by Denis A. Conroy for the Saker blog

One imagines… from outside of America at least…that the political system there, robust one year, retro the next, is on its way to drowning in a sea of vitriolic comeuppance. Half the population think Donald Trump is a buffoon while the other half think the Donald is o.k. But what we overlook is the fact that the population of America living within the aegis of casino capitalism has produced…per se…the conditions for buffoonery. It appears that the working-and middle-class were too busy lapping up dollar benefits to notice that global capitalism had allowed an international corporate class to acquire massive political power across the nations…neo-conservative doctrines arrived to privatise fruition…and the people too immature to understand what was happening.

But the truth of the matter is that American predatory practices are accepted as the norm by the population so long as they get a piece of the action. They are fine with that so long as the ‘trickle-down-effect’ of wealth continues to work for them. They are fine with everything their government does so long as they make money. They are even fine with their government’s foreign policy programs which demonise foreign competitors before destroying their infrastructure and systems of government. ‘To the victor goes the spoils’ factor that they benefit from has become the modus operandi of the world’s richest ‘democracy’ doing it for oligarchs and dictators who basically abjure the concept of democracy.

The systemic roots of degeneracy were much in evidence, but a glib population went along for the ride…as long as Corporate America and the military could impose their own concept of maturation on the system, things would come to fruition. Dollars would keep coming. The people had been indoctrinated into believing that might was right. Those among us who might challenge the inhospitable hegemonic pretentions of the power elites could be restrained. The rhetorical harbingers of American style progress…those who controlled the wealth of the nation…would in time align themselves with the House of Saud, the House of Abraham and the House of Christian Evangelism. Their respective muses manufactured metaphysical chicanery to keep their communities from becoming free from their cant. Political thinking had to be privatized.

But what came into being in America was a brand of ‘democracy’ which professed an aversion to public ownership, public accountability and anything and everything relating to any form of public scrutiny. It would become the ‘stuff’ of American culture long before Margaret Thatcher distilled the privatisation factor for neo-con-speak with such statements as, “There is no such thing as Society, there are individual men and women, and there are families”. She also said, “As God once said, and I think rightly” …!!…which leaves one to wonder if privatising morality is a good thing, as the energies and programming that go into self-gratification must inevitably conform to practices that escape the notice of the public. Was Maggie onto something…a recipe for corporate greatness perhaps…when she said, “You don’t tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive”.

So, on with the motley; isn’t Western capitalism an outcrop of European colonialism? Isn’t corporate jingo-speak the language of exploitation? Isn’t it cute, though inexplicably absurd, that Americans mistook Shylock for Santa Claus.

Evidently the elite operate on the basis that the ‘people’ are too immature to comprehend the concept of democracy…which means that they are vulnerable when ‘democracy’ from above is imposed on them. It was Margaret Thatcher who presaged The War on Terror with her statement, “All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail. It must be business-as-usual”. This said, business as usual was heating up the planet as was Margaret’s rhetoric.

So, when Donald Trump won the presidency, the business that is the business of the two-party system experienced an upping of the ante when the new chief deal-maker began pouring ever more toxicity into the swamp by nationalising his emotions per twitter twaddle. Fear and loathing had now reached such levels that it threatened to deflect the public from the real issues which were parasitism, inequality and evasiveness…the narcissism that cannibalises what is left of the American soul.

The red and blue fight involving the Republican and Democratic parties, hardly disguise the level of hatred that runs through the veins of the monochromatic American political beast that has been nurtured on dollars. The twin-headed beast has become a threat to the well-being of the entire globe.

From the European and Middle Eastern wombs came concepts of the hoary hegemonic kind that had roots in hoary religious tomes spewing forth monochromatic texts dealing with identity and ownership of truth. Over time becoming the boundaries that defined states. The British Crown, claimed that much of the world was their backyard, believing that the sun never set upon its empire. From the American ‘crown’ came the belief that God gave them the engineering skills to revamp his creation, garrison the globe with military bases, engineer wars for profit while celebrating whiteness, and generally fuck-over anyone who disagreed with them, be they climate scientists or the more sentient among the population who questioned notions of maturity.

But the strangest engineering feat of all was the creation of a coalition of the willing…the children of Western enlightenment no less, the white educated class who believed that they, and only they, possessed mature knowhow that would save the developing world from itself. In time it would become known as the white man’s burden and cost the natives of far-flung lands dearly.

