Are We Facing a Serious Choice?

Faced with the present depression and what looks like the collapse of our capitalistic, corporate run government, the path to recovery is through invigorating the consumer side of the market. This means in essence a serious extension of the welfare system and state mandated and operated projects. Short of that, there is likely to be some serious problems of unemployment and the like inviting demonstration and possibly riots. In short, the solution involves changes akin to socialism, for many of us who invent ourselves in terms of the abstractions of ideologies, socialism is for the most part heresy.

The Republicans, who are already sensing the direction the rescue package is taking, are going to see to it that this does not happen so that the extensions of welfare and government projects will be seriously limited while various measures will continue to prop up the financial interests and the corporate system. If this does not satisfactorily rescues us from the collapsing capitalistic system, wide spread discontent will grow and set the stage for social unrest.

What our only rescue is in the direction of social welfare and government interventions amounts to is a very serious threat to the corporate interests controlling much of the government such as the CIA for example. We have two examples at hand of what path the corporate interests may follow. In 1933, the Bush, DuPonts, Melons, Morgans and other powerful industrialists invited Major General Smedley Butler, WWI Marine hero with two Medals of Honor to lead an army into Washington to overthrow or otherwise get rid of Roosevelt and establish himself as our leader in emulation of what Hitler had just done in Germany. There was not enough backing in the masses for this sort of thing and Butler was opposed to it and turned them in. Nothing was done about it.

Then when Kennedy started to threaten the military/industrial complex by trying to end the cold war, opening talks with Khrushchev and Castro and planning to withdraw our troops from Vietnam, the CIA got rid of him. Big business, the military and most of the people in his government considered him a traitor. However there was no economic disintegration so that there was no unrest and in fact the country was supportive of both stopping the Cold War and withdrawing from Vietnam, making a coup both unnecessary and ill-advised due to lack of support among the people.