Daily Archive

Well we can’t be posting sunshine everyday here at DWR.  A small reminder of what the people of our nations are up against.  From the essay titled Revolution and American Empire by Rob Urie.

“Liberal economists have ‘fought the good fight’ for nominally populist economic programs for the last decade with little but growing frustration to show for it. In sequence, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama enacted economic policies— deregulation of banks, tax cuts for the very wealthy, the largest bank bailouts in human history and ‘trade’ deals that formalize corporate control over civil governance. There exist economic theories to support each and every one of these policies. Many prominent economists base which economic policies they support or oppose on which political Party is in office at the time they are proposed. The policies enacted are retroactively deemed ‘politically feasible’ in tacit admission that economic outcomes are politically determined. ‘Markets’ are used to explain these outcomes with the politics removed.

From the time of the American Revolution to today, with a brief compromise between 1948 and about 1973, the U.S. has been run by and for a self-serving plutocracy. Slavery and genocide weren’t ‘accidents’ nor were they the product of primitive thinking. U.S. wars in Central America, Southeast Asia and Iraq were / are as primitive, in the sense of being for-profit and brutal, as any in human history. And it is hardly an accident that elite impunity and immunity from prosecution for crimes, including War Crimes, is matched by brutal repression of the economic underclasses. Banks and corporations are the social forms of economic imperialism, necessary to the imperial project that places the rest of us as imperial subjects. Back to the start: the American Revolution was fought for the freedom to repress while the revolutions of liberation it has opposed were / are by-and-large fought against it.

The obligatory liberal chides against Russian and Cuban totalitarianism, in their contemporary incarnations against ‘strongman’ Vladimir Putin and the aging Fidel Castro, never admit to two centuries of American crimes or to never ending U.S. attempts to undermine democratic revolutions around the globe. This isn’t to gloss over crimes— the U.S. is the only nation in history to drop atom bombs on largely civilian populations, U.S. General Curtis LeMay joked that had the U.S. lost WWII he would have hung for the bombing of Tokyo, three million killed in the Korean War, three million killed in Vietnam, one million killed in Iraq and substantial portions of Central America turned into right-wing gangster states. Cuba is poor today because the U.S. has enforced an economic blockade of it for half a century. And the only guarantee from ‘liberalized’ relations between the U.S. and Cuba is that Cuba will get the worst of it.”

[Source:Counterpunch]