The Week That Was

In a radical expansion of "private gun rights," the United States Supreme Court opened the door for the elimination of most federal, state and local gun-control legislation from the past 50 years, including the Brady Bill, the Gun Control Act of 1968 (passed in the wake of the MLK/RFK executions), and the Public Safety Act of '95 (imposing heavy restrictions on "gun show" purchases and instituting the ban on assault weapons). This blow for jungle law will of course lead to only one result: massive increase in police state powers, as the Unpeople run amok.

The same Supreme Court, following on the Citizens United decision which eliminated all restrictions on corporate funding of political campaigns, seemed to uphold major provisions of the 2002 Sarbanes/Oxley Campaign Reform Act, while actually targeting the regulatory legal authority of such stalwarts as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Social Security Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

Barack Obama's "Finance Reform Bill" made it through Congress -- a near complete capitulation to Wall Street/banking interests, leaving the 5 Big Banks which caused the '08 financial crash in much stronger control over the domestic economy and leaving them with a much larger slice of the US banking system.

And then ballgame.

TORONTO — Leaders of the world’s biggest economies agreed Sunday on a timetable for cutting deficits and halting the growth of their debt, but also acknowledged the need to move carefully so that reductions in spending did not set back the fragile global recovery.
The action at the Group of 20 summit meeting here signaled the determination of many of the wealthiest countries, after enacting spending programs to counter the worldwide financial crisis, to now emphasize debt reduction. And it underscored the conviction of European nations in particular that deficits represented the biggest threat to their economic stability

President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner had consistently advocated a measured approach to debt reduction that would not stymie growth and lead to a double-dip recession.

The United States, however, joined other countries at the summit meeting, which was met by protests and several hundred arrests, by endorsing a goal of cutting government deficits in half by 2013 and stabilizing the ratio of public debt to gross domestic product by 2016. Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, had proposed the targets, backed by Germany and Britain.

With the G20 pronouncements, we descend several rings into the hell of Western corporate totalitarianism. The private sector was the sole cause of the 2008 financial collapse. The private sector is the sole cause of the massive government deficits now being used to exterminate what little remains of a democratic social structure where, to quote John F. Kennedy, "The strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved." Chomsky always says that one can understand what a war is really about only after it is over.

-- The vampires design a system -- with the major collusion of Western State interests -- intended to steal everything in sight -- and intended to eventually "collapse," whether in 2006, 2008, 2015, whenever.

-- The vampires know, because they now control the State, that when the "collapse" comes they will be saved by State/taxpayer funding, causing massive deficits and possible State bankruptcy.

-- The vampires then proclaim that all State spending not dedicated to corporate bailouts and military/police defense of the corporate prison must be seriously cut or eliminated.

What we are seeing is Adam Smith's description of the Masters of his own time ("All for ourselves. Nothing for others") brought to psychopathic perfection, a reversal of 500 years of egalitarian, human progress.

Change we can believe indeed. Welcome to the jungle.