Te Whakatupato: The Great American Petulance of Inequality Is Coming to New Zealand.

KC SHOEN

                

            People Not-Gathered- After Vacant Souls, from the album The Darkest August (2006), available here

The United States is in free-fall, and its fleeing donor class are looking for a new place in which they can pull the ripcord and land softly with their assets and stocks in tact, ready to commit more colossal  rape of sovereignty via resources extraction and  revenue stealing from another location not yet despoiled by such republic-ending ravages, and have chosen Aotearoa.

 It appears, however, that New Zealand doesn't want 'em.

Dylan Lawrence, the General manager of New Zealand Trade & Enterprise (NZTE) put it quite plainly:"...we say the investment's got to be good for New Zealand not just good for the investor, and by that I mean how real is it, does it create jobs for New Zealanders, does it bring capability networks, technology, or does it provide access to new markets?" (Emphasis added).

Mr. Lawrence doesn't seem so smitten with just firing open the storm doors of permanent residency to allow access to the pathological  stock buy-back  prostitutes of the American financial, capital and investment sector.  And why should he? It would allow these psychopathic vermin  access to  a new environment with which they can  destroy the ecology, wring the economy bone dry until it is a parched fissure of immense inequality, then prop up its mortal remains to directly updraft monies via diminishing purchasing power and depreciated wages of the working class: exactly as they have done before.

It is neither aberration nor accident the expanding wealth gap that was occurring here prior to CoVID 19. Although not nearly the Great Crevasse of The Disparate United States  the suspicions of potential impropriety should remain raised. It is under cover of CoVID the US will slide into fascism, and it is that same cover that could see New Zealand inadvertently become the next playground of toxic capitalism to wreck the diverse but delicate economic landscape, while it is still has not yet started its full recovery. 

And whilst many should be concerned about 20% of New Zealand's  wealth being in the possession of 1% of the population, and the fall of the median income within the last year , it should be understood that inequality is already a  blatant feature of capitalism, existing in every freemarket society and is not incidental. CoVID 19 has exacerbated this element of the globalized  supply-side/ suppressed wages construct through small business closures and high unemployment via redundancies. Since the global market melt-down of 2008, the worlds financially affluent have benefited  from stock buy-backs and the 'zombification' of many financial institutions across the entirety of all western nations, those  having still  not generated any true revenue in over a decade, and are perpetually being issued governmental bail outs to continue functioning as frontal facades 

The unemployment rate has held steady at 4% percent, and the wage subsidy scheme issued by Jacinda Ardern's government have proved effective enough to stop the train from riding off the cliff, with Auckland itself  hemorrhaging 250 jobs per day on average during that same spread of time (June-August 2020) before settling down to recent  relative normal. The country still stands poised to rebound locally and can well take on the international markets again when they resume into the 'new normal'. The 'team of 5 million' (or which I and my family were proudly part of) coordinated the most dramatic crushing of CoVID the world has witnessed, even through the island's 2nd wave of the virus.

All taken however, the concern should be placed on  governments fealty to corporate confluence directed firstly, at the likes of Winston Peters , whom is not bashful about receiving favors in exchange for policy consideration from himself and his current party. Anytime members of government who get testy when confronted  by the local media about  questionable receipts of gifts and money from special interests, or feigns indigence at being rendered reasonable questions that do not coddle them need to be evaluated with great scrutiny ( props to the local media for putting the  'wood' to him, and not backing down)  

Concern, also, needs to rest upon candidates, like Judith Collins, whom possess right-wing, nationalist tendencies, favors combative rhetoric over substantive , measured debates on policy and stewardship, and are seeming lacking in self-awareness when its comes to their own willful ignorance. As I have often pontificated with great redundancy, all forms of conservative Nationalism should be absolutely dismissed as nothing more than xenophobic and corporate servile rhetoric used to partition those of the normative 'aggrieved' class against those whom are 'outsiders' , blamed for all societal ills and shortcomings.

Speaking of service to the 'managerial/ elite' class , Jacinda Ardern  also needs closer scrutiny on this matter. Although rather a seemingly harmless gesture of economic good will to allow  James Cameron's crew to fly  directly into Wellington during New Zealand's Level 4 lockdown to complete filming for the Avatar series in March, it also expresses a potential favourtism the Prime Minister  possesses toward vested Corporate confluence, even during a pandemic. 

