By the time you read this the $700 billion bailout will have been old news, one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history. But it will not heal that which ails the nation as it trips and stumbles like a drunken sailor on shore leave. The reasons are simple. For the problems are systemic, built into the rapacious nature of the machinery humming all around us. The Rube Goldberg-like contraption of democratic forms at the service of the financial services industry is a bottomless maw, a gaping mouth that is never sated. Why was there no alarm when millions of people lost their homes to foreclosures made inevitable by variable mortgage rates? When millions lost manufacturing jobs to low paying service gigs? When living standards crumbled, and when take home pay fell to 1973 levels? Where was the alarm? There was no alarm -- for this was the 'blind hand of the market' at work, the leveling way of globalism, the new world order moving through, preparing the way for the triumph of capitalism uber alles. Few were the politicians who gave voice to this immense social suffering. Fewer still used their power to try to assuage their pain, for they too were drunk on the wine of globalism. But when the ripples spread upwards, from the foreclosed homes to the foreclosing banks -and from the banks to investment houses, Congress stirred from their drunken stupor, and rang alarm bells loudest. "It's an economic 9/11!", some bellowed; "It's a financial tsunami!", yelled others. When Americans were hoodwinked into ruinous sub-prime loans, and millions were faced with foreclosures, where was the alarm? More importantly, where was the help for those who were endangered? Nowhere. Nowhere. If they helped them the present economic crisis would've been mitigated. Instead, we're in a situation where a scam artist sets up shop in a street-corner, playing a fraudulent 3-card monty hustle, and along comes a cop. The cop, instead of rousting the scam artist, rifles the pockets of every passerby, and delivers the stolen loot to the scammer. The scam artist, of course, is the financial investment houses; the cop, of course, is Congress -- and you are the passerby, hustled and robbed by both of them. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, 160 years ago, that the State was but the executive for capitalist. After what we are all seeing, who can doubt it? The Empire is crumbling. 10/1/08 (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
