Joaquin Flores — Strategic Culture March 19, 2020

Future historians employed in institutions not yet founded, or perhaps in lands far from here, will no doubt record that it was the flagrant betrayals of the Democrat Party against its own working class base that led to the festival of violence that characterized the implosion now threatening the United States. Its origins though complex, are not complicated. Will this inevitable and bloody social violence serve as the mid-wife for a truly justice-based system?

There will be a new militant labor movement on the rise, but it will be born from bloodshed and social violence. It will make the 1930’s look like a walk in the park and it will have nothing to do with the Democrat Party. It will be led by men and women with nothing left to lose, and it will bring together a united front of fighters and movements which today merely have the appearance of ideological disparity. We are on the edge of a new paradigm beyond left and right.

This is probably tomorrow’s most important story – one we can start telling today

How the DNC constructed and coerced the candidacy of Bernie Sanders was only the final chapter along a whole history of betrayals. Sanders’ candidacy could not succeed on the course it forged, and is certain to finally collapse this week. His attempt at a fireside chat was poorly executed, poor aesthetics against a cold white wall, and rambling answers.

His pledge to support Joe Biden is only further evidence of Bernie’s compromised candidacy, yet the movement behind Bernie isn’t his, just as the movement behind Trump isn’t his either.

At the end of 2015 this author accurately predicted exactly why Trump would win a year later, while America’s left was certain that despite the problems of Clinton as a candidate, she would prevail. Here we will use that methodology to explain why today, with the betrayals of the DNC, all that lies ahead is – to put it frankly – bloodshed in the streets. While we engage with the present news cycle, what’s presented will remain relevant for years ahead.

The foundations of these brother populist movements of the hard-left and alt-light (populist right) will necessarily coalesce into the coming extra-electoral struggle, an extra-legal conflict, and will be predominated by its nationalist and socialist characteristics. To do this is to understand how secessionist and militia movements, veterans groups, and organized labor will solidify together.

Contrary to the speculation of some, the betrayal of Sanders of which Sanders himself took an active role, will not lead to a demoralization among the base of the Democrat Party who overwhelmingly support Sanders. The base supports not Sanders in particular, but supports just two things – his platform and his credibility. This is the truth of the matter despite misinformation in the press accompanied by electoral fraud on the part of the party itself, which has attempted to simulate support for Biden.

Likewise with Trump, whose base required of him an entire re-organization of America’s relationship to the global economy to produce meaningful work and the foundation for hope, they too will believe that no change can come from the electoral process. On the roundabout course of this realization they will quickly encounter the betrayed base of Democrats which had discovered the same.

Sanders and Trump are losing support as their personal credibility deteriorates. This doesn’t mean that folks are simply going to go home. Instead, they are going to go big.

Rather than demoralization in the sense of a resigned complacency, this dynamic will transform into something far more radical than ever seen before in the history of the United States. Complacency is a luxury for those for whom things can still get worse. The median balance in the bank of Americans is a meagre $2,900, but it’s worse: about 65% of Americans don’t have $500 to their name.

The luxury of complacency is a relic of bygone days. The US is no longer a powerful empire with a national oligarchy, rather its elites today are entirely transnational very much like semi-nomadic bankers have always been, as they have been for over a thousand years, as explained in the rich, detailed, documented history of Europe – a history where these bankers and usurers were kicked out of European states hundreds of times. If this or that society collapses as a result of these parasites finally killing the host, the parasites simply move on. That is why the nationalization of banker assets will be among the most prominent demands of the coming American insurrection. It will be chief among the demands of America’s coming social nationalist labor movement.

For millions of Americans, these are times of despair. And despair leads to radicalization where whole social movements are born.

This is not a time characterized by the kind of complacency that the baby boomer generation could, for their part, afford. These are not times characterized by some sense of middle-class charity towards the ‘down-trodden’ minority that fell through the cracks. These are times where most American people are themselves the down-trodden. The coming American labor movement is not based on lofty policy ideals and charity, but on life or death questions of survival for the majority.

How did we arrive at this impasse?

Such a question requires a thorough answer incompatible with a brief of this type. But we can summarize at the cost of generalizing. We can go back to the 1940’s – labor was weakened by legislation passed during the Truman administration known as the Taft-Hartley Act, betraying the efforts of labor backed by FDR. Think-tanks and institutes from elite universities and funded by deep-pocketed lobbyists under the moniker of ‘philanthropy’, instilled a culture of liberalism not meant to empower people but to placate them. Of course some degree of empowerment could have also placated the teeming masses, but the sociopathology of the oligarchy was such that even this was intolerable.

What was the result? The Democrat Party, backed by the ruling class, infiltrated organized labor with the aim of derailing it. But the post-war prosperity (read empire) mitigated the gradual decline of labor.

