Oligarchy: 'If you want to change what is, speak of what is.'

[Xox]

By Michael Ventura. Originally published at the Austin Chronicle

The Left: does not exist in the United States –
not as a meaningful force. To state the stunningly
obvious: Without a serious critique of capitalism,
you’re not to the left of anything. If what’s
left of your leftness is an earnest wish for reform,
you are that most maligned of political entities:
a liberal. Liberals of today are nice. They do
some good. But liberals of old had lefty visions
that changed society’s structure – FDR’s New
Deal, Harry Truman’s GI Bill, and LBJ’s War on
Poverty. Liberals today believe in social access
for all, and beyond that, what? The status quo. No
structural political vision. As Proverbs teaches:
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Political Commentators: Conservative and liberal,
highbrow and lowdown, political commentators huff
and puff on cue. Excited by each new issue, crisis,
and outrage, they parrot the spectrum of views they
(or their employers) have staked out. How often do
they surprise you? Almost never? Shrill with opinions
but bereft of ideas, they mistake political theatre
for a political process. Not one in a hundred has
seriously asked: What is power?

Congress: Oligarchy has defeated the very idea
of a legislative process. The Republican Party is
the blunt tool of Oligarchy in the United States,
Oligarchy’s hammer, but not for the purpose of
achieving Republican goals. Oligarchy’s goal is
to deadlock federal lawmaking bodies into permanent
dysfunction and create a power vacuum that only
Oligarchy can fill. Its method has proved foolproof:
Bankroll the GOP’s extremists and ignoramuses;
count on them to freeze the political process. Also,
count on Democrats and the media to obsess about
the so-called issues and ignore the fundamental
shift in the power structure that Oligarchy has,
in large part, achieved. Absent a surge of public
participation (not likely, but not impossible),
the collapse of our national legislative process has
probably reached the point of no return: the point at
which our national problems can no longer be redressed
through traditional politics.

Gerrymandering: Election coverage concentrates
on personalities, hot-button issues, and
polls, but the basic electoral fact today is
gerrymandering. Gerrymandered extremists now hogtie
the House. Ruthless gerrymandering in Republican
states makes fair, county-level elections nearly
impossible, decimating health care, education,
women’s rights, and the right to vote. In return for
funding extremists on issues that Oligarchy couldn’t
care less about, Oligarchy buys state legislatures,
and its lobbyists write their commerce laws. A
gerrymandered election is a rigged election. News
outlets have failed to put gerrymandering front and
center and keep it there.

Education: In states controlled through
gerrymandering, Oligarchy’s Republicans defund
schools and dumb down education for one reason:
People who cannot communicate beyond their class
and ethnicity cannot fight back. (And a fight it is:
Here in Lubbock, Texas, a highly successful charter
school had its budget slashed 20% this year. No reason
given. Its success seems to have displeased those who
fail to grasp a central human fact: All the children
are our children.)

Obamacare: Health care should be free for all;
Obamacare goes a distance toward that. But there’s
a price liberals ignore, and it may prove exorbitant:
Obamacare makes the insurance industry indispensable
to the federal government, vastly increasing Wall
Street’s leverage. That was the goal all along, when
Oligarchy’s Heritage Foundation first proposed this
health care system. Also, the Affordable Care Act is
an insurance bill, not a health bill. For instance,
it does not address the 440,000 yearly deaths caused
by preventable hospital error (Forbes.com, Sept. 23,
2013). That’s right: 440,000 a year. (And you’re
more worried about terrorists?)

Guns: In the eyes of the world, senseless slaughters
have become a signature of America (as they are
a signature of Central Africa). The argument for
guns is that they protect us from an overbearing
government. Proponents of that argument apply 18th
century tactics to 21st century reality. Wear your
camouflage, speechify, amass arsenals – if you’re
ever seen as a genuine threat, drones the size of
hummingbirds will watch your every move until a drone
that you won’t see or hear launches the missile that
kills you in midsentence. No messy publicity. Just
– boom. They can call it a gas explosion or a faulty
something. But they don’t have to call it anything.

Because now a president can legally condemn you
without trial and order your execution without
oversight, even if you are a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil
– and the lawyer who wrote that legal brief is now
a federal judge appointed by a Democratic president
and anointed by a Democratic Senate.

Meanwhile, ranting on all sides of the gun issue
serves Oligarchy because it distracts the mouthy and
furthers legislative dysfunction.

Police: However, gun adherents do have
a point. “During the Obama administration,
according to Pentagon data, police departments have
received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly
200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of
camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds
of silencers, armored cars, and aircraft” (The New
York Times, June 8). It isn’t paranoia to wonder,
“What the fuck?”

Nonviolent “terrorists”?: “Pentagon preparing
for mass civil breakdown,” headlined The Guardian on
June 12. “The project explicitly sets out to study
non-violent activists.” As the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference proved a half-century ago,
nonviolent activism gets radical results. So now the
Pentagon calls nonviolence “political violence,”
a verbal trick that puts nonviolence squarely in the
sights of the Patriot Act.

The 1%: “Since 2009, 95 percent of U.S. economic
gains have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of the
population” (The Week, Feb. 7).

Defense: Defense of what? America’s massive
military outlay bosses trade routes, bosses far-off
resources, and bosses the dollar’s rule. (Think the
dollar could be the world’s currency otherwise?)
This arrangement pleased Americans immensely while it
benefited them personally. But now the 1% gobbles 95%
of the benefits of our “defense,” while the rest
of us pay taxes to support it. That, fellow citizens,
is the essence of Oligarchy.

The 1% revisited: Once more with feeling: “Since
2009, 95 percent of U.S. economic gains have gone
to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population.”
The second-biggest question: Are there liberal or
conservative proposals that: a) address this fact
and b) have a chance of enactment through our present
political process? If the answer is yes, show me. If
the answer is no, Oligarchy is not coming, Oligarchy
has come and won.

So what comes next?

Question of the Era: Are you trapped in your
vocabulary?: You don’t know how to speak of the
United States in any way other than what you’ve
been taught? So you speak of the present as though
it is the past and your answers are as antique as
your questions.

Thomas Pynchon: “If they can get you asking the
wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about
the answers.”

Hold this truth to be self-evident: Without fair
elections and a viable legislative process at federal
and state levels, the republic no longer exists.

Votes for Democrats or Republicans may serve your
ends in the short run, and good for you, good for
you – but are your ends enough? Are you free?

Oh, let’s suppose you’re free, just so long
as you stay in the little box you’ve created for
yourself – but what do you bequeath if you can’t
or won’t recognize or admit what has happened to you
as a citizen of the republic that no longer exists?

Want to be free? I don’t know the second step,
but I know the first:

Stop speaking in terms that describe a previous
generation’s country.

If you want to change what is, speak of what is.