Getting rid of George Bush won’t solve our problems, if James Galbraith is right. Neither will getting the Republican part out of the White House and both house of Congress, if we don’t recognize the essential problem posed by American democracy nowadays.
That problem is that America has become a predator state, as defined in James Galbreath’s essay . The essence of Galbreath’s thesis is that some elements of the wealthy elite in the United States have broken the civil compact with the rest of us, becoming economic predators who are looting the wealth prduced by the middle class for their own short-term gains.
I boldfaced ‘some elements of’ for a reason, that reason being that not all of the wealthy elite are in on the predator state scam, and in fact dislike it because they accurately see that it’s screwing up the system for them. Of course, the people who are really being hurt by the predator state are the middle class and the poor, who endure economic stagnation while the wealthy enjoy huge economic gains.
The thing I really like about Galbraith’s analysis is that it ties together a number of seemingly disparate economic elements: the corruption that made Enron occur is the same as the corruption that made the Abramov scandal occur, the moral indifference that has made us a torture state, and the general indifference that led to a total lack of after-conquest planning on Iraq is the same indifference that led to the failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The Bush regime and the Republican leadership in Congress and their corporate allies in Congress are predators. Iraq wasn’t a war, it was a kill. 911 wasn’t a tragedy, it was cover for the looting the Bushes and Cheneys and the Halliburtons are doing.
And the thing is, even turning the Repubilcans out of Congress AND the White House won’t do the trick by itself, because nothing is more predictable than that the corporate predators will be doing their damnedest to find new allies among the Democrats, and if the Democrats are held to strict standards, they’ll succeed and it’ll be predation as usual.
The good news is, the Dems can turn this whole phenom to their advantage if they are willign to forswear predation themselves and tag the Republicans as what they currently are: the party of predation. It’s a tremendous populist issue that could probably bring over honest fiscal conservatives who hate what the Republicans have done ot our economic system under their predatory policies, as well as honest social conservatives who hate corruption and graft on general principles.
We’ll probably need their help, because the real genius of Karl Rove’s analysis was that with the help of retarded social conservatives who were willing to vote away their children’s economic future out of fear that somewhere, someday, tow gay people might fall in love and marry one another, the predators could get the political power they needed to loot the economic system. Rove’s twisted vision saw this occuring perpetually, but there’s hope that it might only last for eight years.
We’d better hope it doesn’t because as Galbreath noted, predator states fail because the upper class elite looters don’t care about the outcome of their actions so long as it leads to money for them. If we don’t destroy the predator state elements soon, America could become just another Third World banana republic.
): Has America become a Predator State?