The Trashing of the World

The other day, talking about how the ultra-wealthy have the rest of us ever more and more in their absolute control, I quoted the Yiddish proverb, “If rich people could hire others to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living.”

My friend Glenda replied, “They already do. This is their recruitment of rural kids from the poor regions of the United States, who cannot afford to attend universities, who cannot find jobs, so they are going to war in place of the rich kids who are attending universities or are put by their rich daddies into the family business. However, the poor don’t make a wonderful living, they actually make less than minimum wage if you add it all up with the hours they put in.”

Glenda is right. I am more and more convinced that there is a cabal of ultra-wealthy individuals. Their names are not particularly well-known. They work from the shadows, through their proxies and puppets and puppydogs. They are reinstituting a worldwide slave society, in which all but they have to work constantly for pitiful wages to cover the ever-rising cost of living. Onto these slaves, chained by bills and taxes to their workbenches, the ultra-wealthy have put so much burden that people are crushed thereunder. More than that, wars are engineered as ways to make money (munitions industries, prison industries, construction industries, and so on), as well as to kill off excess populations, and keep people living in fear.

North Americans and Western Europeans are kept in a miasma of fear and anxiety by the overwhelming flood of information coming at them. They are made to feel guilty unless they watch the news and catch up on Facebook. But there is too much information to digest, and it leaves us confused and disorganized, and yet always craving more, and feeling guilty if we fail to review all of the information. Moreover, the information is largely propaganda, and carefully calibrated so people think and behave exactly as this cabal of ultra-rich want.

As I write this essay, there is a peaceful occupation of Wall Street, the financial center of the United States and, effectively, the world. While there was plenty of coverage of similar events in North Africa, this is getting hardly even a brief mention on the mainstream news media - which are owned by the ultra-wealthy who stand to lose a bit of their fortunes if this occupation reaches any meaningful outcome. I have just learned that journalists with the only news outlet providing video feeds - a small alternative outfit that broadcasts through the internet - have just been arrested. Hm. I wonder why.

Shortly before I wrote this essay, I watched in horror the video of a crowd cheering a Republican candidate for the United States presidency when he bragged about executing more than two hundred (mostly minority) people in his state of Texas. And the video of a crowd calling for the death of a man in hospital who had no health insurance. And the video of another crowd screaming imprecations at a man in the United States military, serving in the front line of one of these nonsensical wars, who happens to be gay.

Most people in North America and Western Europe don’t know that nearly one million people have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since the United States invasions, according to the lowest credible estimates. Americans are trained to be chronically incapable of thinking about anybody but themselves. They rarely realize that the Afghanistan/Iraq wars have no credible raison-d’être – there is no relationship between these countries and the September 11 attacks. They have no clue that, on the pretext of those attacks, the United States government has caused the death of thousands of people for every one individual who died in those attacks. These wars are entirely about oil and power, and ego on the part of the Bush/Cheney/Rove collective.

Most Americans are chronically unable to see how the arrogation and bigotry of their government, and its insistence that it has the unilateral might-makes-right to invade other countries and dictate to them how to run their own affairs made such an attack almost inevitable. The September 11 attacks were utterly abhorrent to any pacifist like me. But far more abhorrent, to me, are all the many, and worse, ways in which the ultra-wealthy, through the United States government-military-corporate establishment, have profiteered on their egregious exploiting of bloodshed in the world. Millions of innocent people have died in wars engineered by the United States. Millions more suffer thanks to United States corporatocracy (e.g., Bhopal, the Gulf of Mexico, the Exxon Valdez).

Americans are chronically blind to how their country, which was once upon a time loved and respected, is now broadly hated in the world. The United States has squandered and trashed the good will of the world by betraying its vaunted dedication to good. It now is clearly out to exploit the entire world, through commerce and war. And what is bound soon to happen as a result the United States can only blame itself for.

Descartes famously said, Cogito ergo sum. “I think, therefore I exist.” It is one of the greatest misfortunes of this age that very few people are capable of truly thinking any more, and one wonders if, then, they truly exist. Oh, yes, they think they think, but it is what they have been trained and programmed to think by the mills the public schools have been turned into, by the propaganda news media, by the politicians and the clergy. “Education”, in schools and the media (both news and entertainment) and houses of worship, is no longer about opening minds to the ability to think creatively and critically and to make decisions thoughtfully and to communicate eloquently, but to prepare them for their lifelong enslavement to the system of producing more riches for the rich.