And however impressive her emergency management of CoVID in Aotearoa, and her previous pronouncements of being a 'social democrat' , having gone as far as to acknowledge the outright failure of Capitalism , Ms. Ardern has yet to demonstrate the will to put a halt to the over-protectionism of the New Zealand real estate market, which has ballooned unrealistically over the last two months  (August through September 2020), and has not addressed the inevitable outcome of such protracted parlance upon inequality. Ardern was also a silent partner when it has come to the Deputy Prime Minister Peters' various conflicts of interests over the last year.

These rather seemingly inane examples of governmental inaction and self-interst is exactly how the American Corporate Vampires can seize the blood of New Zealand for sheer profiteering at the expense of the working class. In the U.S., it started with a simple letter of an appointed Supreme Court Judge that set off the American Corporate elite to push back against the counter-culture of the 1960's. Today, every American politician  (irrespective of 'Party', which has no further ideological meaning beyond window dressing currently) is 'purchased' by way of a lurid and filthy corporate pandering called 'lobbyism'. Policy is then 'purchased' as collusion , as both maladroit and cowardly entities then set about raping the system through reduction of public safety nets and social programs (including retirement pensions), and consuming all the rest in reckless abandon for thier enrichment. with 1% of the population holding 97% of the wealth and access thereto.

So, to my Kiwi and Māori whānau,  this American pākehā  is sending a harsh warning:The shit can happen here. CoVID is still among us, and  if you need any further 'motivation' as to the legitimacy of this fact-based article, I direct your attention to the  220,000 dead corpses buried under various American geographic locations that 'lie' as proof  that the corruption allowed in the U.S. help kill them all (and continue to kill more). The American donor class does not care about you, your country, your family or your lives. The New Zealand government, alongside Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein and the rest of these self-aggrandizing  American psychopathic 'Captains Of Industry' should be put in serious check, unless a future world of inequity,  involving living hand-to-mouth in perpetuity coupled with spates of homelessness sounds like a good option....

Prepare the Casket and the Eulogy: America's Pending Death by Exceptionalism

 

KC SHOEN

    

History has arrived at the station of being where long-hallowed veneers now evaporate for the U.S. The generations of denial, greed, corporate corruption, inequality, civic apathy, racial violence and consumerism have reached an 'event horizon': the long endgame. It is now the space where the polemic of pandemic, poverty, fascist brutality and protest now intersect. and need to deliver change, not just critical for improved civic engagement and civil cohabitation, but to the survival of the United States itself, now exposed as being absolutely nothing more than the failed republic that it is. 

It cannot be excoriated  enough, and with any excessive abundance;  the needful elimination of the illusory construct  the U.S. ever being egalitarian, humane , tolerant, equal or free; all in  itself a  worshipful lie of its Christian founding.  To simply succumb to such pompous piety,  would be declaring eugenics not the heart of confluence to a jailed war veteran who attempted to force the capitulation  of Austria via authoritarian overthrow as response to his country's failure post -WWI...

Reverence in the phantom leviathan of  racially-based Anglo exceptionalism fueled three-and-half centuries of colonialism worth of willful ignorance and  denial among the bourgeois elites ,  enabling  the cultural and religious justification of slavery which did not cease until 1865 (alongside the slaughter and displacement of indigenous peoples throughout this period). From that seizure of practice,  continued forward 150 years of 'Jim Crow' legislation, segregation, racial riots,  lynching, perpetual foreign wars, obstruction of human rights both in foreign lands, and domestic territories against the impoverished and people of color.

American culture in the past as in the present tense, remains defined by tyrannical religious zealotry,  technological advancements  in warfare  and gun violence, materialism , witless pop culture iconoclasm and celebrity worship. The difference now is that the US in the throes of self annihilation. CoVID 19 has fleshed out and drawn bare the American Dumb, in all its arrogant gravitas, anti-intellectual splendor. The realm of the American affluent liberal acolytes  of academia does not escape this blistering critique , as their bashing of the working class and subtle idolatry in acquiescence  to the corrupt corporate masters they 'worship' to for their own interests, while making pseudo-progressive overtures in action and deed, is equally as 'stupid' as their uneducated counterparts they assume prowess over.

If you are among of the unfortunate 350 million gasping for air in the United Cesspool of America who are not card-carrying members of the gilded and criminal elite 1%,  you are being bitch-slapped on the daily with rampant disease,  unemployment, riots, threats of local and federally sponsored police kidnappings and  terrorism, militia violence, inaccessibility to emergency medical services, eviction, homelessness, and the dangerous exposure to idiot motherfuckers who refuse to wear masks, who  think the pandemic is a hoax, alongside  the other maskless vermin,  the QAnon worshiping trailer-park all-star inbreeds who are certain that pizzerias, pederasts, registered 'Democrats' and Hollywood 'liberals' are conspiring together to bring America to an end by child sex trafficking on a demonic spectrum , then selling its national entrails to China.  

