London; More Black-Ops
Headline: Long Faces on Bush and Blair as ordinary people draw parallels between the bombings in London and Madrid, rather than to the “Reichstag Fire” of September 11, 2001.
It is now evident to many people that these attacks are designed primarily to give legitimacy to governments that no longer have any positive reason to exist. I mean, really, what good are they? Our leaders can’t give us decent jobs, or affordable housing. They have failed to provide even the minimum education generally thought essential to a decent society (a third of the adult population in my country is functionally illiterate). The “cost of living” is fast becoming beyond the reach of most of us living. There is no health care.
Now, our rulers are failing even to protect us from the amorphous evils they themselves were instrumental in creating.
It is genuinely fearful to witness what these gepattos have done to our republic in the name of maintaining this dubious empire.
Parliaments and presidents are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the peoples’ struggle to better their lives. Real power lies elsewhere, in the banks and the boardrooms. Their time, too, is coming. From Asia to Europe to Latin America, the revolt is growing against the template of deprivation and impoverishment the new order has in store for workers and the poor.
That is why we have the 911s and the Londons and the Madrids. On the other hand, something somewhere has to give. When the people begin to hate and fear their government in the same way and with the same intransigent intensity that the government hates and fears them, what happens next?
fatima mauro
July 14, 2005 @ 4:43 pm
are you saying that government has no positive role to play in the life of society? who provides the health care and schools and protection from fire and crime? only an anarchist believes we can live without some form of state.
Jim F.
July 15, 2005 @ 10:24 am
I wouldn’t pretend to be able to speak for Louis Godena, but the last time that I checked into it, he was no anarchist. I don’t think that he is contending that government, as such, has no positive role to play in the life of society, but rather he is contending that the governments that exist today including the governments of the US and UK have become increasingly dysfunctional in terms of their being able or willing to provide even the most basic public services. In the United States, anyway, most of the politics of the last thirty years has been about how governments, at the federal, state, and local levels, can decrease the levels of services that they provide to ordinary citizen, while at the same time continuing to pamper the large corporatations. This process has been called one of “downsizing Big Government.” In fact, government is as large as it has ever been, but its focus has clearly shifted away from meeting the needs of ordinary working people, to catering the interests of the wealthy. What has been downsized is the basic social safety net. Such governments, we have no need for.
Louis Godena
July 15, 2005 @ 8:13 pm
Well, as I wrote today, I think that government is abandoning all but its function as disciplinarian and enforcer of the rule of capital (sometimes called “the rule of law”). If this trend continues (and we have every reason to believe it will), the “positive” role of the state (i.e., providing needed services) will be increasingly assumed by private corporations, whose control of this or that franchise will entitle them to “profitize” that which is done now by the state. For example, caring for the sick, the elderly, public education, etc., will be by private contract with some sort of reimbursement scheme for the indigent. Sort of like some big public defenders’ office, only private. This hellish scenario, taken to its logical conclusion, might be just the impetus needed to get the Left off its ass and unite and perhaps (surprise!) *do* something besides argue with each other. But don’t bet on it.