You cannot man the barricades with a mouth full of Cheetos
By Joe Bageant
Class solidarity was such a good idea. It really was. Obviously, most of the people who need solidarity are in the world's laboring classes. After all, the rich have more than enough solidarity already, as was recently demonstrated by their successful execution of the greatest global financial heist in history. Oh sure, we'll see some state sponsored mock show trials of a few of them -- they always throw a few of their own out of the sleigh to the wolves during their escapes. The big heist was big news. Working Americans will be applying Preparation H to their keisters for a long time to come.
But the ultimate accomplishment of the already rich, the newly rich and the corporate rich, has been their global solidarity on the corporate/financial front. It's been a long run up to globalism, but the rich have great patience. As an American, all my life I've heard their chief mouthpiece, the president of the United States, beginning with Eisenhower, right on up through Kennedy, Reagan, Ford, Carter and Bush, and now Obama, sing the same song. Which goes moreover like this:
People often comment on the intelligence and insight, the humor and sincerity, of the letters Ken and I receive on joebageant.com. And they say that the readers write as if we have known each other all our lives. I respond that yes, we have, but just did not know each other's names. And that many of us have been pretty much invisible and voiceless except to each other. And that, yes, my friends out there are indeed intelligent and clear eyed citizens. The American populace is often underestimated.
The fact is that America's finest minds and souls have no voice in this chilling new corporate state that has evolved. And if we are not allowed a voice, if our monolithic system ignores us, pretends we do not exist, then for all practical purposes we do not exist. Therefore it does not have to offer us political candidates representing our views or change laws to reflect them. Nevertheless, we are out there -- millions of us.
When Barack Obama took office it seemed to some of us that his first job was to get the national silverware out of the pawn shop. Or at least maintain the world's confidence that it was possible for us to get out of debt. America is dead broke, the easy credit, phantom "growth" economy has been exposed for what it was. A credit scam. Even Hillary Clinton and Obama's best efforts have not coaxed much more dough out of foreign friends. But at least we again have a few friends abroad.
So now we must jackleg ourselves back into something resembling a productive activity. No matter how you cut it, things will not be as much fun as shopping and speculative "investing" were.
The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead.
This column originally appeared on the web site of the Australian Broadcasting Company.
By Joe Bageant
When it comes to expressing plain truths, few are as gifted as American rednecks. During recent travels in the Appalachian communities of West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky I've collected scores of their comments on our national condition and especially President Barack Obama.
In America, all successful politicians are first and foremost successfully marketed brands. In fact, the Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's 2008 marketer of the year. George W. Bush's brand may have "collapsed," as they say on Madison Avenue, but things don't change much. Rednecks instinctively know this:
Sometimes you overhear a remark so wonderfully prescient you wish you'd said it yourself. Especially if you are a writer. Sitting in back of the Troubadour Club, a West Virginia honky tonk high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I'm listening to Petie Yost, an auctioneer, talk to Bud Shanholtz, who lives on Social Security and drives a snowplow occasionally during the winter.
Now ole Petie uses exotic economic terms such as "investment return" and "percentage." He says things like, "I don't do household auctions 'cause there ain't no real percentage in it." Which makes him an economic expert in these beery circles. And right now he is telling Bud why our Social Security and the FDIC do not exist.
post office and mill at Unger Store, West Virginia.
In gathering material for his next book, Joe Bageant has been traveling the hills of Virginia and West Virginia where he grew up. Below is a short excerpt from his ongoing road journal.
By Joe Bageant
Driving Shanghai Road on the way to visit my childhood church in Unger Store, Morgan County, West Virginia, I crest the hill just above our old family farm. And spot something that makes me stop and turn off the truck motor, lest the moment be interrupted. Ahead of me in the Sunday morning sun stands an old farmer I've known all my life, Ray Luttrell, meditating on his hayfield. Standing on the very spot by the road where I've seen his late father Harry stand countless times, he is just looking at that hay field, motionless for many minutes.
