by StarmanSkye » Mon Aug 22, 2011 1:14 pm
^^^^^
Sharp insight Bruce Dazzling, that's the predicament we find ourselves in.
Yes, that's why substantial reform is unlikely to be driven by widespread, organized bottom-up grassroots action. Neoliberalism has dismantled and weakened many/most of the public institutions and community networks necessary to protect the majority stakeholders through a chaotic period of systemic change. The elites have learned valuable lessons during the last 50+ years of managing their consolidation of influence & power, forging alliances among the international oligarchy as they disempowered resistance by the 'little people'. The causes of economic and social justice, human and civil rights, regional interdependence and co-prosperity, economic opportunities, financial sufficiency, progressive and equitable access to self-governing accountability -- by most measures these have all suffered badly in the last 50 years thru the subversion of politics leaving the majority vulnerable and dependant on the ruling elites and the status quo. Look how easy they are able to manipulate public information and perceptions thru the near-total control they have over the mass media which still informs the majority of society -- how they can make massive coordinated public demonstrations against the wars 'dissapear', how they can push political candidates like Ron Paul and Kucinich who challenge the dominant political/economic paradigm into the margins of obscurity, how they can ignore and trivialize critical public issues while distracting their audience with nonsensical, trivial blather -- essentially controlling and directing public debate.
We're all victims of a machine-like disease that has infected our society and body politic, that appeals to the narrow-minded venal greed of grasping opportunists who compromise on principle out of deference to the pragmatic materialism of realpolitic bargaining. The sense of 'nation' and 'community' and 'society' that remains is a mangled relic that the elites have bled with a thousand cuts and bruises thru calculated assaults that emphasize the incompatability of antagonistic 'differences' via classic Divide-and-Rule tactics of pre-emptive disorganization. That's why popular figures like JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X, Che, Mandela, Aristide, Chavez, Wellstone, Russo, a hundred-score of charismatic, principled leaders, speakers, organizers of popular resistance were, are attacked and demonized, discreditted and villianized, assassinated and disappeared -- to remove the human organizing-point behind which movements crystalize and grow.
They got our number, their influence and power allows them to out-maneuver and pre-empt our resistance since we've abdicated SO much authority to them.
But their power isn't absolute -- they can't anticipate or control everything. Chaos as by spontaneous outbursts of public outrage like we've seen in the UK and elsewhere, resulting from extreme frustration and undirected rage by people who feel their prospects have been sabotaged by a system that is biased towards elite self-indulgence and a surfeit of unearned privelege at the expense of ordinary people's access to even moderate benefits of a progressive, dynamic society.
The systems' endemic contradictions, inequalities, inconsistencies, self-referential duplicity, hypocrisy and contempt for fairness have pushed, are pushing more and more people into the margins of acceptable and predictable responses, highlighting the fractures in our society where mobs act-out flashpoint impulses of grab-and-destroy, gangs mutually-reinforce an immediate 'family' self-defensive solidarity of crime outside the constraints of exclusionary 'rules'.
That's probably where most of us will find ourselves, trapped in the middle, unable or unwilling to choose 'sides' between the elite's totalitarian plans, the desperate strategic avarice of gangs, and the reckless, angry ambivalent malice of reactionary mobs lashing-out and grabbing theirs because its the only truly authentic 'choice' they feel they have left.
