Faux Emergencies In America

You’re driving home in rush hour traffic and suddenly a Lexus cuts you off and you have to slam on your breaks to prevent a collision. You are contemplating a response which involves the use of your First Amendment rights, when you notice that the Lexus driver seems to be highly agitated, fists a-waving, head bobbing in rapid motion and you’re thinking that this guy may be a dangerous psycho. After being momentarily distracted and even a bit alarmed by the spectacle, (and by thoughts of your own mortality) you notice that the Lexus has made the light and you didn't. You’re still a little shaken by the experience but try to calm yourself by picturing a scenario, in which the Lexus driver was rushing off to the birth of his first child, or home to his dying dad, or his house was on fire or something. I mean, you’re not just a schmuck for letting him cut you off, if he had a real emergency, right?

 

While you’re sitting at the light wasting gas, you turn on the radio and hear about the Japanese earthquake and wish that there was something you could do to help. You think about your friends and relatives on the West coast and hope that they are okay. The next story on the radio is about how Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and 18 other Republicans decided to break their own laws, by stripping the collective bargaining rights of their own state workers. They say it needed to be done as an emergency measure to balance the budget, but you wonder. You already heard that the workers made all of the financial concessions necessary to “share in the sacrifice” two weeks ago, but Walker ’s union-busting agenda seems to have had little to do with the actual budget emergency. If it had, he would not have given away $100 million to big business the moment he took office in January, right before the emergency that required state workers to give up $100 million and their right to collectively bargain for anything at all in the future. Doesn't seem like the emergency in Japan. Maybe more like your very recent Lexus emergency, but Wisconsin voted in Walker and those 18 other folks, right?...After a twinge of inexplicable malaise, you take comfort in the notion that you are almost as far away from Wisconsin as you are from Japan .

 

It’s not until you are almost home that you actually do begin to feel like a schmuck, for letting that jerk cut you off. But you are tired and maybe don’t care that Republican governors and legislatures are having similar emergencies all over the country, and triaging the damage by “making government smaller.” In Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder’s idea of “smaller government” is passing a law which allows HIM to unilaterally declare any and all counties and municipalities in Michigan to be under a “state of economic emergency” so he can kick out each and every duly-elected local government official and appoint his own person to take over. Sounds like Moammar Kadafi, in Libya , don’t it? I’m not kidding. They passed the law already. Smaller gummint? I guess so, if a dictatorship, means smaller government. Hey, you begin to think, do we have any emergencies, here in Colorado ?

 

You get home and flick on the national news. After the Japanese quake/tsunami-related stories, you see a twenty-second blurb about patriot-Rep. Peter King. R., of New York , who is busy spending our tax dollars right now, doing his best imitation of the former patriot-Rep. Joseph McCarthy. Joe McCarthy conducted communist witch-hunt hearings in the 1950’s. Only this time for Pete King, the witches are Muslims. No, not the Muslims from our rich oil-buddies in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, who raised their children to attack the World Trade Center 10 years ago. No, the Muslims he is going after are Americans, who have been cooperating fully and voluntarily with the FBI and Homeland Security, the American Muslims who provided the intel to the FBI, so we didn't have another 911, for the last 10 years. You may recall that patriot-Rep. Peter King R., was the same guy who thought that it was morally okay for the militant wing of the IRA (the same IRA that perfected the car-bomb for Al Qaida) to target and blow up over 600 civilians in Belfast, as long as they were somewhere in the vicinity of the government troops, who really deserved to die. "If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it". That’s our Peter King. He’s right on top of this emergency du jour and so must be protecting us from those radical American Muslims.What an American patriot, right?  

 

But then you begin to wonder why patriot-King has this particular Muslim bug up his butt.  Yeah, he says that it's an emergency, but there are so many more home-grown terrorist organizations that the FBI thinks are WAY more dangerous to actual life and limb, like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Army of God, the Aryan Nations, the Covenant, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord, the Earth Liberation Front, the Jewish Defense League, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Phineas Priesthood. There are more I could list, but the above are just the wackos who have recently committed acts of terrorism or have been caught plotting to kill, and maim, and burn, and kidnap in the name of the same God that Peter King worships. None of these truly  deranged and dangerous groups are Muslim, and it is not politically expedient to pick on them, because these little posses for Godliness currently support  many politicians in the Bible-Belt and the Pacific North West. They are violent, extremist hate militias that hale from the ultra-left, and the ultra right, but all have one thing in common.  They claim divine inspiration and justification for their acts of carnage. Them radical American-Muslims are WAY down on the FBI counter terrorism list, because they are not nearly as crazy-violent. Still, you are thinking “those towel-heads look really different than us and wear funny clothes and pray all the time and what is this Sharia Law and caliphate stuff, Glenn Beck keeps yammering about anyway?” Glenn Beck thinks it’s a big, fat emergency. Like a tsunami of Muslims, coming at us at 400MPH!

You know, when you have the time, you might want to take a minute and think through why Peter King, (given the above statistics), is really staging this little Kabuki theater in Washington. Maybe there is a connection between his emergency and the Republican's emergencies all over the country who are giving away the farm to big business with one hand and screwing the rest of us with the other. You see, if we have an economic emergency, or a terrorist-related emergency, then politicians don’t have to actually act or react in a moral/ethical fashion, or obey laws, or the Constitution, or actually give a whit about the folks who voted for them. The more of us who are distracted by non-issues like the Boogie-Muslims, or who can marry whom, or what  people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, or just a fear of getting the ax at work, the less we notice this sleight of hand being perfomed on us by the same politicians who have already chipped away at our privacy, decimated our incomes, and made a mockery of our basic liberties.

During WWII, Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and jobs and sent to prison camps, and the U.S. Supreme Court just looked the other way. President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War (or the War of Yankee Aggression, depending on your point of view), with a similar blessing from the Supremes. One could argue that these measures, although certainly drastic, were necessary, or at least understandable, given the actual emergency of war and the endemic mass hysteria. But today, we don’t got no stinkin emergency! And the Tea/GOP and Fox News and Rush, and Glenn, and Sean and Bill, telling us we do, over and over and over again, doesn’t make it true. The earthquake in Japan is a real emergency. The revolutions all over the Middle East are real emergencies. Our so-called emergencies all over America are nothing but a series of manufactured, low-life, carnie-scams. And politicians are using these scams to slowly and systematically rob us blind.

The distribution of wealth in this country has been this badly skewed only once before, and that was just before the Great Depression. The ultra-rich (like Charles and David Koch) have rigged the system to become richer than they have ever been, pay less taxes than they ever have, and own more politicians than ever. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has instructed all major corporations to stockpile their capital, instead of hiring new employees. The ultra-rich are holding out for nothing less than total hegemony. It is not an accident that the middle class is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by millions of indentured servants, who are forced to run faster and faster, just to stay in the same place. And those servants are us.

When you lose your job to a teenager in Mumbai, or you can’t put your kid through college, or you lose your home to the same bank that you bailed out with your tax dollars, or your vote is taken away, because some wealthy politician just fired all the folks you voted for, those will be real personal emergencies. And you can bet that other shoe will drop while you are being distracted, or otherwise made to be afraid of some other issue entirely. And, if you don’t think any or all of the above can happen to you here in Colorado, just read my last post.

 

J. Brandeis Sperandeo