The successful preznit does not kill its host

Before it has a chance to reproduce, anyway.

Chris Floyd:

... I don't believe that the American financial system is about to collapse -- certainly not to the extent that it will actually harm the power and privilege of those on the very top, whether these be the "Old American Establishment" or new-style war-profiteers, etc. Of course we have already seen vast ruin and great suffering caused by the economic turmoil generated to a large degree by the endless Terror War. But who is suffering from it? Not the managers and operators of the great financial houses, who get bailed out by the government or escape the collapse of their institutions in golden parachutes. They live on in comfort and safety to gouge and exploit another day.

And not the bribed and greased politicians whose policies create such a fertile environment for economic predators. Every now and then some bottom-feeding goober like Curt Weldon gets caught up in the net for being too obviously greedy -- but what of the bipartisan legislative leadership that over the past several decades have cultivated this toxic, predatory environment, with perfectly legal, finely-crafted laws written for them by corporate lobbyists? They go on to fat-cat careers as lobbyists and consultants, or they run for president, or they sit on corporate boards, or they go home and play golf. When they are in office, they (and their successors) protect the system they have nurtured and tendered; they won't let it "collapse."

Again, this is not to deny that millions -- perhaps even tens of millions – of people will end up in very dire straits, losing houses, losing jobs, losing insurance, going hungry. This is not to deny that businesses will fold, whole industries could be rolled up like a carpet, and communities will languish and fade or die. But we have seen all this before, and the wealth and privilege of our monied elites didn't disappear; neither did their means of acquiring more wealth and power.

You ask why the old American Establishment would acquiesce in policies that "weaken the United States." But I think the underlying assumption of this question is unsound. It implies that the common good – the welfare and well-being of individual, non-elite American citizens – is somehow synonymous with the strength or success of the United States in the eyes of our elites. But this is not true, and never has been. They identify "American interests" solely with what benefits their own kind. They equate American "strength" with the ability to kill large numbers of people at short notice whenever they desire, and to bully and humiliate those they don't kill into submission, in some form or other.

The American state still retains these capabilities, and our elites are quite willing to see tens of millions of their fellow citizens go down the tubes in order to keep this gargantuan war-and-extortion machine going. To our elites, this ruination is not a "financial collapse," because their wealth and privilege remains intact, the markets remain intact, and if a bit of bother shaves a few decimal points from their fortunes, they will make it up later. And in what sense has the United States actually been "weakened," in their understanding, by the Terror War? The same nations that always jumped to America's tune still do so. Those that are powerful enough to put up some resistance do so, as they have always done...

What's perhaps new on the scene is the overtness of the Big Brother State. Still, there is the scramble for the velvet glove over the iron fist. But is the better term "steel sucker"?



Or, as Giblets says,

Yes, Barack Obama will spy on you. But he will spy on you in the most inspirational, transformative, hopamacational way possible!