There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — [pauses] — shame on you. Fool me — [pauses] — You can’t get fooled again! – George W. Bush
It’s unsettling to know that you are unrepresented, that your “representative” “democracy” is a fucking sham, but after you see the same patterns over and over again (most notably, the endless back-and-forth between the Democratic Party and the Repugnican Party, which primarily seems to consist of examples of history repeating itself), there is no other conclusion that you can draw.
The us-vs.-them (red-vs.-blue, blue-vs.-red) drama can keep you enthralled for a while, perhaps even for your entire lifetime, but some of us eventually come to realize that under the status quo there never is going to be a winner, that the struggle — which apparently was fabricated, or at least is perpetually stoked, in order to keep us distracted from all of the brazenly treasonous looting and consolidation of power that’s been going on – never was meant to end.
The game is (almost) up, though.
Enough Americans are giving up on both of the two major parties*, as increasingly the members of the two major parties serve themselves and their cronies instead of the American people, and even the left is starting to talk about violent revolution (which the right has been talking about for some time — against the wrong people, though, of course).
Ironically, the left and the right have common enemies, but, being too wrapped up in throwing punches at each other, the left and the right don’t see the instigators who stand at the sidelines, raking in the billions and billions of dollars that they’ve stolen from us on the left and on the right.
This is not to say that I agree with the right. Way too many on the right have a “vision” of the United States of America being under theocratic, “Christo”fascist rule, in which misogyny, patriarchy, racism and white supremacism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc., predominate.
Over my dead body.
But the “tea baggers” and I do have common enemies, and no, they’re not Muslims or “illegals.” Our worst enemies are from within; most of them were born and raised here and (would) claim to be staunch patriots.
The documentary “Inside Job,” about the wholly preventable financial meltdown of 2008, makes this clear. For years those in the financial industry have created for themselves — through lobbying politicians to pass laws that benefit themselves, through political campaign contributions, through the revolving door between governmental oversight jobs and financial-industry (and other corporate) jobs, through pro-plutocratic mass media like Faux “News,” etc. — an environment in which they can steal hundreds of billions of dollars yet never see the inside of a prison cell.
These are the traitors who have destroyed the nation — and to their treasonous ranks we must add the traitors of the military-industrial complex, who also rob us blind of billions and billions and billions of our dollars while lying to us that it’s all about “national security” and “defense” when, in fact, it’s all about war profiteering.**
I’m talking about individuals who know that their incredibly selfish actions are harming their own nation – but they don’t give a shit.
If this isn’t treason, then what is?
These traitors throw some of their millions (which to them is chump change) into enough right-wing media operations to ensure that the perpetually battered masses blame the wrong groups for the nation’s ills: “illegals,” Muslims (Osama bin Laden only wishes that he could have done as much damage to the United States of America as the members of BushCheneyCorp and their ilk have done), same-sex couples who wish to marry, et. al.
Because if the masses correctly identified the enemy, they might do something about it. (Now might be a good time to buy stock in pitchforks and torches…)
Fact is, our system is so corrupt, is so rotten to the bone (as “Inside Job” demonstrates perfectly), that the only thing to do now to prevent the total collapse of the nation is to scrap the system and start over. This means that the corrupt old players, all of them, must be forcibly removed from the playing field and put in prison for their treason. (I’d prefer execution for the worst of the mass-murdering traitors, such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but I’d probably settle for life imprisonment, which is quite just for the amount of pain, suffering and damage that these traitors have caused millions of other people.)
As Ted Rall points out in his excellent new book The Anti-American Manifesto, those who have accumulated an insane amount of political power most likely won’t part with it voluntarily, which makes revolution the only viable course of action. Whether or not such a revolution is bloody is (mostly) up to those who have accumulated an insane amount of power and money at the expense of the rest of us.
Work within the system, you say? Uh, we tried that with Barack Obama, whose only real accomplishment, history could record, is that after having pissed off enough Americans with his promises of “hope” and “change” but only having delivered more of the same, he finally spurred the long-overdue revolution against the plutocracy that saved the nation from complete collapse.
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*Ironically, it seems as though the “tea party” is leading this charge, even though I disagree diametrically with the majority of the “tea party’s” platform, and, of course, the Repugnican Party appears to be attempting to co-opt the “tea party” as much as it can, with at least some degree of success.
**The one thing that I have in agreement with libertarians Ron Paul and Rand Paul is that the insanely bloated U.S. military budget has to be reduced. It’s insane — as well as treasonous – to tell the American people that they have to settle for even less in Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements while the war profiteers get more and more each year in what is not “defense,” but in what is thievery.
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