This blog was originally posted on brainspank.org 8/3/2010
Greed permeates everything. It informs our day to day decisions, who we vote for, whether we know it or not, and even how we see ourselves. It has infected our bathroom mirrors. Greed is envy. It is lust. It is a cancer, insidious and consuming like the very worst drug ever. Eventually, everything collapses under the weight of greed. As a country, as a people, as a species, we’ve never been more threatened by greed than we are now. Right now. Yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Right now.
More and more and more the weight of greed defines us. It is heavy on our society, our politics and our religion. Our peace and our war. Our self image and therefore self confidence. Our peace of mind. Although greed has pushed our faces inward with chronic narcissism, so many of us are fat and very ugly. Yet we are implacable. Inexorable. Insatiable. What matters is not what we do have, what we care about almost exclusively, is what we don’t have yet.
We are sick fucks.
We are not a Democracy. We are not a Republic. We are a plutocracy that flirts ,albeit disingenuously, with theocracy because they have money and power. The defining characteristic of a plutocrat is of course, greed. The religious zealots are power brokers because they are adept at whipping the stupid and afraid into a frenzy profound enough to compel them to vote against their bests interests and donate to those that would forsake them in a heartbeat for more money and power, as they inevitably do. Over and over.
Christianity in America endeavors to make you ignore the theory of evolution. Science keeps coming up with million year old skulls. And clavicles. Contemporary Christianity does not even want such an empirically fastidious discipline to be taught in our schools. Instead, it implores you to view the existence of fossils and the carbon dating thereof as some sort of test of your faith. It really wants you to believe some woman bit an apple a few thousand years ago and a serpent emerged and well, we may all be fucked because of it, unless we submit to bigotry, homophobia and narrow minded bullshit dogma.
Santa Claus for adults.
For what it’s worth, the greedy could not give less of a mad fuck about any of it. They chuckle and sneer at the ease of manipulating the zealots while the zealots manipulate their own. Because all of them are really fucking stupid.
Got off on a tangent there. Let me brush the crumbs from my frilly liberal blouse. Oops! Looks like I spilled some champagne and caviar on it too. Need to have the suspension checked on the limo.
Still, greed was the catalyst and now enjoys the momentum. We serve at it’s pleasure and succumb to it without knowing it. We are are consistently beseeched to rail against unfair taxation without bothering to realize that under the Obama administration, most of us are being asked for far less than we have been in nearly four decades. And this same administration seeks to restore tax rates to the wealthiest two percent that were disastrously reduced on the notion that they would create jobs. Guess what? No jobs and another $trillion added to the deficit.
The pisser is the fight to restore tax rates to the richest, and maintain or even cut them further to the middle class and small businesses may already be lost. Republicans are staking their campaigns on defeating it, despite the overwhelming empirical evidence that it will add $3 trillion to the deficit and without a doubt have a broad and devastatingly deleterious effect on the economy in general.
Yet they’ve successfully sold the lie that somehow such counterintuitive, "voodoo", "trickle down", economic policy will somehow benefit the average American. That the administration seeks to only let the cuts on the wealthiest expire, and indeed to extend them to anyone and everyone making less than a $quarter million a year is another absolute fact that Republicans are actively, knowingly, lying about every day. Just like "Death Panels" and the government "takeover" of the banks or the auto industry. Keep the government out of my health care but don’t you dare touch my Medicare. Lies, Goddamn despicable lies and they know it. Despite the glaringly irrefutable proof of the very recent past, wherein we were led through the gates of hell, to shake hands with he of the cloven hooves and bifurcated tail, and in exchange for our souls, we got fucked.
Greed.
People choose to believe it didn’t happen that way, because they really want just a little more money.
Good show. Greed 1, Americans 0.
Why would they do such a thing? Greed. Not just for money. Power. Greed and power are no less incestuous and licentious than greed and money. Greed begets them both and they return to suckle at the tit of it in a lascivious symbiotic spectacle. A greasy orgy of lucre and lies. Clicking and sucking and slurping and smelling of rotting fruit.
Every single thing Sarah Palin does is motivated by greed. You don’t quit halfway through being governor of an American state, immediately release a book and go on an incredibly lucrative speaking tour unless your impetus is the filthy lucre.
Because of unmitigated greed, many of us believe that one of the richest corporations in the history of humankind has been demonized and unfairly persecuted for recklessly destroying an as yet untold amount of our environment, including ecologically irreplaceable wetlands, an entire regional economy and a historied way of life for generations. The media has backed off. America has shifted her attentions. But if you think 60,000 barrels (2.6 million gallons) a day for over three months is just gonna disappear, you’re an idiot. You think this whole clusterfuck is even close to resolved, you’re just dumb. So surface oil slicks are hard to come by. Dispersants just as toxic as the Texas Tea itself distributed in gallons by the million. Do the math, that much oil went somewhere.
Decades, this pollution will rear it’s ugly head for decades. Cancer rates will spike. Entire populations of sea creatures will go extinct. This gift will keep on giving because of reckless, unchecked greed.
This ain’t over because of, you know, greed. We subsidize the industry you know. Some $35 billion a year. About the same amount Republicans refused to pony up week after week for the unemployed. How sick is that? We subsidize the richest business ever, every year for the same money that would allow our own victims of greed to eat. Whenever the Democrats try to end that "entitlement", the Republicans piss, moan and then filibuster.
It’s fucking ridiculous and they’re about to do it all again.
Illegal immigration exists and has become the problem it is because of greed. If there were no demand, there would be no supply. They persist in demonizing the undocumented worker, falsely inflating the crime statistics, which have been falling for a handful of years. Portraying all of them as violent drug dealers. Drugs are another ugly American story. Fomenting the rhetoric that the dirty Mexicans are stealing our jobs. Just this weekend Senator Jon Kyl lied about it all on national television. Claiming that Phoenix was the kidnapping capital of the world second only to Mexico City. McCain has lied about it over and over as does the Governor, Brewer and the sheriff of the only county where crime is up, Arpaio. The aggregate is a HUGE filthy lie. They want immigration reform because they want to control the borders. Not to keep them from coming in but to keep the ones they have and be able to get more of the same kind. What they really want is to better screen and control their pool of slave labor.
Greed.
Commercials and infomercials devoted to making me bigger and hornier and more of a stud. Over a billion capsules sold. With all due respect. That’s greed merely because it’s bullshit. How do they assume I need that? Free lunches everywhere, lose fifty pounds without ever getting out of bed or off the toilet I could literally make $70 grand next month in real estate if I just sign up for this seminar. Them that buy in are just as guilty of greed because they’re looking for something for nothing with an even cruder zeal.
Greed prevents us from acting on global warming and therefore a chance to save our planet.
Greed keeps us from actually helping impoverished countries plagued with disease and famine because they have resources we covet and empowering them in any way would just make it harder to keep raping them.
Greed stood in the way of efficacious health care reform.
Greed stood in the way of meaningful financial reform.
Greed is why we are beholding to and and at the utter mercy of, big energy, big pharma, big corporations, the military industrial complex, banks, credit card companies and even our own government .......
Avarice is an evil lonely bitch, but not for lack of company.
Greed kills.
I think I’m done here.
Drinks for my friends.