Is he saying there is a worldwide Jewish conspiracy? Fact-checkers and critics of how he has read the facts there will be. It must be pointed out that in the US and, to lesser degree, in Europe,[20] Israel is still given the benefit of the doubt on most matters because of the Holocaust,[21] despite its settler expansion into Palestinian lands and universally condemned subjugation of Palestinians. With linked after linked fact dug up and presented in context, Walberg persuasively depicts Israel as an actor on the world stage that has, more often than not, justified the means by the ends – no differently from other players for greater-and-greater hegemony, but, according to Walberg, much more virulently.
Increasingly, the US war against Islam and Islamic countries is the only synchronicity with Israel, apart from the Palestinian-Israeli stagmire. Walberg asserts that an increasing divide exists now between the US and Israel because of the stagmire, and, further, that the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is helping undermine the America’s worldwide imperium. Not concerned except for the fact that it will have to tread carefully in a post-US world order, opportunistically for some time Israel has been pursuing other alliances and protectors to exploit for its own needs and oversized ambitions. One might hope that America going over the cliff does not take the rest of the world with it. Walberg speculates about replacements for US imperialism that may be more peaceful cooperatives of Big and Growing Powers – China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Japan, Germany…Iran. But if the very ugly past is any guide, the transition stands to be much uglier – and perhaps, truly horrific.
V. Post-Game Analysis for those in the Home Bleachers
OK. Imagine a Marcel Proust thirty years from now. Assume a quiet retiring by America from its world control and a society exists in which contemplative writers, an episteme like Proust, might try to recall the zeitgeist. Pictured in his mind – and only other 19th and early 20th century analyses, a phenomenological epoché, followed by a dialectical understanding of materialist history, might just begin to illuminate matters: a great, GREAT, monolithic presence…shadowy, flickeringly visible but only like a mirage, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t thing that, on reflection, you just cannot believe is real. It is so well disguised from the quotidian life of TV.…cell phone…internet…supermalls ever more super because urges for consumption drive the dulling of the citizen as well as eat up the world…[22] family vans, Hummers, and tank-like SUV’s with more and more room to cart home what was purchased (everything made in China)…all of this making up the late postmodern lebenswelt, the life-world…the there, as Heidegger says, though he would despise how American exploitation of the planet and its consumer capitalism not only is false consciousness but has noxious impact and influence on Nature everywhere it goes.
(Not a Proust, but, again, the simple citizen in the plains and gullies of the American Heartland is asking: What are we doing in all these chicken-ass places so far away from home? The slogans pasted on the back of his truck hollow of meaning, he asks: Why should he support, with his taxes, with the Stars and Stripes on his porch, “defense of American interests” everywhere on the globe?)
One draws closer to the structure. A huge dollar sign (not the Euro, not the yuan) is carved on it, in Times Roman font. Little antlike individuals we make out are walking or running on its top. Not many little men, as we look more closely…or else their numbers, though in the thousands,[23] are constantly diminishing. All of the little men as if by sumptuary law are attired in the finest but most conservative suits. The ties are silk. Everything is custom-made, but designed not to look so except to the well-trained eye. We realize they are of The Caste. Suddenly, crudely, some of the little men shove other little men off the monolith. Most float down under golden parachutes.
