It’s the Inequality, Stupid

By Vi Ransel

7/3/09

Our government, composed, ostensibly, of the people’s own representatives has refused to take the banks – merely corporations initially created to serve the needs of the people – in hand and deal with them. The tail has become the dog. The Federal Reserve and Rubin’s sorcerer’s apprentices of deregulation have unleashed the hounds of economic hell and allowed the few who rule from behind the curtains of the financial system to sit upon the rest of the American people as if on a throne. And by that I mean toilet. They’ve plundered and pillaged the United States of America into a reasonable facsimile of a banana republic after financial gang rape by NAFTA, the IMF and the World Bank.

As the financial aristocracy which holds the reins of the banks settles ever more comfortably into the driver’s seat of the rest of the American people’s lives, they strangle the entire economy, squeezing out every last drop of profit at the people’s expense. The level of inequality is staggering, and it’s being ratcheted up even further on the ski lift of excess to the summit of the sheer cliff overlooking the abyss of total economic collapse.

And all for those worthless pieces of paper, those I.O.U.s we call dollars. But no, the Plutocrats are not stupid. They’re planning to palm off this ephemeral currency on anyone stupid – or desperate – enough to exchange tangible assets for dollars. Real things like businesses, factories, infrastructure, natural resources and real estate. Yes, my pretty, your very own home. And all for pennies on the dollar. Just as in the First Great depression, the Plutocrats will consolidate real – as opposed to financial paper or computer entry – wealth into, as George Bush #41 put it so succinctly, “higher, tighter and righter hands.” Please feel free to add “whiter” to that list. This has always been The Plan.

As more and more of us no longer even live paycheck to paycheck, but credit card fee to credit card fee, struggling just to keep our heads above water, the smaller and smaller percentage of those at the tippy top hoarding the bulk of America’s wealth gorges on 99% of the American Pie, floating up there above the rest of us like a yacht the size of a football field, its hull honed to the sharpest Sword-of-Damocles-like edge.

Everybody knows this. It’s as plain as the “knows” on your face. But no one dare speak its name. The Plutocracy parades in the Empire’s new clothes, completely naked – especially its arrogant CEOs – its excess perpetuated by our denial. The market, and the money and power it symbolizes, is our god and it will have none other before it. We may not take its name in vain. “There is no alternative” to capitalism. (Margaret Thatcher)

Thus almost everyone who has eyes to see and yet denies this fact eventually succumbs to apathy, ennui and despair. This feeling of powerlessness in Americans is as carefully cultivated as hot house roses (or genetically-engineered tomatoes) in order to cripple the spirit of the American Revolution as it becomes more and more apparent that merit, character, ethics and hard work are mere road apples in the dust as the Plutocrats’ progeny cakewalks their way to the top of the heap, leaving equal opportunity, a level playing field, liberty and justice for all in the same pile of road apples. And we, the majority of the American people, have languished there in that pile, afraid of, and subservient to, the all-American authoritarianism that masquerades in the sheep’s clothing of democracy until 1% – ONE PERCENT – of 305 million of us is holding 25% – ONE QUARTER – of all of America’s wealth.

Let’s say there are 100 of us in our science class and we’re about to start on our projects for the science fair. There’s a fund we all share in to buy the things we need to complete our projects. Little Lord Fauntleroy gets $25.00. The other 99 of us split $75.00. That means the rest of us get about 76 cents each. How do you think our science projects will turn out? Who do you think will win the science prize on this level playing field?

But maybe our folks, the parents of the 99 of us who have 76 cents each to spend on our science projects, can help us out. Fuggeddaboudit. Mom and Dad haven’t had a raise since 1980. They’ve been financing our American Dream on their credit cards. And Little Lord Fauntleroy’s parents? They’ve been outsourcing our parents’ jobs, loaning them money at loan shark rates, getting them to buy their own debt via “structured investment vehicles” and laughing all the way to the bank.

