Middle Class values are the ones the vast majority of Americans hold to: honesty, hard work for reasonable value, generosity toward those who have fallen on hard times, and live and let live. Many add the virtues of worship, or at least some variety of spirituality to their lives. They feel as though it’s only right that they pay some sort of – reasonable – rent on whatever piece of the planet they happen to be occupying, ideally with work they love, and by helping others get back on their feet. People need to feel useful and even needed.
The rich, however, feel that THEY should be the ones collecting the rent – and anything else they can get their hands on, whoever it really belongs to. If they can steal it by guile or take it by force, it obviously belongs to them. It’s a pickpocket’s ethic elevated to people who run megacorporations, or even countries.
The Monsters Have Been Loosed!
As Sir Winston Churchill and others have said plainly, the rich, who have gained a vastly disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth at the expense of those they took it from by force or trickery, who are also those they keep it from by trickery and fear – and force – only desire to enjoy what they have without interference by those workers who actually created that wealth. They NEED the poor, both for someone to look down on as their ‘natural inferiors’, and as a resource for continuing to gain wealth, as part of the game they play is trying to gain more than the other rich people have. That these gains leave the game counters called "ordinary people" (saying outright that the rich are therefore NOT ordinary, and are deserving of this wealth) ever poorer, always working harder for less and not understanding why it works that way.
Middle Class values are the ones the vast majority of Americans hold to: honesty, hard work for reasonable value, generosity toward those who have fallen on hard times, and live and let live. Many add the virtues of worship, or at least some variety of spirituality to their lives. They feel as though it’s only right that they pay some sort of – reasonable – rent on whatever piece of the planet they happen to be occupying, ideally with work they love, and by helping others get back on their feet. People need to feel useful and even needed.
The rich, however, feel that THEY should be the ones collecting the rent – and anything else they can get their hands on, whoever it really belongs to. If they can steal it by guile or take it by force, it obviously belongs to them. It’s a pickpocket’s ethic elevated to people who run megacorporations, or even countries. If poor people starve or workers end up homeless, well, that’s been happening in the world from the beginning. Better that they get theirs (which includes everyone else’s) while they can. Those in the arms business all use the same old tired excuse too: "If I don’t sell them weapons, someone else will, and then THEY’LL have the money and I won’t." As for the innocents who die, there so MANY damned innocents, some are bound to die, weapons, war, or whatever. If they didn’t breed like vermin, there wouldn’t so much of a problem (nevermind that it’s the rich and powerful who often see to it that contraception is as unavailable as education and medical treatment).
Almost ALL wars – certainly those in American history – have been fought over wealth desired by the wealthy of two or more countries. They have, over the centuries, gotten very good at false-flag operations and other lies to inflame the fear and anger (in that precise order) of the citizens who will have to go fight and die for their profits, and the Iraq War is a prime example, much more out in the open than any before it that I can find examples of. Every single excuse given by the Bush Administration has been shown to be a lie designed to manipulate the people. Still, half of us STILL believe them.
The wealthy in Congress, and those who want to be, of both parties, are busily trying hard to look as though the two parties stand for different things, all the while quietly moving another war forward, if in no other way, by refusing to stand in the way. Investigator after investigator is fired, to be replaced by demagogues on the side of the criminals; general after general who knows this is not right is forced to retire. Scientists who know the facts are other than those presented are silenced, destroyed professionally, gotten rid of. The mainstream Media (MSM) are now mostly owned by more fanatics on the side of the criminals in charge of the country, and they spout government propaganda, attack dissenters no matter the proof they offer, or simply blacklist stories and information that might cause We the People to object if we actually learned the facts. Instead, they feed us gossip, sensationalism, cotton-candy entertainment, much of it loaded with propaganda.
We are still listening to newscasters spouting about how "Our courageous military is over there FIGHTING FOR OUR FREEDOMS!", when those of us who listen, who think and consider things know damned well they’re over there for U.S. hegemony and Halliburton profits. They talk about "the Worldwide Terrorist Network", when we ourselves, our own beloved, hypocritical country, WE are the single greatest source of terror and Terrorism on earth. With this administration, we don’t even need to concern ourselves with a few radical pseudo-Islamists with some bombs; one could wish that was our greatest concern! No, this government is in the process of criminalizing so many types of normal, harmless human behavior, of removing any upward mobility there once was here, of ignoring vital infrastructure while removing the means to repair and update it if we ever actually decide to, of giving the commons over to destructive industry without charge or penalty – or taxes – and taxing those who can’t afford to pay taxes and survive, we trying to fight too many battles on too many fronts right here at home. The Social Contract is as shredded as the Constitution the Liar in Chief swore to protect even as he was in the process of using for toilet paper. If they can change the country to a dog-eat-dog, every man for himself and the Devil take the hindmost hellhole, they can get on with business while we’re busy with what is, by comparison, the small shit. And to top it off, they are doing their damnedest to hand the civilian portion of the country along with much of the laws to violently fanatic pseudo-Christian End-Timers who are desperate to cause the End of the World so they can escape death and go to heaven whole, healthy and alive. They will do pretty much anything to achieve it, too.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are so busy trying to make a living that is becoming increasingly difficult, to pay bills that get higher and higher for less service, and to find just a little time for ourselves in which we can relax and not think about it, that we do not take the time to investigate why the country is richer than it has ever been, individuals are wealthier than any ever in world history, but there are no jobs, no benefits, no help. Two people with degrees working themselves into an early grave can barely afford to raise a child or two, and even then, a single catastrophic illness can render them homeless.