But when America succeeded Britain in the role of super-grandee rearranging the complexion of the oil rich Middle East, it did precisely what its predecessor had done…suppress the aspirations of the various people who were seeking liberation from oppression by supporting dictators amenable to the interests of these latter-day colonists. To establish a hegemonic system loyal to the interests of Western banking, the petro-dollar system was implemented so as to give the emerging empire currency primacy and control over the vital interests of large parts of the globe.

But what defines the corporate mind is evasiveness. The selective particularism of the established news outlets demonstrate how active support for obtuse lesser-evil concepts can generate negative energy on both sides of the political equation for the purpose of giving identity politics ad hominem status by denigrating the character of entire groups. An ugly red versus blue spat roils the political waters as either side presents its case for doing the business of America. Degeneration had been an American weapon of export till it arrived back in the homeland as blowback.

But it is the business of America that throws a shadow across the globe. Specious killing has become its bottom line simply because killing is good for business. The lesser of two evils twaddle is a misnomer in a society that has never found its moral compass. Americans appears to be forever readying for an election, but nothing of significance ever changes or is even discussed. In a nation of private banks, public welfare has become passe. Meanwhile, millions in public service and academia mutely wait out their time in a manner that doesn’t threaten the safety of their pension funds while occasionally…and wistfully perhaps…reflect on the consequences of the aggression America and its allies have wrought on the world at large.

Too bad about hapless Yemen and the wanton slaughter of civilians over there! Too bad about hapless Gaza and the wanton slaughter of civilians over there! Or put more simply; it’s too bad about hapless Yemen, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, Honduras, and the wanton slaughter of people across the globe. Propaganda had become playdough in the greasy hands of Anglo-Zionist corporatism, and the journalism provided by the New York Times was strictly for the manicured minds in the Beltway.

But as nothing is as it seems to be, truth must remain a shadow on the cave wall, sometimes a statistical blur, sometimes a pig-in-a-poke. But the cleverest pig in the American poke must be AIPAC, an institution that manages…quite rabbinically…the tensions that exist between anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism in a country that is xenophobic, socially underdeveloped and evangelical. It has made pig-in -the-poke politics extraordinarily successful by secreting itself into the heart of the system, thereby gaining inordinate control of the so-called Western narrative. Having situated itself as a media player…with the help of the New York Times etc…it has been extremely successful in deflecting critical attention from the destruction of Palestine. It became an institution that gave new meaning to the ‘embedded’ concept.

AIPAC had read the cards correctly and knew only too well how to play the evasive corporate game; keep public interest from spoiling the privateer’s banquet for a start. Its biggest achievement to date is to have ventured into the very heart of its host country economically and achieve unconditional military support for its colonization of Palestine. Its other significant achievement has been to present the Jews as a people of great moral stature to the American people and have them share in their hatred of the Palestinians. But the cleverest achievement of all…and I wonder how this reflects on the American public and much of the West…is to have played the anti-Semitic card to such effect, that so-called civilized communities across the West are rendered mute when confronted by the barbaric colonization that is going on in Palestine. It’s as if the American public, upon observing what is happening in Palestine, see the mirror image of their own business-as-usual mentality, and accept it as normal.

But from outside the west, the perspective is very different, Zionism is seen as a critical mass controlling the critical responses to Zionist propaganda in the many countries that host them. Anti-Semitism is unique to those who imagine that Jews live off the bounty created by non-maleficent business practices in a variety of Western countries, while retaining allegiance to an historic mythological narrative from which they derive notions of exceptionality. That they project them onto their host countries becomes another issue. For instance, the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn…an honourable man and non-racist who has many supporters who regard the criticism of him as a conspiracy…illustrates how Zionist propaganda can release ad hominem viruses into Western institutions for the purpose of establishing for itself the role of the supreme arbiter in matters pertaining to the moral high ground.

John F. Kennedy is on record as saying, “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. When he said these words, he was not addressing special interest groups or portions of the community…he was thinking of the ‘social’ fabric, the entire community. Wall Street casino capitalism, big wasteful Pentagon military budgets, CIA stoked instability, Zionist style Machiavellianism, media-military collaboration and relationships during times of perpetual war were some of the ‘portions’ he had to bypassed. John F. Kennedy, like Martin Luther King was aware that proportionality was a prerequisite to inclusiveness; unfortunately, both were assassinated.

The American way was always to shoot off guns or shout down those who had a social vision. The elites imagined that the many were there to serve the celebrated few. If Margaret Thatcher had been an American, would she have said…’there is no public, there is only The Dow’?

Denis A. Conroy
Freelance Writer
Australia.