"Power to the People Right Now"

Once again my liberal friends are sorely misguided - and I wonder how often it is by the deliberate manipulations of public opinion by their enemies that my liberal friends are so often so easily duped into shabby thinking.

Many of my liberal friends are saying, "Throw the bums out," meaning: throw out the tea party officials and elect new candidates for public office, candidates who more accurately reflect the liberal agenda of appropriately taxing the super-wealthy and their companies rather than shifting it to the poor and middle classes, of protecting individuals through core civil rights from bigotry and arrogation, and of safeguarding social institutions to support people who cannot fully support themselves.

That agenda is superb and I support it with all my heart.

My liberal friends point, accurately enough, to the fact that their opponents - people of the largely Republican "Tea Party" "religious right" persuasion - did just that: the conservatives successfully threw out the people whom they thought of as bums - liberal and middle-of-the-road politicians - and put their arch-conservative candidates into public office.

However, what my liberal friends fail to understand is the system. "Throwing the bums out" isn't going to change a thing - because these vaunted bums are but puppets.

The puppets in elected office are controlled by strings largely financial in nature. It is extremely expensive these days to win elections (especially thanks to the cost of television time), and so candidates must dance to the tune of their biggest campaign contributors. These contributors by definition are going to be overwhelmingly representative of the super-wealthy class and their corporations - and thus will be giving money to the conservative types in office now, and not to their liberal challengers.

And lobbyists, who represent these super-wealthy and their corporations, are likewise strings tying these puppets to the will of their masters.

The same goes for pollsters - it costs a great deal of money to conduct polls, and it is a well-known fact that polls get the results required by whoever is paying for them. (If you want more "conservative" results, for instance, do your telephoning during the day, when more-likely-to-be-liberal young people are off at work and only more-likely-to-be-conservative retirees are at home; be sure to word your questions in a way that just about guarantees the results required.)

And the conservative powers - the super-wealthy and their corporations - now own critical newspaper chains and television networks, and blithely tell people what to think. Liberals failed to hold on to their media outlets, and they now have little opportunity to speak their views widely, outside of a few mavericks like Maddow and Olbermann and Goodman, whose audiences consist of the already liberal, who therefore have little ability to reach those people who listen exclusively to the conservative media's loudmouthed-bigoted-drivel-cum-reportage.

Moreover, the system in place puts a great deal of power into the hands of the incumbents - these conservatives - to gerrymander districts to promote their re-electability (incumbents in the New York State Legislature, for instance, have a ninety-nine-percent re-election rate).

Got a problem with the system? The courts are increasingly stacked with conservative judges. The police and military are there to enforce the laws that protect this system. Want to throw these bums in prison? It isn't going to happen. They will throw you in prison if you gain any power at all to change their system - which isn't likely to happen, given the very self-protective nature of the system. Remember, these stacked courts have decided, against all logic and reality, that companies are persons - except that they live forever, getting more and more powerful, and have even fewer limits on their political influence powers than do the super-wealthy folks who sit in their top-floor boardrooms.

So liberal talk about "throwing the bums out" is fruitless - one, because it will be almost impossible to do so, and two, because the system in place now will either render elected liberals ineffective or (because of the need for financial support) turn them into obedient puppets for the conservative super-wealthy and their companies - case in point, President Obama.

Throw the bums out and their replacements are almost guaranteed to become bums - again, maybe with one or two tolerated maverick exceptions like Sanders, mavericks with no hope of ever gaining sufficient support in their legislative chambers to do more than fume and fuss from their corners and garner applause only from the dwindling cadres of their liberal supporters.

So we must remember that elected officials are only puppets on the strings of the system, with the puppetmasters being the super-wealthy and their companies.

Government is simply legalized crime. The great fourteenth-century sociologist-historian Ibn Khaldūn called government “an institution that prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself.” Government is essentially a monopolistic corporation designed to provide services for the wealthy (and only incidentally for others), and mainly protect the wealthy, their wealth and their power.

Remember, the American Revolution was bought and paid for by the wealthy of that day, as a means of halting the bleeding, of taxation taking their profits off to England. Those who were wealthy before the Revolution were even wealthier thereafter; those who were poor before the Revolution remained poor - if not dead in the war.

So throwing the bums out will not make any difference. Ultimately, only revolution might make any difference. History again and again shows that those who are without, as they get hungrier and hungrier, more and more desperate, they get stronger. When eventually they get organized, or simply rise up in a chaotic mass, the super-wealthy will be in great trouble. The super-wealthy know this, and use their media and their politicians and their armed forces to dissipate and control this chaotic power - but some day it will destroy them.

But there is danger in revolution too, as shown by the American Revolution (see above) and the American Civil War (which was only ostensibly about slavery; it was really an economic war between the factory-based economy of the North and the plantation-based economy of the South). If a revolution is bought and paid for by the super-wealthy, it will only further strengthen their grip on power and wealth.

In the time of the American Revolution, the super-wealthy wanted to stop the flow of money from their coffers to England, in the form of taxes. So they bought and paid for a revolution. Today, the super-wealthy are stopping the flow of money from their coffers in the form of taxes by becoming puppetmasters using the strings of the system to control their puppets, elected officials. In other words, they do not want a revolution.

But, if the people get hungry enough, and angry enough, there will be a revolution. All of the media and the courts and the police and the military and the elected officials are in place to prevent this. The system is in place to keep the poor and middle classes powerless. But, as John Lennon asked, "You say you want a revolution?", and as he answered his question in another song, "Power to the people right now."

We liberals are deluding ourselves if we think throwing out the puppets will do any good. Instead, we should focus on throwing out their puppetmasters. The bums to throw out are not the politicians - the bums to throw out are the super-wealthy and their companies.