Why aren’t the people screaming from the roofs about the insanities? We seem conditioned to ignore them. One can go on and on, and on so many subjects. Isn’t it all supposed to make sense?
Why are the banks collecting up to 29% on interest from you and giving you about 1%? Why are they making millions a year on late fee penalties, essentially tapping struggling people with little money? How did the top banks come to control virtually all of the credit business, with fees and interest that essentially keep people in debt up to their ears.
When you get a mortgage, why is your first payment 99.99% interest and your second payment is 99.98% interest and your third payment is 99.97% interest and on and on? Has anyone ever noticed that the deck is stacked to put people into economic bondage and building equity at the pace of molasses?
Has anyone noticed that virtually all the wealth of the world is concentrated in the hands of about one percent of the people? Giant corporations have gorged themselves with takeovers and only a handful control virtually all of the food we eat. A few giant media conglomerates feed us a version of ‘news’ that never includes an iota of mention of critical world issues that are anti-capitalism and therefore are to be swept under the rug.
The corporate media is often choked with silly gossip issues and ridicule of public figures, who are constantly and eternally under prudish judgement based on some self-righteous Victorian code of snobbery. They wallow in politics but only in its personification of scrubbed-up cliche- spouting mannequin type personalities. Serious issues are rarely brought up in presidential campaigns, replaced with only a collection of lip service cliches and homilies that melt the issue down and drown it in corn syrup.
Is anyone aware that capitalist forces in the U.S. forever seek to weaken government and turn its services over to private profit-driven businesses? They’re selling out our prison population as helpless customers to private companies who are incentivized to keep them there, since they are paid by the head. Does anyone care about that? Are prisons out of sight, out of mind? Do they care if the authorities reward skinhead Otto to go undercover and start fights with inmates who are up for release. Such violence stops the release and keeps them there, where their counted heads can continue to make money for the police goons.
Is the public becoming aware that pharmaceutical power companies have pulled the political strings to keep medicine prices high and people on a treadmill of economic futility for many years, and have demonized a medicinal herb plant that you can grow in your yard that relieves stress and pain and relaxes your nerves. It’s free, so it’s illegal. Medicines are supposed to be for sale.
Are people beginning to see the free flow of political money that commands our government and our economy? Political parties gather rich private interests and try to take over the presidency and congress with sweet smelling oratory, then they serve those interests in making and breaking legislation. Candidates run in order to get on that gravy train and control the electorate with elaborately constructed personalities that are supposed to ring all the voter bells. Then they work for the powers — the ones with the money. They want some of it. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
People don’t seem to notice how well skewed common logic and common sense are in these times? Perhaps they are self-centered, self-absorbed and self-serving most all of the time? Shouldn’t we be more worldly, this being a small planet in these days of ultra communications?
It seems that our worldliness starts and stops with mass purchasing of cheap electronic goods, made in sweat shops that couldn’t operate in this country. Forget our standards, and forget the welfare of American working people, they say, if we can produce time-wasting entertainment electronics with cheap foreign labor and hasten the flow of money out of our country and the decline of rural America’s job markets.
Can anyone put all this together? We are strangling our own economy with a silk scarf, likely assembled in the slums of Bangladesh. Globalism works well for the rich, when they want to exploit cheap labor and take away our jobs, when they want to set up paper entities and global cohorts to avert U.S. taxes, ship wealth overseas and hide it in offshore tax haven banks.
Is anyone noticing all of this? Are we waiting in vain for some politician to say some of these things to actually make them real? If you hold your breath for that, you wind up suffocated dead with a symbolic blue face.
Until this era of Trumpery, politicians didn’t want to insult anyone at all. This non-politician now running things makes it a necessity in order to keep his brilliant tough guy ego pumped and his steam calliope on the road.
How could anyone at all with a sense of what the Presidency is all about vote for this man? Millions did. He was within three million popular votes of the candidate who should be the winner. I always thought that Hillary would get more votes than the white backlash but little did I suspect another minority president.
Which brings to mind the Electoral College and the apportioning of our governmental representatives. In the U.S. Senate, the 50 states get two votes each. Wyoming’s 2 million people get the same representation as 40 million people in California. Is this the way we want it?
In the Electoral College, if a candidate gets one more vote within that 40 million in California, he wins all all of electoral college votes, on paper anyway. The recount battle would likely never end and neither candidate would ever take office.
Are these desirable safeguards to preserve some kind of sovereignty for the individual states? Or do they undermine legitimate popular vote winners like Hillary Clinton and Al Gore? It has historically created the climate for intrusive third party candidates who can’t win but can swing a close election — such as the Dixiecrats of 1948, the closely-related states rights and segregationist candidate George Wallace in a civil rights era backash, and economic maverick Ross Perot. There have been other split vote hijackings through history, most especially the one that delivered up Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden.
Is this the way we want it to remain? Do we do nothing in remedy because of short attention spans? Of course, we must remember that the recipients of the two recently hijacked elections had no incentive to use the Presidency to support any any kind of reform initiative. They won. In the case of George W. Bush, there was hell to pay, with a ruined economy and another war adventure invasion travesty. With President Gore, history would likely be a lot different.
On the business side of things, are Americans unhappy slaves to deep debt and addictive consumerism, or do we enjoy it all enough to make our credit-driven economy okay? Are we the debt-ridden victims of a capitalistic economy that encourages and rewards domination — the taking of it all, the power, the money, the prestige and the glory? Or are we getting our share of the wealth and don’t care about the big picture?
