October 27th, 2009 by Hoopleton

With the Northern Hemisphere trapped in the malaise of Fall, bracing itself for winter and the healthcare debate dragging on without end it’s time to reexamine once again how we, the people of the most powerful nation on Earth (that’s still accurate isn’t it?), are being screwed over by those who would rule us. So, without anymore introduction, I present to you this updated short list of how you’re being fucked by America.

1. China. All right, so China isn’t exactly America, but God knows that everything in America was made in China so it may as well be. The booming, ironically named People’s Republic has had quite the last couple of decades. Unprecedented growth. Massive capitalization. Frantic industrialization. Host to the Olympic Games. China, the country that invented everything from gunpowder to the printing press and yet failed to take credit for any of it has seemed determined of late to regain it’s status as a cultural and industrial powerhouse. The government of China is a Communist one. They enslave entire nations. Many of their citizens disappear on an almost daily basis, tossed into political prisons and concentration camps. Try Googling “Tiananmen Square” in Beijing and you’re likely to get a blank screen. But the products they produce are cheap and plentiful. So what that the toothpaste contains radioactive waste and those baby toys are dipped in lead paint? It may all be disposable crap that falls apart after a week, built by the hands of children and women living in conditions well below anything resembling poverty, but did I mention it was affordable? Also, let’s not forget that China is America’s biggest savings and loan. Currently, as of July 2009, our favorite exporter holds 24% of our public debt, or $800 billion. Some in the defense industry have warned that this could potentially threaten America’s security interests. That it leaves us vulnerable to economic extortion. That our foreign policy decisions might be compromised by our lender status. Wait. Walmart’s having a sale you say? It’s funny, isn’t it, how all that talk of democracy and human rights, of pushing back against Communist and defeating the Great Satan seems to dry up as soon as they can sell you a cheaper toaster? Many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that providing a “public option” in healthcare would lead to socialism and dictatorship, but we seem to have no qualms about selling our souls to a repressive, quasi-Stalinist, totalitarian state. We buy their cheap, disposable, dangerous products, we gleefully sell to them our debt, we turn a blind eye to their treatment of minorities and neighbor states, we demure to their interests even in the face of genocide (see: Darfur), and for what? Save a dollar today only to pay a pound of flesh tomorrow.

2. Food. The American obesity epidemic is well documented. We’re growing fatter and fatter with each passing year. As I’ve written about extensively on previous occasions obesity is close to surpassing smoking as the number one cause of preventable death. It is estimated that by 2015 nearly half of all Americans will tip the scale. This will further drive up healthcare costs and may result in the first major decline of life expectancy figures in the United States. My generation, those of us in our thirties and late twenties, may be the first to die younger than that of my parents. The main culprit for the fattening up of America is our over reliance on corn. We use it in everything from our breads to our sweeteners. Our beef is corn fed. Our potatoes are corn fried. All of this is thanks to the Federal government, which since Nixon does not subsidize farmers but the crop they grow. Without tax dollars being pumped into corn, maize would virtually disappear from our diet. But unfortunately corn is only part of the problem. The use of chemical pesticides has been linked to the increase of cancer rates. Leading some scientists to declare that we are seeing an apocalyptic scale event. The antibiotics given to animals as a way of treating the diseases that come from a corn-based diet have crossed into the food supply making people more resistant to medication. Each year more of us die from simple infections because the antibiotics we’re given are simply not effective anymore. But wait it gets worse. The United States is the leader in genetically modified foods. Banned in Europe, GM foods need not even be labeled on American store shelves. These modified foods include nearly everything we eat and often are a major factor for our increasingly poor health. Any attempts to reverse these food trends have been stone walled by corporations, lobbyists and the public officials meant to protect us. And the worst part is, that even if there was the political will to stop or slow the prevalence of genetically modified foods in our diet, many agriculturalists have warned that it may already be too late as modified crops have spread on their own, seeds carried by the winds, by animals to every corner of the globe. When you add to all this the growing lack of biodiversity in farming, the reliance on single varieties of a crop, you get a national food reserve that’s not only dangerous, but also more susceptible to disease. Ironically, as we get fatter and increasingly unhealthy we face the potential for crop failure and starvation.

