	id AA15213; Mon, 19 Dec 94 17:13:01 CST
Subject: Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 3 Num. 25


              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 3  Num. 25
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")
 
 
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[The following appeared previously in the January 4, 1994, 
"Conspiracy for the Day".]
 
Holidays and Humbug
Editorial from *The International Workers Bulletin*
December 20, 1993
[Excerpts]
 
While the population is inundated with reminders that this is the 
season of Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men, giant 
corporations look anxiously towards their bottom line: December 
sales account for the bulk of retail profits, and the month is 
the last chance to fire thousands of workers and take a big 
write-off on next year's taxes.
 
Nearly 150 years ago, English novelist Charles Dickens created 
the character of Ebeneezer Scrooge in his story, *A Christmas 
Carol*. Scrooge's habit, when hailed with holiday greetings, was 
to utter the immortal, "Bah, humbug!" Considering the current 
outpouring of hypocritical rubbish dumped on an unsuspecting 
public, one might be tempted to say that Scrooge had a point.
 
              -+- Ruling class "good wishes" -+-
 
The ruling class, guilty of so many monstrous crimes and 
outrages, is beyond altruism. What do its "good wishes" mean?
 
Everywhere, in communities large and small, there is a growth of 
poverty and deprivation. Economic hardship produces tragedies, 
great and small, on a daily basis -- house foreclosures, 
evictions, personal bankruptcies, divorces, domestic violence, 
crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, neglect of the elderly and sick, 
deaths by fire due to poor housing, suicide.
 
A firm's announcement that it is eliminating 10,000 jobs does not 
elicit a protest from a single source; it is only a guarantee 
that the share values of the company in question will rise. That 
the loss of employment may very well mean the loss of a home, 
medical care, retirement benefits, pension -- in fact, descent 
into a social abyss -- is well known and understood in the media, 
but no one turns a hair. There is only one conception which 
guides the ruling class: profits are everything!
 
[Yet the ruling class is not totally silent] in the face of the 
economic and social calamity it has wrought. It explains the 
crisis... as a crisis of spiritual values. The Wall Street 
Journal, whose name says everything that one needs to know about 
the values of its editors, is taking the lead in this regard.
 
The December 10 Journal carried an article by William J. Bennett, 
the former Secretary of Education in the Reagan-Bush era [and] 
now a fellow at the ultra-right Heritage Foundation, [in which 
Bennett bemoans] the fact that there "is a callousness, a 
cynicism, a banality and a vulgarity to our time..." [Bennett 
adds:] "In my view the real crisis of our time is spiritual." 
Bennett blamed the troubles of American society on "an undue 
concern for external affairs and worldly things" on the part of 
the ordinary people.
 
The Reagan-Bush years are already synonymous with greed, 
selfishness and the wholesale looting of the economy and the 
state apparatus. As Secretary of Education, Bennett dedicated 
himself to the destruction of public education and, specifically, 
presided over the slashing of the school lunch program. It was 
his department which decided to classify ketchup as a vegetable 
in the meals served to millions of children in order to satisfy 
nutritional requirements at a lower cost. Scrooge had nothing on 
Bennett and company!
 
Having no means with which to provide the population with food, 
decent housing and social services, the powers that be tell the 
masses that a concern with those elementary facts of life is 
vulgar and material.
 
At heart, Bennett's fraudulent project of a national spiritual 
rebirth, as well as the homilies about the holiday season -- 
peace, harmony, good will, charity, universal brotherhood -- 
cannot be reconciled with a society which glorifies only wealth 
and personal enrichment and condemns masses to poverty.
 
Standing on the threshold of the new year, we can say with 
conviction that the foundations of many social illusions held 
onto by the masses in America are in the process of being 
shattered -- in bourgeois democracy and the two-party system, in 
the "death" of communism, in the prospects for peace and 
prosperity in the post-Cold War world, in the Clinton 
administration itself. Even greater shocks are in store for the 
working class and the oppressed in 1994.
 
The crisis of capitalism is historic and systemic. While the 
ruling class, because of the rottenness of the outmoded labor 
organizations, may temporarily have the initiative, Bennett's 
comments indicate its ideological and intellectual bankruptcy. It 
has nothing to offer the masses but "pie in the sky" while it 
prepares further social misery and bloodier, ever-wider wars.
 
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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

 Brian Francis Redman    bigxc@prairienet.org    "The Big C"
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    Coming to you from Illinois -- "The Land of Skolnick"        
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