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August 2002


Another World is Necessary
by Frank Scott

In America , God fearing patriotism - the kind that supports war -has
always dominated god loving patriotism - the kind that supports peace -
and recent hysteria over pledging  allegiance to the god of fear only
indicates once again that we have big problems. Unfortunately, they
aren’t simply our rituals of  regimentation, but more  the  actions of
our disabled political economy . The rituals serve to take our minds off
that reality, and  aid controllers of consciousness who rely on a
confused public unable to think critically, or act democratically.

Episodes of market scheming and book juggling are  treated as individual
crimes by accountants and executives, but they are further evidence of
the degenerate quality of political economics, especially as they have
become in the conservative  romance with fundamentalist marketeering.
This is not to exonerate liberalism; its more elitist and refined form
of capitalism was also a failure, just not quite as blatantly obvious
as the more overt greed of conservatives which is currently straining
all faith in the economic church. But both these groups devoutly believe
that “markets ‘r god”, only differing on how much adjustment of this
commercial deity is acceptable.

Conservatives believe all interference with market-god is heresy ,
while  liberals believe it is divine, if done in moderation, and only to
protect the  investors who are their employers. The investor class is
seen by both factions of the ruling party  as the most important segment
of society, despite  rhetoric  about common people and democracy. In
fact, both sects   pledge and pray to the market god of capital and its
corporate commissars. They do so with bipartisan fervor, to dull public
consciousness while filling the bank accounts of their corporate bosses,
who in turn finance their campaigns.


This cabal  presides over a system of unregulated capital that has lost
tens of thousands of jobs ,  hundreds of millions of stock holder
dollars  and billions in pension fund  money. It threatens the security
of what was once the working class, but has been renamed the middle
class. Some of that middle has entered the stock market casino,through
mutual funds and pension plans, but it  lacks any control over its
money, which is managed by finance capital. It  was duped into accepting
glorified  pyramid clubs , financial paper castles  built on gambling,
greed and  gullibility, all sold as a new form of economic prosperity
and security. Sure.


Slick accountants and their gambling casino employers have almost
totally destroyed confidence in the fundamentalist fiction of
guaranteed  stock market wealth . This religion of commerce has no basis
in the morality idealized in accepted western scriptures , but only in
market speculation, human exploitation and planet devastation.

This earth is rich enough in resources and humanity  to  provide
material security to all its inhabitants, but Instead,  corporate
monopolies threaten the security of all  people and the planet itself.
With zealous belief in  free markets exclusively controlled by private
capital, they destroy social and natural environments and  jeopardize
our collective future.

Market forces under private domination  create incredible wealth for
minorities , while billions of people  live in poverty or under the
burden of staggering debt, which they owe to the very forces that create
our common problems  . We  need to create another world, and it is
possible, but not while  corporate  capitalism monopolizes markets,
under the fiction of competing in them.



Globalization is a buzz-name for the modern international  force of
capital, and it isn’t  transgressed by the latest group of book cookers
and hustlers , but practiced by them  to its logical conclusions.
Individual  criminals  are not the problem, though their number -
possibly including members of the executive branch of government -
should be prosecuted. It is the giant ponzi scheme of a corporate system
that is wasting the lives, dollars and futures of a majority of
humanity, all in pursuit of an impossible dream of progress that brings
incredible wealth, security and pleasure to some, but staggering debt,
poverty and pain to most.

As if  planetary warming and  fossil fuel pollution  weren’t enough, we
have the  rhetorical pollution of gas-bag patriotic politicians, filled
with love for flags and prayers, but complete disregard  for democracy,
peace and freedom. They are stealing civil liberties from an often
terrorized public under the guise of protecting us from an outside
menace, which is kept in our consciousness by repeated warnings  of
pending attacks on America.  This means billions more  squandered on
weaponry, more  loss of life and the creation of more hatred for america
among those we threaten . We need to to deal with problems that are far
more serious than terrorist threats, which exist at least partly, if not
totally, because of the  demands  of the corporate system to maintain
its control of global resources.

Citizens turn away from the political process in understandable disgust,
or participate with only some idea of material  conditions, given their
control by  corporate media that sells them everything they buy,
including their political overseers. The totalitarian practices of
public pledges to flags and prayers to god, indulged in by no other
democracies, and in the past only by fascist regimes, are twisted into
our minds to become immaterial symbols of the liberties which we are
losing in the material world.

But no amount of mind management and defamation of democracy can mask
the material evidence of a system that is failing. It is taking hard
working people’s jobs and money,  and threatens the future of all the
earth’s inhabitants. We need more than prayers and pledges to survive.
We need another kind of world, free of the the tyranny of the  market
gods and liberated from the domination of capital. It becomes clearer
that we cannot have such a world, until we  confront minority power with
the force of a critically thinking, organized democratic majority.


Copyright (c) 2002 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

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frank scott
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