The Permanent Costume Ball

of War, Politics and Economic Manipulation

copyleft 2006

Halloween is a backwards holiday. Once a year, we dress up as monsters and ghouls in parody of how we behave all the rest of the year.

Halloween is a celebration of a protection racket, an extortion threat reduced to the level of a child's game. The original plea for a “treat” carries an implicit threat of retaliation if no sweets are put in the bag. “Trick or treat!” cry the kids who want candy in return for not toilet-papering your car or egging your house. “Trick or Treat!” shout the President, the Congress, the Pentagon and Wall Street as they hold out their bags to extort the world's wealth, its resources, your labor, your children, your futures and your lives. “Trick or Treat!” say the plutocrats, the neocons and neoliberals; “Trick or Treat, or our armies will blow up your houses, bomb you back to the Stone Ages; we'll throw you in prison, we'll beat you, torture you, rape you, shove 'democracy' down your throats.” “Trick or Treat!” scream ambassadors, generals, businessmen and god-mongers; “Trick or Treat! Trick or Treat! Trick or Treat!”

And the majority of us, scared witless, cowed, terrified, pay the extortion, the price of the protection racket, to keep our jobs, to preserve our shrinking health care, to preserve the illusion of retirement benefits, to fill our cars with gas.

Masks and fear-mongering have been part of civilization since humankind learned how to talk and how to throw a stone. The ability to mask one's intentions and to threaten another person are precisely what permits civilization to arise. We are told that we now live in the most civilized of times; and, therefore, these are also the most deceptive, the most masked, the most threatening of times. We inhabit a kabuki theater of threats and counter-threats, of tricks and treats and extortion and retaliation.

Close on the heels of Halloween comes Election Day: the true day of harlequins and masquerades. For whom can I vote? I think to myself as I look at the voter pamphlets: the Vampires who urged us on to War or the Werewolves of the 'opposition' who also voted for it? Is it a “choice” to have to choose between a Monster whose lies killed more than 650,000 and a Ghoul who criticizes the Monster's 'incompetence' in carrying out the killing? Why are there only two Costumed Parties I can go to in America when in other countries they have three and four and five and six?

In Washington State, the television media excluded the peace candidate for U.S. Senate, Aaron Dixon, from publicly debating the Republican and Democratic candidates because Mr. Dixon, a former Black Panther now representing the Green Party, has not raised the million dollar campaign pot deemed necessary by the dominant parties to appear on the same platform with the “mainstream” candidates. When Mr. Dixon showed up at the televised “debate” asking to be allowed to participate, he was arrested. This masquerade is what passes for “free elections”.

Mark Foley, the Capitol's outcast du jour due to his email sexual predation, stripped the mask from the Republican morality play. However, as soon as the elections are over, both parties will stop kicking Foley's dead political body. The pages who came to Washington came to learn what power is all about. Now they know. Where there is power, there is abuse of power, and many are the politicians on both sides of the aisle who indulge their fancies. It is their 'reward' for being good legislative lackeys. Their unrestrained behavior also creates welcome 'file material' by which today's J. Edgar Hoover equivalents can blackmail and control those who might think to place public interests ahead of private ones.

On the surface of America, there is the mask of obedience to the law. Beneath the mask is the flagrant and repeated violation of law. The Congress, both halves of the dominant political party participating, passed legislation that permits torture and perpetual imprisonment without charge, that vitiates the civil and constitutional rights of foreigners and citizens alike; and the Zombie-in-Chief, masquerading as a champion of Freedom and Life and Peace, applauds the Republic's suicide.

The press are fascinated by Hewlett-Packard's misdeeds in snooping on private communications by the company's Board of Directors. But while the press express outrage at the use of “pretexting” to spy on America's boardroom elite, where is the outrage at the telecom giants, the NSA and the Internet backbone companies for eavesdropping on your communications and mine? The masked message is that there are two standards of privacy in America: the lives and communications of the feudal class are private; the lives and communications of everyone else are subject to surveillance.

Meanwhile, the owners of the media have enthusiastically joined the Administration's costume campaign to portray the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea as a rogue nuclear threat to world peace. Never mind that the DPRK has never invaded any foreign country, as the United States has repeatedly done. Never mind that North Korea has been as “stable” as many of the hereditary dictatorships that the United States props up. Never mind that, as proved by the case of Iraq, perhaps the only way that a small nation can fend off the United States is if it is truly armed with weapons of mass destruction. Never mind that other countries that have not signed on to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, like Israel, Pakistan and India, have also developed nuclear weapons.

Wearing its Halloween mask, the American government expresses its solicitude for an Iraq descending into sectarian civil war. Beneath the mask, however, America secretly foments the violence. It is Plan B: if we cannot own Iraq's oil reserves outright by installing our puppet regime, then we will Balkanize it, tear it to pieces, render it like we rendered Yugoslavia, into a patchwork of tiny, dependent states whose resources can be sucked out by western vampires.

But while America makes war on Iraq (and soon on Iran on Syria on Cuba and on Venezuela) at home, just in time for Halloween and the Elections, the Economy suddenly looks downright perky! Right on schedule, the oil oligarchs – the friends and facilitators of the current administration – have dramatically lowered gasoline prices. The administrators of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, who released fuel to dampen the gasoline price run-ups after Hurricane Katrina, have announced that the SPR will refrain from buying any replacement stocks of oil – low prices notwithstanding – until well after the November elections. This lowers the cost (just temporarily, of course) of filling up Joe Voter's SUV and is intended to stimulate inventory-clearing sales of Detroit's gas hogs. Everyone is happy and, in theory, they vote for the status quo, for their economic self-interest and for their pocket books.

For its part, the Federal Reserve Bank has unleashed a torrent of easy money into the banking system, thereby creating a massive build-up in the now totally invisible M3 (the total amount of money in circulation in the economy). This influx of cheap money, in turn, compensates for the reality check in the plummeting housing market, and has been used to inflate yet one more gigantic stock market bubble. The Dow Industrial Index, an easily manipulable measure of only a small basket of the biggest companies (swapped in and out over time to ensure the index's artificial exuberance), shows all the signs of Botoxed youth and good health. If you look closely, however, the hourly charts show sudden mid-afternoon injections of money whenever the graph line begins to plummet downward. The illusion is that of a stock market and an economy that defy gravity. But it is only an illusion. A magician's sleight of hand. A financial masquerade party.

By the calendar, it is Halloween. By the measure of history, it is a permanent costume ball of war, politics and economic manipulation.

Happy Halloween, America. Trick or treat!