Any number of cultural historians have noted the American belief that
success is a sign of God's favor. And over the past couple of decades
he has had a downright love fest with the already-rich. So much so that
the richest 400 Americans now have more money stashed away that the
combined bottom 150 million Americans. Some $1.6 trillion bucks.
This was accomplished by selling off or shipping out ever available
asset, from jobs to seaports, smashing usury and anti-monopoly laws,
raiding the public coffers and manipulating the medium of exchange and
blackmailing the peasantry regarding common needs such as heath care
and energy to keep their asses warm -- to name a few. The ultimate coup
was to convince the entire nation that the well being of the rich,
meaning the well being of Wall Street, was indeed the common man's well
being.
Carstair's muse on Gidget, dominatrix of the North
By Joe Bageant
"I grew up with those people. They are the ones who do some of the
hardest work in America … who grow our food, run our factories, and
fight our wars. They love their country, in good times and bad, and
they're always proud of America. I had the privilege of living most of
my life in a small town."
-- Sarah Palin in her speech to the Republican National Committee
Translation: "Along with John McCain, I am the only candidate who is
not a lawyer. My old man has fished for a living and I have gutted
those fish for dinner. And yup, we have a kid that got knocked up too."
In those few sentences Sarah Palin delivered the only legitimate
populist message -- however thin -- we can expect to hear during the
entire campaign season. Never mind that it is a fraught with
contradictions. Whose life isn't? It's a political sop but it's a
heartfelt sop, true and simple enough for ordinary heartland working
folks to grasp amid the shitstorm of political jargon and crafted
messages that say exactly nothing.
Late at night through my window by the computer I can see my neighbor
Stokes bicycling at 10 p.m. to the local convenience store to buy
groceries. Not only is that an expensive way to feed one's self, but it
is the only way for old Stokes to cop some grubs without getting thrown
in jail. Seriously. As a convicted sex offender, he is not allowed to
come in proximity with young women in a supermarket checkout line. Nor
is he allowed to visit a park, or even his own grandchild, even though
he is not a child molester by the court's own admission. He is not
allowed to drink a beer. In fact, he is not even allowed to read Playboy Magazine.
A dozen or so years ago Stokes, now 66 with a gray ponytail, an
altogether gentle soul who labors under the illusion he looks like
Willie Nelson, (and even has a framed photo of Willie on his wall to
invite comparison), got caught by police in a, shall we say, "a
vehicular sexual incident" with a married woman. They were both drunk. Big deal. That happens in beer joints. To make a long story short, by
the time they got to court the lady's testimony was that it was all
against her will, which being a married woman, solved a lot of problems
for her. That resulted in Stokes being convicted as a sex offender
while his public defender all but slept through the trial.
A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days of hard traveling back and
forth across Connecticut's Second Congressional District. The Second
District is not the Connecticut where Paul Newman lives and Katherine
Hepburn is buried. The one with the marvelously tasteful old homes set
against magnificent Yankee New England seascapes. It's the one where --
although quite pretty in its own right, with its small villages and
winding roads -- the mills are closed, the housing bubble has popped
and everyone fears what comes next. It is a place where good union men
still stick together as best they can in the face of globalization, the
sub prime collapse and a two-party system whose millionaire players are
more married to the game than to the unheralded people who build their
homes and make their world function every day.
Joe died in March 2011, but his email is still being read. His wife and children send their deep appreciation to his friends and readers for all their kind words.
In those few sentences Sarah Palin delivered the only legitimate
populist message -- however thin -- we can expect to hear during the
entire campaign season. Never mind that it is a fraught with
contradictions. Whose life isn't? It's a political sop but it's a
heartfelt sop, true and simple enough for ordinary heartland working
folks to grasp amid the shitstorm of political jargon and crafted
messages that say exactly nothing.
, a book with a selection of 25 of Joe's online essays, is now available from Amazon-US.