And while these financial wizards, particularly the banksters, were racking up billions and billions by impoverishing our parents, they were also slipping it to our representatives in the congressional shark tank in the form of lobbyists and campaign contributions. Why do you THINK the Democrats, who were elected with a mandate to do the bidding of the majority of the American people – enact single-payer healthcare, ease access to higher education, create jobs, save Social Security, stop the foreclosures and get us the hell out of the Middle East, to name just a few – have been bending over, grabbing their ankles and taking it from all comers, Republicans, “conservatives”, neoliberals, neocons, the hospital/insurance/pharmaceutical and banking interests, and their own, body-snatching, DLC “centrist” Democrat ghouls? Money makes their world go ’round. It rings their bell. It makes them feel big and powerful, even if only more big and powerful than lowly “we the people” as they remain subservient, groveling, licking the ass of the money-grubber on the next rung up of the money ladder begging for more shit.

And we KNOW this. We look at it “from the side” like “good Germans” saw their neighbors carted off to concentration camps from the corner of their eye and denied it all the same. Many, to this day. This putrid political parlaying in the twilight of perception management grows inequality like fungus in the dark, popping up everywhere our “reality” is manufactured for us by the kindly protégés of Leo Strauss, who know what’s best for us, who do it for our own good, because we’re too stupid-by-design to be able to run either a government or a financial system all by ourselves – or so they’ve engineered us to believe.

They’ve actually enlisted us to enable, aid and abet our own assault, battery and financial gang rape at the behest of men of obscene and obese wealth – Yes, men. White men. – behind the curtain who made us say we love it, told us to suck it up, baby. Siphon that money up to your American idler daddy, the plutocratic parasite that turned us out and made us what we are today. Who made us believe that greed is good. That what’s good for Wall Street is good for Main Street. This pornographic molestation has fostered the takeover of the United States government, that government ostensibly of the people, by the people and for the people in a coup de banks, which, remember, are only the front men for the creepsters behind the curtain, the billionaires and multi-millionaires who fancy themselves philanthropists like raisin-like old John D. Rockefeller handing out shiny new dimes during the First Great Depression to the foreclosed upon, the jobless, the sick, the hungry and the homeless in an effort to make himself look human via public relations.

Keep in mind that if you make $50,000 a year, you will have to work for 20,000 years to make a billion dollars, a mere 10,000 years to make half a billion. A billion is one thousand million. The richest man in the world is worth $40 billion. What does one do with $40 billion? That’s an awful lot of shiny dimes. And these billionaires are certainly not giving until it hurts. They’re too busy taking. And damn the consequences. “When questioned about the devastation that currency speculation caused to countless millions in Asia when his type of gambling caused cataclysmic chaos, (George) Soros replied casually that ‘As a market participant, I don’t need to be concerned with the consequences of my actions.’” (1)

While they’re busy sucking it up, our money as “surplus” value, our assets and engineered stock losses, that is, they’re more or less telling us metaphorically, perhaps literally, to “suck on our yachts” (2) Charming, no? No.

Between the Plutocrats sucking us dry and “our” Congress and the Obama Administration sucking up to them, all that suction has sucked us up to the top of that sheer cliff overlooking the abyss of total economic collapse. We the people have nothing left for the predatory Plutocrats to suck. And we’re sick of sucking on their yachts.

But note, when they’ve taken everything from us and we have nothing left to lose, they’ve inadvertently set us free, hoisting themselves on their own petard. Let’s finish the revolution.

KILL CAPITALISM BEFORE IT KILLS YOU. POWER. TO THE PEOPLE.

(1) Brian Cloughly, “Scoundrels of Great Wealth”
(2) Matt Taibbi, “Suck on Our Yachts: Goldman Sachs Issues Non-apology
for Destroying the World Economy”, Truth/Slant, Alternet, June 22, 2009

Vi Ransel, TPC’s senior editor of anti-capitalism, is a researcher and poet of exceptional caliber. Very little is known about her.

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