"...we really ought to vote to toss the bastards out!"

On our oncoming future dystopia
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10953

> Column Back through the looking glass?
>
> By Egan Orion: Sunday 10 August 2003
>
> "Turning and turning in the widening gyre
> The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
> Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
> Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
> The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
> The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
> The best lack all conviction, while the worst
> Are full of passionate intensity."
>
> The Second Coming - W. B. Yeats, 1922
>
> ABOUT THREE YEARS AGO, we seemed to fall through Lewis 
> Carroll'srabbit hole into an alternate universe. As in a bad dream, 
> this parallelworld looked the same, but something had perverted the 
> natural order ofthings ever so profoundly but subtly. It's been 
> downhill ever since.
>
> The author normally confines his writing to observations and 
> opinions on information technology news and issues. However, even 
> the most adamantly politically disengaged Libertarian technogeek has 
> to acknowledge -- even if grudgingly -- that information technology 
> industry only exists within the prevailing context of politics and 
> economics. Since these conditions combined to trigger a years-long 
> downturn in IT spending and employment, perhaps -- whether you agree 
> with the author or not -- you might admit a certain relevance to 
> addressing these IT-extrinsic factors here. Without a reduction in 
> the levels of current world conflicts and tensions along with 
> resulting economic uncertainties, the IT industry will most likely 
> continue to stagnate or at least underperform its potential 
> recovery. In other words, this piece relates to information 
> technology, after all.
>
> This sea change manifested itself nowhere faster than in the 
> vanguard of progress we call the information technology industry. 
> But its poisonous effects were not confined to just this one sector 
> of the larger economy, or even to only markets and economics. 
> Everything went seriously haywire almost simultaneously. The several 
> unsustainable exuberances of the New Economy collapsed, the Dot.Com 
> bubble burst, flimsy pyramids of epidemic corporate fraud imploded 
> at Enron, Worldcom, and elsewhere. Inexplicably the US intelligence 
> agencies contracted myopia. Even more incredibly and implausibly, 
> our US defenses suddenly malfunctioned in spectacular ways and the 
> New York World Trade Center Towers exploded -- strangely like a 
> series of precisely timed demolitions. We all know what has 
> transpired, since Fall 2001. Perhaps we can all agree, none of it 
> has been great.
>
> Two million US jobs, many in information technology, have evaporated 
> in the last 32 months. Employers aren't hiring highly skilled, 
> experienced professionals lately. Instead, they want low-paid, 
> machine-part cogs.
>
> The 'official' US unemployment rate is only slightly over 6%, but 
> actual unemployment (and underemployment) is two to three times that 
> figure.
>
> The number of personal bankruptcies within the US is at a peak for 
> over two generations. Mortgage foreclosures are climbing to record 
> levels.
>
> In the UK, one third of independent IT contract workers are jobless.
>
> Simultaneously multinational corporations are relocating 
> headquarters to tax havens and outsourcing all the jobs they can 
> send offshore, overseas to lower-wage poorer countries, just as fast 
> as they can shutter offices and factories, lay off workers. And, 
> with jobs goes purchasing power.
>
> Millions of hard working people have lost their savings, pensions, 
> and healthcare coverage. Meanwhile, some obscenely regressive tax 
> cuts have been handed to the very rich, at the very same time that 
> unprecedented levels of military spending have wiped out former US 
> budget surpluses, replacing them with staggering deficits, as far as 
> the eye can see.
>
> The US balance of trade deficit is unsustainably high, so the dollar 
> is falling in value, while the rest of the world is busily 
> reallocating its investments out from under the US economy. Here in 
> the US at least, the future has not looked so barren since the Great 
> Depression of the 1930s -- for all except the wealthy and 
> politically connected: oil plunderers, bankers, the military 
> industrial complex, and high level executives who can pull down 
> bonuses by laying off workers, shipping jobs offshore.
>
> It is happening as the US flexes its might pursuing war without end 
> -- a policy, unprecedented in US history, of brutal preemptive 
> aggression. In wars designed to grab Middle East oil fields, install 
> Israel as a local US surrogate enforcer in the region, destabilize 
> the Arab countries, and extend an over-reaching American imperium 
> across the whole of the globe in a series of interminable wars, 
> thousands of US soldiers will probably lose their lives, tens of 
> thousands will be wounded or sickened, and all who survive will see 
> and do things that will likely sear their souls.