Indeed, speaking as a retired clergyperson, I blame religion (all religions) as a social institution. Just like countries, just like the medical or insurance or legal or what-have-you social institutions, the short-sighted dimwits who “run” the religious social institutions, wear the sheep's clothing of vaunted spirituality to hide their lupine nature (the analogy is borrowed from Jesus of Nazareth) as they rape the people.

But religion is, as an institution, simply another pool of power, on the part of the ultra-wealthy, to control and harvest the people of the world. It is the Roman Empire, which never died; it simply became the Roman Catholic Church and its similar organizational hierarchies.

Spirituality is not religion. Spirituality, the sui generis yearning of the soul for the infinite, is decidedly not a social institution. Jesus, Mohammed, Lao-tse, Gautama Buddha, Black Elk, etc., on whom all be peace, were not religious leaders, not presidents of some social institution. They were spiritual people. As such, they were antinomian. As such, they condemned the social institutions – they condemned the “pharisees”, the establishment, as hypocrites (as, said Jesus, “whited sepulchres all white without and full of corruption within”).

We need more people like them. We need more John Lennons, Sojourner Truths, Martin Luther Kings, Mahatma Mohandas Gandhis, Dalai Lamas. We need more prophets, provocateurs, revolutionaries, poets, visionaries – people who have a vision of humanity as it should be, and have the courage like those I’ve named to stand in front of the military tanks in Tiananmen Square, to stand up to the well-entrenched powers, to outrage the people, to challenge common assumptions, to inspire and lead the way to a new world.

It is indeed always a battle of sorts between the visionaries and those who would convert the Sacred into the merely mundane. For every Jesus, every visionary, there is an organizer, a corporatocracist, a Paul, a Constantine, to set up the bureaucracy and turn the wild sacred power of spirituality into the mundane and malleable religion. Mircea Eliade and Emile Durckheim both pointed out this sad fact. coming from different scholarly directions.

But does that mean we should give up? As a spiritualist and an artist, I vehemently reject that notion. If through my writings I inspire only one person or maybe a few, and they go on to inspire others – then my life has not been an entire waste.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Capitalism is a shell game: by its very nature it leads to winners and losers. In a bounded economy (one with a finite number of people who are variously the workers, the investors, the merchants, and the consumers), some gain wealth only because others lose their wealth to them. When the economic pool has no external source of additional value, then profit on the part of some inevitably results in loss on the part of others.

More than merely a shell game, capitalism is a pyramid scheme, a "Ponzi" scheme: the first to do well in the game continue to well, and everyone else basically hands their money over to these first-ins.

How so? Once some gain wealth, they inevitably gain power, and can ever more easily manipulate the system in order to gain yet more wealth and power. The only possible corrective against this is through government regulation, setting barriers such that the rich cannot run away with the game. Yet the rich seek to break through those barriers - and often succeed. Those who profit gain ever-increasing control over the economic system, and therefore can manipulate the governmental system such that it serves mainly to protect their quest for more wealth, and thus they can change the rules to maximize their own further profit and control.

The only reason the Western economies have succeeded as long as they have is that they have for centuries exploited the Third World. They have enjoyed a seemingly unbounded economic system. These relatively wealthy Western economies took advantage of cheap labor (imported slaves and indentured servants, desperate immigrants into the capitalist country, and the citizens of poor countries overseas) and a seemingly infinite supply of raw materials and abundant consumer bases both within their own country and abroad.

Today, to some degree, they continue to secure an inflow of value into their economic system – they have lately relied increasingly on off-shore employment (cheap labor in Third World countries), and factory production where environmental standards are lax to nonexistent, or simply less stringently enforced after a few well-placed bribes. And some countries, desperate for foreign cash, allow this to happen, blinding themselves to the reality that, in the long run, that these wealthy foreign companies provide jobs and some local investment, but what little value they put into the Third World country is considerably offset by the value, the wealth, they take out of the country. These are, after all, profit-making companies, and they’re not going to invest in a foreign country unless they plan to get more value than they put in.

