Is the West Blind to Reality? King Midas and the Prophets
by Marc Batko (marc1seed@yahoo.com; freetranslations.foundation)
Back in 2009, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote “Brightsided” and warned her compatriots about over-optimism and ignoring the signs of systemic, structural failure. By repeating the materialist mantra “more, bigger, and faster,” the suffering around us can be downplayed and later forgotten completely. The richest three men in the US have more wealth than 160 million people.
The corporate media choose to be the lapdogs of the super-rich and stenographers of the state. Critical voices and prophets have warned of the coming inevitable social upheaval. Both John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Affluent Society” and Michael Harrington in “The Other America” saw two societies emerging side by side, the affluent private sector and the impoverished public sector, billionaires with their private jets and yachts and 700,000 homeless living in unspeakable squalor all across the country.
China learned from Western technology and didn’t steal. China doesn’t threaten US democracy or US security, political scientist Jeffrey Sachs emphasizes. For China, existence means co-existence. “When we call China, we get an airport. When we call Germany or the US, we get a lecture,” said the Nigerian-born head of the World Trade Organization. You Tube offers us videos documents the many7 Chinese technological wonders improving the lives of the Chinese people, magnificent metro stations all over the country, automated computer-run trains running from 100 to 240 mph, automated taxis, automated drones delivering packages and even beverages. China shows us the technological future and transforms science fiction into science fact.
China is accused of subsidies and “dumping,” and of unfair competition. In the US and Europe, fossil-fuel industries have received billions propping up their now outmoded technology. Electric vehicles now cost 40% more in the US. EU tariffs are about the fear of losing dominance rather than fairness. On November 27, 2024, China cancelled 150,000 electric car orders to teach the European Union a lesson about imposing solutions. China’s supply chain reduces costs. The irony is inescapable. EU tariffs could risk the EU missing its sustainable goals. China is building trade routes that miss Europe entirely. China isn’t just a competitor but the global leader in technology, strategy, and innovation.
What are the leading US values? Critics say lying and cheating! Can the US recognize and admit its arrogance and ignorance, wastefulness and double standards, xenophobia and misanthropy? Is speculation a form of violence? Was militarism sold to us as a life insurance that has devoured our wealth and darkened our future? Did the “rules-based order” impoverish the global South?
Comfort, comfort my people!, God exclaims in Isaiah 40 to bereaved Israel, mourning the destroyed temple in Jerusalem and their captivity in Babylon. “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” Humility is the true human strength. Trashing other people and countries is a perversion, not a strength according to the prophets. Israel was to be a light for all the nations! The universal had to become particular to be concrete and relevant; the particular had to be oriented in the universal so its strength and development would not be frittered away by desires for power and wealth. Unfortunately, Israel turned away from the prophets’ teaching, sought a king like the other nations, and now as political Israel commits genocide against Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen!
Can civil society in the US rise up as a protest culture refusing to be sacrificed in a hyper-materialistic and hyper-individualized culture that is feared as a new military Babylon? Surreptitiously, US culture is dominated by mind-numbing nonstop advertising.
What could have been an information or digital culture has been a Trump culture from 2015. Don’t be deceived! As folksy Joe turned into war-mongering Joe, he allowed Ukraine to strike 240 miles into Russia on November 17, 2024. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are leaders of the blind and masters of manipulation. Possessions possess us more than we possess them. Man cannot live by bread alone. Jesus and the prophets warned against covetousness and false consciousness. Possessions are like thorns; we lose our spiritual identity as subjects and children of the infinite God when we only try to become more wealthy than our neighbor.
Collectively, we clean the outside of the cup and leave the inside filthy. Like the Pharisees of old, we only see the speck in our brother’s eye and not the log in our own eye.
Since 2001, the US has squandered $10.4 trillion in unwinnable, illegal and immoral wars! Warmongering in Gaza and Ukraine has made the US a source of fear rather than hope. Now in 2024, the world with the rise of China and BRICS is finally demanding charity, community, and peace.
