Tag: corporate corruption

History is always written by the winners.  Native Americans know it, African Americans know it, Palestinians know it, working class people in every country in this world know it, every gay man or woman who has ever lived knows it.  Everyone who has ever been beaten into submission by the power of armies, by the power of economic might, by the power of entrenched religion, entrenched conformity, entrenched bigotry, entrenched conservative ideology knows it . . .  

History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books, books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe.  As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon?’

And what is Obama’s healthcare reform bill, but a fable agreed upon?  

By Reid.  By Pelosi.  By the Democrats.  By the reciters of fables at Daily Kos.  Check out the recommended Fable List there and behold all of the happy endings.  Hansel and Gretel follow the trail of crumbs to incremental change and everyone lives happily ever after.  Snow White ate the Poison Option and fell into a purist coma, but Prince Charming kissed her and she awoke in beautiful Healthcare Reform Land, where everyone, even the Three Bears and Three Little Pigs and Rumpelstiltskin and Pinocchio and most of the Seven Dwarfs got to take a first step towards having affordable health insurance.

That’s one small step for the Three Bears and their friends, one giant leap for the health insurance industry.

Triangulation Base here, the Vulture has landed.

But I digress . . .

It doesn’t matter when you check that place out, they’re always off to see the Wizard. Everyone is dancing down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City of More and Better Democrats, where Steny the Tin Man will get a heart, Harry the Cowardly Lion will get courage, and Barack the Scarecrow will finally get a fucking brain. Whatever you do, don’t tell them they’re on a Yellow Brick Road to nowhere, the big bad wolves of Kos Communications Inc. will huff and puff and blow your house down, clean slate or not.            

Happy endings at Daily Fables are only for the true and faithful believers in Humpty Dumpty.   I’m not sure what they’ll do when Humpty falls off that Wall of Centrism, and all of Rahm’s horses and all of Rahm’s men can’t put him back together again, but if their past attitudes are any indication, far left fringe Naderites, Docudharma deadenders, radical Teabagger empowering firedogging firedoggers, Cindy Sheehan worshipping attention whore purists, and instant gratification political neophytes like us will get the blame.

The Founding Fathers gave us democracy.  We have the moral responsibility to restore what was given to us, to take back what has been taken away by corrupt politicians of both major parties.  There is no longer any doubt that the two-party system has been used to Establish, Maintain, and Expand corporate Tyranny.  It has been used to divide and conquer, to prevent We the People from uniting in defense of our rights as citizens.  

The false paradigm of We the Left against We the Right must be rejected.  Americans must embrace a new ideology of Citizen Empowerment, they must speak a new language of Political, Social, and Economic Activism, they most forge a new movement, a local, state, and nationwide alliance encompassing the values and goals they share in common.  They must cast aside the dead language of We the Left and We the Right, for among the victims of corporate Tyranny, there is no We the Left nor We the Right anymore, there is only We the Powerless.

In “Illiteracy: The Downfall of American Society”, Education Portal reports that 50 percent of adults in America cannot read a book written at an 8th grade level.  20 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level.  42 million American adults can’t read at all.  The number of American adults classified as functionally illiterate increases by about 2.25 million each year.

Many of those people are Teabaggers . . .

Yeah.  That’ll help.  

Finding America on a map is also a problem.  According to National Geographic News, 11 percent of young Americans can’t locate the United States on a map. The location of the Pacific Ocean is a mystery to 29 percent, 58 percent don’t know where Japan is, 65 percent don’t know where France is, 69 percent don’t know where the United Kingdom is.

Knowledge of current issues and historical events is just as abysmal. Saul Friedman notes that 34 percent of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, nearly one-third of Republicans don’t believe Obama was born in the United States, more than two-thirds don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade, 24 percent could not name the country we fought in the Revolutionary War.

Many of these people vote, with predictably appalling results.  According to Freedom Daily . . .

Political scientist Michael Carpini analyzed thousands of voter surveys and found that there was “virtually no relationship” between the political issues that low-knowledge voters said “matter most to them and the positions of the candidates they voted for on those issues.  It was as if their vote was random.  

Low knowledge voters comprise 36 percent of the electorate and provide the deciding margins in almost all contested congressional and presidential elections.  Here in the 21st century, with multiple crises facing us, with the worst crisis of all–global warming–steadily intensifying, we have little if any chance of dealing with any of these crises through the political system, because our elections are not decided by the well-informed voters who make rational decisions in the voting booth, they’re decided by the voters who have no fucking idea what’s going on.