According to people who should know, The Ruling Class is using our money….draining our money, the money we use to survive and feed our children and to actual produce things, to rescue the very structure…that allows them to BE The Ruling Class. That enables them to Rule us.
These people, the Ruling Class, are the ones who got us into this financial armageddon. These are the same Ruling Class that took us to war in Iraq, after ignoring the warnings that an attack was coming.
They are the same people who made America into a nation that tortures people they KNOW to be innocent. They are the same people…if they even deserve the name…who are stopping any serious efforts to mitigate a Climate Crisis of incomprehensible scope.
They are the same people that so unprecedentedly had the Supreme Court decide Bush vs. Gore, so they could have Bush cut their taxes and deregulate the very same structures that we are now being called to give OUR money to prop up. Yes, the very same people who are directly responsible for everything that has gone wrong in our world, are the people who are now telling us….not asking us….telling us, that we have to bail them out. While as always, not telling us the whole story, not telling us what they are doing behind the scenes and behind our backs. They are though, telling us…..That we HAVE to clean up their shit, again, and suffer for their mistakes, just like we did in the last depression. The Ruling Class, they insist, is to big too fail. Even if that means that we have to.
These are the same people who let US drown in New Orleans.
And then threw corporate parties and killed Iraqis instead of rebuilding it.
These very same people, this Ruling Class, who have PROVEN themselves to be incompetent idiots again and again, these “elites” who have plunged the world into ruin and war and who threaten us with a dystopian future of rising oceans and droughts and famine now insist that they can fix it. With our money.
Using the same methods, mindset, and lack of brains, lack of compassion, lack of true comprehension of the consequences of their actions on others (as they remain untouched, well fed and warm) and, as is becoming exceedingly clear…the lack of any shred of moral integrity whatsoever.
They are taking our blood, sweat and tears to continue a system that ONLY benefits them.
What is depressing is that this money – staggering amounts of money – is being wasted when it could be used in ways that actually help the economy (hell, giving a $40,000 check to every living American would be a way smarter use of the same money).What is so depressing is that the goal still seems to be to save banks when it should be to save the economy.
What is depressing is that people are again being steamrolled into “bailouts” – 5 years after being steamrolled into a war against mushroom clouds by essentially the same people – and the Serious People are still wrong, utterly wrong.
To them the economy IS a game, to us it is food in the mouths of our children. To them, war is a strategic struggle for tactical advantage in order to control and plunder valuable dwindling resources. To us it is our brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers …and again, our children being horrible maimed for life and killed. To them, torturing human beings, like us, that they KNOW ARE INNOCENT is less important than their fucking careers.
Most Guantanamo prisoners are innocent….
Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former vice-president Dick Cheney fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because “to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership.”
No one need ask any longer….How far will they go?
If you will hold and torture people you KNOW to be innocent to avoid a “black mark”…
If you will invade a country and kill a million people for no discernible reason beyond potential oil profits…
If you will distort and propagandize and spin to LET the oceans rise and portions of the earth to become uninhabitable and create millions and millions of future Climate Refugees so you don’t have to give up your profits and luxurious lifestyle…
If you will DESTROY the world’s economy, the world’s ability to feed their children, for a little extra cash so you can have thousand dollar brunches, and try to make a quarterly balance sheet look good……
Well we now KNOW how far they will go.
We know now how selfish and soulless The Ruling Class is.
The only thing we don’t know is what to do about it.
Because, thank all that is holy and sacred……WE are not THEM.
We are not ruthless, compassionless, rapacious killers and torturers.
WE are Human Beings, dammit. Loving, caring, giving Human Beings.
And we just do not know to fight it….hell we don’t even want to admit it exists, let alone have to fight back against the sort of inhuman, immoral, and yes, perhaps even evil, people and the elaborate structures of finance, politics, privilege and media that support them.
And the ultimate irony, and perhaps the only form of TRUE justice that we may ever get is that these people, these ‘elites,’ this Ruling Class that has dehumanized US to the point where they feel no shame or guilt or remorse or urge to correction….are by these very acts giving up that claim, the claim to be Human Beings. They are, in the unfunniest irony ever, dehumanizing themselves. By renouncing through their repeated and unlamented actions any claim to Humanity itself.
But we don’t know how to fight back….because WE do NOT want to dehumanize THEM. Because WE know that that is wrong. Just plain wrong. A concept that they seem to have grown totally incapable of grasping.
Right and wrong no longer seem to exist for them. Only privilege and tactical advantage and how they can use the media they own to spin their latest fuck-up to blame someone else…..preferably us. Because we were stupid enough to buy their loans, and their wars, and their explanations. We are to blame, they want to say, for buying their bullshit.
Are we still that stupid….or are we learning?
Evil always destroys itself, wise men have said, by not being able to stop itself from taking more. And now they have taken too much. And yet still, they come to us and TELL us that we MUST give them more. Because the Ruling Class is Too Big Too Fail.
Well……….so are we.
They are rapidly reducing the equation to The Ruling Class versus the rest of Humanity.
