At the G-20 meeting currently underway in Pittsburgh the power elite is circling the wagons for the third time within a year to try and salvage what's left of their de facto world government. Having established supremacy via the institutions of corporate globalization such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, they became a virtual senate with veto power over the sovereign choices of nations large and small.
But as Chris Hedges, writing on Truthdig, points out: their run has ended.
Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger...The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save the criminal class on Wall Street and the international speculators of the kind who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.
Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), who is among the protesters from around the world in Pittsburgh, told Hedges the leaders of the G-20 (the managerial representatives of the power elite) are scrambling to protect "their power and money after everything that has gone wrong."
"The draconian security measures," including the deployment of "a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq" that have been "put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh" are a response to "the fear gripping the centers of power," says Hedges of the steps being taken to subvert the protests.
The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city’s police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.
Despite such obstacles, Hedges implores the left to "move quickly" for "no one will save us now but ourselves."
Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do—stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.
Ralph Nader, the tireless consumer advocate/corporate critic/author and presidential candidate suggests another way to break the grip of the power elite. In his first work of fiction, "only the super-rich can save us!", he envisions a group of enlightened "megamillionaires and billionaires" answering the call of Warren Buffet, the world's richest man, to use their influence and resources to rescue the planet and its inhabitants from the plunder of the plutocracy.
Nader's utopian fantasy opens in a luxurious mountain resort overlooking "the lush green island of Maui and the far Pacific Ocean." It is the year 2006 and we see Buffett addressing his guests—who include such real-life personages as Ted Turner (the "Mouth of the South"), media mogul Barry Diller, Yoko Ono, hedge fund guru George Soros, Paul Newman, Bill Cosby and others—for the first time.
My friends, what brings us here is a common foreboding—a closing circle of doom. The world is not doing very well. It is spinning out of control...Many solutions have been proposed, yet even at the basic level of abolishing massive poverty and advancing public health, they are applied too slowly and haphazardly to achieve any real human betterment...For my own part, I must tell you that I am not the person I was a year ago. I've been thinking hard about what I want to do with my remaining years, with my capital, credibility and hopes for coming generations...I want to go out with having advanced and implemented a grand design, and I want to do it now with the best talent available. I suspect that similar feelings are stirring in your minds and souls as well, and that's why I put out the call to you.
Nader, speaking about his new book the other day on DemocracyNow!, said: "Our imaginations have been stifled by the grim reality of concentrated corporate power.
"And that's why I really wrote this book of fiction, because we are not imagining...what is necessary by way of money, organizers in the field, strategy, smarts, determination to break this massive corporate-state gridlock that's put our country into paralysis.
"So we have to break through, and the only way we can break through is the majesty of our mind generating a higher level of imaginative 'what if.' What if we have this kind of resource or these kinds of film(s)...or these kinds of mass media?"
With the promise of globalization exposed as a sham and a farce, Hedges and Nader definitely are on to something. One calls for direct action before it is too late against a rogue ideology that is fracturing the country, the other challenges us to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery in order to develop creative solutions to the seemingly insurmountable problems facing mankind in the 21st century.
Good ideas, both...But if all else fails, there's always the Mick Jagger method.
"... challenges us to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery in order to develop creative solutions to the seemingly insurmountable problems facing mankind in the 21st century."
Those solutions will be collaborative, developed in communities where people work together, like a film crew, all bringing their own individual talents to make an end product.
Collaborative communities. What a concept, eh?
I think when people get over the novelty of the Internet and stop twittering and facebooking around like teenagers desparate to win a popularity contest (wow, Courntey Love has 437 thousand friends!), and start communicating more directly in close, local online communities that function like nodes in a larger network that bind everyone together, then what seems like an idea born of fantasy can become reality.
We are already moving in that direction.
The elite can have their silly meetings, where they wring their hands, scheming for the survival of their clan in a world that has moved passed them, a world that doesn't need them anymore -- and probably never did.
Wonderful post, Alias.
Posted by: Diana at September 24, 2009 09:54 PM...with a nod to bob marley for lifting a few words from "redemption song"...and a similar tip of the hat to diana for another beautiful word -
"collaborative" - i agree that people are finally starting to break out of the atomized stupor that has allowed the PE to control our lives since the end of WWII.
the growth of collaborative communities, along with democratic capitalism and enlightened consumerism is reason for optimism that we can build on the success of the '60s.
it's important to remember, as thomas pynchon notes in his introduction to "slow learner," that those earlier triumphs were limited by the failure of the "new left" and "blue-collar workers to get together politically. one reason was the presence of real, invisible class force fields in the way of communication between the two groups."
and the sooner the progressive echo chamber reaches critical mass, the sooner we can tear down the barriers to communication.
Posted by: alias at September 25, 2009 08:38 AM