Reading news stories about how, despite the best efforts of our leaders, we are at the brink of the worst Depression in the past century, has become surreal. It feels like those reports from mobsters or CIA officials that the victim -- with his hands tied behind him and two shots through the back of his head -- had committed suicide.
How are we looking at people like Geithner and Summers -- and many more in Obama's administration -- as anomalies because they're not helping the country out of its rush toward Depression? Why don't we instead see what the evidence seems to be saying: the plan is working very well, we just don't want to acknowledge what that plan IS?
How about looking at it this way:
What has been going on in the U.S. nonstop since 9-11, regardless of who is in the White House, is exactly the same three-part plan with which we have looted and destroyed countries and citizens around the world since at least 1973? What if the plan is just as it seems to be: transfer as much wealth as possible from the 90% who don't matter to the few percent who do, while destroying whatever is left of a "middle class," so we can rush toward the longed-for Two-Class world of the very rich and the disposable rest? Here are the three steps that have been tried and proven for four decades, and which have been applied -- in almost exactly the same way -- against our own country:
- Invite the well-connected corporations and very wealthy to loot our country's assets, selling off treasures bought and maintained over the years by taxpayers, for just pennies on the dollar, to these greedy and well-connected buzzards. The code word for this is "privatization."
- Change the laws to make sure that the looters can't be prosecuted, either now or in the future. The code word for this is "deregulation."
- Overload the economy with debts, wars, expenses that are NOT necessary, in order to force the society to remove the social safety nets, labor unions, pensions and all other forms of "social security." It is essential that these safety nets be destroyed so that the vast majority of people -- who don't matter -- can be rendered so weak, powerless, desperate and frightened that they can more easily be ignored. The code words are "cuts to social spending."
It seems that if we're serious about understanding what's going on, we should start with the things that are actually being done to us, rather than the sweet anesthesia of thinking everyone in our government is there to serve and empower the 90+% of us who have become -- as other leaders put it three generations ago -- "useless eaters."
It seems more parsimonious simply to say that the operations are a success, the patients are dying, and the plan is working perfectly.
AUTHOR BIO: Davidson Loehr is a former musician, combat photographer and press officer in Vietnam, owner of a photography studio in Ann Arbor, then a carpenter and drunk. He holds a Ph.D. in methods of studying religion, theology, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science, with an additional focus on language philosophy (The University of Chicago). From 1986 to 2009, he served as a Unitarian minister, and has been a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar since 1992. He is the author of one book that sold 9,500 copies, America, Fascism & God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher, (Chelsea Green, 2005). Now retired from the ministry, he is building a platform to become involved in national discussions of religion, science and culture. His book in progress is The Rise of Secular Religion in America.