Most Popular
1. Banking Crisis is Stocks Bull Market Buying Opportunity - Nadeem_Walayat
2.The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market - P_Radomski_CFA
3. One Possible Outcome to a New World Order - Raymond_Matison
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
5. Apple AAPL Stock Trend and Earnings Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
6.AI, Stocks, and Gold Stocks – Connected After All - P_Radomski_CFA
7.Stock Market CHEAT SHEET - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.US Debt Ceiling Crisis Smoke and Mirrors Circus - Nadeem_Walayat
9.Silver Price May Explode - Avi_Gilburt
10.More US Banks Could Collapse -- A Lot More- EWI
Last 7 days
Stock Market Volatility (VIX) - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Investor Sentiment - 25th Mar 24
The Federal Reserve Didn't Do Anything But It Had Plenty to Say - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Breadth - 24th Mar 24
Stock Market Margin Debt Indicator - 24th Mar 24
It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - 24th Mar 24
Stocks: What to Make of All This Insider Selling- 24th Mar 24
Money Supply Continues To Fall, Economy Worsens – Investors Don’t Care - 24th Mar 24
Get an Edge in the Crypto Market with Order Flow - 24th Mar 24
US Presidential Election Cycle and Recessions - 18th Mar 24
US Recession Already Happened in 2022! - 18th Mar 24
AI can now remember everything you say - 18th Mar 24
Bitcoin Crypto Mania 2024 - MicroStrategy MSTR Blow off Top! - 14th Mar 24
Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - 11th Mar 24
Gold and the Long-Term Inflation Cycle - 11th Mar 24
Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - 11th Mar 24
Two Reasons The Fed Manipulates Interest Rates - 11th Mar 24
US Dollar Trend 2024 - 9th Mar 2024
The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - 9th Mar 2024
Investors Don’t Believe the Gold Rally, Still Prefer General Stocks - 9th Mar 2024
Paper Gold Vs. Real Gold: It's Important to Know the Difference - 9th Mar 2024
Stocks: What This "Record Extreme" Indicator May Be Signaling - 9th Mar 2024
My 3 Favorite Trade Setups - Elliott Wave Course - 9th Mar 2024
Bitcoin Crypto Bubble Mania! - 4th Mar 2024
US Interest Rates - When WIll the Fed Pivot - 1st Mar 2024
S&P Stock Market Real Earnings Yield - 29th Feb 2024
US Unemployment is a Fake Statistic - 29th Feb 2024
U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - 29th Feb 2024
What a Breakdown in Silver Mining Stocks! What an Opportunity! - 29th Feb 2024
Why AI will Soon become SA - Synthetic Intelligence - The Machine Learning Megatrend - 29th Feb 2024
Keep Calm and Carry on Buying Quantum AI Tech Stocks - 19th Feb 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

Americans Increasingly Scared of the US Terror State

Politics / US Politics May 12, 2013 - 07:12 PM GMT

By: Global_Research

Politics

Daniel Patrick Welch writes: Syria, Libya and other US crimes invisible to financially scared Americans.

Watch Out, World! Even America’s Wealthy Are Losing Ground.

Cognitive dissonance among the US sub-elite means more war and death for everyone else.


Occasionally the tip of the iceberg pokes through, and the reported facts corroborate the experience of most of the people. The recent Pew Center report that has now reached broad circulation shows that a full 93% of US households *lost* ground in the much vaunted recovery of 2009-2011.

This just validates what we are all living through, glossed over by averages, smoke and mirrors. There is no “recovery.” Sectors *within* the top quintile are holding on, barely.

This is the starkest portrayal I’ve seen in black and white; I had previously been telling anyone who would listen that, while there seems to be a pickup for those in the $250,000 and up range, it is clearly not the case for the bottom 4 quintiles [i.e. $100,000 combined household income 2010]. It should be shocking enough to most middle class types that the real picture is so different from what they believe to be living–that is, that they are actually in the top 8-10%… BUT the data shows even worse. Even families up to $500,000 (!) are losing ground.

This bespeaks the desperation in the political outlook of what Zinn called The Guards and what Chomsky called The Priesthood: people who are doing just fine in the current system but think it needs a few tweaks. As this sector shrinks, the internal contradictions will become more apparent and the response of the state becomes harsher and less elastic. So households with “two good jobs” say $100,000 plus each, are prone to seeing some hope, the famous ‘green shoots’ mantra that fell on deaf ears for most of us a few years ago. Come on, guys–it *can* work! We all need to just be a bit more patient! Etc.

