Tocque’s outstanding essay on the impotence of political blogging has brought us to a watershed moment on Docudharma. Will this blog continue to be just another breast-beating exercise in group futility, or will we move the first stone to build an effective progressive political movement on the Internet? It is time to stand and deliver. If this blog is not the place to begin the fight against America’s predator elite, then we must find one that is.

Accordingly, I propose:

1. That the members of the Docudharma community recommend candidate targets for direct personal political action.

2. That the members agree, by vote or consensus, on a common target for direct political action.

3. That the Docudharma blog prominently publicize the chosen action and all traffic reference this action.

4. That the Docudharma community reach out to other Internet groups to make common cause in pursuing the chosen direct action.

To begin the dialog, I propose a national boycott of FedEx as a candidate for collective direct action. See this link for the rationale:

http://www.commondreams.org/vi…

The facts are plain. Blogging without direct action is an impotent evolutionary dead-end for Internet politics. We must learn to use the Internet to mobilize EFFECTIVE political action. It is time to awaken from the enfeebling trance of empty emotional blog posting. It is time to take action.

Leave it to Hollywood to show us our ugliness in the mirror and make us proud of it. The “Hurt Locker” perfectly communicates America’s dirty addiction to war, which is the driving force behind our militarism. As this film plainly demonstrates, young Americans like the adrenaline rush, the danger, and the bonding that comes from warfare. Those that want to mainline the war drug go to fight. Those who can’t tolerate a heavy dose watch it depicted on TV or in Movies like “Hurt Locker.”

There may have been a time when the post-9/11 wars could have been justified in terms of national “defense,” but that time ended years ago, with the revelation of the Bush administration’s lies and the calculation of the horrible toll of destruction unleashed on Iraq and Afghanistan. Not even the dumbest American recruit has any excuse to disguise the quest for action and adventure in a combat zone.

What makes the popular reaction to “Hurt Locker” so revealing is that the soldiers depicted in the film are not viewed as freaks or unfortunate victims. They are seen as exemplars of a new nihilistic heroism, in which all that counts is personal style and a savage kind of courage. It is this decoupling of sacrifice from reason that is the essence of America’s moral collapse. The soldiers in “Hurt Locker,” like most American consumers, are just living for their next buzz. That is all their lives have been reduced to – long stretches of boredom punctuated by brief moments of great excitement.

This is the end of the line for our sick society – when it no longer cares what it is fighting for, and it simply relishes fighting. We have become a wicked people who delight in violence for its own sake. Future historians will find “The Hurt Locker” provides a simple answer to the question “What were they thinking?” The answer is: “They weren’t thinking; they were just a bunch of war junkies.”

Although the extraordinarily evil corporation formerly known as Blackwater is prospering under its new nom de guerre, Xe, it has been decisively defeated in the arena of popular culture. Hollywood has pronounced its verdict in three recent films: “Moon,” “District 9,” and “Avatar.” In each of these films, a corporation assumes all the powers of a sovereign state and unleashes elite mercenaries to ravage the innocent in pursuit of profit. This consistently negative depiction of malevolent, militarized, predatory corporations is a clear indication that the public no longer supports these corporate killers. Let’s take a quick look at the films:

The progressive blogosphere has been reduced to what Churchill called “bouncing the rubble,” indulging in irrational overkill of the shattered remnants of Brand Obama. What the ProgBlogs don’t seem to grasp is that the truth they are obsessively reiterating is an impossible one: Americans will not abandon a symbol vital to their belief system, no matter how completely shattered its effigy becomes.

Brand Obama is not like Brand Tiger Woods. The unfortunate Tiger was expendable, since there are many other smooth athletic champions ready to carry the logos of the corporations. But Brand Obama is inseparable from delusional America, and no amount of brand trashing can break this delusional psychosis.

Brand Obama is the living embodiment of the invincible folly of American Exceptionalism. We make the rules because we are special. We break the rules because we are special. We are special because we are special. To repudiate Brand Obama means acknowledging that the entire American adventure has been a blood-soaked lie, a terrible, brutal story of greed, oppression, and deceit. This can never be acknowledged, and thus Brand Obama can never be destroyed, no matter how thoroughly discredited Obama becomes as a person, a politician, or a symbol.

The majority of Americans cannot accept that their sons and daughters serve willingly as paycheck killers in an endless war. They cannot accept that they are ruled by sociopathic corporations pushing our society toward a new feudalism. They cannot accept that their lifestyle is physically unsustainable. How can such people be persuaded that their champion is a weakling and that his policies are folly?

