Democracy For the Few

Today, people are exercising “choice” that is often meaningless: Democrats who are reactive or fumbling, Republicans who are belligerent or obstructive, Tea Partiers who are mad with no plan. This mask-flipping sideshow will do little to impact the true powers who cynically feed it all. These true powers? The corporate and financial ‘elites,” and their allies. The sideshow is just that, a show. These “elites” have already put into place what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls “The Great Decoupling” of them from the rest of us. 75 percent of Americans make $50,000 or less (often a lot less), and those Americans have largely been abandoned by the elites who are at the top of the other 25%. Those elites love for you to get angry at politicians, and chuckle when you think that favoring one party over another will make much of a difference. It won’t, other than to make it worse in different ways.

So confident and seemingly secure in their power are they that they fully expect you to either 1) not understand what is happening, or 2) to comply out of fear, intimidation, or perceived helplessness. They blithely and uncaringly TELL you that high unemployment/low paying employment is a new structural reality beyond their (or anyone’s) control, and that globalized free market forces have permanently altered things and you can’t do anything about it.

It doesn’t take much examination to realize they are lying. This is a system they have moved into place and carefully manipulated. That system is a construct, not an inevitable fixture, and they are manipulating and perverting the market, not operating honestly in it. The laws, the interpretation of laws, and the interpreters of those laws, largely favor them, and they constantly work to keep it that way. Labor is increasingly commoditized and controlled, and they already control the capital and much of the choice land, plus many of the vital information avenues. Statistics are manipulated too, and a media they largely control or direct spouts those statistics as if they are real and meaningful.

We don’t have real capitalism here, we have Robber-Capitalism. After every demonstrated failure of that Robber-Capitalism (past Depressions of the late 1800s and 1930s especially), populist and progressive forces have moved for change. But they have not studied their enemy well, and so those forces have eventually faded. However, their enemy has studied THEM well, and learned from history, and now that enemy does the things necessary to deflect, gut, confuse, enfeeble, disorganize, dis-empower, divide, distract, misinform, unbalance, and depress those forces before they gather traction.

“We the People” are going to have get wiser in this fight.