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So, the big news is that Standard and Poor's has downgraded U.S. Federal debt from AAA to AA+ .
Two notes on this: first these are the same cretins who gave a AAA rating to bundled subprime mortgage debt, at the behest of their Wall Street masters. They served them then, and they serve them now.
Second, that lower debt rating means the government is now going to be expected to pay higher interest rates on the debt. This is how these bastards work: they downgrade your credit worthiness, and then charge you higher interest. The poor are thus inevitably screwed by high interest rates (because they have less money to repay loans, so banksters charge them more to cover all those poor people who fail to repay..)
Note, the lower credit rating will make those who hold the debt more money.
I guess I should try to explain my thinking about this in a bit broader fashion..
Ever since I've been to Mexico and Egypt I've been in reaction to the extreme poverty that I saw in those two places. I lived and taught in Mexico for a year in the mid- 90's in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican debt crisis and U.S. engineered bailout that devastated that country in the early nineties. They paid me 16k dollars, and gave me Mexican socialized health care benefits to work at one of the best (read wealthiest) prep school systems in the country. They paid "North Americans" (U.S. and Canadian citizens, never mind that Mexico is in North America too, they still called us Norte Americanos to distinguish us from citizens of los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, which is the official name of Mexico) there twice what they paid their Mexican staff, which was an uncomfortable reality..
The people living in dirt floored shacks with livestock, the crowds of kids flocking intersections begging while giving cars unsolicited windshield wipings in the brief interval between lights..
I didn't know how to process any of that - there were so many aspects of that experience that blew my mind's capacity to process sanely that the economic subtexts were left unanalyzed for a long while..
My year in Egypt five years ago brought these economic realities all to my mind's fore. Poverty there is if anything more extreme, and the landscape - both geographic and spiritual is far starker and more barren.
That extremity scarred me. I came home radicalized.
It suddenly became very clear to me that we in the United Sates (deliberate "misspelling" there) are at the center of a global network of wealth acquisition. A very highly tuned one.
We (this "we" includes all American citizens, no matter how much money they have) are all the beneficiaries of this system due to the fact that our leadership - the men of money and power in places like New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago and Miami (and so forth) - are the architects of this system. Further, our military is the "praetorian guard" (so to speak) of this class, who deploys American military force in such a way as to guarantee its integrity.
They will, and have, done anything necessary to maintain this flow of wealth toward themselves.
Now, I could say we will do anything necessary, because let's be perfectly clear here, anyone who supported either Iraq war, or the violent execution of the Cold War in places like Nicaragua or Vietnam (or any of the dozens of other places where that war became hot) is morally complicit in this system.
That's to say all of us, practically speaking, are guilty of advocating (which is tantamount to using) violence to maintain our bourgeois lifestyles.
To include myself.
Now, what we are witnessing - to put it clearly, in bald terms - in this global recession and all the "retrenchments" and "debt crises" - is the acceleration of the extent of debt servitude to the point that the masters of this system are now applying the same tactics of debt warfare that they have used against third world countries and their populations (so as to essentially enslave them with poverty, and then exploit their labor - and usually much more importantly - their natural resources ) to what until now we've called the First World.
Note that the "Second World" was the Communist Block. Now that that threat and alternative to the Neo-Liberal Capitalist order has been removed, they are going for the jugular. There is no socialist threat anymore to keep them in line. It's been subverted. They no longer have to share the wealth for fear that the masses will have them for lunch.
They are prescribing the same program for their First World populaces as they once did only for Third World satrapies. The government will be reduced to the point that it exists to guarantee contracts, and protect the rights of the wealthy. Courts, perhaps prisons. Police, armies, maybe. They can buy even those things, and privatize even the law. And that's what they are doing, right in front of our bovine eyes.
Note I'm not bullshitting you or making this up. I'm not babbling crazy. They've come out and said it very clearly. Google Milton Freedman, Grover Norquist, libertarian economics. These people have said there should be no public sphere, or only a minimal one, meaning that everything should be owned by someone. What they mean is that everything, and everyone that they deign to allow live will be owned (their time and services bought) by them. And that "them" is a very small number of people.
They do not care about anyone except themselves. They want to be rich, powerful - and ultimately transcendent - masters of the universe. They will do whatever they need to to achieve this.
I'm going to talk about this "transcendence" I think "they" hope for some more on the blog these coming weeks.
Now though, I'll conclude by saying this:
One of the main reasons I am a Catholic is that Catholicism is to my mind one of the very few coherent epistemologies and anthropologies that resoundingly rejects their worldview.
Islam is, incidentally, perhaps another one.
To be a Catholic is believe in the sacredness of every human person, even the poor, even the idiotic..
Even, note, the evil fascistic rich man. Even he deserves a dignified trial before he is thrown in jail.
Justice, which is Mercy Himself, demands it.
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