Couple this with the reality that your incumbent President is cementing his permanent station within the Oval Office as your Supreme Leader via suspending the 2020 election ( and enacting Martial law in the ensuing mass public unrest), so  that aside the pre-ascribed  manifested petulance (which itself makes your continuing survival questionable), you may have to go into hiding if you are not in 'alignment' with Big Brother Trump and Company.  The scepter of permanent incarceration around other CoVID convicts nation-wide will be a death sentence in itself if you are not careful and compliant...

Empires always reach such active levels of hubris upon their inevitable extinction, but America's moribund death-knell is quite something to behold, indeed. Accelerated by a vicious virus that was met by the very aforementioned stupidity,  exposed it to be the den of inequity it has always been throughout its densely slave-infested, derisive, violent, barbarian history.  And while I appreciate Wade Davis' romantic sentiments in  regards to America's  unraveling , it is still done through the annoying lens that most Americans themselves allow their vision to be clouded by: exceptionalism.

The cultural beatification of American exceptionalism is the very reason why the U.S. is now on its way to the failed-state graveyard. The conditioning and propagandizing of the past two and a half centuries of its existence ensured its demise would be assigned rapidly into the vacuum bag of history. In its beginning, the founding fathers and their euro-white colonist brethren  sanctified the evils of the imprisonment of  Africans kidnapped and sold into chattel slavery, the murder of indigenous peoples and criminal acquisition  of their lands,  the further destruction  of local culture through puritanical religious doctrines establishing missions and colonies to forcibly convert and kill indigenous people as warranted. This fanaticism of exceptionalism became as sacrosanct when Monroe dropped his doctrine in 1823, directing American foreign policy as right to invade the sovereignty of other nations as warranted to preserve its sphere of influence without European usurpation. Andrew Jackson would cement the exceptionalism of the European descendants and their power to 'redraw' the map domestically whenever suited for Anglo expansion during his vicious,  pre-civil war tenure .

Throughout the latter 19th and prevailing 20th century a society was borne from this through generations that would collectively believe itself to be indispensable to the world at large: the most free, the largest of all capacity for opportunity unmatched in the planet, the most democratic of all governments, the most productive. The myth of exceptionalism seemed solidified in full view of the world after America's victorious involvement in WW II. At 6% of the world population, the US ran the table with providing nearly 90% of the worlds goods. 

Americas outreach, confluence, economy and culture became at once stratospheric, monolithic and legendary. Nearly twenty years of world dominance in these arenas were astounding indeed. It was  also the period of ultra-conformity  imposed upon the boomer generation who would come of age during this time (1945-1962), as their parents wanted the absolute best for this generation after they had suffered the Great Depression and fought fiecely during the proceeding war.  They wanted their kinder not to stand out or be different, honor all authority as absolute, stay away from 'free-thinkers' and 'creatives',  get an approved, socially acceptable career, get married, swim with the rest of programmed minnows and be a brick in the Great Wall of American  Exceptionalism.

This same generation would be the ones to lead the US straight off a cliff, for their own enrichment. Consider this:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of  1965, and all the well-intended social safety nets that were created during the 60's and  70's  did not change the realities for Blacks in America. Lack of upward social mobility, affordable medical access, fair housing, financial equality, coupled with voter suppression, excessive incarceration, police brutality aka "death by cop" are all as active in  the present tense as in time 30, 40 50, 100 even 150 years previous. 

Regardless of this obvious anomaly,  white boomers like to gloss themselves as the music and protest generation, yet, at the first instance they could glom any patronage of status, position and money within the upper classes through their white entitlement they ran for it, and did not give a shit who they left behind, or stepped on in the process to get there. Once Tricky Dick resigned from the Oval office, and Vietnam was over, their obligation to  'social consciousness' was swiftly concluded. The younger boomers later became known as the 'Me Generation' of the 70's and early 80's :  the self-enamored,  self-entitled, and mean-spirited sect that sparked the rise of serial killings, child abductions, rapes and homicides,  later on being the fore-bearers of  modern American Gun  Entitlement:  mass public shootings.

With  exception of Reagan and Obama, it has been primary boomer administrations like the Clintons , G.W. Bush and Donald John Trump that continued to sell this sense of American exceptionalism always for personal gain.  Boomer corporate trouser stains such as Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs), Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Kudlow (current Director of National Economic Council) Larry Summers  (Former Director of the EC as well as the U.S. Treasury under Clinton), and David Robert Malpass (President of The World Bank) have all successfully, and in part, over  the course of 50 years en total,  collectively  created, and personally benefited from, the continued creation of American inequality.

