Why Dismantle the US?

It doesn't seem to make sense that Americans, many from old families living in this country for many generations, would want to dismantle the country that nurtured them.

In my Dec. 7th blog-post, "Come-on to Apocalypse," I showed how a libertarian/conservative list was promoting relocation to any of "80 beautiful countries." Allegiance to the US seems absent among the moneyed. Their attitude: take your fortune somewhere else, where you won't be so heavily taxed/regulated/controlled. The assumption is that the US is all of these things, although our tax burden is lower than almost all other developed nations. In many developing ones, however--and some developed ones like Greece--taxes and regulations are not enforced.

I expect the emigres would evade taxes of both their new abode and their former one, but it's ironic that the site promoting emigration also highlighted free medical care, something most conservatives complain about when it's "Obamacare."

So, the financiers, or other wealthy, have places to go. Their means of enrichment, however, might even suggest a parallel to fugitives from the law, who flee the country to escape imprisonment. For example, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, et al, get virtually free money from the Fed, which they use to speculate through computer programs and algorithms, doing split-second trades for billions of dollars, and profiting with fractions of a cent. Actually what they are doing is ripping off millions of dollars daily, from everyone else. How different are they than the cyber-criminals who siphon unnoticeable fractions of a cent from millions of transactions? There have been crime movies, in which super-criminals invade bank security networks and do the same thing.

But Goldman, et al aren't criminals, at least in the legal sense: they're Wall Street operators. Why do they want to dismantle the US? Because they can: they can come away fabulously wealthy, but at the expense of everyone else.

The same ethos rules many American businesses: military contractors who overbill, "frackers," who don't care if they ruin our drinking water, for-profit prisons gaining "clients" from corrupt judges and manufacturers who outsource to avoid taxes and union wages.

This isn't just economics, it's politics: the effect of trade treaties. Mexican or Chinese workers undercut American labor. Trade barriers were lowered or eliminated enabling corporations to break unions and force American workers to compete with the lowest-paid labor globally.

Again, why? There is strong anti-union feeling among those who earn from capital: after all, the more a worker gets, the less they get--and vice-versa. Additionally, workers without unions can't resist the boss.

It boils down to class struggle. Capital is winning, never mind if it's destroying the country. With their money, the wealthy can always go somewhere else: one of those "80 beautiful countries." They can even find new victims.

In Rome, Senators voted to hand Italy and the Emperor over to the Ostrogoths, rather than raise taxes on themselves.

Wiki-Revolution II

Wikileaks has added a new wrinkle to non-violent protest. Neither Gandhi, nor Martin Luther King could reach so many, to unveil the secrets, of violence and corruption, by so many, over most of the globe. Neither could stop wars, and perhaps wikileaks can't either, but it can certainly reach the masses of people with the information they need, so popular revulsion could stop them. It's possible.

The wikileaks case is radical. Political alliances crumble, and others emerge in unforeseen places, like conservative libertarians and anti-war progressives: Ron Paul insisted that Assange is only the publisher and that nobody was killed by the document dump, compared to the many killed in illegal wars caused by lying, the very thing the documents illustrate. He said if Assange is prosecuted, then the Times and WaPo should be as well. He claimed (as Ellsberg has) that what Assange did was just as legal as Daniel Ellsberg, and the Pentagon Papers. Some claim that Assange is no Ellsberg, but one funny fact is: Ellsberg loudly proclaims that he is.

However, this is bigger than one person. What wikileaks wrought is not simply Assange's creation. As wikileaks' name implies, it involves the cooperation of numberless collaborators all over the world, but it has also awakened a sleeping giant--yes, like Gandhi awakening colonized Indians from their torpor. The counter-offensive, after wikileaks was attacked, on the web and financially, has made people wake up. If you have a computer, and you're enraged at the world as presently constituted, here is a bloodless, even relatively safe, way of expressing your outrage, and perhaps forcing changes. Technology now being what it is, it is entirely possible that a small global movement, say 1 million strong, could force the world's governments to negotiate, to stop their wars, to enforce fair labor laws worldwide, to oppose the power of global corporations, or to act definitively and decisively on global climate change.

Anonymous demonstrates a whole new power, much more direct, non-violent, and populist. Yes, you have to have minimal understanding of computers, and a computer, of course, but computers and computer literacy are like a disease spreading across the globe with lightning speed.

On matters of free speech, and on wars and secrecy, progressives should look around them. As Ron Paul's speech indicates, progressives can find allies in funny places: progressives and libertarians have more in common than they think. There will be more libertarians, and hardly fewer progressives in the next Congress. Think how progressive the free exchange of information could be.

In addition, the resulting generation of hacktavists could make it possible to dismantle The Empire without bloodshed. The US might emulate Britain, peacefully withdrawing, instead of collapsing, like the fall of Rome.