Architects of Our Brave New World

Without the Soviet Union around to keep the capitalists in check, the world turned into a playground for the cowboy capitalists.  It took less than two decades after the fall of the USSR, however, for the party to end. These merry capitalists so abused the prerogatives of their newfound playing fields that they practically brought the whole house of cards down on themselves.  The greatest crisis the West had faced, and still faces, was brought about not by some outside force, a foreign evil empire, but by the evils that lurked within its own DNA.  If there is any one individual we have to thank for this historical turn, it is Reagan and Thatcher chum, Mikhail Gorbachev.
         The cowboy economists had their counterpart in foreign policy in U.S. neo-conservatives who saw in the demise of the USSR a unique historical moment in which they could win for the capital of the empire true global dominance.  Just as the financiers could not resist overreach, the strategic planners threw caution to the winds and began to "consolidate" the empire.  Even before the Bush cabal stole the presidency in 2000, Democrat Bill Clinton had gotten the ball rolling. Ground to dust under the thumb of Western interests was the deceased Josef Tito's Yugoslavia, a country that represented --aside from its considerable success as a socialist country--no threat to any people but its own. Then Reagan's Evil Empire morphed into Bush's Axis of Evil.  But the targets of American policy were not limited to Iran, Iraq and North Korea or even lesser regimes in Cuba, Libya and Syria.  
      Neo-conservative overreach gave us Barack Obama. As fate would have it, it was just as the American permanent government began withdrawing its support for a Bush regime that had given us two failed wars with hundreds of thousands of deaths, the tearing up of freedoms going back to the Magna Carta and the institution of techniques to get prisoners to talk going back to Torquemada, that the financial Panic of 2008 took place. Barack Obama, hand-picked to redeem a regime in disrepute at home and abroad, a man who had voted against the war in Iraq, was now tasked with virtually saving the capitalist system from itself.  The tears of joy on the cheeks of the victorious voters who had virtuously given us our first Black president had not dried before disturbing signs began to emerge.
     Gorbachev, who spent most of his tenure claiming to be saving socialism and the USSR, ultimately betrayed the forces in the USSR committed to socialism and communism and became the midwife of its demise.  Barack Obama, the chosen messiah, his advance Nobel Peace Prize in hand, groomed by the elite to bring us back into the community of normal nations by getting us out of the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rein in the torturers and close Gitmo, would now have to deal with an accident of history brought on by financial wizards who had written notes for an estimated half a quadrillion dollars in derivatives and credit debt obligations.  He was, to put it mildly, side-tracked by events threatening a world wide depression.  Few Democrats who had voted for him could have predicted in the fog of the financial panic that ensued that, like Gorbachev, he too would serve as a midwife for a demise, this time the demise of a liberal tradition that went back not to a revolution in 1917, but to the near revolutionary crisis brought on by the Great Depression of 1929.
      All the ingredients seemed to exist in 2008 for another New Deal.  In both foreign policy and economic policy, the poverty and dangers of conservative policies had become manifest. Here, too, Bill Clinton's policies anticipated the unbridled recklessness that the conservatives later fully unleashed.  NAFTA was a slap in the face for American workers. Risky mortgages were pushed on the poor as a substitute for affordable housing.  The tearing up of the Glass-Steagall act unleashed a Walpurgisnacht of financial wheeling and dealing.  Yet, even before entering the White House, President-elect Obama began surrounding himself with the very men who had not only stood by and watched, but had actively engineered financial policies that had garnered unheard of wealth for the few, and total disregard for the plight of ordinary citizens.  Similarly, in foreign policy, he kept on into his planned cabinet men chosen by the so-called Iraq Study Group led by none other than James Baker and Lee Hamilton, two perennial gate keepers for the permanent government.  For Americans who knew the players, it became clear how an Obama administration would operate.
       In an unparalleled performance of political backward fumbling that would have made medieval alchemists envious, Obama transformed political gold to lead.  Rather than rallying the nation to reverse failed conservative policies as FDR had in his first inaugural address, under the pretense of spearheading a government of reconciliation and compromise with the other side, he oversaw a sequence of events that amazingly allowed the forces of reaction to double down on their attack on the working classes, pretending that they were the aggrieved party.  Tea Party brown shirts began disrupting talks given by liberal legislators, state governors like demagogues Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Chris Christie of New Jersey launched attacks on already hobbled unions and began making deep cuts into state budgets already diminished by the financial crisis. Official, stated, Republican Party policy was gridlock and obstructionism.
      Still clinging to a vestige of hope for real change, American voters re-elected Obama in 2012, but both the House and the Senate fed by the anger and disappointment of many Americans at the apparent ineptitude of the Democrats to offer relief, fell to the Republicans.  With the help of a reactionary Supreme Court, the same court that had made a gift of the presidency to George Bush, the country we will inherit when Obama leaves office is now fully in the hands of large corporations that prey, unchecked, upon ordinary citizens. Union membership is at historic lows.  Attacks on voting rights and gerrymandering help insure Republican victories.  Austerity budgets prevail in state legislatures while the stock market somewhat mysteriously rebounds from its crisis low of a Dow Jones 6000 to its current level of above 18000, lining the pockets of the 1%.
   In affairs abroad, our Nobel Peace Prize winner bombed Libya into its present chaos during a bogus "Arab Spring," threatened to do the same in Syria and watched much of our "victory" in Iraq ceded to the apparently unstoppable new forces of ISIS.  With regard to Iran, "all options are still on the table" as we nervously await the outcome of negotiations over sanctions.  The world is one bombing run on Tehran away from unimaginable horrors.



Note:  For the photo of Obama as Gorbachev credit goes to: https://symonsez.wordpress.com.  I was rather amazed to find in the course of writing this post to find that I was not alone in seeing similarities between the two men.