The real threat

The other day current POTUS Obama declared that the biggest threat to the United States of America and to the world is terrorism.

Really, Mr. POTUS?  When my chances of being killed by a rogue cop overreacting to an exponential degree with virtual impunity are greater by a factor of ten or a hundred than being killed by a terrorist, the chimera of “terrorism” is not the greatest threat to my health, safety, and well-being. 

And if that were true, Mr. POTUS, then why did you allow agents of your government to back down from doing their jobs in the face of white right-wing American terrorists in Nevada?  What would have happened if POTUS Eisenhower had backed down when Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to enforce segregation in that state’s schools? 

Fortunately, we didn’t have to learn the outcome of that because Eisenhower not only nationalized the Guard but sent in the 101^st Airborne.

In truth, the biggest danger to the U.S.A. and the world is not terrorism but the uninhibited power and de facto legal immunity of those who have produced and are still producing the Great Recession and whom people such as POTUS Obama have bent over backwards to protect from us, the outraged 99%. 

Well, theoretically “99%”.  Let me explain. 

True, the 1% at the top of the pyramid nationally and globally control a mega-glutton’s share of the wealth of the nation and the world.  They are the masters.  But the masters can’t do it by themselves.  As Turkish journalist Nuray Mert noted, “It is those who choose their well-being and careers over matters of principle who create an autocrat, not vice versa,” only in this case substitute “oligarchy” for “autocrat”. 

Because the 1% needs the next 10% to keep them in power.   So really what we have is an outraged 89% with 10% covering the backsides of the 1%, like the current POTUS and COTUS did with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  That, of course, was in addition to the $485 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed under the previous POTUS and the secret no interest $7.7 TRILLION (that’s twelve zeroes, folks) in loans to national and global financial houses in 2008 under the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility of the Federal Reserve.

When he was still Malcolm X, the prophet Malik el-Shabazz frequently told the parable of the house Negro and the field Negro.  Were he still around today, he would call the outraged 89% of us field slaves and that other 10% the house slaves.  What the 10% and the 89% have in common is that both groups are slaves, virtual and de facto maybe rather than literal and de jure, but slaves nonetheless.  Both are proletarii.

Since the current $COTU$ has grossly expanded the definitions of corporations as persons and money as speech, each of we average citizens (or is it subjects now?) only amount to about three-fifths of a person anymore, so the description fits.

Marx called that 1% at the top of the nation and of the world the “finance bourgeoisie”, as opposed to the “industrial bourgeoisie” and the “rentier bourgeoisie”.  One factor Marx got really wrong was that he never foresaw the supremacy of that sector of the bourgeoisie over the other two.  He may not have carried is historical dialectic back far enough, because the ultimate roots of the world’s banking system lie during the centuries of crusades, quests, and pilgrimages in the methods of moving money around internationally developed by the Knights Templar.

That is not a conspiracy theory reference.  The KT were not mystical Illuminati and they had to develop some manner of moving vast amounts of wealth safely across hundreds and thousands of miles of often extremely dangerous land in Europe and West Asia and the pirate-infested Mediterranean Sea.  That’s how and why the modern banking system came into being. 

So a millennium thence, their financial elite descendants, released in Clinton’s administration from the final bonds of the financial safety net enacted under the New Deal, went on an unprecedented avaricious binge of fraud and excessive consumption, and when everything fell apart because of their profligacy, they hand us the bill, all of us, here in America and across the world, urging “austerity” and promoting destruction of programs for the general welfare while declaring, “By God, you better not raise taxes!”.

Money as speech, corporations as people, politicians sponsored by business interests as literally as NASCAR drivers…the KT were at least honest in their financial dealings, also competent and shrewd; too good at it, at least for the King of France and the Vatican, and look at what happened to them.  Now, I’m not saying we should try the financial gods of Wall Street for heresy and burn them at the stake, but where’s an enraged Galilean prophet with a whip when you need one?

Mr. POTUS, if you really believe “terrorism” is the biggest threat to our country, you really need to read an essay I wrote a few years back called “Shadow of Fear in the Aftermath of 9/11”.  We have done far worse things to ourselves, to our country, to our freedom, and to our own souls than anything Osama bin Laden and his minions could ever do.