Whither the Unraveling United States of America?

The United States of America is unraveling. The headlines about the United States make it obvious:

Suicides of Soldiers Reach High of Nearly 3 Decades (reported also here and here)

U.S. Unemployment Rate Soars (reported also here)

In Hard Times, Tent Cities Rise Across the Country (video of one in Los Angeles )

Krugman: U.S. Headed for Jobless Recovery (What's next? A "survivor-less peace?")

Income Inequality is at an All-Time High: STUDY (and this is by DESIGN!)

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations (read more here )

The suicides by soldiers and the rising rates of unemployment, homelessness and imprisonment, are symptoms of a deeper problem in the United States: a small plutocracy controls the country. They use their power (via ownership of the mass media, control of the major political parties and the funds candidates need to wage successful election campaigns, and ownership of the corporations that decide who has a job and who doesn't) to cause the symptoms that make these headlines.

They increase an already obscene degree of economic inequality. They automate jobs out of existence or ship them overseas. And they wage unjust Orwellian wars whose main purpose is domestic social control that relies on generating a "war mentality" to get Americans to voluntarily send their youth (especially the poorest for whom military employment seems better than no job at all) to commit mass murder of innocent people in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and to respond to the deaths and suicides of American soldiers by thinking it necessary to "support our troops" and the plutocracy who sent them to kill and be killed.

Does the American plutocracy care what ordinary Americans want? Let's see.

The plutocracy knows that a robust majority of Americans want to end the notorious lack of universal health care (that distinguishes the United States from virtually all other countries) and that they support a single payer system that would accomplish this by using tax dollars to pay for everybody's health care. So how has the plutocracy responded? By ignoring what the majority of Americans want and instead defining "health care reform" to mean a law that will require all Americans to buy health insurance. Only in America!

The American plutocracy knows that a robust majority (74% according to a scientific poll conducted by the University of Maryland reported July 1, 2008) of Americans do not want their government to take the side of Israel in the Israel/Palestine conflict. But the myth--that Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East" and that Palestinians (and Muslims and Arabs in general) attack Israel not because it commits ethnic cleansing against non-Jews but because they are hate-driven anti-Semitic crazed religious fundamentalist terrorists who also want to kill all Americans--is a crucial pillar of the Orwellian "war on terror" story line. It is so crucial that when the UN Report by Judge Richard Goldstone (a pro-Zionist Jew) concluded, with irrefutable facts and documentation, that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza against unarmed civilians, the United States House of Representatives and President Obama decided to "shoot the messenger" by denouncing the report without being able to point to a single factually incorrect statement in it. In opposition to 74% of Americans, the plutocracy insists on taking the side of Israel.

The plutocracy can read the headline, Public Opinion in U.S. Turns Against Afghan War, but that doesn't stop them from their warmongering that produces headlines like this one: Obama Approves Afghanistan Troop Increase.

The plutocracy could not care less what the American public wants. In order for the United States to reverse direction and head in the direction most Americans want it to go-- towards being more equal and democratic, not to mention getting out of the business of committing mass murder of foreign peoples-- it will be necessary to remove the plutocracy from power.

How can we do this? How can we remove the plutocracy from power? Good question! In fact, it is the single most important question that the American public needs to start talking about and coming up with an answer to, if we are going to stop the continual unraveling of our society.

The biggest problem in this task is that we have no organizations that want to talk about this question. The political parties, obviously, do not. The big labor unions don't. The churches (of any religion or denomination) apparently don't. So how can we do it?

We need to start from scratch in creating organizations that aim to engage Americans in figuring out how to remove the plutocracy from power.

Who will do this for us?

The right-wingers who blast "big government" on Rush Limbaugh's radio show won't, because they studiously avoid bashing big money.

The liberals won't because they are happy as long as the plutocracy rules with Democrats like Obama with Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and Goldman Sachs stooges controlling the Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank, instead of Republicans like Bush with Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and Goldman Sachs stooges controlling the Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank.

The left-wingers won't because they are more afraid of ordinary people being in power than of the plutocracy being in power. Strange but true. The Marxists among them would no doubt like to replace the plutocracy with themselves, so they could carry out their Marxist social engineering and eventually, after many generations, make "racist, homophobic, selfish, pro-imperialistic" ordinary Americans good enough to deserve having a real democratic voice in social decisions. But they know that the realistic choice today is between having our present-day "socially enlightened" corporate elite in power versus having ordinary Americans in power, and they much prefer the former because they worry that ordinary Americans, unlike today's politicians and judges and corporate directors, don't approve of same-sex marriage or the racial quotas of Affirmative Action and so forth. The left doesn't even want the American public to be allowed to vote on a question as important as same-sex marriage, speciously proclaiming, "It's wrong to vote on rights."

Who does that leave? Each of us can see the answer in our mirror each morning. Yes, we are totally unorganized and for that reason feel like there is nothing we can do that will have any real effect. Yes, the political activists from right to left are organized and, indeed, often funded by the plutocracy. Nonetheless, we are the vast majority, not them. We can prevail if we organize with the explicit intention of prevailing. Let's do that. If we do not, then imagine the terrible answer to the question-- "Whither the unraveling United States of America?"-- that lies in store for us and our children.