3. Wall Street. If you’re not getting fucked by foreign powers, the food in your refrigerator or the various products around your home you’re probably being fucked by the business establishment. Wall Street, and the various institutions of capitalism that it represents, is no stranger to cheating basically anyone it can. That’s the nature of the beast. They take away your pension. They take away your healthcare. They take away your home. They’ve always done it if there’s profit in it. But whereas once they did it all in the hopes of creating long term gain, or at least of gaining power, now the idea is to take the money and run. Whereas once the robber barons built infrastructure, libraries, museums and hospitals, now they leave only a wake of destruction in their path. The ongoing housing and banking crisis is perhaps the most recent example, but lest we forget that Enron and Worldcom weren’t all that long ago. For every Bernie Madoff in jail another hundred are still walking the streets. It makes you wonder if they know something we don’t. Is the ship sinking? Are the lifeboats already full? In the 1950s and 1960s a family of four could live a comfortable Middle Class lifestyle on one income. One income. Two cars in the garage. A dog. Summer vacations and weekends off. Food was more expensive then (thank you corn!), so were many of the products on the store shelves, but incomes relative to inflation were higher. People could afford more then. Today that same family of four has two incomes to live virtually the same lifestyle. We’re more isolated from eachother. Rates of divorce are higher than ever before. Unions are corrupt and beaten down. Corporations lay off workers by the tens of thousands while the salaries of CEOs are astronomical compared to what they were even twenty years ago. Retirement age gets pushed back further each year while our life expectancy grows shorter. There are more elderly Americans working today than since the introduction of Social Security. The entire system is designed to put us into debt. To make us buy crap we don’t really need. The GDP, the basic measure of a country’s economic performance goes up not when you save money, it doesn’t count the value of domestic work or the inequality of wealth distribution, but it does add points for every patient diagnosed with cancer or every casket that’s sold. It’s not anyone industry. It’s not just Big Oil. It’s not just food. It’s not just Walmart. It’s all the bastards. Modern capitalism at its core. We once had made great strides in our economic relationships. In the regulation of our financial industries. In evaluating our worth. But more than ever we seem to be reverting to an owner class society in which most of us will likely be owned. They won’t stop till they take everything away, and once they do they’ll sell you a dozen times over until one day you’ll get a letter from your masters in Beijing. You’ve been bought and paid for, fat, diseased body and empty soul.

4. Military-Industrial-Complex. Let’s just put it out there, Eisenhower was right. For a man who spent most of his time on golf courses, the 34^th President of the United States left office in January of 1961 on a note of terrifying brilliance. Speaking to the American people he warned “against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” A cabal of sorts, comprised of the Defense Industry, the Military and Congress that would turn the land of the brave and the home of the free into a glorified arms factory, exporting only war and militarism throughout the globe. The Military budget of the United States for the 2009 fiscal year was $515.4 billion. Adding emergency discretionary spending and supplemental spending brings the sum to $651.2 billion. This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget. Overall the United States government is spending about $1 trillion annually on defense-related purposes. In other words, we Americans spend more on the business of war than every other country in the world combined. Increasingly military solutions seem like the only solutions and we tend to most often fight the very monsters that we create. Creating new monsters in the process. The frightening trend of the last several years has been the privatization of the military. Mercenaries trained by tax dollars. Corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton have taken over many of the duties once performed by soldiers. Often time above the law and motivated purely by profit, these groups operate with impunity abroad and at home. Blackwater doesn’t only operate in Iraq or Afghanistan. If anything their increasing role in domestic security makes foreign operations look like pocket change. How does this translate to you and me? A permanent war economy means permanent war. We’ve been in Iraq for six years now and the war in Afghanistan is just reigniting. If we ever leave the Middle East new conflicts will arise simply because they have to. Peace may be nice for reasons of longevity but it hardly justifies the largest defense budget in history. More war means more debt, more death, increased instability and an Empire in freefall. The Europeans will complain but won’t ever do anything about our love of war. They can’t. We are their army. All those social programs are nice as long as you don’t have a defense budget. Though China may feel intimidated, more spending here means bigger profits there. There will always be a new enemy. There will always be another war. Conflicts will breed conflicts. Young men and women, inspired to fight for country will die never knowing why.

