Tag: political philosophy

Apr 30 2011

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Organized Money, Political Philosophy

An Antemdius entry uses a quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said in his speech announcing the Second New Deal in 1936:

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

Sound familiar?  We are repeating the past.  Roosevelt went on:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

What was true in 1932 is true today, and has been for going on thirty years now, but especially the last ten.  We saw 9/11 happen on the Shrub’s watch, with the election-stealing chimp sitting on his ass and let a major terrorist attack kill nearly three thousand people.  We saw that same dictator brush off warnings that hurricane-wrecked levies, allowed to deteriorate for years, would not hold up under the weight of rising floodwaters, and New Orleans drowned.  The Shrub presided over the largest financial meltdown since the First Great Depression, and the current dictator enable the bailout of the very same corporate criminals who caused it.  Barry Obama, Hopey McChangerton himself, sat by and let the Gulf of Mexico die from BP’s criminal negligence.  Now the Obamassiah is waltzing through the devastation left behind by ever more extreme tornadoes as a result of Global Warming, spouting empty words, as is his pattern, but fully intending to do absolutely nothing to help the survivors.

Apr 07 2011

Drifting Over the Edge

Dmitri Orlov is an interesting commentator. He has been claiming publically since about 2006 that the U.S. is on the edge of collapse similar to what the Soviet Union went through only a bit worse. He was born in Russia and experienced first-hand the privation of the post-Soviet period which, if you dug a little, was pretty bad. Interestingly this collapse had been predicted up to a decade before it happened but was not widely reported because of the Reagan agenda of demonizing the Soviet Union as an existential threat to the U.S.

Orlov along with people like James Howard Kunstler and many others on both the right and left-in fact, my monitoring of this movement shows a real blurring of left/right distinctions that is interesting in itself. I won’t go into the merits of Orlov’s predictions here but only want to say that the movement towards survivalism and a fascination and even longing for a collapse seems to be spreading in this country. I don’t believe this movement is irrational at all. Why do I say that? Because it should be very clear that we are in a kind of serious decline, not just economic decline, but serious political and social decline that we ought to wake up to or Orlov’s collapse scenarios may in fact take place.  

May 22 2010

The Tea Party and the 21st Century Social Crisis

I’ve been thinking tonight about the accumulating and apparently accelerating cycle of social crises and conflicts of the past several years.  Specifically I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the rightist “Tea Party” movement, which may have reached its high-water mark with the nomination of Rand Paul as the Republican candidate for Senator from Kentucky.  Most notable to me is the stridently pro-corporate, pro-business nature of Paul’s rhetoric.  This exposes to some degree the contradiction between the rightist nature of the Tea Party, and the string of corporate abuses that have provided much of the social discontent on which the Teabaggers have sought to advance.

This is also the first, tentative and provisional, step in my long contemplated effort to develop a larger social and ideological critique of the current social crisis, both in the US and globally.  I’m sure I’ll backtrack, reassess, recorrect some good portion of this and what will follow, but for the first time I feel at least sufficiently  confident of my understanding to begin putting words on paper, or on electron as the case may be.