>
> Hand in hand goes an equally unprecedented assault on public dissent 
> and civil rights, the US Constitution and most of the Bill of Rights 
> -- free speech and right to assemble, right to bear arms, habeus 
> corpus, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, separation of 
> church and state. In reality, the US is heading hell-bent down the 
> road to a police state. It is obvious that we cannot hope to retain 
> freedom by relinquishing all of our civil liberties, yet this seems 
> to be precisely what this current US Administration intends. Its 
> wish-list is a veritable blueprint of police state abuses: 
> suspension of habeus corpus, abrogation of accused's right to 
> counsel, secret detentions and trials, and even secret executions.
>
> It's as though we've collectively tripped through some invisible 
> barrier into a mirror-image alternate reality, a sinister parallel 
> universe. In this version of space-time all the physical laws work 
> the same, but the moral order of the cosmos has been reversed, as 
> through a looking glass. This is a disjoint and dystopian time in 
> world history, a nasty time. If you doubt it, just count the coffins 
> and wounded sent home from Iraq.
>
> Here's our future, unless we can step back through the looking glass:
>
> Loss of two thousand years of civilization's progress towards 
> universal fair dealing within agreed upon legal frameworks, ethical 
> relationships between different countries and cultures, and 
> responsible stewardship of the earth and its resources in the 
> interests of innumerable generations of our descendants yet unborn.
>
> Loss of all civil liberties with the rise of a fascist world in 
> service to corrupting corporate masters, also leading to the loss of 
> privacy. It seems particularly ironic that this nascent police state 
> infrastructure relies on information technology. But it's not too 
> surprising after all, if one reflects that IBM facilitated 
> meticulous Nazi record-keeping, in World War II. That's not 
> something IBM advertises, but it did happen.
>
> An all too avoidable clash of religions and cultures portending 
> decades of wars and miseries and deaths -- coming at us like a 
> runaway train. It also seems strikingly unwise for 5% of the world's 
> population to go out of its way to alienate and even attack 33% of 
> the world's population -- especially in support of less than 1% of 
> the total world population.
>
> A world where 95% of the population lives barely above the poverty 
> level while a cynical, manipulative and venal few live in debauched 
> luxury. In the US, the middle class will disappear at the end of our 
> Golden Age.
>
> A ruined, toxic environment of cruelly malthusian population 
> control, an ever-decreasing quality of living, ever-shortening life 
> expectancies.
>
> This is our future outlook -- all of this will be delivered to us by 
> the smirking arrogance of unrestrained political and military power 
> mongers, purchased on the cheap by accumulated wealth and its 
> insatiable grasping greed for ever more concentrated wealth and 
> power. Abandoning our ideals like cooperation, honest dealing, 
> personal and corporate ethics, and the rule of law will bring us 
> these futures just as surely and inevitably as such deadly sins did 
> to many other civilizations, in earlier periods.
>
> Is it too late? It might be, I do not know. But we'll never even 
> stand a chance or ever know if such a dystopian future is 
> unavoidable unless we try. What future world do you want to be 
> remembered as having bequeathed to your great-grandchildren? This 
> sinister parallel universe of probable outcomes? Or one that looks a 
> lot more like the one we used to know?
>
> Finally, the former Soviet Union proceeded in the last twenty years 
> from totalitarianism, through a period of kleptocracy and into a 
> semblance of democracy. The US seems to be going in an exact reverse 
> progression. If the Administration's program to concentrate 
> corporate power and rape our natural resources isn't soon reversed, 
> the US will be a kleptocracy. The next step after that will be 
> relatively easy, after we're all proles.
>
> If you don't like what's going on, speak up! Write letters, walk in 
> some protest, sign a few petitions, and by all means let your 
> family, friends and neighbors know what you think so they'll know 
> it's okay to be angry, whether you're a Buchanan or Perot 
> Republican, centrist Democrat, Nader voter -- blue, red, green, pink 
> or purple. And next time the politicians hold an election, we really 
> ought to vote to toss the bastards out! µ
>
> Egan Orion holds a Philosphy degree in Ethics. His views are 
> entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect those of either the 
> INQUIRER or Breakthrough Publishing Ltd. In addition, he retains 
> copyright.
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