Franz J.T. Lee, January, 2009
Concerning President Chavez of Venezuela ... both Bush and Obama sang the same Swan's Song
The extravagant United States "150 million dollar" presidential inauguration festival cannot hide the current deepening economic recession and global depression, also not the cancerous alienating outgrowths and the dangerous, belligerent contradictions of the coming of a possible global fascism.
The horrendous Gaza massacre of innocent children and women, using sophisticated weaponry of human torture and agony, was a gruesome kind of political lightning conductor to deviate the world public attention away from the real causes of the Gaza genocide and of more atrocities to come.
Furthermore, historical experience indicates that during all economic cycles of depression, tendentially world wars threaten to break out; latently, a nightmare for the system, possible anti-capitalist social revolutions also tend to flare up across the globe and the weakest links of the metropolitan imperialist chains begin to erode, to shatter.
Currently, more than last month, corruption, speculation and bankruptcy are rife; the slump deepens inexorably; across the globe big banks falter, sectors of the world market plummet and economic growth stagnates, slinging huge economies like Japan and the USA, in fact, the whole world order into apocalyptic jeopardy.
The elected president Barack Obama had nothing to say of its loyal Middle East ally, with regard to the Gaza massacre ... because two presidents of the USA cannot voice their class opinions simultaneously. However, what is valid for Pontius was not valid for Pilate: with reference to President Chavez of Venezuela, before the opulent show, in unison both Bush and Obama sang the same old terrorist Swan's Song.
On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009, the inherent, structural recession was not impressed by the feudal aristocratic United States 'monarchy', that is, by the military and industrial festivities ad nauseam of the social class basis of the new Democratic president; it was not participating in the huge pan et cirsenses, on the contrary, while the celebrations took place, on Wall Street, and elsewhere, the stock markets declined progressively; all over major banks suffered heavy losses.
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) summarized this fiasco as follows:
But
this was not all:
"The financial sector took the biggest
hit yesterday, with the S&P 500 Financials Index closing down 17
percent to its lowest level in 13 years. Bank of America stocks
closed 29 percent lower, Wells Fargo lost 24 percent, JPMorgan Chase
fell 21 percent, and Citigroup declined 20 percent. Boston-based bank
State Street, the world's largest institutional money manager,
plummeted 56 percent after it announced $6.3 billion of unrealized
losses in its investment portfolio, shocking financial analysts who
had regarded State Street's financial operations as among the safest
in the market."
In Britain and on the European continent
major banks suffered similar losses, were shaken by the
structural, systemic crisis of world capitalism.
What this
means for the metropolitan workers the European Commission told us
without any flowers: unemployment in the 16 countries using the euro,
which could reach 10 percent at the end of this year. Of course, this
is already being accompanied by layoffs, and soon by cutting of
wages, of social benefits and by higher taxation to bail out the
capitalist State and its respective ruling class bosses.
In
reality, what the Murdoch Empire does not inform us about, like in
the case of the ex-world power, of the Soviet Union, is the possible
dissolution, the demise of the United States of America within the
historic context of globalization. To get a glimpse of this historic
possibility, Christopher Ketcham, ... who is not a Marxist, rather he
is a serious writer of Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper's and other magazines,
... will tell us in his upcoming book why he feels that "The
United States Must End".