Dear Rebels in Libya,

Many of us–millions of us–here in the United States see and feel your pain. We understand that you are only fighting for freedom and dignity, and we hear your urgent calls for help. We’d like to see your crazy, murderous dictator taken out of power, neutralized somehow. It’s only reasonable that the international community of rich and powerful nations take some kind of action to stem the violence being inflicted by a crazy man whom everybody everywhere openly describes as crazy, delusional, insane, mad. But alas, apparently, politics is complicated. And nothing happens. Your blood continues to flow.

As I said, millions of Americans stand with you and would like our nation to stand with you. But unfortunately for you and us, we are currently undergoing our own conservative oligarchic coup as we speak. The American Republican Party, which is the U.S. political arm of the global transnational oligarchy, has seized power in D.C.–by electoral “mandate,” as they love to trumpet–and are currently pursuing a radical evisceration of our public sector:

  1. The EPA unfunded and denuded of regulatory powers. The winners: dirty energy producers, the oil and gas industry, chemical polluters and hazardous industries of every sort. The losers: all Americans, who will suffer increased health hazards like poisoned ground water and worse workplace conditions, the environment, other species, public lands, etc.
  2. Defunding our Public Broadcasting, which disposes of such radical threats to democracy as child education programming.
  3. Slashing spending on education and and other investments in the young.
  4. Shredding the principles of Net Neutrality in favor of big telecom companies who would like to monetize the information superhighway–and thereby ghettoize all non-commercialized internet activities.

Those are just a few off the top of my head. And at the level of the States, the right-wing business revolution is proceeding at a precipitous pace. Several states, 29 of which are now in control of Republicans, have declared fiscal “emergencies” and under this pretext are consolidating their power by all sorts of sleazy and unconstitutional maneuvers. Wisconsin is the tip of the iceberg. In Michigan–which has become in some parts a post-post-industrial apocalypse anyhow–the state now plans to engineer the local political landscape by executive fiat, through “appointed emergency managers” who will have the power–I’m not sure where they derive this power, exactly–to dissolve city governments, terminate collective bargaining agreements, etc. It’s amazing what one can get away with in an “emergency.”

You get the picture. The point and the upshot is that at precisely the moment you all in the Arab world have had enough and are standing up, and even taking up arms against, your oppressors, we here in the United States are complacently accepting the dictatorial regimes of a Wall Street and Big Oil oligarchy. There is very little else that anybody with any sense could conclude.

What seems to have happened is this: The absolute impunity with which the money shell-game swindlers on Wall Street and in investment firms around the world got away with their shock and awe campaigns that brought down the global economy has now emboldened them to press their advantage and consolidate their gains. The rearguard at the SEC and Federal Reserve are fending off any attempts at accountability for, first, the housing-mortgage meltdown and, second, the massive-scale bankruptcy fraud-industry, and they are holding steady. The Obama Administration is completely captured by Wall Street and has owned the bailout despite not authoring it. The U.S. monetary system is absolutely captured by the Too-Big-To-Fail Bank/Investment Firms. At this stage any real accountability might just threaten the very legitimacy of the United States Government.

So unfortunately we are suffering the same evil but opaque forces as you are, as we all together watch the “international community” do nothing to stop the bleeding in Libya. We are forced to the unhappy speculation that perhaps those in power, those who can and do “pull strings,” whose word and will carries weight, in international affairs, are more satisfied with violence and chaos than with democracy and stability in Libya. At least in the short term? Perhaps it serves as a convenient and distracting media cover for right-wing gains in the “world’s only superpower”? Make the world that much safer for untrammeled capitalist extractionism.

But such paranoid speculations aside, one thing is clear. The “international community” is not really interested in flesh and blood Libyans, any more than in flesh and blood Americans. What they covet is your oil. Rapprochement with your crazy, delusional dictator in the last few years has meant for the most part gaining safe and easier access to Libyan oil fields for international producers and for foreign export and consumption.  When the oil fields start to burn, then we can expect people to get serious about going in, intervening, making Libya “safe for democracy.” Just like they are busy dismantling democracy in the U.S. to make it safer for what they call “democracy,” but which really is unfettered kleptocracy by offshore expatriated plutocrats.

I wish we could help you, I really do. But no amount of goodwill from the American street will change the opaque machinations of those in power. And we are suffering from their malevolent schemes as much as you are. Let’s hope, god willing, that somehow they go too far and bring down the house on their own heads….

Your American comrade in spirit–

MWF