellectuals herded like cattle into a two legged stampede of idiocy about our democratic process having been sullied by Russian theft, said process being a product of minority wealth since it came into being and having no more to do with democracy, on a national level, than an alleged free market where there is no such thing as a free lunch has to do with freedom. If you haven’t enough money for housing you can live in the street, as half a million Americans do, and if you can’t buy political power you can remain politically powerless, as 95% of Americans remain. This despite what we’re told by our owners about our supposedly cherished and sacred freedom, which is like masters telling slaves they own the plantation. When the slaves believe it and start arguing about which of them have better positions in the house or the field, the master, slavery and capitalism is strengthened. But all of us and not just the convinced suffer. That’s where America and the world are concerning the political economics which rule and have ruled since long before Trump, creating situations of dire crisis for billons of people and the earth itself. And the marketing of new brand names and new product lines like “climate change” or “immigration rights” do nothing but perpetuate the overall systemic crisis by isolating and mis-identifying many of its problems in order to make a solution more difficult to achieve.
 
The possibly largest contradiction in profit and loss marketing under the control of capitalist billionaires is mentioned in that opening quote and desperately needs the attention of those justifiably concerned about environmental destruction, appalling poverty and endless wars over control of capital. Which is why we are to be kept mindful of which individual hero or villain sits in the CEO chair following the dictates of minority banking, and treated as a mindless minority concentrating on one or another identity group that separates us from the only identity group that really matters; humanity, which is only divided by skin tone, religion, sexuality or nation for the purpose of keeping it/us from identifying as ourselves, and demanding and enacting democracy in material deed rather than meaningless word.
 
In the American political economy that spends more than 600 billion on war, more than 60 billion on pets, reduces millions to poverty and hundreds of thousands to being homeless, to mention only a handful of the staggering contradictions that were and are our reality whichever clown prince sits at the surreality seat in DC, we need to become conscious, active and truly resistant to it and not simply individual or group personalities. Millions have been murdered in the Middle East by that system and now its unconscious supporters are maneuvered into standing up for the rights of immigrants we have forced out of their countries by our murderous practices. It would be like a Polish Jew trying to escape the Nazi onslaught by trying to emigrate to Germany, with decent if terribly uninformed German citizens crying out “we must help them”.
 
We need not attend graduate school to understand the dreadful idiocy of conducting economic affairs in adherence to practices that reward fewer and fewer people, at greater cost and poverty to more people and the earth that sustains us all. Unless we change that in resistance to problems that threaten humanity, any resistance offered one or another villain, manufactured by mind managers or real, will amount to nothing.
 
Merely consider what any of us marketplace survivors deal with every day but try thinking about it in substance instead of just reacting as we are socially managed to react. How can a gallon of milk be more expensive than a gallon of gasoline? What does it take to create the milk in the cow and how much labor is involved in milking a cow? Anyone can understand that gasoline comes from petroleum, which is not as accessible as milk. After you milk a cow, the next day it will have more milk. But you don’t just squeeze earth’s teats to get petroleum and when you take it from the earth it won’t reproduce for millennia. And the process of changing it into gasoline is massive and costly, even before the pollution it creates. So why is milk more expensive? Market forces of supply and demand?

Of course, especially if you believe the slaves own the plantation. And why are organics only available to people with more money? Why is it more expensive to buy fruits and vegetables that are simply planted and nurtured by nature, rather than jacked up with expensive chemicals, fertilizers and other petroleum by-products? Market forces of supply and demand? And how do we meet the demand for weapons and satisfy our demand for pets while leaving so many humans with so little “market force” that they lead lives of abject misery?

These and countless other contradictions cannot simply be reduced to heroes and villains and must be seen as the workings of a system that can only benefit a few at cost to very very many. Billions of humans on a global level, but millions just here in the USA. That is a much bigger problem for us to deal with than the identity, personality, skin tone, religion, or sexuality of one or another individual or member of a group. And all of us, once we deal with the political economics that rule our lives, will benefit, not just some of us.

In other words, stop worrying only about Trump and start worrying – big time – about capitalism.   
 
Frank Scott writes  political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate

http://legalienate.blogspot.com

Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah & ccun.org.

editor@aljazeerah.info & editor@ccun.org