The demonstrated failings of Obama are numerous, obvious, and thoroughly documented. But the truth of his failings is the truth of America’s failure, and thus it is an impossible truth. My advice to Progressives is to save your energies for surviving the collapse of the Babel Tower of folly that America has become. Brand Obama is logically dead, but the pernicious, unkillable spirit of Brand Obama lives, and it continues to beckon America towards destruction.

Would you like to see a symbolic self-portrait of America, circa 2009. Here it is. I give you the Predator:

Ugly, isn’t it? But it wasn’t designed to be pretty. It was designed to kill without warning – cheaply, efficiently, and at no risk to the operator. That’s a Hellfire missile under the wing. It can destroy any armored vehicle or demolish a small building. The little sensor globe under the nose allows the remote pilot, sitting in a cubicle somewhere in the good old USA, to deliver sudden death to America’s enemies on command. There is no defense against the predator, and no warning.

This is who we are now. This is our new national bird. We thrill at the killing of victims who never know what hit them. Aggressive violence has become a perfected perversion in America, and its ultimate expression is the ability to kill with absolute impunity. American industry and ingenuity have supplied this perfect remote killing device, and for this they have the thanks of a grateful, bloodthirsty nation.

Predators and predation are terms used increasingly to describe the miscreants of Wall Street, but these are only the best-paid of America’s predators. The whole “success” culture of America has morphed from a value-based model to a smash-and-grab, quick kill paradigm that equates to predation.

This transformation is perfectly represented in our mass culture. The measure of progress in the American popular cinema is the intensity of stylized violence in our beloved “action films.” Each new Batman movie, for example, shows the (progressively “darker”) costumed protagonist unleashing sudden, unexpected violence on the villains. He strikes with overwhelming force, out of nowhere, then vanishes completely.

So what’s so bad about predation? After all, nature is full of predators and prey. It’s a jungle out there. The problem is that civilization is based on value exchange. Giving fair measure in return for fair payment is the foundation of all commerce, and, arguably all human relations. When we adopt predation as our model for living, we regress from the civilized state to animalistic behavior. When predation becomes a society’s behavioral paradigm, businessmen become gangsters, government becomes brutal, and trust vanishes.

If you want to experience cognitive whiplash, ask any young adult what they think of Goldman Sachs, then ask them if they would take a job there. The fast hit to make a killing is now the American Dream. We are now a nation of predators.

The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is slowly being forced to acknowledge that, like other parts of America’s ruling elite, its operations are based on falsehood and deception. The cloak of secrecy that it desperately wishes to preserve has masked decades of deception of the marketplace: deception regarding market manipulation; deception regarding industry and institutional favoritism; deception regarding political expediency, and, most importantly, deception regarding anti-democratic economic policy.

Enough evidence has accumulated to confirm that the Federal Reserve has acted to repeatedly make good the losses of an unstable and unsound financial industry. It has upheld a system that privatizes profits and socializes losses, always in favor of moneyed interests. It did this during the Latin American debt crisis, the S&L scandal, the dot com stock bubble, and now during the real estate bubble. The problem facing the Fed is that each rescue of the plutocracy from its excesses has been progressively more costly to the US economy. We are now in a situation where such massive public deficits are needed to make good Wall Street’s latest losses that the global reserve currency status of the US Dollar is under attack.

Because liars rule our nation, there have been no regulatory reforms passed in the year since the crisis started. There have been no prosecutions for fraudulent lending. There has not even been a formal investigation of what went wrong. All we have are bland assurances that remedies will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, fat bonuses are being paid on Wall Street out of huge, unaffordable, taxpayer-subsidized Federal-Reserve liquidity injections.

American voters may tolerate the leadership of fools and liars who mortgage our future and debase our currency, but foreign governments and investors are far less accommodating. Truth and justice will return to America under foreign auspices when the liars’ last stand fails to halt the slide of the dollar and America sinks under the weight of its unsustainable debts. Our new owners will clean house, and the current “stewards” of our economy will be reviled as frauds, flunkies, and incompetents by those who write the history of America’s imperial decline.

Obama, Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, and the whole sick Washington establishment crew believe that they can lie their way out of this debacle. They can’t. This is the end of the road for a government of lies.

A number of economic commentators have begun to agree that an enormous, generational shift of wealth in America has occurred. This vast operation, which I shall call The Great Reagan Robbery, was nothing less that a program to cap the standard of living of the majority of Americans at mid 1970s levels and transfer all future increases in national wealth to the top 1% of the population. Here is how it was executed.

