A local pundit wrote in the opinion pages today, "There’s nothing wrong with America that an unleashing of our creativity, our business acumen, our free-market, risk-taking ethos wouldn't cure."
The results of the past 40 years of "free market" ideology: A society where the elites have been exposed. The free market that is being praised turns out to be not very free at all. It is a rigged game that scoops up the wealth of the nation and deposits it in the accounts of the Wall Street elites. They call this "being successful." Success in raising the unemployment number, success in casting the poor and the elderly farther into poverty, success in subverting public education, success in the dumbing down of America.
Washington intervention in our lives is what government does. It's what we as citizens in a free nation choose to do for our own general welfare. It includes everything from subsidizing school lunches to providing adequate infrastructure, to ensuring the national defense, to preserving the quality of life of all of it's citizens.
The Elite don't seem to mind government intervention after they've purchased to power to open the coffers of the national treasury for their own profit and plunder. Would they mind turning over all their government contracts? Would they mind not using the roads, the public lands, their own government subsidized education, the homeland security forces? Would the oil companies like to pay for their own safe passage over the seas or for their own security in foreign lands without the helpful support of the taxpayer funded Federal Government? Government intervention seems to be just fine if it helps corporations find huge piles of money to be made.
Chris Hedges offers
this:
"Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.
Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.
Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional super committee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street."
The revolution has begun. 40 years of steady erosion of the gains of the Great Society is over, the pendulum has swung, it's time....
More work to do...