Jamie Dimon – who looks like a nice fella – is up there (see him ‘lashing out at global bank rules as “anti-American”); calculated for the last five years, his compensation from B of A was $107 million. Also Brian Moynihan – another square-chinned mensch (see him explaining that five dollar debit card fee). And John Stumpf (see him explaining how the “rogue trader” $2 billion loss at UBS is a windfall for him). Many others are there from the investment firms. The hedge funds. The CEO’s of the oil and energy companies. Boeing and other defense contractors. The paradigm for the successfully diversified gigantic multinational, General Electric – whose current Chief, Jeffrey R. Immelt, is the head of Obama’s “Job’s Council”. GE is particularly interesting because not only is it part of the military-industrial complex, with GE Capital it focuses on what many, not just Muslims but also Eastern Orthodox and old-school Catholic Christians, are against, usury. As was Marx. GE operates round the world. With its great cadre of tax lawyers focused on exploiting to the hilt corporate tax loopholes, Immelt’s GE reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion in 2010, but paid $0 in taxes.[24]
But men like Immelt and Blankfein and Dimon cause great things to happen. They are the real leaders of the world, the helmsmen – not presidents or prime ministers or other satraps. They are of consequence. Of substance. They make history. The work they do is for us. Well, not us. Humanity, in the abstract. Making sure the best genes are passed on – “best” determined by who swims in those rough green seas of money and eats the smaller fish. As Leo Strauss advised, channeling Hegel’s Master-and-Slave, life is a fight, might makes right. They don’t make huge amounts of money for their own sake, nor for our sake, but for the sake of the species, altruistically breeding the best that humankind can be. The determinant for who can pass on their genes is who piles up the most money. Is there any better type of human than the Patriotic Neocon or the Banker? A bit unfortunate for the IOs.
Congratulations to Walberg for a magnificent, and all-too-timely, work. Buy this book. Read it.
Notes
[1] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933935.html.
[2] For Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, on ‘doing God’s work’, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEMaFuOQZVo. What Blankfein does not mention is the source of the inspiration for his finance capitalism,: Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago economist and gray eminence behind the neocons. Strauss, believed capitalism was a contamination of the purer interpretation of the Hegel’s Master-and-Slave allegory – he preferred feudalism, instead, with a hereditary nobility and serfdom.
[3] Tallied in September. This is two points higher than the all-time low of 13%, reached in August of this year (http://www.gallup.com/poll/149399/Congressional-Job-Approval.aspx).
[4] The exhaustion of Britain after World War II, together with inspired and persistent rejection by its colonies, led to the collapse of the British Empire. However, how it collapsed – recognizing indigenous nationalist movements demanding self-determination, divesting itself of them in a peaceful manner, allowed what could have been great amounts of deaths and suffering to be avoided. With the power neocons continue to have in Washington, the American exceptionalism of the Republican Party, and the great investment in and stockpiling of soldiers and weaponry throughout the globe, the inevitable collapse of the US Empire collapse may be entirely different. Eisenhower’s ‘military-industrial complex’, in effect, requires endless war, and is more powerful than ever, with the corporation-friendly Reagan and Bush years shoring it up such that pulling the trigger of the cocked pistols is going to continue all over the world until the US government has no money left.
[5] Social scientists distinguish “states” from “less complex” entities such as “chiefdoms” by their ability to wield coercive force. The US possesses great coercive force with its military, police, FBI, CIA, NSA, Department of Homeland Security, and other resources. Any violent revolution, therefore, has no chance of success. Only people power can cause change to come about.
[6] Obama, too, has been awed: he thinks Blankfein is a “savvy businessman”. See http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aKGZkktzkAlA.
[7] An excellent one is Eric Escobar.
[8] 1997.
[9] As Marx observed, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
[10] See Socialism or Barbarism, by Istvan Meszaros, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2001.
[11] One of the tactics was to tie rebelling Indian captives to the fronts of cannons and then fire off the big guns.
[12] According to http://vizwiz.blogspot.com/2011/02/who-owns-americas-debt.html, China and Japan own 23% and 22% respectively of the US debt, followed distantly by the UK, which owns 12%.
[13] Eisenhower’s Secretary of State under, John Foster Dulles, was one of Wall Street’s top lawyers, working for the law firm hired by United Fruit, which was the banana company that owned at one point half of all the arable land in Guatemala. Supposedly also because of his religious convictions, he was also a staunch anti-Communist – Communism was ‘atheistic’. Dulles regarded the Monroe Doctrine – asserting its right to hegemonic control the Americas, defendable by military force at US discretion – as the single most important pillar of American foreign policy (for this pages 9-10 of Richard Immerman’s dissection of the 1954 CIA-assisted coup in Guatemala, The CIA in Guatemala, University of Texas Press, Austin [ninth printing, 2004]).
