Antiestablishmentarianism

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. ~ Dwight Eisenhower

We're back to school. This semester is going to be a long one. The mid-terms are in fourteen months, on November 2, 2010; the finals are in thirty-eight months. The mid-term exam counts for 70% of the final grade. If you ain't got it by then, you don't have a chance with the final exam in the Fall of 2012 ...

In 2010, all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are up for sale; the Senate is raffling off 38 desks. I would imagine that most of those seats, however, are already spoken for, in spite of the rantings and ravings of disaffected "progressives", libertarians, and frothing remnants of the repugnant party. The Greens? Well, you know. For what it's worth, my bet is that Republicans, if only by default, are gonna gain some seats. Apostate dumbocrats just don't have anywhere to go.

The last semester was short, but all of us, I hope, studied hard and learned a lot. We learned that presidents are appointed, not elected, by corporate media propagandists funded by elitist power brokers. We learned that "hope" and "change" don't feed the bulldog. We learned that we have to ask very specific questions, then doubt the veracity of the responses. We learned to follow the money - because we've been fleeced of most all of it, then it was laundered, and reinvested in programs and policies designed to suck every last vestige of freedom, independence, and dignity from us.

We learned that people don't change systems - systems change them. The case study on this one was imagining that Wowie Howie Dean would "transform" the Democratic Party into a responsive, populist champion of the politically disenfranchised that would get us out of useless wars, engender government transparency, turn the economy around, restore the Constitution, and, in short, stop lying. Thanks for playing. Next?

Let me tell you exactly what the mid-term exams will be about. There's just one question: "Will the American people continue to play ring-around-the-party, splashing in the fouled waters of Denial River, hoping to effectively replace a few fornicators and con artists with new souls clean as the driven snow or will they rise up to create a populist movement to completely overhaul a failed system? Discuss."

Here is what the mid-term will not be about: gay rights, women's rights, animal rights; legalizing marijuana; taxes; health care "reform"; guns; swine flu; climate change.

The mid-term won't be about war, as Stephen Sniegoski, writing for infowars, points out:

It appears that most liberal opponents of the wars in the Middle East/ Central Asia have ceased their opposition with the Obama presidency. The liberal Democrats who abhorred Bush’s war policy (and most grass roots liberal Democrats did vehemently oppose the Bush war policy although this was not always the case with liberal politicians and media figures) apparently were simply opposed to wars led by Republicans ...

... Obama can say such things as the war in Afghanistan is “fundamental to the defense of our people” and not be savaged by the former critics of the war. This is not to say that the former anti-war people have become cheerleaders for war. Rather, they have become largely indifferent to it. Their attention has been largely diverted to the health care issue, the economy, the environment, or some other liberal cause ...

The mid-term won't even be about the economy as such. All of these issues are important, of course. But what most folks seem still unable to grasp is that the mid-term will be about all these issues as mere subsets of the bigger issue of whether we will take back control of our very lives.

In a way, the mid-term will be about the "new world order". Not about whether it will occur - because it already is here - but about who will be in charge of it and us. It will be about democracy and capitalism, about society and anarchy, about freedom and slavery.

Of all people, Larry Flynt, writing at HuffPo, has it right:

The American government -- which we once called our government -- has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "economic royalists," who choose our elected officials -- indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.

This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment's hesitation, they took our money -- yours and mine -- to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame. They don't care what you and I think about them. Henry Kissinger refers to us as "useless eaters." ...

The reason Wall Street was able to game the system the way it did -- knowing that they would become rich at the expense of the American people (oh, yes, they most certainly knew that) -- was because the financial elite had bribed our legislators to roll back the protections enacted after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Congress gutted the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial lending banks from investment banks, and passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed for self-regulation with no oversight. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently revised its rules to allow for even less oversight -- and we've all seen how well that worked out. To date, no serious legislation has been offered by the Obama administration to correct these problems ...

I'm calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.

Let's set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn't effective -- if the politicians ignore us -- we do it again. And again. And again.

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It's time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.

I must admit that Mr Flynt is the last person I ever imagined I would quote in these pages. Heh.

I like the notion of a general strike. But it would be just a start. The changes we need - in order to simply survive - will certainly not be won with assault rifles, or mobs, or street demos. It will take more than that to reclaim our bodies and souls from the rich and powerful ruling class. We cannot beat them on their turf.

We have to stake out our own battlefield and make up our own rules. We have to frame the debate. We have to decide the issues. We have to control the game. We cannot beat them with money or violence or anarchy. We can't beat them with better propaganda or political savvy.

We can win, though ... if we drop the factional posturing and rhetoric of "left" and "right", "socialism" and "fascism", "Democrat" and "Republican". It's all a carefully and cynically orchestrated shell game. We must fully reject politics as usual and find a way to meet on common ground and throw out the establishment - completely.

Study for the mid-term, please. Vow to actually learn something. Flunk the mid-term and the finals won't matter.


Categories: new+world+order, Americanism, change, post-democracy, post-politics, principles, values


[originally published at P!]