We have good reason to fear the US capitalist class and its government; a wounded animal is a dangerous one.
By exposing the dirty dealings of the US capitalist class and its agencies, the CIA especially, Wikileaks is a further threat to the stability of the regime. Not because the likes of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, or Bush will lose face, but because the viability of system itself, already greatly discredited in the aftermath of the Great Recession, will come in to question.
The severity of the heroic Bradley Manning’s treatment by the US government has nothing to do with supposedly placing the lives of Americans in danger; Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and now Obama are the masters of this. The US capitalist class, much more aware of the crisis lurking beneath the surface in the US military than we are, is sending a warning to the thousands of young men and women in the military who are demoralized and disgusted with what they see and experience, as well as the fact that they have been lied to, and is warning them to keep their mouths shut or else. We only need to remind ourselves that the main US victim of Abu Ghraib was a working class white woman who grew up in a trailer park as top military brass and Rumsfeld and co walk free.
Despite entering the new millennium confident after the collapse of the Stalinist dictatorships, and after a decade of tech driven growth when profits reached a 40-year high, the US capitalist class are now in a state of extreme depression. We should not underestimate the level of concern they have over the Wikileaks revelations. US politicians calling for Assange’s assassination or execution, and the treatment of Manning is evidence enough, for anyone that wants to see.
The corporate mass media paints a rosy picture for the economy in the main but the truth that the strategists of capital are aware of lingers like an olfactory nightmare. US society is mired in debt and its infrastructure is crumbling. Much like the British Empire before it, US capitalism finds itself overextended as it is bogged down in predatory wars it cannot win and a military that is stretched to the limit; empires are expensive beasts.
In order to pay for the defense of the US capitalist class and its global interests, American workers are losing ground at a rapid rate; class polarization is increasing. The brief and limited period known as the American Dream is officially over never to return while the rise of China and other competitors will further increase tensions between the great powers.
Warren Buffet pointed out that there is a class war in the US and his class is winning it. The ability of the US media machine to obscure this process has been weakened over the past period. And as this occurs, the attacks have to take on a more ferocious character weakening it further. In their serious journals, the capitalist class openly discusses this and the fact that even the mighty US economy cannot avoid the laws of the market.
For fear of social unrest, the two parties of US capitalism are incapable of finding a way forward and are instead locked in permanent combat. The attacks on the US working class are increasing but they have to impose further cuts. Capitalist economists fear that the “magnitude” of the tax increases and the necessary cuts in spending are so great that the their class hasn’t the stomach for it. “The more likely path is a solution imposed on the United States by global markets”, wrote Roger Altman and Richard Haass in last month’s Foreign Affairs magazine, adding that, “The American people and their elected representatives postpone solving the country’s debt addiction at their great peril,“ He makes it clear though, that the interest on the debt is sacrosanct.
Conservative mouthpiece of capitalism, Steven Malanga warned his colleagues in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that they have to act; the US working class must be driven back to conditions that predominated prior to the rise of the CIO and the civil rights movement. “Tricks” have fed the spending habit he writes and that the borrowing can’t go on as “The budget holes are cavernous”.
He concludes that the “New Reality” (austerity and poverty for US workers beyond the millions that already have it) “isn’t going away” and urges the representatives of capital in Congress to “Wake up to it”. As a theoretician of capitalism, a bourgeois economist working at the conservative, free market worshiping Manhattan Institute Malanga can afford to be brave, he is not so close to the victims of his suggested policies as his colleagues in Congress are; they have to be elected and occasionally come face to face with them. But these people know that market forces are a greater power than any individual economy and the attacks will continue one way or another.
In Malanga’s piece he gives plenty of examples of where the money is, like the billions in interest that we have to pay for basic human services. He describes how the state of Illinois had to borrow $3.5 billion at a cost of $4.5 billion or how Arizona has been forced to use all sort of selling gimmicks, including its government buildings in order to eliminate some of its deficit. He correctly criticizes the borrowing of monies from funds that were set up for different reasons like New York’s infrastructure fund. But if we have to borrow money, someone else has it. This should be our point of departure.
But Malanga leaves out the profits, tax loopholds and other scams of the corporations. He leaves out the $3 trillion or so their predatory wars are costing the US taxpayer, the $2 trillion in cash the capitalists are sitting on and the bailouts of the banks and the free market system itself.
The attacks on Manning and Wikileaks and the mindless garbage that dominates the US mass-media, in order to obscure reality, print, television and film industry, have to be seen in the light of a these developments; the decline of US capitalism, a very powerful, extremely nervous and heavily armed superpower.
The US working class in unity and solidarity with our international brothers and sisters, has the power to change this situation. This blog has raised this also, perhaps more times than readers would like. But like electricity, we try to find the line of least resistance, try to get on with our lives as best we can and avoid a fight. But we can’t avoid a fight and the longer we avoid it the more casualties we incur. When workers fight back, whether it be the likes of Bradley Manning, workers incarcerated in our prisons through a racist and discriminatory justice system, or workers on the job or media like Wikileaks; we have to engage.
Like the laws of the market that exist independently of our individual will, history has placed on the shoulders of the working class the task of ridding ourselves of the system that perpetuates this madness.
We ignore that at our peril.
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