[15] Interestingly, “human-rights” criticisms of Islam and Islamic regimes often have to do with the status and treatment of women. As admirable as this “transcendent value” might be, cultural context is rarely taken into consideration before application of this as a reason for intervention by force. Conveniently, other regimes with far worse treatment of women are unmentioned and left untouched, while other, less mentioned, reasons for war, as in Iraq, Iraqi oil, are downplayed or conflated to make them appear unimportant. As much as the ordinary citizen of the West may have believed that Saddam Hussein was a demon, women had equality in his Iraq, women’s literacy rates were the highest in the Arab world, and health services and education were almost cost-free. One has to fight, mentally, not only the accepted version of Saddam Hussein provided via a constant tide of propaganda to see matters in better perspective. One way, of course, is to consider the main source of the demonizing before the Iraq Wars – Bush’s White House. Another way to accomplish this is by simple comparisons. For example, if we accept that capitalism as part of state expansion and vice versa played a large role in causing the two world wars of the last century, the 80 million military and civilian casualties and deaths greatly dwarf Nazism. One would think that rightwing believers in capitalism as representing freedom would have a hard time justifying its transcendent values as worth so many dead. Mao and Stalin may have been responsible for as many as 50 or 60 million, though accurate estimates are difficult to come by and depend on how one makes the count. Of course, with the Vietnam War – Americanized when French colonial hegemony ended at Dienbienphu – the US fought against communism, extending the Monroe Doctrine to Southeast Asia; this war saw approximately 1,275,000 combatant deaths, and 2,000,000 civilian dead. Estimates of Iraqi citizen deaths have been extremely hard to come by – the obvious conclusion: the US government does not wish the number known.
[16] With the book’s small publisher located in Atlanta, Georgia, and given the immensely influential American Jewish lobby and American Jews in positions of great power in government, banking, Wall Street, and Hollywood, Walberg says his relatively small means and Spartan life-style, living in Cairo, can’t be targeted effectively.
[17] From Rudyard Kipling’s time, the dismissive phrase, ‘the wood cutters and the water carriers’, well conveyed the inconsequentiality of the native populations subjected to colonial control and exploitation.
[18] As Walberg documents, Israeli spying in the US has been sustained, large-scale, and continuous. Only one spy for Israel working in the US, Jonathan Pollard, is doing serious jail time. There have been many other Israeli spies but all seem to have been let off with the lightest of rebukes or their espionage has simply been passed on.
[19] Dick Cheney, of course, was CEO of war-profiteering Halliburton before he selected himself to be Bush’s vice presidential running mate – and before the Republican Five on the Supreme Court selected Bush to be president. Cheney’s role as de facto president has never been seriously questioned. How many readers of Spike remember Don Regan? He was Reagan’s chief-of-staff as well as the CEO of Merrill Lynch; in one now notorious appearance by Reagan in front of Wall Streeters and journalists, Regan is shown on video whispering to his supposed boss to shut up and leave the podium. Can anyone, nowadays, dispute that the chiefs of military-industrial corporations and finance capitalism are still largely running the show?
[20] Diplomatically more countries around the world have recognized the Palestinians state than have recognized Israel.
[21] No reasonable person can truck with “Holocaust deniers”. But other atrocities in history were far, far greater in scope and scale than the killing of Jews in World War II. Estimates are that within a hundred years of the Spanish Conquest ninety percent of the indigenous populations of the Americas were dead. While yellow fever caused a large number of these deaths, slavery, massacre, enforced work laws and, latterly, civil wars and genocide in Central America, killed native populations in numbers far greater than the Holocaust did.
[22] Tossed around so often it is like a water polo ball is the statistic that the US consumes 25% of the world’s resources. The result of humans eating up the planet is global warming, fished-out, acidified, dying oceans, and excretions of junk and false consciousness almost everywhere.
[23] In 2007, Forbes Magazine counted almost a thousand billionaires worldwide. Bank of America ‘wealth management chief’, Sally Krawcheck, counted ten million millionaires in 2010 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnPatMfEMRM). Sally actually was one of those pushed over the edge after she made her count. Uncounted were the exponentially increasing numbers of people living below the poverty lines.