The political ramifications are quite alarming. This sector is crucial to the viability and perceived legitimacy of the system, and their panic has far reaching consequences. It may just beginning to dawn on them that they, too, will ultimately be left behind in the wealth shift, and that it was never really about them. Slowly but surely, and to varying degrees, they are recapitulating Judas’ epiphany [the Andrew Lloyd Weber version, at least]: “My god I’m sick. I’ve been used–and you knew all the time!” They are just beginning to see that they are facing an uphill battle in a rigged game against the House with a stacked deck–and any other cheesy analogies you want to cram in there–but there is nowhere for them to go.

Paradoxically, the initial wave of reaction to this newfound betrayal by their patrons in the ruling class is not to turn on their masters. It is to express this anger at those below, in the age-old game of shooting the messenger. Consequently, they become even better “shushers,” the Seinfeld term for viewers who keep order in a theater. Border collies, gatekeepers… they have always been there, but they were more consciously part of the professional ‘left,’ an icon of the political class. In the current period, their anger is more desperate and more diffuse: They have always been more inclined, for example, to trust the police, to believe the official version of events, to avoid sources of information considered by their class position and experience to be beyond the Pale. Having rarely, if ever, been on the wrong side of Officialdom, or had to bail relatives out of jail, or had any race-tinged experiences themselves, they are primed and pampered to be the intellectual shock troops of Acceptable Discourse. In the face of increased perfidy on the part of their class betters, they can’t (yet) bring themselves to bite what they still perceive as the hand that feeds them. Consequently, they will lash out at the incongruously labeled ‘parasites’ who they feel are ruining their banquet, even as the din of cognitive dissonance grows inside their heads.

The brutal fallout from this game is apparent all around us, as the body counts rise and the single minded state terrorism of the state apparatus grows ever more horrific in its attempt to maintain their bloated lifestyles through hegemony over the world’s resources. This transaction is completely lost on the Shushers–rather, they become its ghoulish cheerleaders, with or without acknowledgement. They are capable, somehow, of rationalizing the complete destruction of country after country–even as they are shown they are being lied into doing so. It is inconsequential to them that their government is funding, arming and training the very Islamic terrorists in Syria and Libya that they are primed to fear elsewhere. The simple mathematical rule of balance and scale demands that they acknowledge and reject the 1000 : 1 ratio of violence ravaging the world in their name, with their money, with their silence at best and enthusiastic endorsement at worst. They just don’t give a shit, and their macabre privileging of the relatively few victims among their own–as awful as these surely are–is lost outside the bubble, where the rest of the world grieves for their victims.

The economic consequences of their loss of station “scares the sh..t” out of them: while logic and basic morality dictate that they should wake up every morning with the bloody carnage of their own drone army foremost in their minds, they are instead preoccupied with how they can no longer afford an annual pilgrimage to Disney, or that they may have to postpone the kitchen/bath/boat/car upgrade they have been contemplating. If this makes them sound like monsters, it should. There is something epic about the horror of simultaneously having no power over a political system that wreaks such destruction and yet defending that very system as acceptable and benign, without at the very least having been the proverbial canary in the coal mine, the littlest Who shouting ‘We are here!’ from the tallest available tower. It is more than a sham and a shame. It is a moral crime, a breach of ethical duty that will yield unimaginable consequences when the balance is eventually righted. And yes, for international readers, I do realize the self-absorption of focusing on the internal American experience, and hear your cries of “Who gives a shit!’ inside my head.” If you have stuck with me this long, much respect. Sometimes I feel it necessary to speak to and about my American countrymen from the perspective of one who shares, albeit sometimes tangentially, their experience.

I believe we are living in the time of tremendous turmoil. It may take a year or two or ten, but in historical terms we are living in that instant, that one day where, looking back, it will become apparent that everything changed. It is the pivotal moment so brilliantly enacted by the montage at the end of Les Miserables where all social actors, no matter their role or position, sense that something momentous is on the horizon: “Tomorrow we’ll discover what our God in heaven has in store. One more dawn. One more day. One day more!”

Daniel Patrick Welch is a frequent contributor to Global Research

© Copyright John Glaser , Global Research, 2013

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.


© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in