What are we going to do about it?
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actually, I need to Phone A Friend… not sure if its okay to say here or should I just send you an email…? Theres some “low hanging fruit” in a current dkos diary (commenters) … and Im … not there yet, in terms of being able to give some answers.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/…
😉
I have to tell you something here that may get me in more trouble than I know… but probably won’t or it would have already.
The only thing we don’t know is what to do about it?
Don’t play in their game. Don’t buy their crap. And don’t buy their crap, either. As someone who spent years in direct sales I know that 90 percent of products produced are produced to be sold. Not to be bought. The people who make them mostly won’t buy them because they are crap made to be sold, not to be bought.
Everything is a lie. All of it. Everything. The ruling class is propped up by people buying the lies and the crap that is sold.
Virtually everything I need someone else can supply me with in exchange for something I can do for the that they need. There is the entire economy. All the economy I think that anyone needs.
Tax me to prop up the ruling class? I haven’t filed a tax return or given anyone in the government my address for more than five years. I don’t know if I ever will again.
They are taking our blood, sweat and tears to continue a system that ONLY benefits them.
…
Well we now KNOW how far they will go.
We know now how selfish and soulless The Ruling Class is.
The only thing we don’t know is what to do about it?
How about this?
Us, and them
And after all were only ordinary men.
Me, and you.
God only knows its noz what we would choose to do.
Forward he cried from the rear
And the front rank died.
And the general sat and the lines on the map
Moved from side to side.
…of all people, coming out in complete opposition to Krugman is Brad DeLong, who also “should know”.
I had meant to write about this subject myself, but I think this poses an interesting conundrum. Krugman and DeLong both have excellent “progressive” credentials and excellent academic macro ones as well. Krugman has done more important academic work, but in trade theory, not finance or anything else which gives him significantly greater standing on the subject. So, what do you believe and why? And remember, while DeLong is calling for two trillion in public liabilities, Krugman is calling for more, not less, including greater public assumption of illiquid securities.
Fact is that, from the POV of the elites, they are being moral. As Lasch pointed out in The Revolt of the Elites the ruling class identifies itself with it’s peers internationally. For much of human history the elites had a sense of place and society for good and ill. It was important for them to have privileges and good reputations. If you go back to Aristotle you see that morality was very closely linked to your reputation. Dishonor was a very important social constraint in ancient Greek society as it remains in many parts of the world paritucarly the Islamic world which inherited the ancient world’s traditional views (i.e., the Greek notion of hospitality that is almost absent in the West now).
One of the main problems Americans face vis a vis the elites is that, as Gore Vidal repeats every time he can, we have perhaps the worst public educational system in the world. He once said that he meets plenty of interesting 6 year old but few 16-year old kids that are anything but dull. What happens to people? I’ve seen it with my kids and their peers–fortunately my kids had some alternatives available–my youngest daughter, for example flat out refused to go past 7th grade in public school and this in one of the best PS systems in the country (she’s now in a very expensive private school with some liberal scholarship help). I’m pointing this out because the problem is less in the elites than in us and how we have raised our children so that they are now lifeless and lacking all conviction (and following Yeats those are the best of them).
We have enormous potential to change things and to overcome the advantages the oligarchy possesses. But unless we educate our selves particularly in history, logic, social science, and (above all) politics there is nothing we can do. People on the left blogs act all shocked at how malevolent the elites are–well what do you fucking expect? The left (I hesitate to call it that because in America it has no solid theoretical underpinning) has somehow bought hook-line-and-sinker the ideas of American Exceptionalism that somehow we are immune from the temptations and vices of other societies–because, well, we just mean well. We don’t mean well more or less than any other people–we just pretend we do. When push comes to shove the most generous people I’ve encountered live in lands most American’s despise.
Like Marx, I believe Capitalism plays an important transitional part in civilization but that by itself without the counterweight of a solid left-wing asserting humanistic and spiritual values that recognize there is more to life than capital accumulation and, indeed, that unquestioned capitalist morality leads to cultural poverty and ecological catastrophe. Without a clear analysis of our situation we are just complaining “it’s not fair” and stamping our feet. With a solid theoretical foundation we can move on and establish a way to use the tools available to us to revivify the left and even the principled right (i.e., the opposition). Then we can have the inner strength to a) create our own institutions that benefit us and those who join us and b) separate from the system so that when the man snaps his fingers we roll up and say “yes sir boss, anything you like” which is the situation for most of us.
As I’ve often said, the problem is not so much that the oligarchy is strong but that we are weak politically, morally, and spiritually.
dont they love their children too? Its their kids & grandkids’ planet too.
At what point do they say, No, the cost is too high?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
OMGZ, budhy, of all the diaries of yours over the last few years that I’ve read this is by far the best.
It is not a “rant”–it is both a political tract and a call to action.
I’m responding to you here because I want you to read this. (I read it over at the orange.)
This posting should be spread all across America in whatever way shape or form that it can.
All the best to you buhdy–mark