[Peace-discuss] Inauguration Day, 2009: A Day of Mourning

[E. Wayne Johnson]

>  As in the case of 9/11, when the Bushies launched an invasion of a 
> foreign country in the name of a national "emergency," */our economic 
> 9/11 has now become the occasion for a massive invasion of government 
> into the private sector. The nationalization of the banks, the auto 
> industry, and even, it's rumored, the newspaper industry, augur ill 
> for the cause of individual autonomy and for the social base of the 
> Jeffersonian remnant: small business, the middle classes, broadly 
> defined, and the shrinking proportion of the population not entirely 
> dependent on Washington's largess/.*

These are interesting times indeed...

C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> "...An inaugural celebration? Not for me, thank you. I'm going into 
> inaugural mourning: all black to mourn the victims of Obama's wars, 
> and the death of our old republic."
>
>     Inauguration Day, 2009: A Day of Mourning
>     For the victims of future wars, and for our old republic
>     by Justin Raimondo
>
> When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, he sought to dismantle the 
> evolving Federalist tradition of pomp and circumstance. In a 
> ceremonial sense, royalism seemed to have been restored, or so it 
> seemed to him. As this blogger put it, "Dressed in simple attire, 
> Jefferson walked over to the Capitol with a phalanx of riflemen, 
> friends, and fellow citizens from his home state of Virginia."
>
> In these last days of the American Empire, such austere republicanism 
> would be considered impossibly quaint. Having long ago morphed into 
> Jefferson's worst nightmare, the closer we get to the end, the more 
> glamorous our inaugurals become. The poorer we are, the more millions 
> we'll throw at a ceremony that is really the crowning of a monarch – 
> and not just any old king, but an emperor bestriding the globe.
>
> Appearances must be kept up. Like a bankrupt living on a palatial 
> estate – one step away from foreclosure – we bask in imperial splendor 
> even as the repo man comes knocking at the door.
>
> At a time such as ours, the spectacle of jeweled and gowned courtiers 
> feasting on inaugural canapés is beyond tacky. The Bourbons partied, 
> too, right up to the eve of the French Revolution. Amid all the 
> sounding of trumpets and the hailing of the chief, however, there is 
> something hollow about all this unseemly extravagance.
>
> The Obama cult has imbued our new president with superhuman powers: 
> they expect and enjoy the spectacle. Yet the relentless lionizing of 
> this messianic figure is ironic, because here is an American chief 
> executive who will doubtless become aware of his own limitations 
> rather quickly. America is a bankrupt empire engaged in two overseas 
> wars, with troops on every continent and bases ringing the globe. It's 
> unsustainable, and our ruling elites know it.
>
> The crisis [.pdf] of American state capitalism will consume Obama's 
> presidency until his credibility is reduced to a cinder. The only 
> solution is for the administration to create a new social compact, one 
> in which the government takes not only a major role but the leading 
> role in directing the economic life of the nation. In order to do 
> this, however, a broad coalition is necessary, one that spans – and in 
> a sense transcends – the traditional categories of "Left" and "Right." 
> And this has been a source of Obama's broad appeal: the belief that he 
> is above it all.
>
> Of course, libertarians make the same claim for themselves, yet they 
> do so on ideological grounds. The Obama-ites, on the other hand, 
> disdain all ideology and claim the mantle of pragmatism.
>
> This claim to be non-ideological, and therefore "practical," is a 
> smokescreen for what is clearly an ideology of a very definite sort: 
> it is garden-variety statism, i.e., a belief in the radical extension 
> of governmental power. As in the case of 9/11, when the Bushies 
> launched an invasion of a foreign country in the name of a national 
> "emergency," our economic 9/11 has now become the occasion for a 
> massive invasion of government into the private sector. The 
> nationalization of the banks, the auto industry, and even, it's 
> rumored, the newspaper industry, augur ill for the cause of individual 
> autonomy and for the social base of the Jeffersonian remnant: small 
> business, the middle classes, broadly defined, and the shrinking 
> proportion of the population not entirely dependent on Washington's 
> largess.
>
> In the U.S., the private sector – and I mean this in an ecumenical 
> sense, including the nonprofit and underground sectors – has always 
> been the dominant force in society. The voluntary interactions of 
> consenting adults – the cultural bedrock of our old Republic – have 
> charted the course of the American river, but now the state is 
> directing the flow.
>
> Obama's economic program can be summed up in one word: reflation. 
> Massive government spending, preceded by an orgy of bailouts. 
> Earmarks, which yesterday were anathema, are now presented as a 
> panacea. Spending on this scale requires some degree of bipartisan 
> complicity, but how will Obama get the Republicans to go along? You'll 
> notice he's been courting them rather assiduously, and that's given 
> rise to a whole new brand of "conservatives," the so-called Obamacons.
>
> Most of these were won over on the basis of their growing Bush-hatred, 
> but the rest will come over because of his foreign and military 
> policy. Obama, after all, ran on a platform of increasing an obscenely 
> bloated military budget – misnamed the "defense" budget, but in 
> reality a sum devoted to interfering in the affairs of other nations 
> and peoples on a scale unprecedented by any previous empire. A sum, 
> mind you, more than equal to the military budgets of all other nations 
> on earth combined.
>
> This is the grand bargain that will be struck, the one that will give 
> us guns and butter. The conservatives will be won over by what John T. 
> Flynn described as their "devotion" to "military might." As the 
> economic crisis deepens, military Keynesianism will bring the two 
> parties together, as Flynn foresaw, because "militarism is the one 
> great glamorous public-works project upon which a variety of elements 
> in the community can be brought into agreement." The propaganda of 
> fear will become an economic necessity:
>
> "Inevitably, having surrendered to militarism as an economic device, 
> we will do what other countries have done: we will keep alive the 
> fears of our people of the aggressive ambitions of other countries and 
> we will ourselves embark upon imperialistic enterprises of our own."
>
> Flynn was one of the most trenchant and acerbic critics of FDR, a 
> president Obama is expected to emulate and may even surpass in the 
> sense that the new administration seeks more power than even Roosevelt 
> ever managed to grab. Certainly the current economic turmoil mirrors 
> the 1930s in ways we have only just begun to experience, yet I agree 
> with Katrina vanden Heuvel, who fears Obama may come to resemble a 
> more recent Democratic president: Lyndon Baines Johnson. He, too, gave 
> us guns and butter. He also escalated and prosecuted an overseas war 
> that was increasingly unpopular with the American people – and 
> economically and morally damaging to the United States. It's 
> heartening to hear the editor of the Nation, the premier old-line 
> liberal magazine once edited by Oswald Garrison Villard, swim against 
> the "progressive" tide by publicly worrying Obama will get bogged down 
> in Afghanistan, charge into Pakistan, and wind up being brought down 
> by his own hubris, a quality certainly not lacking in the new 
> administration.
>
> In the age of Obama, what the late, great libertarian theorist Murray 
> Rothbard dubbed the welfare-warfare state will take on gargantuan 
> proportions, just as it did under LBJ, both at home and abroad. This 
> is bad news on every front. An inaugural celebration? Not for me, 
> thank you. I'm going into inaugural mourning: all black to mourn the 
> victims of Obama's wars, and the death of our old republic.    ~ 
> Justin Raimondo
>
> http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=14097
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20090119/1e5231d3/attachment-0001.html