The Real #revo11ution Action: Not in Libya, but in America with #OccupyWallStreet

You probably already know about the brutal crushing of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Oakland and other American cities. It seems more like the revolution going on in Tunisia and Egypt than Libya, where the dictator was finally overthrown by armed guerrilla forces backed by NATO bombers. Rumor has it that Qaddafi was put down because he proposed a new currency to replace the dollar. Well, guess what? Back in the imperial homeland, the issue is still the dollar. But this time, the people — yeah I know, the liberal commie hippie traitors, not the Real Americans commanding the crackdown from their million-dollar penthouses — are the threat to the Almighty Dollar. Therefore, the American people must be crushed. If, of course, they do not march to their bankster masters' commands in the TEA Party. The problem: the TEA Party fell completely under corporate control. In fact, it actually began as an attempt to coopt the Ron Paul Revolution movement. Dr. Paul refused to cave, being the principled libertarian he is, so the banksters started their own astroturf movement catering largely to the most retrograde elements of White America. However, Occupy Wall Street is not under control, and refuses to submit to even Democratic control. That means it must be crushed. If the Ron Paul movement had gained mass support, it too would have been attacked the same way. After all, it opposed the Wall Street dictatorship to the point of calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, a call taken up by OWS. Okay, you tell me, isn't America a democracy? No. It never was a democracy, and was never intended to be one. The Constitution was designed to establish an oligarchic republic. In fact, it was intended to prevent democracy. In The Federalist #10, the Constitution's author, James Madison, states:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

The oligarchic republic Madison worked to establish no longer works. It has fallen under the control of an increasingly militant and terroristic faction which believes that its possession of most of the world's money entitles them to rule by divine right. The American Revolution was fought, and the Republic established, to abolish the divine right of kings. However, the constitutional protections against the divine right of oligarchies have all been nullified, so we're back where we started in 1776. I'm not saying this is going to turn into a revolution. Fact is, it already is. The more terrorism the divine-right oligarchy commits against the people, the more the oligarchs deserve to be overthrown. Face it, America is the new Soviet Union. It's already too late. Sorry, conservatives, you can't erase the past and bring back the good old days. The Law of Entropy is already at work bringing the whole tottering edifice to the ground in smoking ruins. The oligarchic republic no longer works. It's merely monarchy with more rulers who are equally clueless. Democracy is the future. The future is already here. This is what the 2011 Revolution is all about.

The #revo11ution Comes to America

That wave of revolutions sweeping the Middle East? It didn't stop there. The revolution that started with the toppling of America's Soviet-style satellites, the oil plantations of the Middle East, has come to the homeland at last! It started, interestingly enough, in Wisconsin.

The Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, has declared war on the civil service unions. He wants to strip them of all collective bargaining rights. Needless to say, in the Midwest's great stronghold of Populism, his action has provoked massive protests in Madison and Milwaukee. Cairo has come to Wisconsin.

What he's doing, of course, is good old-fashioned union busting, what the Robber Barons of Gilded Age I did in the late 19th century. Like them, he intends to call in the National Guard to crack down hard on the protests. If the National Guard doesn't work, he will likely attempt the Robber Barons' other solution: call in the mercenary enforcers: Pinkerton back then, Blackwater today.

Here's Walker's scheme:

1. Give massive tax cuts to giant corporations and ultra-rich corporate welfare kings.
2. Fudge the numbers, the same way the Conservative Book Club games the bestseller lists, to make it look like there's a huge deficit.
3. Blame the public sector unions, call in the enforcers and the Pravda Fox News propaganda machine, and SMASH!

There's some evidence that the 2010 elections were themselves gamed, the same way the Iran election of 2009 was rigged. Vote rigging, of course, is a venerable American political tradition ("Bring out the dead!"). But in this case, the problem is bait-and-switch: run on jobs, then screw the workers over and wage culture and class war. That's what Ahmadinejad did.

Way to go, Governor.

Now witness the TEA Party. What are they doing? Heeding the siren song of the Fox News propaganda machine and rushing to Madison to support Governor Walker! You know what this looks like: the pro-Mubarak counterdemonstrators who rushed the protesters in Liberation Square, on foot and on camelback, and attacked — at precisely 2:15 in the afternoon. I suspected the TEA Party would be their American counterpart. Now we have absolute proof.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian workers are calling for the resignation of all those corrupt union leaders who were in bed with Mubarak. American workers should do the same; after all, the union brass here are in bed with the Wall Street bankster oligarchy.

The 2011 Revolution continues, and the empire of Corporatism had better watch out...

EDIT: Ole Ole Olson at News Junkie Post debunks the TEA Party's defense of Walker here.