The whole world is making the transition. America was producing boats on wheels. Trucks were advertised with masculine characteristics. For a time, this was profitable. Now the Chinese BYD is the largest car manufacturer in Europe. The US is isolating itself. Pipelines into India represent socialism with Chinese features. Socialism is what comes after capitalism. France unbowed is led by a socialist. Europeans have always been connected. Factories and businesses want governments to intervene to soften harsh capitalist rules paying workers almost nothing.
China may have 85% of rare earth, a skilled manufacturing labor force and dependable supply chains. The US will need many years or decades to equal China. Can the US corporate media learn the language and behavior of humility, interdependence, renunciation, disarmament and car-free life?
China is the future of Africa and Africa is also the future of China. The new $50 billion project will employ 1 million people in building roads, vehicles, dams, and trains. China is totally focused on trade and development with 33 African countries. Intel is cut off from China. Mutual development is far different than one-sided profit!
Misconceptions come from people who have never been to China and from prejudiced media repeating that rural China is dirty. Has the US obsessed with money, success and growth become blinded by hate? Have jealousy, envy and inability to learn replaced humility, simplicity, caring and selflessness? The infinite transcendent God who created all things out of nothing will heal our prejudices and stereotypes if we come to him with hearts and minds open for transformation !
Democracy isn’t a strong man or manufactured consent but rather everyone can be a reporter. The economy is a part of life, not a steamroller crushing self-determination and creativity. The state should protect citizens from manipulations and extreme poverty.
Man is born free and is everywhere in chains (Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Advertising is worlds away from critical thinking and redeeming truth and creates false needs and individual and collective helplessness.
Whoever controls the past controls the future. Whoever controls the present controls the past. (George Orwell) A rude awakening is an unpleasant and unexpected realization about a situation. It can be caused by an unexpected event or news that forces you to face reality.
In 2001, the Marxist economist Jorg Goldberg wrote an article “The Cure is the Sickness.” He decried the destructive Washington Consensus of privatization, deregulation and liberalized markets (casino economy) and correctly predicted that it would be abandoned by Europe and the world. Ten years later, the British Colin Crouch published is influential book “The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism.” Money out of thin air, financial markets returning to equilibrium, speculation, financialization, and money as a private matter are five debilitating neoliberal myths. Once a seeming energy powerhouse, Enron was bankrupted and exposed as a fraud or Ponzi scheme where future profits were included in the company’s balance sheets.
Real solutions to the economic and social crisis include ending tax havens , the tax avoidance industry, stock buybacks, micro-second betting (stock market), insider trading and endless wars. The social state dismantled on the quiet must be reconfigured so the poor and homeless and socially marginalized are not ignored and forgotten. A Marshall Plan for Journalism would fill the coming generation with hope and public spirit to counter the despair and information gap created by concentrated economic and political power. The rich must pay their fair share and not neglect schools, roads, hospitals, transportation and public welfare. Empires rise and fall and sometimes become republics like England.
In our current elite democracy, lobbyists craft laws and representatives raise campaign money every day. Corporate welfare far exceeds social welfare. The 700,000 homeless are made invisible and ignored so people are incentivized to keep working. A four-day work week and car-free zones like Gastown in Vancouver B.C. are taboo subjects and never discussed.
Public infrastructure decisions have long been the unspoken elephant in the room. Vancouver Canada with its 26 community centers and its three-structure “Welcoming Center” (2014) could have been models of a more human future. The US has massive problems of guns, fentanyl, corruption, fraud, housing, taxation and bank stability. The US bullies, threatens and scapegoats. The US has an enemy fixation to deflect anger and concern and exonerates “crime in the suites.” The media is in bed with the state, prioritizes “business-friendly” news, and serves as a lapdog instead of a watchdog. When the corporate media ignored Israel’s genocide in Gaza after Hamas killed 1130 Israelis on October 7, 2023, it discredited itself as xenophobic, blind, hypocritical with double standards and irrelevant. Proportionality has always been a key criterion in international law. For example, the police cannot be given machine guns or nuclear weapons. Tolerance and de-militarization should be obvious “no-brainers.”