However, it is an illusion to believe that this system, in which developed economies take value from relatively undeveloped economies, is unbounded. It is only unbounded from the point of view of a single developed economy that is exploiting other, undeveloped, economies in the world. It is in fact bounded, because at any given time the potential value to be derived from the world economy is itself bounded, simply on a larger scale, and needing more time to be exhausted. A certain developed economy may conceive of itself as unbounded, but it is not; sooner or later, even if other less developed economies don’t take action to prevent this draining away of what resources they have, the value in the world that is yet to be absorbed by developed economies will eventually begin to run out.

Put another way, developed and undeveloped economies are part of a single world economy; just as wealthy individuals in a developed economy gain increasing control of the system such that they can accrue even more wealth, so too wealthy countries in the world economy gain increasing control of the system such that they likewise can accrue even more wealth.

Through international governmental and trade organizations, the wealthy developed countries in the world have long set the rules for international trade to their own advantage, just as the wealthy individuals do within their own countries.

To name one example, the wealthy countries do little of significance to counter the scourges of war, disease, and steeply rising populations that the poorer countries struggle with. It is to the advantage of the wealthy to allow – indeed, to subtly encourage, these scourges. Greater populations of unemployed, hungry people means, in the future, greater possibility of cheap labor. And greater instability in poorer countries caused by disease and war, and the like, goes a long way from preventing them from ever developing strong smart governments that could effectively counter this draining away of wealth through their economically porous borders.

To name one other example, countries like Monsanto aggressively market genetically altered crops to poor farmers in poor countries. Since the seeds, on an introductory basis, cost less than the “regular”seeds, many farmers buy and use them in their fields. But, unlike “regular” crops, which can be used to replant in future years, these genetically altered seeds must be bought every year you want to plant the crops – and here’s the catch – once a farmer has used these altered seeds, the regular seeds will no longer germinate in that field.

It’s getting harder for these ultra-wealthy and their companies. Cheap labor is ever harder to come by as poorer countries try to raise their minimum wage standards. Meanwhile, raw materials are getting increasingly scarce, competitors in other up-and-coming economies are cutting into what once were sure consumer bases, and pollution and regulation imposed by the “left”, even in poorer countries, is seen as further destroying the ability of the rich to get richer.

And more and more of these Third World countries are in fact “wising up”, taking bold steps to slow down the drain of wealth from their economies.

These countries already face considerable pressures because of their inability to compete with the developed economies. They are typically saddled with colossal foreign debts that they will never be able to repay, and on which the interest is forever multiplying like maggots. They don’t have the efficient factories, the investment pool, the know-how, the transportation systems, or the control of the world economic system to ever get on their economic feet: they are largely “on the outside looking in”.

Added on top of this, these countries struggle to feed and put to work their huge and steeply rising, and increasingly restive populations. And many of them are also caught in the web of endless wars, petty in nature but bloody in results, either in their geographical regions, fighting over crumbs with their similarly struggling neighbor countries, or trying to put down independence-minded resistance groups within. As a result, much of what wealth they have is wasted on huge military machines, and much of their potential work force is wasted on military training that will not later convert to peaceful employment, should the wars miraculously cease.

Still, some poorer countries are bravely trying to take steps against this drain of wealth – for instance by nationalizing foreign industries, by setting up economic impediments (such as import and export duties) to slow down this drain of wealth, and the like. Some are even taking the wise step of enacting strong environmental laws to prevent that form of exploitation that (Bhopal, for example) only further destroys what little they have.

These countries have no choice but to do this, beset as they are by exponentially growing national debts and rising costs for the goods and services their citizens are demanding (thanks to the way Western commercialism has so successfully marketed itself worldwide).

In response to these countering efforts on the part of weak economies, the major capitalist countries are increasingly turning to exploiting their own populations – to dumping tax burdens on all but those in control, the ultra-wealthy, to demanding more and more work (product, which converts into value for the ultra-wealthy), and to selling the finished product back to the powerless at high markups. Rather than relying entirely on exploitation overseas, these ultra-wealthy are seeking to create a Third World from their own poorer and middle classes, which they can then exploit.