Try to explain it all to them, and you are immediately labeled a "tinfoil-hat wearing, liberal nutcase". Evidence doesn’t matter. Even pointing out how dissent and protest were once rights and not signs of traitorous intent, how the Constitution NEVER intended this to be a Christian country, and in fact the Founders worked hard to keep church and state separate, even showing them – if they’ll actually pay attention – that we have not only the right, but the OBLIGATION to abolish a government not responsive to, or even destructive of the People, and you become a dangerous anarchist who probably ought to be locked up.
Education in this country has been very successfully undermined, especially regarding the rights and obligations of citizens. Logic hasn’t fared well under this regime. Show people how every law the Bush administration has passed actually does precisely the opposite of what it was putatively passed to do, and they say, "Oh, well, they obviously didn’t intend that to happen!"
But they DID intend that to happen, and they do. Close to two and a half million citizens are in jail, most for non-violent, non-crimes that should not have been crimes. Another seven million or so are on probation or otherwise entangled in the legal system. There is no justice for anyone but the rich, and for them, justice is getting off scot-free. We have an unknown number of others imprisoned, including children, essentially simply for existing and being available to raise the bottom line of the privatized prison industry; some, again including children, have been and are being tortured. The rest of us are under a surveillance so close, the old USSR would have done anything for such a capability; people make excuses for it. The War on Terror is a lie and an excuse; the War on Drugs is too. It’s all really the War on Everything and Everyone they can get away with. We have no rights the government can’t decide to take away from us. And they can take them at any time, because they’re no longer rights, they’re privileges – for now. Until the last generation that remembers that they WERE rights, and are SUPPOSED to be rights is dead and gone. Then they will be too. And then the long night of the next Dark Ages will begin, just in time to coincide with a mass extinction event that will include the majority of the human race. If enough of us survive, they will have to start the long, hard climb back into knowledge and civilization all over again, all of the last two thousand years WASTED. All that suffering for nothing.
Just so some rich bastards can eat the last few fish (because they’re so expensive), and live in an air-conditioned mansion, spending resources for their comfort and to maintain their flab that would keep tens of thousands of the people outside the walls alive and healthy. And most of those rich bastards won’t even realize that they’re not really the ones in charge: it’s the corporations! Artificial entities with monstrous resources and no mind, really; just the instinct to expand infinitely, to grow no matter what it takes. And they’ll grow until, like any other disease, the host dies, unless something or someone can destroy them first. The rich will stick with them, though, because they are parasites themselves – that’s the ONLY way a single individual can end up owning the fruits of the labor of three hundred-thousand other people!
Are you angry enough to pay attention YET?
Then consider that last couple of statements, please. If a CEO doesn’t do what s/he was hired to do, s/he gets fired and another becomes CEO, until someone gets hired who will do whatever it takes – take all the water from an area and destroy a village, destroy a town, sell poison medicine to 28,000 people who then die, chop down an entire forest that could have supplied wood and other things for centuries, kill all the animals, drive them ALL into extinction – WHATEVER IT TAKES for maximum profits RIGHT NOW. Remember, there’s no real brain there. Just The Blob, Inc., growing until something stops it. The people who get to be RICH because of it simply find it easier to believe that they will survive, even if most of the rest of the race dies. They even think they’ll survive in luxury. If they consider it at all. Most don’t – there have been rich people and corporations for a long, long time and it’s never happened yet, has it? Why should it now? Why even think about it? SOMEbody is going to get rich this way, so it might as well be them.
The monsters are loose, and they’re after profit! They can take your job, your home, your health, even your body and make a profit from it, and they will. The rest of you can just die, since you’re so stupid you actually believe in the Golden Rule, conservation and all that. They don’t intend to leave anything to conserve. As for a single country, well, America wouldn’t be the first country they sucked dry and abandoned. And they WILL abandon the US, just as soon as they own everything worth anything and can enforce it. All they really need for that is to own the government, the military and the prisons, and they’re almost there now.
Almost there.
Now.
Ian MacLeod
March 5th, 2007
Oregon