5. Government. There is perhaps no way to adequately capture all that’s wrong with the United States of America without mentioning its political system. It’s the bastards we elect, supposedly there to represent our interests, who are most directly responsible for all the misdeeds mentioned in the points above. Our public institutions are not part of the problem. They are the problem. In fact, the government is not only guilty of negligence but I would go so far as to say that they are guilty of willful criminal acts against the people. Should we start with scandals? Watergate may be the most obvious example but we need not travel that far back in time. In the last decade we’ve seen a torrent of scandals involving corruption, thievery and sexual misconduct. Alabama Governor Don Siegelman (D-AL) found guilty of bribery. Connecticut Governor John G. Rowland (R-CT) pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax fraud. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) charged with conspiracy to commit mail, wire fraud and solicitation of bribery. Illinois Governor George H. Ryan (R-IL) found guilty of illegal sale of government licenses and contracts as Secretary of State. Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards (D-LA) convicted of extortion. New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey (D-NJ) resigned from office after admitting his homosexuality and the inappropriate appointment of his alleged male-sex partner to a government paid office. Ohio Governor Bob Taft (R-OH) guilty of four first-degree misdemeanor ethics violations. Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) who had voted for the Bill Clinton impeachment, admitted during a press conference that he had traveled to Argentina to have an extra-marital affair with an Argentinean woman. I could go on. The list is quite extensive and this is only a partial look at what’s going on at the gubernatorial level. Local political scandals list in the hundreds. Should we try Federal? Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff, NSA Wireless Surveillance, Lawyergate, Ted Stevens, Tom Delay, Jim Traficant, Sarah Palin. Those are just the big ones. Just the ones who got too greedy or too stupid and got caught. And even now, some are still respected names in politics. Some may even stand for President someday. Bribery, graft, patronage, nepotism, embezzlement, kickbacks, every last member of every branch of government is guilty, if not by direct involvement than simply by association. Our government is run by a pack of shortsighted, self-serving crooks. The mob has gone legit and it’s writing legislation. When not stealing from the coffers to enrich themselves or to pay for those high-class hookers, our government fucks us with the legislation they pass. Again, the list is too extensive. They’ve dismantled nearly everything good in the last thirty years. Labor protection. Oversight. Clean air and water laws. They subsidize a corn diet that will kill us. They turn a blind eye to an ecosystem in collapse. They spy on us. They take away our basic rights. They use double-speak and change the meaning of language. The Patriot Act. No Child Left Behind. At this moment John Mccain’s Internet Freedom Act, a piece of legislation meant to provide the exact opposite of what its name implies is finding popular support. They think we’re stupid. They think we’re saps. And the sad part is we are. We are stupid. We are saps. We reelect them over and over again. We give money to them. We buy into their bullshit. We let them distract us with fear mongering and race bating, with abortion and homophobia. The Chinese will never be the superpower they crave to be because they don’t understand that the illusion of democracy will triumph over brute force every time. This country was founded by a slave owning wealth class and it remains so till this day. They raped and pillaged the land and when that was all gone they started in on us. We are so stupid we willingly fight for them. Die for them. We provide moral justification for their crimes. And when they finally leave office where do they go? They become consultants, CEOs and members of the board. Because it’s the corporations they serve. Not us. Not us. At this moment the United States has a national debt of over $11 trillion dollars. That translates to nearly $40,000 per person. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security could be bankrupt in ten years. If Congress manages to pass a healthcare bill you better believe it’ll be overpriced, corrupt and ineffectual. We’re long past the days of the New Deal or the Great Society. What we have here is a free-for-all. Pork and shit sandwiches, hypocrisy slathered on thick. Maybe I should vote for a third party? HA! Go ahead you idiot, throw your vote away!

