← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · weisbrot
Thread ID: 18316 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-05-20
2005-05-20 14:46 | User Profile
BAD IDEAS HAVE WORSE CONSEQUENCES
By Franklin Sanders
An address to the Southern National Congress Organising Committee McDonough, Georgia March 5, a.d. 2005-03-06
Ideas have consequences -- and bad ideas have worse consequences.
In 1930 a group of Southerners warned the South, "Beware of the bargain you are making. Beware of its consequences." By and large, the South ignored their warning.
The South entered a bargain to give up its independent agrarian ways and enter the "industrial capitalist" system of the United States. Notice that I do not say "capitalist" but "industrial capitalist." Industrial capitalism has as little to do with "free enterprise" and "free markets" as slavery has to do with freedom. By "industrial capitalist' I mean the business-government partnership which now rules the United States. It is, technically and accurately, a fascist system.
In 1930, fascism or corporatism was the idea of the day. It was the idea of Mussolini and Hitler. It was a bad idea. We live with the consequences, and they become worse daily.
SLAVES OF THE CONSEQUENCES
Today, we Southerners are the slaves of those consequences. The South gave up control of its life -- economic, social, cultural, and political -- to that bad idea. Today, we have no control of our lives, or our children's. Today, our future is determined by unelected elites who plan our future behind closed doors, according to what is best for their future. They then hand these plans over to legislatures, who turn them into policies and laws, and we have to live with the consequences.
One example will suffice: the Southern Growth Policies Board. Southern governors created it in 1971 to "develop and advance visionary economic development policies by providing a forum for partnership and dialog among a diverse cross-section of the region's governors, legislators, business and academic leaders and the economic and community development sectors. This unique [!] public-private partnership is devoted to strengthening the South's economy and creating the highest possible quality of life."
This is not democracy, let alone constitutional government. This is fascism, a government-business partnership where business is the general partner and government is its enforcement thug. It is devoted to developing the South's economy so that giant corporations create the highest possible quality of profits, and for Southerners, quality of life be damned. This is government and business joined in a cartel to determine your life and your livelihood -- and your children's. What is the consequence? Exactly what those Southerners warned in 1930, the destruction of all Southern ways and culture, and the theft of the South's soul, replacing them with a crass consumerist society that converts all independent freeholders into enserfed employees.
BAD IDEA, WORSE CONSEQUENCESWhat has been the consequence of this very bad idea?
Our people have been driven off their ancestral lands and crowded into cities. Our once-thriving countryside, towns, and villages have been depopulated. Once independent farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers have been transformed into servile employees in meaningless jobs. Worse yet, many have been forced into welfare dependency, where once they supported themselves.
Farmers have been driven off their farms by the "factory in the field," "get big or get out" model imposed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Those farmers remaining either work as employees of giant distant corporations, tending their factory hog and chicken houses, or they work as clients of government, unable to survive without government subsidies.
Our small towns have been sucked dry of wealth. Corporate competitors, often with tax-exempt favours provided by local governments, have shut down local businesses. Local economies have withered as cash flows have been sucked out to be capitalised on Wall Street and leave our communities forever.
Our native industries, from textiles to tools to tobacco, have been destroyed, the job exported overseas as soon as workers could be found to work for even lower wages than Southerners. Governments have offered bounties to foreign corporations to come exploit what's left. 750,000 American jobs vanished in Bush's first term.
Our once unique cities and architecture have been transmogrified into clones of American mediocrity, identical to every other empty city.
Our people have been transformed into debtors all, slaves of banks that create money out of thin air and legally force us to use it.
Our common law rights have been destroyed, replaced by "privileges" we hold at the pleasure of the state.
Our people, once the world's most independent, have been changed into timid, docile worker bees, labouring all their lives for the promise of a retirement that, in all likelihood, will not materialise.
Now at home The Idea is pursuing an Assyrian policy of transplanting more docile workers into the South, to displace our Southern people from their ancestral homeland. Abroad, The Idea wages war around the globe to expand its empire. Now the "dream" held out to us is a government job or a computer job in a factory owned by Japanese or Germans, or the wonderful prosperity that tourism will bring, as we pose for snapshots, grinning toothlessly in our overalls beside our trailer houses, holding up home made quilts, or as we change beds in their hotels, or serve them black-eyed pea soufflé and country ham quiche. I'd rather buy me a tin bill and peck shhhhââ¬Â¦..--- peck in the dirt with the chickens.
HOW IS IT WORKING NOW?
