Bankruptocracy

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
-Ike Eisenhower

As I write this, shockwaves from the financial tailspin are reverberating in Asia, and the US stock market has continued its precipitous decline. It appears the emergency measures enacted by the federal government to "stanch" the flow of capital from shaken markets have failed to inspire confidence among investors and institutions. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his predecessor Alan Greenspan are AWOL and we are left with a former Goldman Sachs CEO pleading on his knees for full license to disperse nearly a trillion dollars to the same financial elites that helped precipitate the crisis. Despite including a few baby carrots for their confused and angry constituents, legislators gave President Bush and Secretary Paulson the wide latitude they sought, and the public have been asked to make good on the debt payments.

The outrage is palpable on all sides of the political spectrum, yet is subdued by a collective sense of learned helplessness. The members of the two-party duopoly, which the majority of Americans have entrusted to safeguard their prosperity and security, have failed in their mission, ostensibly distracted by their efforts to portray the other party as out of touch and as petty partisan hacks. People openly wonder why the average citizen, facing budget cuts, foreclosure, poverty and even homelessness is not bailed out. Questionable ties to financial sector lobbyists abound in the news media, despite presidential candidates' claims to be inured to their influence. Yet somehow, voters feel even more locked into the lesser of two evils argument as they consider their dueling options for the November election.

The two-party system truly has been running on fear for some time, a fear that one or the other party will cause us to slip from dominance and render our cherished lifestyles untenable. This fear has led us into global environmental degradation, numerous intractable armed conflicts, unholy alliances with brutal regimes, astronomical expenditures on advanced weaponry and defense systems, domestic spying and torture in the name of security, and massive subsidies to a corporate power structure that has no internal modus operandi of serving the public good.

I wonder whether the current state of panic will miraculously replace fear as the motor of our stalled-out economic growth, in a twisted fantasy of Friedmanites (Milton, not Thomas) who long for widespread confusion and disaster to ram through unobstructed the structural adjustments to what they see as the welfare state embodied in the embalmed corpse of FDR's New Deals. The crisis itself thankfully puts in stark relief the false dualism that has long existed in the modern collective consciousness between socialism and capitalism, allegedly the only forms of civilized society remaining after tyranny has been bottled up:

On one hand, we see a communist heavyweight, China, completely tied into a global deregulated neoliberal economy, unable to improve the average quality of life for its citizens without cutting workplace standards and introducing a class system into the social fabric. On the other, we see a dominant capitalist socio-economic Empire scrambling to intervene in the markets, with the US and Britain now openly considering partially nationalizing banks. In short, we may be witnessing the bankruptcy of this ideology of division. We increasingly see a broad continuum of community, of humanitarianism with all the worn labels peeling off.

Assuming the most dire predictions of a new global Great Depression come true, what are we left with? Will we still listen to the pundits and politicians squabble over soundbites with the same interest? Will we tussle over the differences in our values on religion, homosexuality, abortion, and stem cell research with the same fervor? Will we remain convinced that we must support trillion dollar occupations in order to deny a small network of enemies the ability to claim a Pyhrric victory (while they watch the economic system collapse entirely)?

If political and economic capital are depleted to the point of no return, what will remain if not social capital, the power of our networks and relationships to improve our lives? We may be forced to leave the old paradigm that you are either in the winner's or loser's circle in an inevitable social binary. The problem is making the crossover. We all have networks of friends and family, and many even have online networks of friendly acquaintances and business associates. But when it comes to actually accomplishing your personal goals, ask yourself how reliable your network truly is to you. Without the luxuries of free-flowing communication and transportation, how could your family survive?

The time to start forging and learning how to collaborate in human networks is now, before things get any more catastrophic. Perhaps, for many, it takes a sheer collapse of security to spur the motivation to make the connections that make survival feasible, but it doesn't necessarily need to come to that. The bottom line is what common ground, if any, can you seek out with others? If your answer is "let the government take care of it," or "don't bother me and I won't bother you," then I wish you and your network the best of luck. If your intuition is that this need not be a dog-eat-dog world, and you would prefer dignity and support, collaboration and community, you are not alone.

Nothing comes for free, except the life we are born into. What do you really have to lose?