6. Media. It’s the circus, baby! If the politicians and the business interests are guilty of criminal acts, the media is responsible for letting them get away with it. As newspapers close down across the land, journalistic ethics go the way of the dinosaur and the trend of media conglamerization continues unabated we are left with little in the way of real information. All we have is a sideshow of pundits and bloggers more interested in winning an argument then telling us the truth. Facts get twisted out of shape or go unreported all together. MSNBC and Fox scream to the fringes while networks like CNN report opinion as news. In a 24-hour news cycle there’s no room for content. All stories become old stories as soon as they’re reported. Spin rooms become credited areas of expertise. News broadcasts become infotainment and platforms for cross-promotion. Disney has a new movie coming out? Expect full coverage on the ABC Nightly News. But we give the people what they want, every media executive will be quick to say. The problem is that you can’t give people what they want. People would gorge themselves into the grave if given half a chance. What you need to give the people is what they need. Not that it’ll happen. It’s all part of the show. A ruling class happily in bed with the political elite. John Mccain’s new bill? Who do you think sponsored that piece of prose? The government leases to the media the public airways as to inform and guard the public trust. The fifth estate exists, in theory, to protect the fragile institutions of democracy. But instead they aim to destroy them. What we have is “news” organizations sponsoring white fear protests. Movie stars peddling dangerous drugs on the market. Commercialization run amok. Whereas China sensors its media our media sensors itself. That’s the beauty of the American system. Delusion built upon delusion. Lie upon lie. And where does that leave us? George W. Bush liked to say that people crave freedom, but the truth is all that people really want is entertainment. As long as you distract them enough they’ll happily swallow whatever pills you feed them. And so here we are. Fucked from all sides. A fat, ignorant populace with neither the power or desire to fight back. God bless America.

September 7th, 2009 by Hoopleton

In the Dark Ages the Catholic Church ruled over the European continent with an iron fist. The Holy Inquisition terrorized women, intellectuals, ethnic and religious minorities with torture and murder. Clergymen stole from the poor and gave to themselves. The Church at times even assumed temporal authority, establishing its own governments, armies and states. The rationale for such tyranny was protectionism. The Church saw itself as a bulwark against the forces of darkness, mainly those external, but also those manifest from within.

The issue is not whether or not the Catholic Church acted cruelly. Several popes have apologized for the conduct of the Holy See. The history is well documented. The real issue, perhaps, is whether in some, murderous, blind, intolerant way they may have been right. Stripping away the deep layers of vile sexism, anti-semitism and general bigotry there is the sense, and ultimately the argument of most religions, that people need protection from themselves. That we are a species ultimately incapable of natural morality or empathy. We are born of sin and will revert back into our natural state if even given half a chance.

There is an argument to be made in defense of this utterly pessimistic worldview. One needs only to crack open a history book or tune into a twenty-four news network to see who we are as a species. Murder, torture, even genocide are served up daily as has been the case for ten thousand years. We often seem in desperate need of saving from our base instincts, from our seemingly inexhaustible ignorance. From fear itself.

America’s recent decline is a case study in the human capacity to do the wrong thing. Whether we talk about the greed that led to our current fiscal mess, the spectacle that is the healthcare debate or the general ignorant bile that is our politics, we exist now in a perpetual state of self-interest. America crumbles not because of crime or poverty or the Democrats or Republicans, but because we look to our own selfish needs ahead of those of our neighbors. Myopic colloquial concerns become the only concerns. Selfishness and greed are good, to some even becoming the very testament of God. As we become more polarized and inward gazing we also become increasingly incapable of reason, and where there is a lack of reason there is also a lack of good.

We are selfish, brutal animals and so all that remains is to impose brutality upon us. Such was the reasoning of the Church, as well as Machiavelli and many a Russian Czar.

But human beings are interesting not because we are inherently evil but because we constantly strive to be good. Instead of just accepting our nature we fight against it constantly. We erect religions, we codify laws, we write happy endings. We are obsessed with justifying our actions, with being regarded, remembered favorably. The most evil men in history did evil only after convincing themselves that what they were doing was just.