 

 

 Source:Economic Policy Institute, current as of 24 August 2020

The Boomers became the very epitome of what they sought to set themselves apart from: greedy, selfish conformists, and permanent members of the establishment who have enabled and  perpetuated unjustified  foreign wars in support of breaking the sovereignty of independent nations for economic and political gain. Maintaining segregation and inequality between whites and non-whites, the affluent class and the impoverished working class through instruments of law and individualism..

Less the heroic pastime warriors for justices old a la  Malcolm X,  Huey P. Newton, or Abbie Hoffman,  but more the obsession for power, prestige, control and corporate glory akin to Richard Milhous Nixon and the Powell Memo

The true 'face' of American Exceptionalism.

To relegate the entire onus of Americas death-by-tropes entirely on this whinging mob of megalomaniac milquetoast malcontents, (however may be it personally satisfying), would not be accurate, and doesn't answer for the deficiencies of the descendant groups from Gen X to Z.

Americans became complacent, lazy and willfully ignorant within the last 40 years in particular, and did not proffer uprising nor meaningful resistance when Reagan delayed release of the American hostages in Iran to coincide with his inauguration, stripped the negotiating power of Unions, deregulated Wall Street, or  when Clinton dropped his 'three strikes' aberration decimating black communities, anti- Rooseveltian New Deal policies  sharply curtailing  the public safety net, lesser regulations regarding black-box derivatives stocks that would crater the economy in two major crashes in 2000 and 2007-8 fomenting further inequality between social classes, etc.

Americans constantly vote against  their own interests, inheriting more degenerative, selfish , criminal, even violent leaders in both local and national levels in every election cycle since 1968. This is the aspect of exceptionalism that creates the space of apathy, of  'everything will be fine , we are America'  has constantly interceded into reasonable and honest discourse, disrupting critical thinking  necessary to adjudicate that things are fucked up and why.

 The hallucinogenic and hyperbolic fervor over conspiracy theories, anti-intellectualism, anti-science and non-factual hubris has been a feature of American ideology and culture  for the entirety of its existence, for certain. Exceptionalism allows the inexplicable to be reasoned away, the illogical to abscond and dissolve genuine fact for belief as truth, dominates discourse with rancor, repetition and threat, rather than verifiable bonafides. It is the vaunted superstition of old, reconstituted as 'fact'  to subordinate a  peculiar belief or construct, giving and inciting drama over phantoms and shadows, so as obstruct the obligation to face the adversity of  our existence directly. 

It has maturated from existential threat to full bore 'alive' in the present: CoVID 19 will be the pandemic that catapulted the US into fascism under Trump, as there will be no election with which to remove him. No matter the frequency of our history screaming into our present, the lights our going out in America. From anti-vaxxers, anti-mask Trump supporters to dunderhead, inept Neo-liberal politicians to the biased-fed masses who place their allegiance to MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and Washington Post-like echo chambers, many Americans will meet their death by exceptionalism in the end , both as a society and as a nation.

There is  no loud  rumble of sustained multi-million person resistance on the horizon to undo the damage of corporate malfeasance which has fed racial and economic inequality, as would be necessary to exact necessary revolution. Americans as a collective continue to leave this to "others" when there are no "others " to take up the fight. Americans are too comfortably divided  to unify over such an obvious encroachment and destroyer of human existence such as inequality: that would require the acknowledgement that America is , and has been for about 5 decades, a shithole country, that America has fostered and has been primed for fascistic take-over.  

Required acknowledgement, too, is  the fact that the incompetent handling of the pandemic was simply  that: incompetent. America has the highest percentage of dead and infected that any. other. nation. period.  It has held this distinction since April 2020.

 It would require acknowledgement of the dark, disgusting history which built and sustained  it, with Trump being understood as its end-product, not its source. It requires that the centuries-worth of evolving  latitudes of propaganda , euphemistic doublespeak, entrenched conditioning, religious zealotry and lying sobriquets of American Exceptionalism be dropped entirely from the synapses and lexicon of a nation,  to unify as a society, and allow capacity to survive and regroup to foment and awaken.  

It will not happen. There seems to be not enough death, violence, state sponsored terror or socioeconomic ruin to bring this dilapidated bastard Republic together to enlighten itself.

Best prepare your casket and eulogy, then. Your exceptionalism is terminal.