Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Whistling Past the Graveyard of our Hubris

Just a note following my bet on Huntsman: he wisely announced before the Republican debate that he would announce his candidacy in a week.

Now to more serious issues:  the question of why, as reported by Joshua Holland it today’s Alternet, corporate America is hoarding tons of cash.

Could the answer be that they see they handwriting on the wall?

For all its military capabilities, resting partly on its technological superiority, the United States - like Israel, its overarmed Middle East partner - is whistling past the graveyard.  The New York Times is sufficiently alarmed by the situation to have published a long piece by Helen Copper entitled the Quiet Mideast Corner (Surprise), that admits the Arab Spring is a Catch-22 for both countries.

The roiling Middle East is not Obama’s only problem.  The latest issue of The Nation traced a gloomy picture of the so-called reset of our relations with the Russians.  Hillary Clinton travels the globe telling former and perhaps future allies how to behave, or how to deal with their obstreperous populations - in vain. The world may not know where it’s headed - but neither do we, and they have the numbers on their side.

Remember Vietnam?  We had all the military/technical superiority in the world - and we had to back out.  At the time, the pundits warned of a domino effect if South Vietnam were ‘allowed’ to go Communist.  It didn’t happen.

But what did happen is that eventually, forty years later, the message about colonial liberation and equity has penetrated the consciousness of Muslims living under feudal Imams and self-serving ‘presidents’ - who constitute almost a quarter of the world’s  population.  The (limitless) battlefield being off limits, we are reduced to devising ‘internet suitcases’ to help these populations overthrow their/our dictators.

‘Reduced’, of course is a relative term.  For the money being hoarded by corporate America will, after buying a fully committed president, buy them contracts of all kinds, as we continue efforts to subdue ever-larger populations paying off the new dictators we will have engineered into power.

That is where corporate money is going to go, but it is unlikely to work better than Vietnam.

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