The Beltway Mob

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 10 Oct 2011

Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service

The Beltway Mob has a pedigree going back at least a couple of thousand years, to the Senators of Republican Rome, who handed over the reins to a family of degenerates remotely connected with Julius Caesar; to the priests of the Spanish Inquisition who acted in the name of Jesus; and more recently to the apparatchiks round Stalin who converted the rule of the people into a fearsome charnel house of massacre and deprivation. The Beltway Mob is kept good company in the present-day by two of their staunchest allies – though they are mutual enemies – by the Pakistan military who in the name of a merciful and beneficent God exports terror abroad and imports oppression at home, and the Indian political class who though descended from humble, hardworking, and austere Gandhians are among the most rapacious whores in power today.

But though the lineage of the Beltway Mob is important, to know who they are and how they work, we are more concerned with how they have destroyed a great nation, and brought discredit to a people who constituted themselves on the principle ‘that all men are created equal.’ The on-going Siege of Wall Street shows that at last Americans realize that their nation is unequally and cruelly divided between the one percent rich and the dispossessed rest, with at least twenty percent of their undernourished children living in homes being seized by unprincipled banks, and with fathers who have lost any hope of getting jobs.

This destruction of the cherished dreams of a great people did not happen in a day. Wars and foreign conquests brought Americans windfalls of wealth, as it did the ancient Romans. It was a sin of commission to believe that any lasting good can come out of wrongs done to others, however faraway. It is the Beltway Mob that smoothed conscience and perpetrated a gigantic fantasy, like their ancestors in Rome or in Whitehall, a hundred years or so ago. First, the easily sold lie that the people they conquered were barbarians, of different names, Boadicea, Tipu Sultan, the Thibaw of Burma, or more lately Gaddafi of Libya. The second lie, that people must sacrifice their sons in short wars, that unfortunately time and again turned disastrous, to bring civilization and wellbeing to the conquered. The third lie that they themselves were selfless public servants dedicated to the public good.

Why are good people fooled time and again by such hypocritical nonsense? The first reason is that they see the people in power as one of their own, persons they have trusted when younger and not in power, persons that they have groomed and wished well as they rose. What happened to these aspirants when they entered the charmed circle at the top, to their values, to their lives? The circle of power is heady, seducing, it offers positive measurable achievements of the day, it thinks short-term, it offers unrestrained control over others in the place of companionable discourse. An entrant has to adapt or be spat out as a ludicrous failure, like President Carter was for sticking to a few old-world  notions. Democrats turn into warriors; rural priests turn into inquisitors, as they did in Old-World Spain, or as they do today with the Taliban.

For short-term benefit-snatching we must adopt any means today to achieve the ends of tomorrow, and this seduction of action over value has brought so many people to grief. At the end of his life, Lenin saw that all that had been created was only ‘the Tsarist machinery painted Red.’ Gandhi was right after all in sticking to good means to achieve good ends. The sorrows of India would have been averted if the Congress Party had dissolved itself at the morn of Independence and made itself over into Society’s Workers, as he advocated. Gandhi could not push through with that revolutionary idea, for within months he was shot dead by a man who represented the political class’s conventional thinking about the uses of power.

Could Gandhi have converted his freedom-winning party into a peoples’ leadership to win economic wellbeing for all, amity among India’s varied communities, and a value-based friendship with other countries? We do not know. Nehru, his spiritual heir, at least tried in an aristocratic way ‘to lead’ a non-aligned movement, much to the neglect of pressing issues demanding attention at home. His fame abroad masked what happened within India, the dereliction of duty, the rampant growth of corruption, and the continued colonial oppression of the poor and ethnic communities, all of which sowed dragon seed for generations to come. Much of India’s present-day difficulties can be laid at Nehru’s door, but he would never have stood by without uttering a cry of protest like India’s Prime Minister today, while independent and hence friendless Libya was being bombarded for future ransacking by NATO countries.

The man who has unleashed this latest act of banditry is fair-spoken Obama, who needs to prove that though he is black, with Hussein as a middle name, he has the heart and stomach of an American President, when it comes to war and pillage. Bill Clinton, another Democrat feared to be soft, quickly recovered his ratings by bombing a pharmaceutical firm in the Sudan. FDR was spared the need to commit a ferocious act by the second world war, which luckily for him was the right war, and it also brought in jobs for the many and profits for the few in unimaginable quantities. The charismatic Jack Kennedy of course put the small emerging country of Cuba outside the pale and started the Vietnam war, so he was also all right, but not quite right enough as his tragic end proved. Now, Obama needs to do a lot more if he is to win the election in 2012. Then, in his last term he hopes to achieve some social good, before he turns into a lame duck. So, we can already see his eight years in office divided into the first two of big talking, the next two of rightwing moves at home and wars abroad, the third two years of attempting to fulfill some promises, and the last two looking back to ensure a chair at Harvard. This is the deal the Beltway Mob offers him.

The American people can do more. They are by and large likeable, open hearted, friendly to strangers, not caring a whit about most people’s class or origins, and with strong local traditions of democracy built around their town halls. They are hardworking and innovative – as Pablo Neruda said ‘We like not your military face, but your unassuming hand covered in oil.’ It is that hand we all want to grasp. That military face is not seen at home but is worn by the Beltway Mob. Now with the Siege of Wall Street comes a chance for Americans to see what this mafia has wrought in their name, at home and abroad; here’s a chance to fall back on their own sturdy independence and shun banditry abroad; to cut their dispossessors to size and enforce reparations; to clean up Congress as they would their own town hall; to disperse the Beltway Mob to their homesteads; to make Obama the President they wanted and not just another Uncle Tom.

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 Vithal Rajan, Ph.D.[L.S.E.], worked as a mediator for the church in Belfast; as faculty at The School of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, and as Executive Director, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. He has founded several Indian NGOs, is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.

 

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 10 Oct 2011.

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