The Tapeworm Economy

Sunday, October 21, 2007
The Tapeworm Economy
Pottersville

"I feel that utter truth is essential and to get that truth may take a lot of searching and long hours." - American photographer Margaret Bourke-White on her work.

Quick econobiology quiz: What's the difference between a tapeworm and rapacious corporate CEOs and our current government?

The tapeworm is easier to excise.

Back in the spring of 2003, Catherine Austin Fitts wrote a two part (and an undeservedly ignored) landmark article, The American Tapeworm (a link to part two is at the bottom of the first installment.). It had been given some decent play in various alternative news sites but had been completely ignored by the mainstream media and four and a half years ago the progressive blogosphere, still forming and gathering steam, was probably largely unaware of it, too.

If you've never heard of or read it before, I urge you to do so. Never mind the fact that this woman is the head of Solaris, an investment advisory firm that offers alternative, non-rapacious investment strategies or that she's a former Wall Street insider and Bush 41 HUD official. What this woman has to say about the triumph of the tapeworm in our global economy will answer at least some of your questions regarding how things could have turned out so badly without any of us being aware of it.

And when I'd read it today, I was hit with something like an epiphany: That the war in Iraq, this whole, abstract, formless war on terror, is not the biggest problem facing us today, as many of us persist in believing. This war that's already cost us well over half a trillion dollars is only symptomatic of a larger problem and that the ongoing, neverending war in Iraq was catalyzed by a parasitic global apparatus already firmly lodged in the guts of national economic infrastructures.

Yes, I'm saying it: Iraq and the looming war on Iran, which Bush seems to be saving as a coup de grace, is a mere consequence, a mere symptom, of the Tapeworm Economy that Austin Fitts helps illuminate. That may not come as a surprise to anyone who views the war in Iraq as a mere convenient instrument to further bloat private industries such as Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, the Carlyle Group and especially Blackwater USA. But the problem and the motives behind it are far more massive and insidious than even the most cynical of us had ever dared believed.

This Margaret Bourke-White photograph, obviously taken during the Great Depression, is, if anything, even more relevant now than it was when it was snapped roughly seventy years ago. As when she collaborated with Tobacco Road author Erskine Caldwell in a legendary cross-country trip across America in 1935-37 building material for an unjustly forgotten and neglected American classic, You Have Seen Their Faces, this single photograph is still emblematic today of not just the disparity between black and white America but also Richistan and poorer America, period.

It's Us vs Them and each side knows exactly which side they stand on.

The billboard behind those African Americans, with its quasi Communist-era energy and style, almost seems to mock them by disingenuously offering to them hope that they, too, can buy a Buick Roadster and take part in the Great American way of life just like white people while they're standing on line waiting for a temporary job or a loaf of bread.

But this tapeworm economy is no longer a racial issue any more than it's a political issue. It's no longer about white against black, conservative against liberal or Republican against Democrat. The lines have been drawn separating much more abstract factions than mere racial or political ones.

The book, for anyone who's read it, starts out with Caldwell giving us a brief history of the rise and fall of the textile plantations in the Deep South. The plantation owners, after eroding and destroying the rich soil of the Mississippi Delta, discovered that the cotton business was by then merely a means to make a living instead if a fortune. They responded by moving to the cities with their ill-gotten gains and living off their fortunes, leaving the poor sharecroppers behind holding the bag.

This is in itself a microcosm of the kind of scorched earth mentality that motivates the sociopaths who run national and multinational corporations. It's the kind of mentality that's running our government that in turn is run by petroleum cartels, pharmaceutical and health care giants and defense contractors and other war-profiteers such as Blackwater USA, in short, the military industrial complex of which a departing Eisenhower had warned us. This tapeworm mentality explains the crashing housing market that's making, as Paul Krugman pointed out last August, is making quasi-banking institutions close its doors while the Federal Reserve is coming to the rescue of hedge fund managers while leaving homeowners, who were cheerfully exhorted less than two years ago to assume debt with at minimal risk, to twist in the wind.

And this parasitic tapeworm mentality is what makes those with the bloodiest hands angrily wheel around and snarl that there is no such thing as class warfare when obvious, undeniable and unjustified economic disparities are brought up.

The only way to help reverse this trend and to beat the system is to follow the example of the woman who helped expose economic disparity, racism and man's inhumanity to man even if she had to descend into a mine shaft or walk into Buchenwald's concentration camp to do so.

You have seen their faces. And the one looking at you from your cracked mirror is one of them. So what are you doing about it?