Well, you may ask, what are you complaining about? Your belly's full, isn't it? You have a job and a mortgaged house and a mortgaged car and a mortgaged bass boat. And your kid can borrow $30,000 from the government to go to college, can't he?
Alas, any critic of the present fascist system is faced with writing the biography of a man who never lived. Who can know what the South might look like today if we had heeded the warning of I'll Take My Stand?
What we can write is a diagnosis -- and prognosis -- of the present system. Has The Idea paid off? How healthy is it now? How does its future look?
In a word, Not good.
The once mighty, once good-as-gold yankee dollar has lost more than 95% of its 1930 value. In the last three years, the dollar index has dropped 30%. Before this decade ends, I estimate the dollar will lose 75% of its 2000 value, if it does not collapse and disappear altogether.
The dollar is held together only by foreigners' willingness to recycle dollars received in trade into US government securities. Foreigners now own over half of all US government debt.
The US balance of trade deficit topped $600 billion last year, and will probably grow this year again. US imports are now 50% greater than US exports, and now we have begun importing even agricultural commodities.
In the last 25 years the United States has transmuted from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor. In the last 15 years foreigners have accumulated $3.6 trillion in US assets.
Every two or three years the world financial system is terrorised by crises that threaten to bring down the entire system by what Alan Greenspan euphemistically calls "cascading cross defaults."
The US economic system, like a heroin addict, requires ever-larger dose of monetary dope to stimulate it into activity.
Combined government and private US debt totals three times US gross Domestic product., Once that debt starts to crumble, it will collapse in a deflationary spiral that no inflationary injections can cure.
But as the last four years have shown, inflation is the only weapon the government and the Fed have, and they will use that weapon until the dollar is inflated into worthlessness.
The US stock market topped in 2000, and there is no technical or historical evidence that the slide then begun will not continue for 10 or even 20 years, dragging the US economy down with it.
And the retirement pensions invested in that stock market will be dragged down with it. If the corporations that promised that retirement have not gone bankrupt by the time you retire and taken your retirement down the hole with them, there won't be much retirement left anyway.
And don't count on social security, which reaches demographic and financial bankruptcy about 10 year's from today. Neither should you clutch to your breast the hope that Bush's so-called "reform" will bail out social security. It won't.
Nor should you count on real estate for safety, for Greenspan's inflation has blown up a classic real estate bubble that will soon burst and drag values down to 50, 25, or even 10% of their present levels.
All these are the consequence of The Idea, the government-business partnership: inflation, instability, terrorised insecurity alternating with phantom prosperity. For you and your children. Forever.
CHARGE TO THE SOUTHERN NATIONAL CONGRESS
We sold the South for a mess of pottage, and the pottage is rotten. Bad ideas have worse consequences.
But I do not despair. I know my homeland, and I know my people. Our land is rich with resources. We are intelligent and ingenious. Most of all, we are tough. We have outlived the English (twice), Indians, yankees, defeat, reconstruction, hook worms and boll worms and pellagra and poverty. We have outlived them all and we will outlive them all, and we will thrive.
But now we must re-learn independence and self-sufficiency. We must rebuild our local economies. We must help each other learn again to govern ourselves, to control our own lives and futures.
Today you have met to plant a seedling -- a seedling of self-government. Do not despise the day of small beginnings. Do not despise yourselves. Do not despise your people. DO not despise the power of God.
In the days when Israel was oppressed by the Philistines, when the king of Israel and his army trembled before their enemies and no hope was at hand, one man, only one, went over to battle the Philistines. And Jonathan said to his armour bearer, "Come, and let us go over unto the garrison of these uncircumcised: it may be that the LORD will work for us: for there is no restraint to the LORD to save by many or by few."
Few as you are, go over. Go over! And God will be with you! Let us pray.
God, our Father, Who alone raises up and casts down nations, Look down from heaven and have pity on the South, our country without place or name; Forget not, O Father, your covenant with our fathers, But renew your mercy to us their children, And so turn the hearts of our people toward you, That with repentance and joy they would once again Love and serve you alone; And grant that, having taught us to govern ourselves by your Spirit and your law, You would be graciously pleased to grant us, A name and place among the nations of the earth, That we might lead them in serving you, Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end, Amen.
God save the South!
McDonough, Georgia March 5, a.d. 2005
[url]http://leagueofthesouth.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=14&mode=thread[/url]
2005-05-20 15:11 | User Profile
Weisbrot,
He nails it with this: [QUOTE]Today, our future is determined by unelected elites who plan our future behind closed doors, [U]according to what is best for their future.[/U][/QUOTE] Yep, that is exactly what they do.