The tea party lunatics in the U.S. Republican Party, and their equivalents in other capitalist countries, are therefore not the cause of this new trend, but merely a symptom. They are not the core of the problem. They have been duped by the ultra-wealthy, who control the system (and thus the media, education, and government), into believing that this exploitation of one’s own citizens will eventually benefit them, foolishly believing themselves to be the friends (not the exploited tools) of the ultra-wealthy.

The capitalist system, in short, is in its death throes, and the ultra-wealthy realize this, and they are trying (through their proxies, their puppets in government and media), to stave off its eventual utter collapse long enough to drag home a few more fortunes.

I believe that the ultra-wealthy have determined that somebody – if not they, then somebody else – is going to make a move for world dominance, and rape it of whatever value can be squeezed out of it now, and the future be damned. The ultra-wealthy may or may not literally believe the various conservative pseudo-Christian dogmas that say the εσχατον (the end of the world at the hands of G-d) is coming soon, but they DO believe that at least in some secular sense it is coming soon. Therefore, it might as well be they who takes advantage, rather than somebody else. Hence, they don't give a flying forkful of flapjack for “The Future”; they’re going to take what they can now, and then hole themselves up in their bombproof bunkers and ride out the conflagration that’s about to engulf the world because of their actions.

The ultra-wealthy have decided that public education is to serve not to enlighten, not to inspire, not to instill the beauties of culture, but merely to train. It is to serve only to prepare fodder for the mills of servitude to the extremely wealthy, and the military required to control the rest of the world. It is against the best interests of the ultra-wealthy to have the unwealthy educated sufficiently to question the moronic and inconsistent platitudes of their media marionettes and legislative lapdogs; it is more in their interest to keep the public blandly stupid so they vote as they are told.

They create a miasma of fear – most unwealthy Americans live in fear of losing their jobs (most states now allow employers to fire at will), fear of increasing costs, fear of terrorists, fear of, well, just about everything. Minorities – especially Muslims, gays and lesbians, and their supporters – are especially to be feared. Fear debilitates: it keeps people from thinking rationally through these issues, and from organizing to protest what the ultra-wealthy are doing to them.

The ultra-wealthy have set up an efficient organization – efficiency is what they’re all about. It is impressive to me how all of the political right talks and acts the same. They say the sound bytes, they behave in the same manner. It’s more, far more, than this or that individual politician. It’s the sum-is-greater-than-the-parts pervasive force of all of them. Clearly, there is a directive coming from above – from, no doubt, the super-rich whose financial abundance puts these inexperienced morons into power by buying elections (through gerrymandering, fake polling, TV ads, etc.). And these nouveau politicians, knowing that’s what put them into office, do as they are told, and speak hate rhetoric against gays and lesbians, Muslims, and left-handed liberal pinkos like me.

And, over time, the very plentitude of such hate talk, from radio and television commentators to lawmakers on the state and federal level, makes it acceptable. The first time you step over a body in the streets of New York City, you're shocked. But, after the twentieth time, you hardly think about whether this body is alive but drunk or on drugs, or dead; you just step over it and hurry on your way. It is becoming acceptable, centrist, to talk hate.

All of this is exactly the effective technique described by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf.

In this way “typical Middle Americans” are trained to believe that we “have to be tough on crime”, and that we have to “send a message” to the “criminal element” that crime will not be tolerated. They believe (wrongly, of course, as history and sociological studies repeatedly demonstrate) that prison and capital punishment are effective deterrents against crime; even though the United States has the highest percentage of its population in prison and has the highest rate of execution of any developed country in the world, with minorities, especially African Americans, at percentages far higher than in the general population, crime has not abated. In prison, young people simply learn from older, experienced prisoners how to be better criminals. When they get out, because of their criminal record they can’t get a job, so inevitably they go back into crime.

“Typical Middle Americans” are taught to believe that politicians who are “soft on crime”, probably “bleeding heart liberals”. just want to hand their hard-earned money to criminals, to “molly coddle” them in the form of government “handouts”. They are taught to believe that people who survive on public assistance are on drugs – despite the irrationality of this, since the demographics clearly show most drug-users are financially comfortable suburbanites.

