By Richard C Cook

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15952

Global Research, November 6, 2009 Richard C. Cook

If you want to get an idea of what America once was like, read the
poems of Walt Whitman.  Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819 and
grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His family was poor, but even though he
left school at the age of 11 he gave himself an education by reading
and working in the printing shop of a newspaper until he gradually
became a published writer. He worked as a teacher and news reporter
and owned his own newspaper by the age of 20.

In 1848 Whitman was a delegate to the founding convention of the
Free Soil Party. During the Civil War he worked as a nurse in Union
military hospitals and held several government jobs, including
interviewing Confederate prisoners for pardons. Some of his greatest
poems came from his war experiences, including his famous elegy
upon the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Oh Captain!
My Captain! His great collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, was
self-published. He died a national hero in 1892 in Camden, New
Jersey, where thousands of people came to pay their respects.

Whitman has always been viewed as a poet of the people, in contrast
to the pretentious dandies from academia who have controlled official
American culture for much of our history. He wrote of workmen,
farmers, sailors, soldiers, lovers, criminals, and prostitutes.

In the text of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he wrote of
himself as, Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander
above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.
He had discovered a great secret, one that is known to everyone who
is young at heart: that the free individual, always potentially a
kosmos, stands at a much higher level in the scale of creation than
any man-made collective.

Thus was Whitman a hero to the Beatniks of the 1950s who tried to
rediscover an authentic American voice in the streets and on the
roads and highways of this great land. The spirit of Whitman was
surely present through the rebellion of the 1960s, when America's
young men and women rose up and fought the Establishment to stop
the Vietnam War and bring civil rights to racial minorities.

The Establishment fought back with a vengeance and, through the
most egregious betrayal in history, reduced the world's greatest
industrial democracy to the pathetic shadow of its former self we
are today.

The first thing the Establishment did was destroy the industrial
job base by shipping millions of good jobs to China and other Third
World nations, where slave laborers could be forced to churn out
consumer products at a fraction of the cost of similar work done
by American workers.

Acting through the CIA and organized crime, the Establishment flooded
the cities and college campuses with illegal drugs in order to rot
the minds and souls of our youth.

They dumbed down education to the point where young people who
graduate today know little and can do less of a practical nature.
Vocational training is dead. A high school graduate is worth virtually
nothing in the job market, and many college graduates are semi-literate
and self-absorbed, often lacking backbone, skills,  or initiative.
Some high school and college graduates are even drug addicts or
alcoholics.

They turned the economy over to thieves from Wall Street and created
a military machine that turns youth into murderers and assassins
whose job it is to conquer the world for the fat cats of global
capital.

They ruined the arts, literature, and music through crass
commercialization, making it almost impossible for any real original
creativity to be produced or communicated. The one bright light in
this darkness is the internet, which is being threatened by commercial
suppression of freedom of expression by the ambitions of big
communications companies. Thank goodness too for the rare creative
genius like Michael Moore who has the courage to hold up a mirror
to this deeply diseased society.

Then they wrecked people's health with processed food and constant
inducements to a sedentary lifestyle while pumping us full of
dangerous vaccines and prescription drugs. They drummed it into
everyone's head that we are basically weak, ill, helpless creatures
who can only survive by taking pills and making constant trips to
doctors, hospitals, and clinics.

They induced us to fight over our possessions and freedoms in law
courts with the aid of greedy lawyers in front of rapacious judges
who have built up the largest prison population in the world.

They pulled money and credit out of the inner cities and rural areas
leaving those segments of the nation and their populations to rot.

The list could go on and on and on.

Today we are in the midst of not just a recession but a terminal
depression.

Getting the banks to lend again so people can buy homes at what are
still over-inflated prices or so they might compete with immigrants
to get construction jobs through building of more useless office
buildings or military bases is not a recovery. The greening of
America is a myth. There is no resurgence of alternative energy
investment or new public infrastructure apart from a few highway
projects.

American family farming is practically dead and is under a new
assault from speculators who are undercutting prices and forcing
foreclosures. The local manufacturing sector never came back after
the calamitous decline produced by the Paul Volcker recession of
1979-1983, when interest rates were deliberately raised to over 20
percent to kill off family-owned businesses so that global corporations
could step in and take over. Since then we had the Reagan Revolution
when the banks took over the economy, the Clinton dot.com bubble
of the 1990s which crashed in 2000,  and the George W. Bush/Alan
Greenspan housing bubble which blew up in 2008. Now Main Street
lies shattered and shuttered as a result of the crimes and treacheries
of the last 30 years.

True, there is a rebellion brewing, including a monetary reform
movement that has attacked the power of the Federal Reserve, as
well as a few progressive voices that call for a much larger economic
stimulus than the Obama administration has seen fit to implement.

But is there any practical plan on the part of either political
party or organized movement to restore America to what it once wasa
place where ordinary people could live, work, learn, and flourish?
The answer is a resounding No. Not a chance. And Change You Can
Believe In hasn't changed a thing. All it has done has been to
produce another financial bubble, this time using huge amounts of
public debt through the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds. Business is
not growing and jobs are not coming back. The only thing that has
gone up has been the meeting of military recruitment quotas.

This latest bubble will fail too, because money created through
lending to float the prices of assets is not wealth. Rather wealth
consists of goods and services produced by labor applied to natural
resources. Those who provide the labor must be recompensed fairly.

So what is to be done? The answer is that nothing can or will be
done, if by that you mean whether a political savior is going to
come along to rescue our nation and its people from destruction.

In fact, what they are planning is to continue to throttle and
enslave us with a predatory financial establishment and a military
policy that is preparing the groundwork for World War III. The war
will be fought with American troops against Russia and China, after
which China will take over as the world's policeman while this
country disappears from the face of the earth. It's the ultimate
plan of the New World Order, the ones American politicians, financiers,
military leaders, and academics bow down to.

It is time for each and every individual who values his or her own
life along with the creative potential of the human spirit to begin
to work with others to create a new nation and world. The government
isn't going to do it for us.

Please believe me. This is not a system that can be reformed. It
is a system that must be replaced. And it must be replaced by the
ordinary working men and women who have been crushed, used, and
abused during the past ugly half-century.

Americans, get to work. Call your friends and family together today
and begin to figure out what to do. Start with 15 minutes of prayer
and meditation. You will be shown the way from within yourselves.
My own view is that setting up local currency systems, as many
communities are now doing, is a good place to start.

Richard C. Cook is a former federal analyst who writes on public
policy issues. His latest book is We Hold These Truths: The Hope
of Monetary Reform. His website is www.richardccook.com.

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