So perhaps given the chance we claw our way into the light, or, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, we do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities. If this is true than maybe in the history of civilization we were simply never given the chance to prove our capacity for natural morality. We’ve been imposed upon for millennia. By religions and rulers, by financial systems and racial/gender divides. Perhaps, just perhaps our natural state is just something we’ve never trusted ourselves enough to develop.

August 13th, 2009 by Hoopleton

When FDR was pushing through the New Deal or Johnson was moving the Great Society through Congress, often by the sheer power of their stubbornness, politics was certainly full of venom. The opposition was full of sound and fury, but there always remained, or generally there prevailed, a sense civic courtesy. Despite the turmoil brought on by the Great Depression or the 1960s, despite murmurs of fascist or communist uprising, or a youth movement ready to reshape social order, the system continued on as it always had. The nation changed, as it should have, and despite the omnipresence of extremists on both sides, the discourse of the public sphere was always generally calm and rational.

Looking back from our present political environment, as born out of those decades of necessary turmoil, it’s difficult to find examples before the 1990s of a time when American politics and greater American society were so consumed by bitter, violent divisiveness. The current healthcare “debate,” featuring angry, ignorant mobs screaming for blood, whites sobbing over an America that once was, may be most immediate in our mind, but the bile that is the modern town square extends to everything. Abortion, gay rights and education, guns, immigration and taxes. I don’t recall another President in the last hundred years so dehumanized. A foreigner, a radical muslim, a socialist. I don’t remember the media ever being so militant, so quick to incite unrest.

One has to go back to the days of the American Civil War to find a climate so rife with tension, bitterness and vitriol. A society on the brink of self-destruction, it’s undoing centered around the ugliness of slavery, which for many represented an entire form of independent culture. A vanishing America. Then too the citizenry of this land was bitterly divided, then as now the media stoked the fires of disunity, the representatives of the people not only held one another in contempt, but at least in one case, brutally attacked their fellows on the floor of Congress.

Are we on the brink of such times? Is America descending into the maelstrom?

Although anything is possible it seems unlikely that in this day and age our society would collapse into a second civil war, but things never need to be so dramatic.

In 1968, Edward Luttwak examined the whys and hows of planning and executing a coup d’état, or an usurpation of a legitimate government. He stated that a “good coup country” would be one in which politics were well organized, but polarized into hostile factions and where the country itself was completely independent of outside political pressures. Obviously, he added, the best opportunity for the seizure of power would be during a time of crisis, whether real or merely perceived.

Coups are nothing new to global politics nor to these shores. In 1933 a group representing some of the leading business interests of the United States approached retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler as to higher him to lead an overthrow of the Roosevelt administration. Butler turned out to be a patriot and immediately reported what has since been dubbed the Business Plot to Congress and later investigations, although confirming Butler’s story, concluded that the plot was far from ever becoming a real national threat.

But if we follow Luttwak’s formula the climate was not right for such treason. Although the United States certainly faced a crisis in the guise of the Great Depression and was quite isolationist, politics was not as bitterly divided as it is today.

As an aside it may be worth noting that Smedley Butler went on to become a voice against war profiteering, calling his own thirty-three year distinguished military career as that of being a “gangster for capitalism,” while Edward Luttwak, the man who in the 1960s came out as a voice against the dangers of political polarization, was quoted in 2008 as calling Barack Obama a muslim who would unhinge America’s standing in the world.

So here we are. The patriots seem to be of an older generation long since gone and those we’d look to for expertise and reason have instead taken on the banner of partisanship. If the conditions weren’t right for an overthrow eighty years ago, whether violent or bloodless, how do we fair today? Are we a people united, or does the tree of liberty need to be refreshed yet again?

July 24th, 2009 by Hoopleton

“Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

–J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1945.

