Are We On The Brink of a Dark Age? 

Jane Jacobs in her 2004 book, Dark Age Ahead, warns that there are many signs that, compared to other historic downturns of  past cultures, can be interpreted that we in the West are about to experience our own dark age. One clue is this:” Greed becomes culturally admired as competence and false or unrealistic promises as cleverness”. Does that remind you of a corporate entity, political party or anyone you may have voted for?

In one chapter she writes this about conservative ideologues: “Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances. Every society contains such people. But they can exert considerable power only when they control public purse strings which are not subject to the principles of subsidiarity and fiscal accountability.”

Think of the prefabricated answers Bush, Cheney and the Republicans in control of their party had for Iraq and just about everything else they’ve screwed up in their eight years of control. Don’t make me count the ways the idiot-in-chief and his evil puppet masters caused pain and suffering for this nation.

Jane Jacobs points out that in 2000 when the neoconservative government in Canada paid a $200 tax cut rebate to each Canadian: “That is why librarians can’t be paid, or music teachers and teachers of English as a second language. It is why there are no low-rent rooming houses for (the poor).”  She says most families receiving the rebate ended up paying much more than the $200 in higher public service costs, higher rents, higher transit costs, and new recreation and tuition fees.  She suggests, “The tax cuts chief benefit, as far as I can see, is the emotional benefit they bring to ideologues.”

She explains, “At the core of this intellectual phenomenon shaping much but not all of Western culture is a moralistic belief that each public service or amenity should directly earn enough to pay for its cost. Thus each school is supposed to earn enough to support itself, through fees of some kind or through profit-making arrangements such as sale to a corporation of monopolistic rights to sell soft drinks and snacks. Such arrangements are called public-private partnerships (PPP or P3) and are much encouraged by neoconservatives and most boards of trade. Each artist is expected to earn enough in his or her lifetime to prove the art’s fitness to exist. Hospitals, transit systems, and orchestras are scorned as free-loaders seeking handouts (Ed note: witness public schools, NPR and NPT) if they can’t directly pay their way or, better yet, make a profit either for tax collectors or for a corporate partner. Greed becomes culturally admired as competence and false or unrealistic promises as cleverness.”  

Jacobs goes on to point out that the excuse by neo-cons for giving tax breaks to taxpayers in the form of rebates and tax breaks and cuts to rich tax payers and corporations is that it will create jobs. What the cuts instead do, she says, is “allows the neo-cons to buy elections”.

That is exactly what the Bush-Republican $600 tax rebates were intended but failed to do. I can only pray there are enough intelligent voters who are finally waking up to the lies and subterfuge practiced by the corporate-funded pirates that make up the Republican Party leadership and unfortunately, too many of the elected Democratic Party leaders as well. How many stupid, uninformed voters will vote for those who promise tax cuts and against those who promise true reform - real change that benefits all people, that benefits the nation as a whole, and not just corporations and those with the most money and power? We must change the way DC and the federal government operates; get rid of the cancerous corruption in our system and we can then lower taxes for everyone. The taxes we now pay could be cut in half and by much more if we could eliminate corrupt corporate control of our government and the outright theft of tax dollars by corporate thieves and dishonest elected leaders.

The Republican “Party” is over in more ways than one (as in “the party’s over”) as long as voters don’t cave-in to any new fears generated from strategically fabricated scares, threats or events orchestrated by those who see their power slipping away. Those corrupt corporations and individuals who have lapped up the gravy from the criminal acts of the Bush-Cheney corporate crime syndicate are not going without a fight and it will take a public uprising to get corruption under control and return the government to the people.

  

Whether the common masses recognize it or not, this is a nation in serious economic, political and cultural turmoil and it won’t do anything but become worse for years to come as the Obama triage team attempts with very limited success to stop the bleeding and repair the damage caused by eight years of Republican rule which has become a dark age in and of itself.

Rock the boat.