You are slowly losing your freedoms. And the beauty part is that you are doing it to yourself. The *big* freedoms, those you can see: the freedom to marry, to control your own body, the political freedoms. Those, they dangle before you, almost as a distraction: see, look, *they* are taking away your freedoms.
But the *real* freedoms, the freedom to live a life outside of work, to work an 8 hour day, a 5 day week, for 20 years then retire with economic stability, those are already gone. The ability to start working at 18 and have two government pensions and retire at 60, you can look at that as a fleeting memory even as the postal system dies -- cuz that was the easist route: military to post office. Economic security for the working class has been the billionaires' target since the 70s.
Remrmber the 70s? Those were days when the government *had to* offer these great benefits because they were competing with private industry and they couldn't afford to compete on the wages and benefits... where did those great jobs go? At Honeywell and US Steel and Chrysler where one person could support a family and have a house and a car and send the kids to summer camp and a road trip to the Grand Canyon? *And* a pension? To travel in their Golden Years.
Remember that?
Remember those Halcyon Days? The days that Donald Trump is harkening back to with his lies of Making America Great Again? But they are lies. And his lies are aimed at taking MORE money from the 99% and giving it to the 1%.
Just like last time. But on steroids.
He is lying. Of course he is.
But those DAYS they were real. Like when America's obesity rate was in the single digits. When did we get fat?
Hint: they did THAT on purpose too, with that fucking food pyramid telling us to eat 6-11 helpings of grain a day. But we did it to ourselves. Of course we did.
Like we made ourselves poor.
But the corporations which benefit daily from our bricking ourselves into a lifetime of poverty and wage slavery, those same corporations benefit from our shortening lifespans and our booming debt.
It is a sickness. And we contribute to our own misery by strengthening the billionaire class.
If we have a care at surviving this century -- really this decade -- we need to get serious about our political freedom, and we have to look at debt as the chain around our necks that it is.
And we need to weaken the billionaires, to make them, at the very least, live in the same reality as the rest of us.
And they will fight that to the death. But they don't have to worry. Because they are convinced that we wont awaken from our stupor in November.
And, after that, if they're right, it wont matter any more.
This is the end game they have been fighting for all along.
But they cant win without us being fat, exhausted, overworked, and blind to the fact that their world domination starts in our kitchens and in our bedrooms. Or, at the least, that we are willing to give them control of both.