Lately I’ve been tortured by the seeming putridity of American culture. Why is it that we’ve become so selfish? So egotistical? So self-absorbed? So hateful? Whether speaking of politics, business, religion or the common interactions of everyday life, we exist in a society increasingly devoid of courtesy, decency and humility. Enron, Worldcom, Bernie Madoff, the sub-prime mess, every case representing the sacred belief that it’s every man for himself. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, reality TV. We are obsessed with instant fame, with self-worship. Fuck what you have to say, read my comments, look at my pictures. Me, me, me. Forty years ago things were hardly perfect, women lacked rights, segregation reigned, but most people knew their neighbors. All service was full service. The customer was always right. Now we have self-checkout lanes at the supermarket and gated communities to keep the rabble out. The streets are drowning in tension and violence. Makeshift mass murderers slaughter entire schoolhouses, office buildings, churches and community centers. Our political leaders auction off their integrity to the highest bidder in a frenzy never before seen while our religious leaders rage for the blood of gays, Muslims and Jews. We all seem to suffer from the symptoms of some undiagnosed disease. Anxiety runs high. Small gestures seem absent. People practically bowl eachother over when walking down the street. A billion hands clawing at the walls and all there is to do is climb the bodies higher and higher pushing down anyone brazen enough to get in the way.

But why? What is the cause of this malady? Why do things seem to be getting worse?

America has always been a whore. We’re cheap. Walking billboards with price tags sown in. Since the founding of this great nation we have committed unspeakable acts of genocide and destruction. We took a land of vibrant beauty and paved a wall-to-wall strip mall in its place. We’ve commodified everything from our most sacred belief systems to the air we breathe. Whereas once we built great public works and exported idealism now we stand an indebted shill, arms broker to the world, an empire on the brink of collapse. Our turn in fortune is of our own making, a natural and expected result of our greed. As the ship sinks we scramble for the life rafts, women and children be damned. And yet it’s not as simple as all that. Our social morality began to collapse long before our dominance on the world stage.

In the 1950’s the generation that would elect Kennedy and usher in an era of social upheaval came into adulthood. Writers like Ginsberg, Kerouac and Mailer, comics like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, musicians like Miles Davis all rose out of the fires of global destruction to deconstruct a social order they saw as rigid and false. Academics like Alfred Kinsey and Marshall McLuhan challenged basic perceptions of human relationships and our trajectory as a species. Feminism, civil rights, revolutionary politics, concepts of decency, social order and basic rights. In film, music, literature, journalism and art. On every front everything was reexamined. Everything was taken apart. The world as it was didn’t make sense anymore. The old order had to be usurped. In every case these luminaries, these revolutionaries, were reacting to one and the same thing: an America brimming with unlimited prosperity while standing on the precipice of complete annihilation.

The generation that gave us the Beats and modern Jazz was the first to come into maturity under the shadow of the nuclear bomb. Cities melting into the ground, billions torn from flesh and bone, the eradication of civilization, the apocalypse alive in stark reality, one act of madness away from fruition. And so every generation since has come into the world with a gun cocked and pointed to the head. Aware, whether consciously or not, that the end of all things is omnipresent and inevitable. The social transformation of the 1950’s and 60’s was necessary, vital. The lessons learned over those decades invaluable, but unfortunately incomplete.

Today there are some 20,000 active nuclear weapons in the world, of which about 7,000 are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched within fifteen minutes of an order to do so. The largest of these weapons have a yield of some 50 megatons (which equates to a single warhead having the destructive power of 50 million tons of TNT). The system is called deterrence. The idea is that under the threat of complete global destruction no country would ever risk unleashing their nuclear arsenal. Yet conventional wisdom states that if you build a thing you must use it. And so we live with a knife at the throat, waiting, ready, expectantly for the final blow. This insane system, peace at the barrel of a gun, is, as it has been for fifty years, defended as the only way to avoid large scale conflict. When this stark raving mad concept in global diplomacy is understood and compounded further by the looming specter of climate change, the stifling problems of overpopulation and imperial collapse, is it really that hard to see where our society is headed?