Recently a live audience cheered and clapped when Texas Governor Rick Perry bragged about seeing some two hundred people executed in his state. When Congressman Ron Paul talked about someone in hospital without medical insurance, the audience shouted out that “they should let him die”.

As the Bible puts it, “All we like sheep” have been led astray by false shepherds. It’s a Pavlovian technique: the media have trained these people to applaud what these politicians say: when the plants in the audience (and you know media-savvy types like Perry have plenty of plants in the crowd) start the applause, everyone around them applauds too, even if they missed what was said, or didn’t fully comprehend it - like a wave rippling out from stones tossed in the water.

The ultra-wealthy, through their puppets, are determined to eliminate Medicare and Social Security and “privatize” them, so a profit can go into their pockets. Once Medicare is gone, a private system will cherry-pick the profitable clients, and the rest will be rejected.

Now the ultra-wealthy want to eliminate FEMA, the federal agency that responds to natural disasters, by refusing to fund it. In its place they intend to establish a profit-making private disaster-response company, headed up by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, son and brother of former presidents. This, along with profit-making privatization, in prisons, education, and hospitals, will enable the ultra-wealthy to collect a few more fortunes out of the system before it collapses.

“Death from a thousand cuts” - cut the cost of government, cut it until it is profitable for the ultra-wealthy who manipulate it in order to increase their wealth. Dump the burden of taxes onto the shoulders of the poor and middle classes. Set up casinos, which are really a form of regressive taxation, appealing as they do to the poor, the minority, the elderly on fixed incomes. Fund education through property taxes, so the suburbs where the wealthy live have good schools, and the poor inner cities and outlying rural districts, suffer with shabby education.

Economies are going to die. And there will be revolutions.

But don’t worry about the ultra-wealthy; they will be safe in their bomb-proof underground mansions while the rest of us up here fry in World War III.

As the Bible said: “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Do Not Allow The Poor to Vote!

According to a politically conservative columnist and author named Matthew Vadum, allowing the poor to vote is like "handing out burglary tools to criminals."

He goes on: "It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. ... Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn’t about helping the poor. It’s about helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money."

Of course, the conservatives are already doing their best to disenfranchise the poor - whom they believe, often correctly, to be predominantly Democratic or Democratic-leaning. Now that directly racist disenfranchisement is ostensibly illegal, they're doing it in other ways.

Registration processes are deliberately made complex so people without higher education, or a strong command of the English language, find it difficult to register successfully. There are fewer voting booths in poor urban districts, and they are generally older and more subject to breakdowns (real, intended, or imagined), creating long lines that discourage would-be voters. More often it is in precincts such as these that recounts are demanded, processes in which Republicans have gotten good at challenging every Democratic vote such that it is thrown out and, lo and behold, the Democratic candidate eventually is deemed to have lost.

Of course, the very sanctity of voting - that supposedly the people decided, that supposedly the outcome was unknown until the people had spoken - is long gone. It's such a science now that they know how you're going to vote even before you pull the curtain - no, not you specifically as an individual, but there are experts who can predict with appalling accuracy the results of every voting bloc: by district, by racial makeup, by educational level achieved, by religion, they have you pegged.

More than that, there are experts who manipulate - who pull certain strings in order to produce the election results that those who pay for their services require.

Thus it doesn't matter whether the poor, whether Democrats, vote or not: the Powers have set up mechanisms that engineer the desired outcomes to elections, notwithstanding what might have happened had the process of voting remained what it was intended to be. This is because the trained lapdogs of the ultra-rich in the Congress and state legislatures, put there by means of fooling the poor into voting for them, have destroyed any meaningfulness to the voting process.

The mechanism of this destruction includes gerrymandering, lobbying, no-bid contracting, PACs, corporations as persons, fit-the-desired-results pollstering, media blitzing, and of course owning the news outlets that tell people how to vote under the pretense of objective journalism.

