Class War Criminals

The concept of a class war is somehow omnipresent and yet not there, a reference to nowhere. We hear about it once in a while usually when right wing conservatives are commenting on union activity in the news. On a rare occasion you may hear the opposing version when corporate friendly union busting politicians are attacking the hard won rights of the workers. But we are now entering a heightened stage of this mystical, metaphoric war in which both sides will be fighting for their very existence. Though we've never heard the term "class war" in most history classes, it's somehow more important, more prevalent, and more instructive in our current world of multinational corporate power than any military war in the history of the planet. In a way it's also the longest running war when you begin to see the consistent thread of aristocracy through the bloody legacy of empires from roman to american. Maybe it's time we include a history of class in history class, to teach about the class war on par with WWII.

Clearly the most notable difference between a military war and the class war is the role of nations, or the seeming insignificance of their roles. Wars are most often visited from one nation upon another, both with massive resources to draw from. When a nation wages a war it is overwhelmingly the poor to middle class (or bottom half) who put their actual bodies on the lines in the ultimate sacrifice. But this is not how class war works because the wealthy simply do not fight, and when they do join the military they are rarely if ever in harms way and historically enter the ranks at officer levels. Wealthy people have too much to live for, they cannot be expected to fight in infantry positions and therefore their numbers are severely low, especially when compared to the middle to lower classes who make up the bulk of fighting forces around the globe. Imagine if the class war were waged in the same military manner as WWI and II, the odds would be overwhelmingly in the favor of the poor. The rich and powerful upper 10% of the world population are not dumb enough to challenge the bottom 90% militarily. On the contrary, they're smart enough to get the bottom to do virtually all of the bidding for the top for a sliver of the reward.

In this very real war for the power and proprietary rights to the worlds resources, Fox news (or Faux news) is the pillar of propaganda for the rich and powerful, like the Koch brothers (pronounced "Coke") who have together bank rolled the entire tea party phenomena and all of it's puppet political candidates and campaigns. These billionaire cowboys have always been manipulating our so called democracy, but since the supreme courts handy work turned our corporations into "people" in a plot copy and pasted right from the script of Frankenstein, they can shop for the election results they want the same way they bid for fine art at Christie's in Rockefeller center. And wherever the Koch bros want them, there is Faux News repeating ad nauseum the talking points the wealthy corporate interests program them to say. Fox and all of the tea party candidates are little more than billion dollar Koch whores. There has never been a clearer demonstration of the corrosive effects of capitalism on democracy. The cohesion between Fox news and the republican party is seamless, and the claim of "fair and balanced" is designed to convince weak minded people that the far right is the center, effectively eliminating the left in a feat of overt Orwellian mind control.

There is no question that money makes a difference in elections, the only point that could be debated is exactly how much of a difference it makes in each individual election. And there is no doubt where the majority of money is coming from and where it goes thanks to many organizations tracking large campaign contributions from corporations and wealthy individuals. The average american doesn't contribute financially to political campaigns, most don't even bother to vote in midterm elections. So it's simple to conclude that the difference that money makes is overwhelmingly in the favor of the wealthy corporations and individuals who pitch the most into the pot. The one real variable is the significant sector of the poor who vote republican, but those numbers have been historically lower than the poor to middle class who vote for democrats. So for the sake of argument, let's be conservative and say that without any campaign contributions the races would be close, within a 5-10% margin. The difference that money makes only needs to be from 11-15% to ensure a republican victory at the polls. The reason democrats still win however is that without the extra money much fewer people would vote republican and that 11-15% difference just isn't enough.

In the state of Wisconsin there is a powerful, peaceful, peoples' uprising going on (as of this writing) over the recently "elected" republican governor Scott walkers' overt union busting tactics reminiscent of pre-FDR america. Walker has taken the gloves off making it easy to rip the mask off of the class war that is usually so subtle in it's ferocious appetite for destruction. He came into the drivers seat of a state that was well within budget and on track to have a surplus and declaring the state "open for business" (or "for sale") he immediately gave away over one hundred million dollars in corporate tax breaks putting the state into deficit. In the same stroke and without batting an eyelash he demanded that public workers make the sacrifices to pay for the hole in the budget, AND that their unions give up collective bargaining rights, the backbone of union power. Asking unions to give up their collective bargaining rights is like asking corporations to give up their limited liability status. When a somewhat weak union response came back to say "We'll make the sacrifices of our hard earned rights, but we won't give up our right to collective bargaining." Walker was uncompromising, unions must go so corporations could feel safe to call Wisconsin home. Walker beat his democrat rival by a mere 5%, this governor was purchased almost exclusively by the Koch bros for the purpose of destroying the unions and now his work has begun.