A reality of our own making. The battle of Armageddon that a growing segment of our population would welcome with utter glee. An America in which we stand, as James Thurber once wrote, “not on the brink of war, but on the brink of was,” where basic human decency, civic duty and compassion are sacrificed on the alter of instant gratification and decadence. The me society. America has always been a whore, capitalist ideology run wild, greed as divine right, but now more than ever growing over fifty years strong there is the presumption that even if our actions have consequences we won’t be around long enough to face them. Live for today no matter the cost because tomorrow will never come.

In this same sense it’s easy to understand why so many have pinned such unrealistic hopes on Barack Obama, as they so desperately, hungrily crave, need a savior to lead them out of the dark. Ironically, despite our certainties of destruction we cling to hope. Despite our momentary lack of empathy and compassion we remain good people, or at the very least we hope to be good again. We just can’t make sense of the world right now. The end is coming soon. In our despair we become inhuman. Murderers, rapists, thieves, megalomaniacs. We embrace what is easy. We consume and allow ourselves to be consumed as our only means to cope.

June 4th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Congratulations on your purchase. What did you buy? Why, General Motors of course. Unless you’ve been dead for the last few days, you know that GM, formally the world’s largest car company, has filed for bankruptcy. And you probably also know that the government has taken a sixty percent controlling interest in the automaker. The brains behind such products as the Chevy Cavalier, the Hummer H2, and the greatest single line of passenger cars in the world, Saturn, are now your employees. Let the firings begin!

The GM bankruptcy represents the largest single business failure in United States history. With debts totaling some 173 billion dollars and layoffs expected in the tens of thousands, taxpayers can expect to wait a very long time before they see any return on their investment (in the last year GM has received 20 billion dollars in bailout money and is expected to receive another 30 billion in the coming months).

So why did GM fail?

The economic collapse certainly had something to do with it. As people lose their jobs they tend to spend less money, which means avoiding buying big-ticket items such as cars. But the failures of GM go far beyond recent events. Although once synonymous with strength and dependability, in the last three decades GM products have proven increasingly unreliable. In fact this extends to all three of the major America car companies. To buy American means to spend half your time at the mechanic, paying for repairs on things that you didn’t even know existed in the first place. While Toyota and Volkswagen can boast solid craftsmanship, products from out of the Big Three seem better suited for Walmart shelves than dealer lots.

Perhaps the biggest factor leading to the collapse of GM and the American car industry is the incredible lack of foresight. While Japanese automakers were making smaller, safer, fuel-efficient cars, Ford, GM and Chrysler were putting out gas guzzling SUVs. Some of the models of the Hummer brand, for example, managed as little as nine miles per gallon. Add to this unrealistic pension plans and the sort of hubris reserved for the heroes of Greek tragedy, and you get companies owned and operated by the United States federal government.

What’s interesting to consider is how this immense failure reflects on US manufacturing and the nation as a whole. In the post-war years America was a country of unparalleled production. We not only built things, but we built them well. There was a real pride in US workmanship. An ethos of hard work and ownership. But as corporations went global and a new crop of robber baron put fantasies of instant wealth ahead of civic responsibility, the American brand began to wane. Corporations once at the heart of community transplanted overseas for cut-rate labor. American workers became expendable. Products became cheap. Wages disappeared and with them the promises of the American dream.

Over the last forty years, but with greater ferocity over the last twenty, those who would lead the United States have mainly turned to pillage its resources. Privateer capitalism has become the name of the game, a brand of piracy that has been exported across the world. America stands now, mainly, a bloated arms factory. The idealism and innovation that were once the hallmark of national pride, replaced by the ethic of shortsighted self-interest.

As the Big Three transform into the Big One and a Half, the question that remains is whether the United States still has the capacity to remake itself. Do we have the strength to reclaim the virtues that once made this nation the leader of the world? Or are we doomed, just as countless empires before us, to fold back into the shadows of history, as to make room for the emergence of younger, stronger powers?

Saint Augustine once said, when speaking about the collapse of the Roman Empire, “If that which God has built will one day vanish, than surely that which Romulus built will disappear much sooner.” Nothing in the world lasts forever. America certainly can’t endure into the point where the sun irradiates the Earth. But are we witnessing that end now? Or is the indomitable American spirit still viable enough to lift us up into a better day?