When we marched against the Iraq war back in Ought Two and Three, that did about as much good as going to the movies. When we voted in 2000, and 2002, and 2004, that also did about as much good as going to the movies.
Because the fix is in, including fixing the mainstream media to not report on the voting machines’ obtuse relationship to reality and to election polling. When every voting discrepancy, everywhere in the nation, goes to the GOP’s advantage — that’s not a story??
“At Fux News, Ignorance Is Job One.”
Whatever the outcome at the hustings this November, it won’t be an accurate count of the voters’ stated wishes. A voter’s choice isn’t sacred, it is a thing that is no longer actually desired or required; in fact, it is getting to be a damned nuisance.
A vote is something unpleasant left on the sidewalk, it is something that needs cleaning up. If the common people don’t have the sense to vote how they’re supposed to, well then people who know how things work these days will just have to pick up after the idiots.
And maybe post some signs so they don’t do it again.
And how do things work these days?
Well, among the six billion persons walking around on this blue planet, a vanishingly small percentage — about one percent — own and operate the whole place because they have gotten a hold of most of the capital, and they accrue more capital all the time.
For example, in America, with point three billion people, a mere 14,000 families own over 51% of the cash, stock, and assets of the nation. A mere 5% of the US population owns 85% of what’s ownable from sea to shining sea.
You can be damned sure that our government, at every level, is highly sensitive to the needs of this tiny, tiny slice of our population. There’s we, the people, and then there’s The People Who Count. The Haves and the Havemores, who have hired eight lobbyists for every one of our Congresspersons, and who fund his multi-million dollar reelection campaign.
Hae you hired eight full time Washington lobbyists for your Congresscritter? Do you pay for his media-heavy reelection campaign? No? Then why do you think he cares what you want, need, or say?
These guardians of amassed capital pay brilliant, educated people to run their corporations, and to lobby and guide their government, world trade bodies, the WTO, media corporations, universities, banking, publishing, defense industries, arms sales, the drug trade, pharmaceuticals, insurance — the whole slew of functioning and money-making enterprises out there doing the global capitalization thing. They pay them to run it in their favor.
The owners and operators at the very top are vanishingly few. But they own damn near everything, so what they say goes. And what they like to see is that they own a little more of everything, every day.
Because the prime goal of capital is to protect itself, and to increase itself. Like a python taking a tighter grip every time its victim breathes out, massed capital first kills its competition, and then tweaks the laws and regulations, the norms of behavior, the supplies and demands, the marketplace itself — further in its favor every day. Bit by bit, the human resources and natural resources and ways and means of this world are accumulated into fewer and fewer hands.
Hands that are tied by the need to maintain and accrue even more capital. When you have a billion dollars, you don’t go out and spend it — you increase it.
You increase it, even if that means taking it penny by penny from the several billions of people away out there who live on a dollar a day or less. All those pennies add up, inexorably, until one day you have two billion dollars. Then three. Then four. There is no upper limit, no stopping point.
And if taking all those pennies meant taking the oil and natural resources and prospects and liberty of impoverished nations and populations for yourself, so what? That’s just how things work around here; get over it — or you’ll never have five billion. Or six. Or seven.
What will happen in this 21st century will be something like what happened in America and France back in the days of Revolution, when people up and decided that Liberty was just like air and water — it was just out there for everybody.
During this century, people everywhere will up and decide that capital is the lifeblood of their nation, and that it is not meant to flow into the mouths of a very, very few vampires whose only waking goal is to get even more.
People are going to nationalize capital, even here in America. Individual people will be restricted to owning and operating no more than a billion dollars. Or five hundred million. Or a hundred million, tops, as their personal walking around money.
The rest will be taxed, and put back out there into the many hands of the nation. Like Liberty, money will be seen as the property of the people at large, and once that concept takes hold, it will not be possible to drain a free people of their ways and means for the obscene benefit of the insatiable few.
This will happen because Americans will not spend this century living twenty-five times better than the Chinese, or Indian, or African, or Brazilian, or Bolivian person. Americans will spend this century learning to live more like them. We have no Manifest Destiny to live twenty-five times better than other human beings, no matter what Mister Cheney and Bush say. They speak for vampires when they say those things.
Part of the American adjustment to emerging global realities during this century will be getting these corporate vampires off our backs, and putting the wealth and ways and means they have siphoned from us back into our own pockets, and our own communities.
If that means nationalizing the defense industry, the oil industry, Microsoft, WalMart and Starbucks — it will happen. It won’t be bloody, or uncivilized, or unkind. Bill Gates will still be walking around with a hundred million in his hip pocket. It’s just that whatever further profits he wishes to earn will flow to public education, public healthcare, public transportation, and the care and feeding of our national family, not to his personal and private General Fund for Utterly Crushing Competitors.
Throughout history, when the few take too much from the many then empires fall, borders change, and heads roll. They bring it on, they bring it on themselves. George Bush likes to compare himself to Churchill, and Abe Lincoln.
He has more in common with Marie Antoinette.