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

-Robert Burns, To a Mouse

History was supposed to have ended nineteen years ago with the collapse of the Soviet empire, when the "endpoint of man's ideological evolution" ushered in the emergence of the last man in the form of Empire Lite and the benevolent neoliberal superpower. But even post-history needs a little revisionism.

Today we find ourselves after the turning point, still standing on a precipice of our own machinations, and history still miraculously chugging along. On a day when we are told to pause for a moment during our picnics and BBQ's to remember the sacrifices made to make those feasts possible, we are nudged to in turn reflect on how we, too, have been a part of this history.

What sacrifices has the average American made during the past two decades to advance the cause of the Good Empire? It seems only yesterday we were told to go about our business and leave the infinite justice to the pros. All that was needed was half of our taxes, so the more profits, the merrier. Some heeded the call to stand down; others sought success in the rapidly emerging disaster capitalism complex. Still others reached into their collective memory and realized a time-honored duty to follow the wise generals into that Immemorial Theatre so that family and friends would not have to.

And now where do we, those who can of course, stand? We stand on the fruited plains, in a graveyard, side by side with our Decider-in-Chief, staring at rows upon rows of the stewards of the end of history:

"Today, we gather to honor those who gave everything to preserve our way of life. The men and women we honor here served for liberty. They sacrificed for liberty. And in countless acts of courage, they died for liberty. From faraway lands, they were returned to cemeteries like this one, where broken hearts received their broken bodies -- they found peace beneath the white headstones in the land they fought to defend. It is a solemn reminder of the cost of freedom that the number of headstones in a place such as this grows with every new Memorial Day. " The soil of Arlington and other sites is filled with liberty's defenders. It is nourished by their heroism. It is watered by the silent tears of the mothers and fathers, and husbands and wives, and sons and daughters they left behind."

Why does a man gain respect after he is dead? Shouldn't that respect be paid to the living instead? For those soldiers still of flesh and blood, and the families of the fallen, the insults to injury keep piling up. As Bush noted, peace is to be found under the alabaster. For the rest of us, we are told to stay standing down, with our heads down to the ground.

Our fearless leader is now threatening to veto a Senate-passed bill that funds the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars into 2009 and carries no "benchmarks" or "timetables" for withdrawal. A withdrawal-tied supplemental has failed in the House of Representatives due to 132 registered "present" votes by a bloc of Republicans apparently in a similar position to the Democrats of yesteryear--attempting not to be against the troops but limiting the blank check of the military industrial complex and preventing the ramrodding of other unrelated measures through a careless legislative process.

Democrats themselves still relish playing the zero-sum game of presenting bills that have no realistic chance of gaining compromise and thus painting their opponents in a negative light. The one area where this strategy truly works is with the revamping of the G.I. Bill to increase college benefits in tandem with rising costs of private education, at a cost of 50 billion dollars over the next 10 years, a mere drop in the bucket compared to the trillion dollar war we are still paying off on our global credit card bill. The problem: students can't re-enlist to fight wars that have no end in sight.

So I have a few proposals this Memorial Day:

We should honor the fallen not only today, but every day, with a commitment to dismantling this bloated complex otherwise known as Empire.

We should honor the innocent lives lost with a commitment never to use pre-emptive strikes in absence of a threat, never to use weapons that cause massive collateral damage (cluster bombs, nuclear earth penetrators, unaccountable contractors on top of Bradley fighting vehicles).

And we should start making sacrifices--not just of our mental space as we politely hold back our Iraq fatigue today--but of our precious time-as-money as well. See if we can't help a veteran--it may be as simple as leading a homeless person to a shelter or buying him a lunch--after all, a third of the homeless are veterans:

"About 154,000 veterans (male and female) are homeless on any given night and perhaps twice as many experience homelessness at some point during the course of a year. Many other veterans are considered near homeless or at risk because of their poverty, lack of support from family and friends, and dismal living conditions in cheap hotels or in overcrowded or substandard housing." (Veterans Administration)

We can also enlist so those vets can be schooled in ivory towers and not in the streets: those of us formerly unqualified, the conscientious objectors, flamboyant homosexuals, bar brawlers, the disabled, convicted felons, former residents of Guantanamo, and of course senior citizens. Because we understand the cause just as well as anyone.