Loyalty and betrayal

I was rereading Greg Palast’s “Bailout Bonanza” this week to recall the details of how Mitt and Ann Romney made millions on the General Motors “bailout” engineered during the first Obama Administration. Palast relates how the Romneys partnered with the notorious Paul “Vulture Fund” Singer and other financier sharpies to strip and deunionize the auto company’s parts supplier, Delphi, such that it now employs 100,000 Chinese (no doubt miserably) but only 5,000 Americans. One of their hedge fund squillionaire buddies, Daniel Loeb, crowed after the deal that his newly acquired stake in the company was a great coup because it now had ”virtually no North American unionized labor” and “significantly smaller pension liabilities,” as the hedges had jettisoned those responsibilities as part of the bailout arrangements.

This story provides important perspective on the accusations of “treason” that have enlivened our current political season, most recently those aimed at Republicans for trying to become penpals with the Iranian ayatollahs. Meanwhile, to call Obama a “traitor” has been a staple of GOP and Tea Party rhetoric since he took office—a Google search of the word pops up Obama’s photo more than Kim Philby’s.

But although the GOP love-note to Khameini is an Onion-worthy moment, to be sure, betrayal of the nation isn’t really out of character for the bulk of our rulers, despite their nonstop rhetoric of patriotism. That is, if we understand love of one’s country as a refusal to turn one’s back on it for personal gain.

We presume a basic loyalty to our immediate relatives, our society and the polity that governs it as a fundamental human virtue, an expression of gratitude and loyalty to what gave us life. The Latin root for “nation” is nascere, “to be born”; we are a nation because we share a “motherland.” In short, we feel affinity with and owe something to others who were born in the same place.

So do we? Should we? Perhaps like religion, how we understand these concepts is best left to the private sphere. In any case, the desire to contribute to the wellbeing of our place of birth and citizenship is certainly a laudable sentiment, but our governing class cannot be said to harbor much of it. As Palast describes in gruesome detail in the GM/Delphi case, Republicans and Democrats both have eagerly dismantled the country’s industrial base and shipped our citizens’ jobs to the four corners of the earth. The beneficiaries, along with themselves, have been regimes that crush their own workers to generate succulent profits for the deracinated, international owning class.

So Obama, Biden and Hillary C can rend their garments all they want about the GOP’s attempted seduction of a turbaned cleric. Republicans and their indignant bubba supporters can wail and stamp their feet over Obama’s daring to occupy the White House as a resident instead of a bartender. But they all have long betrayed the interests of the people who actually inhabit the country that bore and bred them. Despite the talk about patriotism and the fetish of American flag pins, these squabbling elitists are not true nationalists. They have no loyalty to the human polity that gave them birth as they continue to sell out working people of all nationalities for their own gain.