Most appalling, these people use the emotional appeal of out-of-context religious phraseology and a flag-waving patriotic fervor to gain the support of millions of woefully uninformed citizens (thanks to financially undersupported schools that have been turned into menial-work-preparation mills and empty political platitudes in the guise of news but packaged as entertainment) - even as these people rip away from these people their civil rights, their jobs, their health, their clean environment, and dump heavy regressive taxes on their shoulders.

I'm reminded how, decades ago, I saw the manuscript for a fellow pastor's sermon. At one point in the margin his wife had noted, "Your argument's weak here. Be sure to raise your voice in emphasis." This, to me, is a metaphor for what these lunatics are doing - they have not weak arguments; rather, they have none at all. So they raise their voices into a din of outrage against those who try calmly to explain the complicated, boring facts.

Remember:

Those who do not set the bulwarks of their positions on the foundation of fact and raise them up on the girders of logic, but rather on the emotional appeal of flag and scripture, don't want you to realize that their rhetoric entirely lacks both fact and logic.

This Matthew Vadum fails to comprehend an essential feature to the whole idea of every citizen, rich or poor, white or minority, Christian or Jewish or Muslim, liberal or conservative, being able to vote. If every citizen is able to vote, it is much more difficult for a self-governed country to be taken over by an oligarchy.

We have seen in history what it's like when only whites can vote - blacks are kept as slaves. We have seen in history what it's like when only men can vote - women cannot inherit or hold meaningful jobs or get a decent education.

If only Christians get to vote, for instance, other faiths will soon be tightly regulated, or heavily taxed, or even outlawed. If only Republicans get to vote, there will be no "loyal opposition" to their maddening excesses. (The Democrats are no band of saints; they too have their idiots and their monsters. But they're all we've got in opposition to these tea party Republican lunatics!) And if only people who do not receive public assistance get to vote, then laws will soon be put in place denying those on public assistance (including the poor and the elderly) their essential civil rights.

It is only because those on public assistance (and those who agree to the necessity of providing it) still can vote that the poor and the minorities still have a few rights. It is only because they can still vote that the United States hasn't yet quite fully become an oligarchy of the wealthy. The country is already dangerously close to that, with lawmakers in state and federal legislative bodies doing everything they can to eliminate taxes on the wealthy, to create corporations as legal persons, to take away all public assistance (including health, housing, food, and other essentials), to eliminate environmental and safety standards, and safeguards against monopolies, and reduce all but the ultra-wealthy to slaves, working several jobs and still struggling to pay their taxes and their exorbitantly priced necessities.

And, if those on public assistance are denied the vote - even though the United States Constitution enshrines the vote for all citizens - then I warn you: You Are Next. Are you of a faith other than conservative Christian, or (shudder) of no faith at all? Is your racial heritage something other than Northern European? Do you have more than a high school education? Once they start that snowball rolling down the hill, there will soon be an avalanche of widespread disenfranchisement.

I'm a left-handed left-leaning scholar-writer, ordained in a liberal Protestant denomination and someone who practices (shudder) other faiths as well (Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Native American spirituality) who lives abroad because he can't afford life in the United States and is angry about that reality. I expect them not only to take away my vote, but to take away my pension and my Social Security that I paid for by working for forty-five years. You should be concerned that you, too, will lose certain essentials.

Vadum also fails to understand that voting isn't a "right" anyway.

It's a responsibility.

A right is something that is permanently yours. You can't lose it. A responsibility is something that, if you don't use it, you lose it. If you don't vote - and vote for people who will protect your rights and your responsibilities - both of them - you will lose at least your responsibilities, and very likely some day your rights, too.

Allow me to explain:

Every citizen has as her or his responsibility participation in self-government. If one fails that responsibility, one tacitly is allowing others - whoever those "others" may be, including the ultra-rich and the ultra-conservatives who toady up to them - to govern them instead. If a citizen doesn't vote, then a citizen has no right - this is where rights fit in - to exercise free speech to criticize the government.

That, at least, is what I used to say. But now that elections are so carefully managed that their outcomes are designed by the super-wealthy, the opportunity to exercise that responsibility has been taken away from us. I'm no longer sure whether it is worth the effort to vote, when the outcome is already been bought and paid for.

Vadum is only verbalizing what is increasingly a reality: that the United States is no longer a self-governed country, but an oligarchy of the super-rich.