Then in the 1970’s, there was a failure to institute a UBI during the Nixon years despite it being championed by libertarian economist Milton Friedman. Martin Luther King Jr. had also expounded on its necessity in the decade prior. This was to be a trade-off to the exportation of manufacturing work to the Orient and Latin America, as well as a necessary component of economic justice and growth. This could have been a reasonable component to the otherwise ridiculously revised terms of the fractional-reserve banking system as the US abandoned a currency backed by precious metals.

As a consequence, the desired outcome forced upon the people by the bankers then ‘required’ the use of credit lines for the boomer generation to stimulate the same level of consumption that UBI would have. But unlike UBI, this came with the inflation and psychological slavery which results from profit-driven credit systems – where interest rates produce an upwards redistribution of the people’s earned wealth, into the hands of the oligarchy. That credit ride didn’t last long before bubble after bubble was created only to burst. Each round of ‘bursting’ led to the further upwards redistribution of wealth. The wealthy never saw better days than when the economy was ‘weak’. Home foreclosures only meant asset forfeiture; whatever was paid on a mortgage simply lined their pockets. They were then free to sell the same homes at full-pop.

Did no one see that the upwards redistribution of wealth was one of the leading causes of inflation?

Unemployment was redefined, the profit driven economy was compelled by a misanthropic idea that 4% unemployment rates were optimal. That 4% was much closer to 10%, even 15% in reality – hidden by the new definitions being used by the priestly caste known as the economists of the Reagan years, and forever after. This forced people to continue to work under any conditions imposed, out of fear of foreclosure, out of fear for losing health insurance. A free people do not work out of fear in times of peace.

The theory and practice of the permanent war which transcended the Cold War and into the never-ending ‘war on terror’ was characterized by a race to the bottom where the labor market was intervened upon by big government to act on behalf of the robber barons of industry and the cosmopolitan bankers.

Thinking that through a little more – maintaining a 4% and up unemployment rate meant slowing down job-creating economic growth for the sake of increased profit margins. This is contrary to the oligarch’s professed canon that more ‘liquidity’ in the hands of the few meant more possibilities to invest. Interest rates were managed precisely to stunt economic growth for the sake of quarterly economic performance. Only a social-national approach to a fully mobilized and employed people could have created the personal and family wealth to complete the production-consumption cycle.

The end of gold and silver backing the currency, and the dominance of the petro-dollar and the fiat system, paralleled the demise of organized labor. Social managers have been brilliant in their ability to divide and conquer; those aware of the currency reality were also led to believe that ‘socialist labor’ was also to blame. The opposite was true – capital was to blame.

These are just some of the critical moments that led to the present crisis. This crisis is irreversible. Maybe Trump could have been something of a new FDR, but the contradictions of the terrain and the coalition of billionaire oligarchs he forged made this impossible. His ideological outlook was also at odds with understanding all the features of the present moment, despite his unique brilliance and prescience over a score of other matters, even if related. Trump still adheres to the disproven ‘trickle-down’ economics of Thatcher and Reagan. Sanders also perhaps could have been a new FDR – if he wasn’t dead set against his own electoral victory. Sanders lacks confidence and fortitude – two necessary features of a winning leader. Roosevelt, despite being from a moneyed family of tobacco and aluminum, had a formative educational experience under the influence of the great Social Gospel mentor, Endicott Peabody.

The take-away

Trump will probably win a second term, but it will be one so compromised by the oligarchy on the domestic front that his radicalized populist base will never see the economic promises of an employment-based economy realized. His foreign policy of renegotiating trade to jump-start domestic production, while avoiding the geopolitical tinderbox of unipolarity inherited by the neoliberal Democrats and neoconservative Republicans, will continue to be frustrated by threats of impeachment under bogus charges.

You see, in the America story there was this dangerous myth that it would all work out in the end. The historically established fact of the life cycles of civilizations was never entertained. Toynbee was apparently just a wrongheaded doomer who didn’t understand the permanence guaranteed by American exceptionalism.

We can see where this impasse must lead – and it will be bloody.

The metrics don’t lie: Mass hysteria over a global epidemic, threats of an economic meltdown, open and flagrant election fraud. Layer on millions of Americans who never recovered from 2007 as the banks were bailed out, not the people who lost their homes. Wages pushed down, families torn apart, small businesses permanently shuttered. The dignity of fathers as bread winners obliterated by an identity-politics driven culture, bent on the demonization of boys and men. Insurance companies dedicated to fleecing and outright theft. Labor unions controlled by DNC insiders who collude in the frog-in-boiling water tactics of neo-liberal austerity.

Make no mistake – there will be blood. But what will come next? How will the next great movement of the American people respond? Stay tuned – we’ll address it in the next part of this series.

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