VHeadline commentarist, University of Los Andes political sciences professor, Dr. Franz J. T. Lee writes: The extravagant United States "150 million dollar" presidential inauguration festival cannot hide the current deepening economic recession and global depression, also not the cancerous alienating outgrowths and the dangerous, belligerent contradictions of the coming of a possible global fascism.
The horrendous Gaza massacre of innocent children and women, using sophisticated weaponry of human torture and agony, was a gruesome kind of political lightning conductor to deviate the world public attention away from the real causes of the Gaza genocide and of more atrocities to come.
Furthermore, historical experience indicates that during all economic cycles of depression, tendentially world wars threaten to break out; latently, a nightmare for the system, possible anti-capitalist social revolutions also tend to flare up across the globe and the weakest links of the metropolitan imperialist chains begin to erode, to shatter.
Currently, more than last month, corruption, speculation and bankruptcy are rife; the slump deepens inexorably; across the globe big banks falter, sectors of the world market plummet and economic growth stagnates, slinging huge economies like Japan and the USA, in fact, the whole world order into apocalyptic jeopardy.
The elected president Barack Obama had nothing to say of its loyal Middle East ally, with regard to the Gaza massacre ... because two presidents of the USA cannot voice their class opinions simultaneously. However, what is valid for Pontius was not valid for Pilate: with reference to President Chavez of Venezuela, before the opulent show, in unison both Bush and Obama sang the same old terrorist Swan's Song.
On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009, the inherent, structural recession was not impressed by the feudal aristocratic United States 'monarchy', that is, by the military and industrial festivities ad nauseam of the social class basis of the new Democratic president; it was not participating in the huge pan et cirsenses, on the contrary, while the celebrations took place, on Wall Street, and elsewhere, the stock markets declined progressively; all over major banks suffered heavy losses.
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) summarized this fiasco as follows: "The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 4 percent lower, losing 332 points and falling below the 8,000 mark to 7,949. Also sharply down were the Standard & Poor's 500 Index (-5.3 percent) and the Nasdaq Composite Index (-5.8 percent). The Dow and S&P are now at two-month lows, largely erasing the rebound that followed the November presidential election, which saw the markets anticipate an Obama administration stimulus package. "Optimism that government spending would revive the economy [has] evaporated," Bloomberg News reported."
But this was not all: "The financial sector took the biggest hit yesterday, with the S&P 500 Financials Index closing down 17 percent to its lowest level in 13 years. Bank of America stocks closed 29 percent lower, Wells Fargo lost 24 percent, JPMorgan Chase fell 21 percent, and Citigroup declined 20 percent. Boston-based bank State Street, the world's largest institutional money manager, plummeted 56 percent after it announced $6.3 billion of unrealized losses in its investment portfolio, shocking financial analysts who had regarded State Street's financial operations as among the safest in the market."
In Britain and on the European continent major banks suffered similar losses, were shaken by the structural, systemic crisis of world capitalism.
What this means for the metropolitan workers the European Commission told us without any flowers: unemployment in the 16 countries using the euro, which could reach 10 percent at the end of this year. Of course, this is already being accompanied by layoffs, and soon by cutting of wages, of social benefits and by higher taxation to bail out the capitalist State and its respective ruling class bosses.
In reality, what the Murdoch Empire does not inform us about, like in the case of the ex-world power, of the Soviet Union, is the possible dissolution, the demise of the United States of America within the historic context of globalization. To get a glimpse of this historic possibility, Christopher Ketcham, ... who is not a Marxist, rather he is a serious writer of Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper's and other magazines ... will tell us in his upcoming book why he feels that "The United States Must End".
In plain text, more than a century ago, in his magnificent work 'Capital', Karl Marx explained the main reason for the current volatile 'transrevolutionary' global situation. Only concrete living human labor force produces profits, surplus value, accumulation of capital. Dead technology, in the form of machines and computers do not produce a cent worth of real surplus value. What Marx has called the tendential law of the development of the organic composition of capital is now becoming the Damocles Sword hovering above world capitalism. Just look at who produce what, that is, the bulk of the products on the world market, to note the Achilles' Heel of corporate imperialism.
War machines and computers do not consume, do not realize capital, surplus value. They destroy, they kill. They produce massacres, My Lai, Sharpeville and Gaza. We are entering a mode of production of weapons of mass destruction, of the destruction of capital, of labor, of possible world wars, of the possible annihilation of life on planet Earth.
This is what more than two million United States workers have to try to stop in Washington. Next time, they will have to march on Washington to celebrate their class victory, the end of a mode of destruction, of genocide, torture, massacres and terrorism.
In fact, thereafter they should return home, peacefully, to play with their kids, to make love and not war for a month and then we could see who are the sovereigns of this world. This is much easier said than done, really, if this would be possible to organize on a global scale, then it would not be necessary to do it at all. However, we fear that earthly human emancipation will take another road, that one which our masters have taken for millennia, and are now choosing it for us in Gaza and elsewhere.
For us, here in Venezuela, the class consciousness to eradicate all modes of production, that is, of human destruction, logically, scientifically, philosophically and sapiently, has to be superior to anything that the bourgeoisie ever did, thought about, and ventured beyond. If this would still be possible, only the twinkling stars could tell us.
Franz J. T. Lee
franz@franzlee.org.ve
Venezuela is facing the most difficult period of its history with honest reporters crippled by sectarianism on top of rampant corruption within the administration and beyond, aided and abetted by criminal forces in the US and Spanish governments which cannot accept the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people to decide over their own future.
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