This is Class warfare union busting at it's finest, or worst, but one thing is certain, It's on. In the words of Florance Reese's classic union song it's time for everyone in the world to ask themselves deep down "Which side are you on?" The Koch bros and their cabal of Koch head republicans are watching this battle for Madison very closely, if Scott (The Imperial) Walker can destroy unions in their long time stronghold of Wisconsin, they are going to do it everywhere until there is nothing left for working people in this world. It's not as if they say amongst themselves "Lets destroy most unions, but leave a few here and there." they want them all dead, much more than they care to seek and destroy any terrorist hiding in a cave somewhere. And they argue somewhat effectively that our unions are driving jobs out of the nation, as if union members voted to have the factories moved overseas. The only reason the factories go where people won't defend themselves is because their unscrupulous owners want to exploit labor for their own disproportionate gains. Madison may not be Tunisia, but america is not the middle east, I see in Madison, Wisconsin a spark that can begin to resolve thousands of years of inequities in a mass global uprising of the people, by the people, and for the people.

If the unions must be sacrificed so must the system that justifies their existence.

Egypt Rising

When a great mass of people come together into the streets, uniting across many differences and cultural boundaries to express themselves with a clear message, the very least we can do is watch, listen to their stories, hear their cries of corruption. So let's look at Egypt, so often overlooked in such a consistently troubled region, despite it's border with Palestine, Israel, Sudan, and Libya it's so rarely in the headlines. The average American knows just a few basic facts about pyramids, pharaohs, the Sahara desert and the Nile delta, we know more about it's ancient political system than it's current politics. It's one of those countries (the vast majority) that Americans know little of until they bomb it to kingdom come. And perhaps this has something to do with the fact that it's had the same leader/dictator for three decades, political stagnation, not much to see.

The phrase "life under Saddam" became redundant in the Bush years, and we were all led to believe that Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator and life was pretty much hell for the people of Iraq. Life is now pretty much Hell for the people of Iraq and it's hard not to look back to "life under saddam" and notice how, at least relatively, life was somewhat better. So how does "life under Mubarak" compare to Saddams' Iraq? We heard a lot about the torture Saddams forces would dole out and the "rape rooms" that as far as I can recall were never found, and I assume that's where the WMDs were hiding. Torture was prevalent under Saddam but so it was under Mubarak as well, and when we wanted to outsource torture it was good to have a friend with experience. If only Saddam had offered his morbid services to the US we could have done business and been allies like our good friend Mubarak.

But not only has the US been a strong ally of the Mubarak regime, Egypt is the second largest recipient of US military aid after Israel. And Israel is another thing Saddam and Mubarak had in common, though Saddam held fast to the popular Arab sentiment of solidarity with Palestinians and their plight under Israels' aggressive expansionism. Israel and Iraq don't share a border but they can easily lob missiles over Syria and Jordan and of course they did during the first Bushs' war with Saddam. We did fund and arm Saddam back when he was fighting the Iranians, whom we were also funding and arming, but that was a long time ago and we haven't spoken much since then. So Saddam remained a potential threat to Israel while Mubarak and his family were growing fat off of their friends in Washington DC, the latest reports show his family is worth 70 Billion dollars while the people of Egypt live in squaller.

Of course the majority of the aid that we "give" to nations like Egypt must be spent with US corporations in the military industrial complex so it's just another way to funnel tax dollars into the war machine. In a way this is the worst face of the American war machine, making war our biggest export, encouraging the acquisition and use of ever more powerful weaponry the same way a car salesman would encourage you to go for a Sunday drive. And of course on the domestic front we also export police suppression, torture, kidnapping, and other horrible acts by people in positions of power protected from prosecution. Though Saddams' corruption became quickly untenable for George W. Bush, Mubarak was totally cool with him, I guess he was a good dictator. As long as we could buy an ally for Israel we could care less just how evil that particular dictator happened to be.

Barack Obama is not Bush and he is not Mubarak, but despite his inspiring speech to the Egyptian people and the Arab world he carefully worked behind the scenes to maintain the status quo in Egypt against the will of it's people. Now Mubarak is gone (as of this writing) and the state department will be working overtime to make sure that the next leader of Egypt is equally friendly, or equally greedy. It is one thing to support a dictatorship and work closely with that regime to commit crimes against humanity as in the secret renditions, but the Obama administration is actively working against democracy, to prevent it, and/or weaken it. They're working over-overtime because they are doing the very same thing in Haiti at the same time as the democratically elected president Aristide is finally being issued a passport to return to his own country after our government (along with the governments of Canada and France) removed him from his home and country at gun point.

So what will happen now? Could the spark of revolution spread across the Arab world? Or the entire world? Could the people of Saudi Arabia take to the streets demanding a democratically elected government? What about the democratically elected Hamas in Palestine, don't they deserve to rule the country they won in a fair election? You may say they are a terrorist group but state terrorism is a part of the blueprint of power, in a way it merely proves they have what it takes to rule. And the bigger question is... Can it happen here? It will happen here, but what will it take? This is the headquarters of global hegemony, it's hard to say how a real American revolution might look but it can't look much different than what we've been watching in Egypt. Remember, there never has been an American revolution because there was no nation called "America" before 1776, and what we call the American revolution has given us an aristocratic model of democracy in which the wealthy have an overwhelming advantage.

We the people of the world can unite, we can overcome the tyrannies of the institutions of power.