CEOs of evil are hard to identify, due mainly to the fact that they clothe their style in masquerade. Take the current election fiasco in America, for instance, which goes from ugly to uglier, and one gets the impression that the mask of exceptionalism and faux patriotism projected into the public domain is little more than a joke extended to the 99% by the 1%. It’s just another way of saying, ‘we’re making America great again’, so, ‘shut the fuck up’. After all, capitalism is only for those who possess loads and loads of money! Hegemony means putting rules in place that benefit the 1% …and have you noticed that the 1% kick ass and destroy whole countries to get what they want, because that’s their definition of exceptionalism? America is on the march to implement trade treaties that benefit the 1% . Meanwhile NATO arrogantly secants another’s hegemonic sphere, namely Russia’s, while snidely restraining Iran’s development through bank-sanctioning posturing in order to dictate trade practices.
To suggest that all is quiet on the Western front would be like calling furphy fact. A cacophony of explosively stupid policies clearly demonstrates that the amoral CEO’s at the vanguard of American Foreign Policy are doing their utmost to terrorise the globe. Those that interfere with America’s long tradition of invading other people’s countries will inevitably be branded as ‘terrorist’ but, hey, who is doing the terrorising? In this election season, the candidates competing for that seat in the White House, are abroad selling their versions of a meme marinated in existential lament…America has to defend itself against something or other… while avoiding the issue of America’s insane brutality in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yes, that red herring, the ‘us-and-them’ meme; the mother of all memes proclaiming American exceptionality is paraded yet again with lots of the usual twaddle about good leadership, to the mesmerised masses.
But what has to be looked at here is the potency of the American financial apparatus that has gone global to advance regime change whenever and wherever it sees an opportunity to undo the social glue binding a country together, in order to exploit it. This is the American Foreign Policy agenda — the elephant in the room, if you wish, that ought to be at the very forefront in this election year. But no, the country that has lost its own glue, democracy, has lost its voice too. The 1% — CEOs of evil are effective obfuscators when it comes to manipulating the public, telling them what they ought to focus on. Being the propagandists they are, time and time again, they deflect the mesmerised masses away from the truth. The furphy fucked facts that obscure truth are at play again in order to conceal the reality of what America has done to the Middle East. The bloody consequences of America’s looting abroad cannot be revealed to the light of day. Instead, just call blowback the response of racially inferior Arab ingrates, incapable of appreciating the wonders of liberal secular democracy — but don’t mention Wall Street on the Potomac, whatever you do!
Call America’s craven masquerade what you will, but facts speak loudest. Liberal secularism has become the false glue holding society in thrall to money making. ‘Making America Great Again’ means dominating weaker countries. The current crop of would-be leaders striving to be the next CEO, are more-of-the-same opportunists who have sold out main-street to investors who play the global stock market. The West’s long tradition of interfering in other people’s countries has been an unrelenting exercise in extorting territory and the resources of others. For decades America has invaded a string of hapless countries across the world simply because it possesses the means to do so. Sleep-walking up the stairway to secular liberal heaven, Americans came to value money as the social glue, suggesting that identity and possessions were synonymous with power…and anything else was mere socialism or pandering to soft options. Shaping the world in America’s image became ‘do it America’s way or else’! The CEOs of empire building knew the value of doing business with a big stick. But who is running the show and for whom?
Educated or otherwise, Americans went along for the ride, building careers around business practices that conflated democracy with empire building. Traditional religious values, relationship to the land and the tribal context that people identified in (a very different bottom-line) were relegated to choices outside the secular polity the state had come to personify. Americans granted themselves the right to judge others at a time when self-righteous hyperbole was taking them into cloud cuckoo land. Investors in the first-world would come to regard military power as leitmotif de jure and a means of achieving dominance in all matters of trade. Believing that American democracy was a force for the good, the public interpreted America’s business activities abroad as benevolent. Walking with a big stick had become shtick. Recording the number of Americans who died in war or as a result of gun violence at home were exact enough, but the numbers who died in Muslim countries, due to violent interference from Western nations were of little consequence.
What occurred in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, became the catalysing force that defined the American way of doing business. War and more war became the norm. The American public in the main expressed little concern for the millions of citizens slaughtered in the course of conducting wars for access to oil, or for bloody global incursions that sought to secure clout in matters relating to the control of ‘terms-of-trade’. Life for Americans became ever more trigger-happy at home and abroad. There was no longer anything to focus the imagination on, so the value of human life and the well-being of the planet were consequently subsumed to money. The idea of ‘the commons’ was lost in the heat of a battle in order to possess anything that might secure a safe haven in the arid marketplace the 1% had created. Throughout the demeaning decline into ever greater inequality, Americans of the yeomen ilk bought and used an ever greater number of guns. To date, America has lost more to gun violence at home than it did in World War11…micro and macro violence apace!!
So over the course of the 20th century, the masquerade took on a semblance of religiosity. They who were not of the faith were seen as terrorist or homophobic or alien to ‘our’ exceptionalism, or hated our values, or were extremists or extreme-extremists or, simply goddamn evil…or something! Americans failed to grasp that the country had become a house divided because a corrupt Foreign Policy had taken possession of the national character. The yeomen who had cleared America of its indigenous people while claiming the “right to bear arms’ to achieve that end, soon turned to covet possessions elsewhere. Prioritising gun culture, power became the mantra that metastasized into the bloated military beast that it is today, breathing halitosis throughout its hegemonic reach. The people went along for the ride, feeling smug about being associated with the top dog.
Amnesia took care to erase the track record that followed; after all, America is still in the business of shitting on South American states or anywhere else it pleased, provide ammo for the destruction of Gaza, do deals with anyone…human rights be-damned…if it could expand and if there was a $ to be made. Who cares about justice for all? It was no longer morning in America, innocence morphed into cynicism, yet the people remained ignorant of the fact that the Emperor had no clothes and that militarism had become the masquerade of death. Given the colossal amount of money the Pentagon leeched annually from the federal budget, Voltaire’s remarks regarding Prussia, that once-upon-a-time bastion of militarism suggests a parallel, “While most states have an army the Prussian army has a state”.
But the state is now captive to the charlatans who so slyly lobbied for deregulation to avoid government oversight. Privatisation as we know it came as a blessing to those who consider government as a hindrance to business. Speculative finance works in ways most mysterious, avoiding accountability and severing connection to the social polity wherever and whenever it can. In order to conceal the nature of their private activities, it was necessary for the 1% to buy politicians so as to privatize them. Hence the flow of trillions of dollars into tax havens surged, suggesting that privatization had become a toxic version of winner-take-all. The bulk of the population who were intrinsic to the evolution of the nation state were neutered and given their ‘get-go’.
So, the question of the rigged voting system will not go away until the electorate gets its democracy back. Deal making is no substitute for ‘the real McCoy’…and the real McCoy is about inclusiveness based on the realisation that it is intolerance that pushes the ‘other’ off the page…and we don’t have to keep going there, do we?…the ‘real McCoy’ has many strands, a bit like “In my Father’s house are many mansions!” (John 14:2)
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