| January 26, 2008 at 07:30:27 Headlined on 1/26/08: by Siv O'Neall Page 1 of 2 page(s) | |   |
A World Out of Joint If there is not a restoration of some balance of power, the world will sink into a maelstrom of screwed-up governance, callous disregard for the people and a state of permanent war. The chief purpose of our neocon government is to give the Empire undisputed power and to make the giant corporations the multi-billionaire kings of this lopsided world.
Quality of life counts for nothing. The general wellbeing of the billions of people in the world, their health and education are of no importance. Job security and the fair treatment of workers are of no consequence. The good life as we know it will be gone forever, and very soon, if there is no change in the direction the present trend is leading us.
Only greed and lust for power and profit on the part of the tiny minority of sociopathic men and women who run the corporations and thus control the politicians will set the rules for the governance of the world. Everything else, everything of any human value will be deleted, annulled. There is no profit? The tyrants are not interested.
Free markets and deregulation
Neoliberalism began to take hold of the economy around 1980 with Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the U.S., both hell-bent on redirecting the economy for the profit of the already wealthy, creating free markets all over the globe and deregulating trade and money speculation so as to set no limits for the further enrichment of the greedy.
The money would have to come from somewhere. Simple. The powerless workers would have to become increasingly powerless, the lower classes would have to become less and less educated and capable of standing up for their interests. The middle classes would have to give up their secure lives so the financial elite could bathe in champagne and blithely ignore the hardship of the working classes.
The Empire is born
Since the end of World War II especially, but actually since at least a hundred years earlier, the United States has seen itself as the undisputed Herrenvolk[1] who gave itself the right to invade and plunder countries of its own choice, defenseless countries with resources that the U.S. industrialists coveted. They saw it as their innate right to exploit countries and peoples who were unable to defend themselves, economically and militarily. Americans, the Herrenvolk, struck out and conquered, ignored international treaties, ignored the force of nationalistic feelings, ignored the rights of sovereign nations to govern themselves, to run their own economy and to solve their own internal and external disputes. Feelings of national pride and human dignity were totally disregarded and this, in the long run, will no doubt be their downfall.
How long can the Empire last?
The United States is completely set on dominating the world economically and militarily and to that purpose it has over 700 military bases in over 160 countries spread all over the globe[2]. Between this global presence and the mindboggling cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, paid for by the U.S. tax payers, the treasury has run dry and now that the U.S. is trillions in debt, mostly to Japan and China, what is the future going to be like? The tax breaks for the superrich, which started in the Clinton era and have been senselessly increased during the past seven years of misrule, are of course one of the reasons for the explosive state of the U.S. economy today. Huge tax breaks during a time of increased spending on the military seems to be a political expedient totally lacking any trace of common sense, an opportunist policy that is going to backfire one day very soon.
Considering the position the United States has put itself in, beyond all intention to cooperate with the rest of the world and totally refusing to look at the true complexity of today's situation, it does not seem likely that the United States will ever again regain its superpower status.
But will the planet survive long enough for the rest of the world, the suppressed masses, to wake up, to gather strength and to put up powerful resistance? Will 'We the people' have a chance to protect our human rights, get our dignity back, stand up to the tyrants? Those robots who act like Pavlov's dog when they see profit ahead. Profit is King. We the people have to prove to those mindless lackeys of the Empire that the world is ungovernable without the support of the masses. The blatant arrogance of the present masters of the Empire will one day soon blow up in their faces, the day it becomes obvious that the United States is not the only or even the foremost powerhouse in the world. The blindness to reality of those self-assured kings will precede their fall.
Break the people's spirit
The present power holders are all set on depriving the people of their dignity and hope for a better life, at home and abroad. Take away people's dignity and you break their spirit. Tyrants throughout the ages have known this basic fact. Today's tyrants see the people as being of no importance, as having no rights. Money makes might and right. Keep the people poor and ignorant, take away their human rights, their democratic rights, their right to a vote that is sure to be counted. In fact, do away with democracy as the founding fathers meant it, and every step of improvement added to the Constitution in later days, such as the rights to vote for black people and for women.[3] That is the way we are headed in the United States under the present rule of callous robots. Those tyrants maneuver endlessly to deprive the people of any true understanding of what is being taken away from them, of how they are increasingly shut out of access to oxygen and to the living life.
Where did equality go?
Siv O'Neall was born and raised in Sweden where she graduated from Lund University. She has lived in Paris, France and New Rochelle, N.Y and traveled extensively throughout Europe. Siv retired after many years of teaching French in Westchester, N.Y. and English in the Grandes Ecoles (Institutes of Technology) in France. In addition to her own writing, Siv has also provided Axis of Logic with translation services. She has been living in France, first Paris, then Lyon, for 30 years. In addition to her political activism and writing, her life is filled with family, music, animals, reading, traveling and "anything that pleases the eye or the palate".
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