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Where your treasury is, there will your heart be also

By Owen Paine on Sunday April 29, 2007 02:51 PM

I bet some of us like the writings of Joe Bageant. His embrace of trash Whitey oughta make him my kinda good people.

Well, not so fast -- yesterday I read a piece of his over at Counterpunch and it gave me troubles, troubles his bold roosterin' has caused before:

http://counterpunch.com/bageant04282007.html

Despite agreeing with 97% of his rant, I've been troubled by him, and I haven't been able to get my arms around why, except that it's all contained in just this one line, right up there in the very first paragraph. The fucker just pissed me off so much, I couldn't enjoy the rest of the hayride:

The financial mobsters will still continue tunneling their way under the national treasury.
Seems innocently fierce enough, doesn't it? So whats your beef, you fuckin' painiac? Ole Joe's just doin a bit of nude streakin' here, right? Harmless and playful in itself, so why bat an eye, even? Because it contains such a heavily layered, utterly wrongheaded, payload of smug ignorance, that's why!

This commonplace, worthy of, say, the late Molly Ivins, this second-nature sourced flourish, set my ticker off, because it's crap and misdirection and and and ...

Let this be a lesson to us all about our own deeply self-assured ignorance, ignorance that is too dangerous to let fly past, no matter who's displayng it.

Am I just being my usual pedantic cuff to point out that the "national treasury" is the creation of these financial mobsters? Far from having to steal it, it's already theirs, and always was. Borrowing to pay for foreign crusades is better for them than taxing themselves to pay for it. But even deeper, a national treasury is itself a socially constructed chimaera. There's nothing there to rob but paper. And if, as I reckon, ole Joe's worried about eating seed corn and the like -- well then he's just as ignorant as Jethro's goat.

If we have a huge "problem" here in America, the promisers' nightmare, it's not the treasury bonds Uncle issues in the trillions each year, but the dollar he manages to keep sky high in spite of that borrowing.

Now I suspect a statement more or less along those lines would prolly cause our Smokey Mountain oyster brain here to go, "say whaaaaaat? The dollar is a-plungin', ain't it?"

Nope, noodlehead, not against what it oughta drop with respect to all our emerging states' trading partners' currencies.

I could go on from one link in the chain of knownothing leftitude to the next, and prolly end up attacking the modern family and the climate change mantra. Sorry, gang, sorry I'm so, errr, bilious, but it can sometimes get to being a tough thing walkin' around so simply and completely enlightened in such a desperately blacked-out world.

Comments (4)

Scruggs:

Old Joe goes in and out of metaphor in his writing and will speak the language of the people he's addressing, if he feels it's needed. The robbery of the "national treasure" and the "national treasury" are easy to understand for people who only have Krugman for their radical economics.

paine:

i guess i ought to go easy on him

but he owes it to his "people"
to know whats really fuckin em
jacksonian political economy
is just swell ...if its 1833

op:

"Nope, noodlehead, not against what it oughta drop with respect to all our emerging states' trading partners' currencies"

that is the sort of sentencing
that gives me a deserved bad rep

"nope noodlehead ..." we'll keep

lets write the rest though like this

the imperial dollar still reigns over the emerging world's currencies
like king kong over his island

don't matter what it trades for against the euro or yen

so long as we keep
the rmb and rupee are at about one third their proper value

Scruggs:

Most of his readership consists of highly educated idiots, who are certain that this time, yes this time, they've found the magic frame or the magic theory (even, capital "T" Theory) that will bring back the good old days. It's sort of sickening to see them indulge their self-loathing by acknowledging his best points and then trundling off to complete their shame by consciously acting exactly the way he warned them against. I guess he might recognize the effect of the imperial dollar, but he really is trying to decretinize the highly educated idiots first.

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