Here's the American people. Here's the government.
Here's us. There's them.
There is no "we" in Washington.
There's only the money.
It's time for sober citizens to realize that our Federal government is not ill or diseased or broken or even gridlocked. Oh, it works just fine to accomplish what it's there for -- the servicing of its paying clients.
And whom are these clients?
They are the persons and corporations and institutions who privately pay for the reelection campaigns of the two political parties and their candidates. They also pay for an average of seven lobbyists for each and every member of the House and Senate. This is the era of billion dollar Presidents, and ten million dollar Senators, and that's all private money, vulture capital, money that seeks a high rate of return on investment.
Or else.
Politicians who don't respond with alacrity and polity to the wishes of the money don't get to keep their jobs, don't get to move on to a well paid position on Wall Street or somewhere in the defense industry or over to K Street or to a DC think tank after their time in the political limelight.
This is equally the case at all 50 of our State Legislatures as well. The money sets the agenda, and the money makes the rules.
It's time to realize that, like so many governments around the world, ours is not diseased or broken, and that no amount of fixing this or that about it is going to change its condition or its course because it is no longer a national government intent on managing the affairs of state.
It is a well paid servant of the trillions of hoarded rentier dollars now operating internationally, moving freely from nation to nation chasing cheap labor and quick profits in order to acquire ever more hoarded dollars, yen, rials, pounds, works of art by Picasso and Monet, stacks of bullion, and any other form of wealth that can be squirreled away.
All that hoarded wealth, all of that unimaginable mountain of idle money doing nothing but committing incest with itself to increase its power and reach, is now the real governing power behind every government in the world. It cannot be ignored or shut out. It permeates every policy decision, influencing always in its own favor.
The money is no conspiracy of any one ethnic group or cabal of bankers or even of particular families or people. People come and go. The money stays and grows. It is nameless, and faceless, and it runs the lives of the people who inherit and "own" it for their lifetime just as surely as it runs the life of the lowliest, hungriest bastards among us, the billion or so scratching around for some kind of nutrition on less than a dollar a day.
So they can be here tomorrow to do it again.
They live here, too, and they are the mirror image of the $32 trillion stolen and hidden in a dark vault somewhere, doing nothing meaningful for anyone, having furious sex with itself to grow by basis points and stock certificates into a larger number. The little children it spawns are just more zeroes.
The moon-high mountain of hidden, hoarded wealth is a living thing, a beast that eats people's lives, that gobbles away other species by the thousands per annum, pushes them right out of existence just to fatten itself a smidgeon more. The money is an amoral predator actively destroying climate and life support systems right around the planet without a thought toward anything but grasping and hoarding more wealth this very quarter.
If this nation-less mass of money finds it needs to change or skirt or ignore even the most fundamental laws of a particular country, or change its leadership in order to better accommodate its pursuit of more money, it's easy to arrange. Money and other pecuniary and career rewards channeled to politicians and officials always gets you a thousand percent return on your money. It's the surest thing going.
It's time to realize that no one attempting to fix, change, cure, purify or remake this government is going anywhere. That is in no wise a different folly than trying to cure rampant cancer with band-aids and aspirin. It's like getting out your crescent wrench to repair a car that is on fire. What the hell do you think you are going to fix while the flames lick at the nuts and bolts you're trying to tighten?
If this was our government we could tweak it, clean house, fix it, make it work for us. But this is not our government. This government belongs to the money.
What the hell are you going to fix in a government owned, operated and on fire with the gasoline of greenbacks from nameless sources sloshing cash everywhere in endless supply? And there's ten times that amount waiting in the wings to get what the money wants. Money from foreign governments, money "earned" by not paying living wages to the people who make the products, money "earned" by purposefully making cheap products that last a year and go straight to the landfill right on schedule, money "earned" by not wasting it on schools or bridges or roads or health care or the safety net that has kept us from seeing ragged, walking skeletons standing and begging for pennies and scraps in our city streets since the Thirties.
Leave off the aspirin and wrenching around, will ya? You're not going to fix anything by tinkering around the edges. The patient is terminal. The car is totaled.
It's time to go after the international pirates who daily buy this government, with our money.
There's only one policy that makes any sense at this juncture: Take It Back.
Take It Back and thereafter forbid any human being anywhere on our planet from having and hoarding more than he or she needs to live in complete health and outlandish comfort for all of their days. Name an outlandish amount, say, a million a year in walking around money. That should be more than enough. Everything above that goes back into circulation so that every human has a decent chance to live their potential, and the millions of species surrounding us have a decent chance to live as well. Take It Back so we have a chance to clean up the dangerous mess we've made of the only world our species has.
Take It Back and thereafter forbid that anyone in any corporation take home more than 25 times what the lowest paid employee takes home. Henry Ford knew that much. You have to pay your employees if you hope to sell your products.
There is more than enough wealth in this world to see that nobody goes through their days sick, hungry, or lacking for education if we just stop letting pirates steal and hoard the money, and use the money against us all.
If huge capital projects need funding, like a skyscraper or a moon colony, let the many who support the project provide the capital and share the profits. There is no logical or ethical reason that the money for it should all belong to one man or one bank or one corporation. There is no logical or moral excuse for Donald Trump to be able to purchase the moon some day, or to own the rights to all the water and oxygen on the planet.
That would be insane.
Yet that is exactly the course we are sailing upon as long as we let international, lawless, nation-less pirates continue to steal the wealth of the world, hide it, and then use it to steal even more. That is an an insane, utterly senseless activity. If we witnessed a troop of baboons letting 1% of the troop hoard all the food while the other 99% starved we would call them a suicidal species not long for this world. Even wild wolves behave better than that.
But here we are the masters of this planet, captains of our own fate, doing exactly that. We let a very few of us hoard our food, our clean water, our knowledge, our healthcare and medicine all so they can be richer than super rich. We let them hoard and profit from hoarding everything of value to humankind. If something has value at all it gets hoarded and held back so that a very, very few can feel powerful. Until they die. Then their children get their turn to be living royalty for four-score and whatever.
It's time for all of us, everywhere, to shout out loud for the one and only policy that will pull us out of this cesspool of blind greed and stupidity: "Take It Back!"
Let the people living under diseased and broken governments everywhere stand up and speak the same truth to the super rich, to the hoarders: "That's Our Wealth, Not Yours!"
Pull the money out of the vaults and put it toward human potential everywhere it's needed. Every type of coin and currency hiding in the hands of the very, very few around the world should be found and equitably returned to its owners, the 6.9 billion people of this planet.
No one will be impoverished by losing their sixty-thousand-million and having to get by on only a million a year. Malaria will still get eradicated, new medicines will still be discovered, we will still build moon colonies and go to Mars and then the stars. We'll even scrub the CO2 out of our atmosphere and switch completely to cleaner energy sources. Not because it will profit a very few people handsomely, but because these things need doing by and for everyone who lives here.
It does not require the hoarding of capital in a very few hands to do any of these things, and to them well. Quite the opposite -- they will never happen if wealth remains in a very few hands.
We'll do them with our government. Not this government, but our government.
Take It Back and individual wealth, power and influence in future generations will be measured by 'how much do you contribute to our living planet and the many species living here?"
Not by "how high is your stack of bullion, beans, and bullets?"