The Revolution Wasn't in Iran; or, The Revenge of the Arab Street

Here I was, thinking that there was going to be some sort of revolution in Iran. I'd even saved a draft entry just for that purpose. But that was not to be. The mullahs crushed the opposition and sent it back down into the underground. I get the feeling that when revolution finally does come to Iran, it won't be the "greens" doing it, and the American Empire will probably have collapsed first like an unwieldy business conglomerate, leaving the mullahs with no more "Great Satan" to build their dictatorship up against.

Here's the surprise. The revolution came to Araby first. Specifically, Tunisia.

If you've been paying attention to that part of the world, you know that the Arab countries are ruled by dictators and absolute monarchs propped up by American foreign aid and military power. The exception, of course, is Iraq, which is ruled directly by the US military as a colony, same as Afghanistan. The Arab kings and dictators are notoriously cruel and corrupt; many of them even use Islamists as symbiotic enemies or (in Saudi Arabia especially) as enforcers.

Now the dictatorship of Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali has fallen in Tunisia; he and his notoriously corrupt family have decamped to — surprise! — Saudi Arabia. Tunisians are a famously laid-back people. However, the Ben Ali/Trabelsi family mafia (there is no other word) enforced its absolute monopoly over the economy so brutally that they provoked their subjects to revolt. Now all the other autocrats in Araby are finding themselves at war with their own subjects, the fabled Arab Street. Expect more crowned heads to fall, and soon.

Why the Arab revolution came as a surprise to Americans: the image most of us have of Arabs is of savage headhunting barbarian jihadis battling Western Christendom over control of the Holy Land during the Crusades. You know, the crap they taught us in Sunday school. Al-Qaeda fits the Sunday-school stereotype all too well, perhaps even by design. Illusions fall hard, especially when they concern people outside our own petty tribe.

Some people are calling the revolution being fought in Tunisia the American Empire's 1989 moment. For those who remember, the 1989 Revolution was when the Soviet Union's "satellite" buffer colonies broke away from that rebranded Russian Empire. Keep in mind that the 2011 Revolution didn't start in American rival Iran, but in one of the more insignificant satellite régimes in a Mediterranean world turned American Mare Nostrum. And it's barely even begun...

Class Struggle

Back to the subject of my previous post "Populism vs. Elitism". Basically, what lies behind this phenomenon is something people call "class struggle." The idea is older than Karl Marx; it's an Enlightenment idea that predates even the French Revolution. In fact, it's impossible to understand the history of Western civilization since the rise of the Greeks without it.

What is this "class struggle (or warfare)," anyway? First I must explain that people in different roles in society tend to have different interests. Sometimes these interests clash. The most important clash of interests is that between those in power and those out of power. Those in power usually have an interest in exploiting those out of power in order to gain benefits at others' expense. Free riding, for example, is an almost irresistible temptation of power. Those out of power, however, would rather do their thing without busybody authorities constantly interfering in their affairs. This fundamental contradiction inherent in any society based on dominance hierarchy -- which means, right now, any society, period -- has its inevitable consequence in the form of some sort of class struggle.

Two eras have been plagued by wars originating in class struggle. These are the classical societies of Greece and Rome, and the modern age which started with the Renaissance. The cause in both cases is the idea of democracy, which has inspired the common people to resist the oppression of their kings, dictators, politicians, bureaucracies, and churches. Democracy is inherently revolutionary. That's because whenever the common people assert their interests, the people in power are always threatened with the loss of their power, and strike back. That's why revolutions, social and cultural as well as political, are always so violent. No establishment has ever tolerated any kind of popular revolution; so either the ruling establishment is overthrown or at least transformed, or the establishment prevails and the revolution is crushed.

Unfortunately, the rulers have their revolutionary ideologies too. Stalinism, fascism, Nazism, and neoconservatism are among the most popular elitist ideologies that sprang up since World War I. All of these are heavily influenced by synarchism, an ideology that originated in France among Catholic and neo-Gnostic monarchists who revolted against the principles of the French Revolution (but see the note below), and by Social Darwinism, a pseudoscience that tells the elite that they are the vanguard of evolution and that Nature, red in tooth and claw, has preordained them to supremacy over the masses. They are more violent reactions against the popular revolution that steal from the people their language of revolution. All true populists oppose them, since they attempt to use the new revolutionary means to restore the old order by any means possible.

Populism and elitism exist because of the class struggle, and are its political expression. As a libertarian populist, I've long since taken my stand. I'll tell you what I think about certain antipopulist "libertarians" and "objectivists" in a future entry.

Note: If you enter the word "synarchism" in any search engine, most of the entries you'll find come from the Lyndon LaRouche cult. He stole the idea from Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, and uses it in his wacko conspiracy theory as a code for his eternal bete noire, the "kike-limey (sic) conspiracy." But he's hiding behind "synarchy" to cover his own lust for dictatorship. Synarchy? Jeremiah Duggan suffered it from LaRouche himself. I'll write a future entry, or a full-blown essay, on this.