1. A telegenic pitchman for corporate America, Ronald Reagan, was elected to undermine the legitimacy of government, glorify the private sector, and demonize the poor.

2. Labor union power was crippled by direct strike breaking actions (Reagan’s firing of the Air Traffic Controllers) and anti-union propaganda campaigns.

3. Taxation was made more regressive, effecting a huge transfer of wealth from the working class to high-earning professionals and investors.

4. Speculative bubbles and financial scams, like the S&L debacle, enriched well-connected investors at the expense of the taxpayers.

5. A successful class war against the poor was launched, resulting in cuts to welfare and other programs that reduced income inequality.

6. Rapid inflation in the price of amenities Americans had once taken for granted, such as safe neighborhoods, good education, and adequate health care, enriched affluent providers of housing, education, and medicine, as these became costly “luxuries” for the general population.

7. Americans who were losing economic ground were encouraged to load up on debt, further enriching the lenders and holders of capital.

8. A blanket of ideological propaganda concealed the problem of growing inequality by fostering a culture of worshiping the rich and maintaining the myth of universal access to riches.

The bottom line on The Great Reagan Robbery is that it accomplished the most massive transfer of wealth within American society in our entire history without arousing any politically significant resistance. It was a brilliantly executed class war, in which the rich decisively defeated the rest of us.

The problem the rich now face is that they succeeded too well. The momentum of the stealthy, unstoppable, robbing machine they created is continuing to push the majority of Americans into third-world debt slavery and subsistence existence, and this sharp decline will undermine the entire economy, including the fortunes of the rich.

America is bogged down in an economic and political crisis, but the overarching problem is that of a failure of elites. The people who have gained top leadership positions in business, government, and non profit institutions in the last two decades have demonstrated extremely poor performance. Why can’t we replace this generation of bad leadership? Because the elites have learned how to defend themselves through elaborate networks of personal alliances.

Any attempt to remove a top leader is checked by that leader’s allies. You can’t get rid of idiot NY Times columnists like Friedman or Brooks, because they are defended by incompetent chief editor Keller. You can’t get rid of Keller, because he is defended by irresponsible owner Sulzberger. You can’t get rid of Sulzberger because he is defended by investors who owe him favors.

The same problem exists in just about every large, dysfunctional institution. Nobody bucks authority, because authority has the power to crush dissent. In a short time, America has changed from a pragmatic and independent nation to an enfeebled society dominated by cronyism. Managing “relationships” is now the crucial career skill, and every other consideration, including the public welfare, is secondary.

There will never be incremental reform of these elites. They must be replaced wholesale, and unfortunately that will not happen without considerable social turmoil. America’s elites have decided to defend their rich franchises against the public interest, but the public interest will prevail. This harsh and difficult struggle will define the next decade.

In America’s imperial twilight, one technology stands above all others in its perfected power: television propaganda. Indeed, the politics of TV-drugged America have been defined largely by the progressively more audacious use of the medium to propagate increasingly pernicious untruths. Pick any outrageous claim – flat earth, creationism, alien abductions, the kindness of health insurers, or Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, and the TV spinmeisters can have 60% of America believing it in a week. This technology of disseminating falsehood dominates modern American society, and the Internet has managed to counter-act it only to a slight degree.

It is a distinctive feature of American innovation that advances in one field are rapidly applied to relevant problems in others. Thus, it was only a matter of time before the Government’s expertise in “winning” wars by declaration was extended to the current economic crisis. The spin doctors are now flooding the TV media with declarations that the recession is over and that a slow recovery is under way. This is exactly analogous to how the Iraq war was “ended.” The average citizen believes that America won the Iraq war by means of a “surge” in troops that defeated the opposition.

But the “war” in Iraq continues to smolder in that ruined nation, and unemployment in America continues to increase, with most indicators of economic welfare sharply depressed. Yet the average citizen is being persuaded that the recession is over, because that message is pumped out with Orwellian regularity through the almighty TeeVee. It is a matter of survival for the American plutocracy to keep civic unrest at a minimum. A reordering of economic power is not an option that will ever be presented to the TV audience. The great mystery of the moment is how much can TV propaganda addle the wits of the American people. Just how bad does reality have to get before it can’t be concealed by smiling TV “personalities?”

Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses, but he never imagined a nation that watched an average of five hours of television a day. TV is much more than an opiate; it is crack cocaine, and like the cheap and destructive crack, it is deadly. It has wrecked our politics, mired us in absurd wars, destroyed public health, and crippled the very essence of public discourse. Instead of a shared search for the truth we have duelling cacophanies of lies.

So behold our economic recovery by declaration: a miracle of propaganda levitation, defying the gravity of actual experience, and confirming that engineered falsehood can conquer simple truth through the black magic of American television.

I just realized what has been nagging at the back of my mind about the creepy demeanor of Treasury Secretary Geithner. He has the affectless expression of a hitman, but he is a special kind of hitman. Like John Perkins, the author of “Confessions of an Economic Hitman,” Geithner was hand-picked for his willingness to execute the instructions of a powerful elite – no matter what the consequences for ordinary citizens.

Consider Geithner’s career progression. Wikipedia gives us the key early dates:

After completing his studies, Geithner worked for Kissinger and Associates in Washington, D.C., for three years and then joined the International Affairs division of the U.S. Treasury Department in 1988. He went on to serve as an attaché at the US Embassy in Tokyo. He was deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy (1995-1996), senior deputy assistant secretary for international affairs (1996-1997), assistant secretary for international affairs (1997-1998)

Nobody in the press pays any attention to Geithner’s early years, but these were the years in which he became a made man in the service of the US Plutocracy. In 1985, when he joined Kissinger and Associates, Henry Kissinger’s reputation had been badly discredited by reports of his involvement in numerous ugly international plots of the Nixon administration, including the bombing and destabilization of Cambodia, the murder of Allende in Chile, and dirty dealings backing the Argentine dictatorship. Ask yourself what kind of well-informed Dartmouth graduate would join Kissinger Associates. The answer is an aspiring hitman.

Like Perkins, Geithner’s ambition knew no moral bounds, and he was determined to make himself useful to the wealthy and powerful. Having established his bona fides at Kissinger Associates, he rose rapidly in Government “service,” with the backing of Kissinger-connected godfathers and patrons, and always accumulating greater influence in preserving the wealth of the people who run the world. As president of the NY Fed, he was at the center of decisions that transferred huge amounts of taxpayer wealth into the hands of failing banks and financial firms. As Treasury Secretary, he continues to protect the strong against the weak and the wealthy against the poor. He has been a safe pair of hands for the Plutocracy, and for this loyal service he will be richly rewarded.

Tim Geithner was not made Treasury Secretary by President Obama. He was installed by America’s permanent government: the Plutocracy.

The current economic troubles in the US can be explained as a simple case of policy inversion. Because our government is a plutocracy, controlled by the wealthy, its response to economic distress is to provide aid disproportionately to those who need it least. What we are witnessing is a zero-sum struggle between the 1 million people who run America and everyone else. Bankers, realtors, lawyers, lobbyists, and corporate executives are using the Federal Treasury to maintain their incomes, and this is being done at the expense of the vast majority of the American public.

An elaborate propaganda campaign has been created to persuade the people that the world will explode if the earnings of the plutocrats diminish. But the continuation of this reverse-Robin Hood policy is far more dangerous than cutting Federal subsidies to the wealthy. It is the American citizenry that provides the economic base that supports the affluent elites. By sinking the population under unsustainable debt to win a few more quarters of big bonuses and golden parachutes, the plutocrats are risking the total collapse of the US economy.

The correct course for US fiscal policy is for the government to stop being the lender of last resort and instead to become the EMPLOYER of last resort. Only by restoring a secure income stream to the working class and middle class can America’s prosperity be rebuilt. It is objected that government employment programs are wasteful. But just how efficient have our private employment markets been? How efficient has Wall Street been? How efficient has General Motors been? How efficient was Enron?

What Obama needs to do now is throw out his economic team and commit to a populist agenda. We need to stop grinding the US people down to keep champagne flowing on Wall Street.  Corporate executives with myopic vision restricted to the next quarter are not going to rebuild America’s transportation network, energy infrastructure, and educational facilities. Our government needs to put people back to work making the things America NEEDS. Instead, it is piling on more debt so that we can continue to consume the garbage that makes unsustainable profits for corrupt corporations.

When the private sector fails to allocate resources properly, the government must step in. We have witnessed a massive failure of resource allocation in America, and attempts to persist in that misallocation are doomed. The wealth of the people should be spent on the welfare of the people, not on the aggrandizement of a predatory elite. This is the change that America needs, and it is the change that Obama has failed to deliver.