The political atmosphere has changed from an open, dynamic, deliberative body to a shark tank of name-calling, mud-throwing, threats and accusations. Historically, the US was able to shift its financial problems to Argentina and Mexico and stabilized its economy by enticing foreign capital and foreign investment. Money creation and interest-manipulation made the US a safe place for investing capital. Now the world has changed with the rise of China and BRICS. BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and 20 others) represents 50% of the world population compared to 14% in the G7. China is building airports, hospitals, railways and dams in many African countries. Canada and Mexico are pushed together by Trump’s arrogance, insolence and megalomania to save continental trade. Trump’s 25% tariff threat is a blow to keeping alive the free trade idea, peace, and collective security.
We have had dark periods before. Trump is proposing wrecking American hegemony. In his first term (2016-2020), Trump poisoned dialogue by repeating venomous Hitler words vermin, killers and invaders. Trump ruined and divided the US, demeaning sharing, criticism, rethinking, redistribution, and poverty reduction as weaknesses! “The fog is lifted. The language of proclamation runs crossway to the language of time,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached to the underground Confessing Church. Diversity and tolerance grew in the de-industrialized service economy as in San Francisco. Men of steel and power are losing control by the hour, sang Devo, Phil Collins and Genesis in “Land of Confusion” (1980).
Peace is a risk and an adventure and cannot be reached on the way of security (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). Wishful thinking and magical thinking are constant threats. A multi-polar world of interdependence, intercultural learning, qualitative growth and partnership could replace the sordid legacy of militarism, colonialism and imperialism. Making trade enemies of Mexico, Vietnam, Korea, India and China is narrow-minded and self-defeating!
Hope comes from collaborative thinking and redistribution of power, not from top-down “efficiency” that only intensifies inequality and enriches the super-rich. Can’t we have broad discussions of diagnosis and therapy, critical thinking and alternative investments, intercultural learning and qualitative change? How can the common good and efficiency be understood when space travel and not affordable apartments is the top priority? Is trickle economics a discredited myth or the only discussed proposal for the future?
Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Korea and Costa Rica have escaped mass poverty and have vibrant food economies and night life! Vancouver B.C. has 26 community centers that give working and non-working people a stronghold in the rapidly changing modern world.
Government isn’t a business or a housewife. Many guardrails are taken away. If the state is intent on firing many people, they don’t disappear. You are creating a crisis. Elon Musk fired 80% of the Twitter employees so they aren’t his responsibility. The state is obligated so everyone can survive.
Immigrants provide essential services in hospitals, harvesting food and caring for people. Trump can try to expel 11 million but where are they to go? The small-minded micro-economic attitude is nihilistic or barbarian. The US with a crashed government is a terrifying prospect (Richard Murphy). US consumers will have to pay more for whatever they buy. There will be soaring inflation. That is the purpose of tariffs, to make imported items more expensive. To pretend otherwise is absurd, crazy or mad. There will be less money to spend in the service sector. This is a deeply recessionary choice. Tariffs may be necessary in developing countries to protect infant industries. We cannot afford consuming goods at the present rate since we are burning the planet. Chaos is never a good way to run an economy. The poorest will suffer most.
Skilled manufacturing labor, rare earth, and reliable supply chains are all vital to create a manufacturing powerhouse. Labor costs are a whopping four times more than in China. The US doesn’t have enough manufacturing workers. The cost of an I-Phone could be $2000 or more. China controls 85% of rare earth elements for laptops and smart phones. China is the largest producer of graphite for batteries.
Peace, solidarity and respect are thrown to the wind by arrogant, ignorant authoritarians! In response, a protest counter-culture forms representing the world we desire. Threatening political enemies and ignoring poverty, homelessness, and social exclusion are signs of barbarism and savagery, of a rogue state or a failed state.
Our changed world is resisted by the misanthropes and those incapable of learning! China, Canada, Mexico, and the global South are new realities in the age of BRICS. The declining US and the West create their own worlds of denial and amnesia. People no longer clamor after Coca Cola, rock n roll and incomprehensible financial products. After the bizarre Washington Consensus, countries grow rice and beans for their own people instead of strawberries and tulips for Miami! Can the state be a crisis administrator or is it condemned to be a corrupt, heartless creator of crises, conflicts and unspeakable misery?