The real American way to the admirer of Capitalism is domination, not equality. That term was just lip service in real world that shows little of equality anywhere. We have one in the White House now who would be a dominator — on his own behalf first and also ours. He supposedly speaks for our nation. But I have never heard him say a word on behalf of the equality of souls and the welfare of all people, and not just the dominant.
Everything is a business deal in his real estate mind, but hundreds of thousands of poor and homeless people in our country don’t have a dime to deal with, and spend their time salvaging scrap items to build shacks and windbreakers. What about them? Is anyone aware of the massive numbers of homeless in our streets?
Capitalists find it difficult making them into customers or in developing any kind of pity for these wretches. They often dismiss them as just drug or alcohol addicts, which should raise many more questions rather than being just a term of disdainful dismissal.
Does anyone notice or care that the military budget takes 57% of our money, while some war industry politicians cry for rebuilding our military to enrich their investments. Is it really logical for government-castrating Republicans to cut the sliver that goes to food stamps since that is actually food in the mouths of needy Americans? We have military bases worldwide, surrounding virtually every country in the world. We reportedly have over 1,800 nuclear warheads? Do we need more? Do we need to get into another war to expend our firepower so that we can buy some more from the war industries?
How close are we to insanity when we continue to pour our resources into armaments for killing and allow our own citizens to suffer with inadequate income to raise a family, heavy college debt loads from trying to educate our children, and one major illness away from bankruptcy in a bloated health care system that is massively over-priced.
Why is it necessary for Americans to shed blood fighting for a dark ages fiefdom where warlords are well known and democratic principles are sheer nonsense. Why would these people accept a centralized government in Baghdad or Kabul when it is clear and unquestioned by them that ruling parties take everything of value and denigrate or destroy all opposition. One party rule is the ideal and the mission, and across the world, ruling governments impose it — no opposition. Why in the world would it be allowed?
Americans need to stand up for our own values and not submerge them in physical battles between primitive people with primitive ideas. They involve death and suffering and they are not worth one human life in our country. In these parts of the world, they will continue to kill one another until they evolve to higher purpose. But I don’t think we can drag them up those golden stairs, and certainly not by sending soldiers to help them kill the other side.
Should we not be the world’s largest arms dealer by far, and likely the world’s largest user of armaments, then our constant cry for world peace would mean more. If our own citizens weren’t so immersed in a money-sucking defense industry, then maybe we wouldn’t find as many incentives to war such as our misadventures into Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fortunately, President Obama has greatly pulled down our involvement and our casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan and has been wise enough to avoid the Syrian bloodbath that now engulfs the Syrians, Russians, Iranians and Kurds. Let them have it. Let them fight and die and may we continue to use drones, bombs and aerial targeting to take out our terrorist cell enemies.
But will we plunder into another war with a President of such troubling temperament and infantilism? Can we learn nothing from our ruinous invasion escapades of the past, or do we want to when we can swagger like a bully and blow up things. Will Trump get into a tweet war with another child-like ruler in North Korea and throw us into war? Will they need to instigate another gunboat incident to do it? Will the American people support it all once again, and, once it starts, be transported into a soldier adulation mode — to honor the troops and forget the idiocy that sends them to their death.
When U.S. soldiers and veterans are killing themselves at a faster rate than the enemy can do it, then the system, whatever it is, isn’t working. Since so many soldiers return mentally traumatized and demanding drugs and getting addicted and still committing suicide, then we have a national tragedy on our hands. And the government-hating Republicans still want to castrate the Veterans Administration so they can get their grubby capitalist hands on veteran health care. This is part of the GOP mantra. Privatize and Profit.
Maybe American soldiers aren’t prepared for a state of constant stress, boundless evil and chaos, bombs blowing apart children, shattered corpses all over the streets, explosions and bullets flying, secret bombs blowing up innocent food shoppers, killer buses ramming through their barricades and exploding. their friends in arms dying left and right, the futility of it all coming up more and more into the consciousness and finally screaming in frustration that this horror is killing all of me, my heart, my mind, my senses, my hope for any kind of salvation from the madness.
Are our soldiers not prepared for this because we have reached a much higher level of caring and sharing civilization and we shouldn’t send them back down into a world of savagery from which we have evolved?
So what of the helpless, innocent people living under those cruel dictators, dying in those incessant uprisings and civil wars? Do we care? Certainly our hearts ache for their suffering. America should be the hope of the world that we envision and work for greater societies which show community and sharing among its people — not armed camps facing off against each other or some other neighboring country. This is a great ideal. But we have not been successful in killing confrontations to get there, nor should we expect to be. Taking the side of the Sunnis against the Shi’a is pointless and nonsensical. Neither of their doctrines is worth a human life. They are only statements of primitive beliefs, which should be classified as opinion.
In a world with all these insane contradictions swirling through our lives, do we notice them or just take them for normal? Do things have to make sense for us to accept them? Is our normality what we make it? Does our self-service take precedent over anything and everything so that it doesn’t matter if it really makes sense? Do we just shrug and complain and say we can’t change things when we certainly can, and often do?
So many things make so little sense, but they pervade our lives. Now we have done the inexplicable, electing an inexplicable candidate to take over our country in a swirl of inexplicable false realities. He worries the hell out of 65 million people.
Or, given that Trump lives in his own separate reality, will he drag us over there, and what will we find? I’m sure there will be no ‘political correctness’ there, unless one re-defines it with a new reality of what that means.
The False Wealth God
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© Jim Cleveland 2017