The Kids Are Alright 3

The current three-pronged attack of buying off the major players in government, the Tea-Party, Republican Party, AND the Democratic party, plus The Supreme Court and most of the press, is crumbling the very structure of our own American Town Hall.  I've stood in the same room where the Declaration of Independence was negotiated and signed, as well as the Constitution.  Some of our current business and political leaders might easily burst into flames and blow screaming around the room like a deflating balloon should the historical essences of our forefathers catch them there, so far have we strayed from those noble ideals, imperfect may they have been even there and then.  The spirit of the law of liberty and justice for all is what fills Americans and people around the world with pride and respect, for us, not the tattered, swiss cheese intepretation our cowboy kangaroo justice system is built on now.  There is good and there is bad, but increasingly there are two standards: one for those inside politics and law enforcement and one for those outside.  That is a recipe for disaster.  The two forces are polarising against each other rather than standing back to back and rremembering we are all one.  No controls can predict backlash, when the public is tired of being second class citizens. There is possibly time and willpower to turn it back, but the cracks in our current structure are proving difficult to mend because of our own polarising tribalism and party system, and willingness at the highest levels to set fire to the house rather than have a family discussion.  It shows a complete lack of respect for the public who are employees AND customers AND citizens AND families--what our nation is built on--and for our history and the rights of workers and societies all over the world to hold onto the guarantees so recently drafted by America and the ideas of which have carried over in good faith to the United Nations: www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

It is truly sickening that most of our leaders have never even read this document, and who currently CERTAINLY hope WE never have!  These rights are inconvenient to our current strongarm society, and of course, many nations of the world have NEVER aspired to these ideals either.  Why would they when they see our example?  Whether we are go-getters or lazy about work and giving to society is nearly irrelevant anymore, because we are all treated exactly the same way--as commodities rather than people.  This is corporate-think.  This is bean-counting gone wild.  And CEO salaries skyrocket because they APPEAR to be turning companies around when the seedy truth is that it is the stolen dreams of billions which are feeding the fires of profit, creating the comfy warmth of bonuses for these corporate leaders, and the competition and cuthroat peer-pressure creates a domino effect of other leaders following suit--trying to look cool.  So what if investors are happy?  It is a pyhhric victory.  We are so far gone that we PRAISE these people as working miracles and they all pat themselves on the back for destroying society, and making fools of those who remember that for which America once stood.  Way to go chaps!  Now watch what happens when common sense catches up.  There can be nothing but instabilty when you erode the very foundations that any democracy is built on: the Peoples' dreams of freedom, the Peoples' ability to pursue their own happiness through a well-working, well-meaning system of society, education, business, healthcare, and government, freedom of choice and civility and privacy on a daily basis.  It is obvious where our sensibilities now lie: Corporate-think and financial bubbles guaranteed to fail again and again.  Congratulations!  You win!  Here's your booby prize: economic wasteland, at the edge of which the dogs of war are barking.  Hear them howling for your childrens' blood?  No?  Perhaps you are deafened by the applause in your own little awards ceremonies, then.

"Sittin' by the window/Lookin' out at the rain"  www.youtube.com/watch?v=OisKaj… (JANIS JOPLIN [Big Mama Thornton's] Ball & Chain, 1970)

It is dramatic to say so, and unfair to all of those elected leaders and businesspeople who are actively striving AGAINST these ideals, and to right the ship, slow the train, do the right thing, and America is still a great place no matter what these shitheads do to it, and we can see that they are outnumbered by a long, long way.  Propaganda can only prop them up so long before even their own kind are forced to look at them in disgust.  We can see that the wealthy minority rules a tiny molehill in reality.  Perhaps the saddest (and most dangerous) part is that most of them don't even understand what they have done wrong.  They were raised to be leaders in business.  Business means making money, doesn't it?  So striving and building a company is the dream of capitalism isn't it?  Yes, BUT we are ALL interconnected on this planet.  Capitalism is NOT separate from democracy.  There is no vaccuum that insulates us--not even wealth.  The goal of capitalism is to SUPPORT a society built out of happy people with strong ideals and laws that work.  It is NOT meant to be extortion.  It is not meant to turn its back on freedoms and rtewrite the constitution.  It does not lead, and when it tries to, it fails.  Ditto for the military.  Militancy CANNOT lead, it only ever creates war.  It doesn't understand anything else.  It is self-fulfilling when we are guided in our domestic policies or foreign policies by the principles of war.  It is self-fulfilling to do that.  It is lighting a match in powder magazine.  Business is a pillar of society, not a pediment.  The pediment is reserved for our gods, and our business leaders are not gods any more than our secret agents or our president, but flawed human beings like the rest of us.  They are harder to teach, though, insulated as they are, and supremely less interested in admitting their mistakes than the rest of us.

That is our business model, and we act surprised when our world devolves.  We thought we were doing the world a FAVOUR by teaching them corporate-think!  Look how productive everyone is (don't look behind the curtain to see how people really live--in bullshit--scraping by)!  Business is productive, but the economy isn't because there is no wealth in the mainstream middle class anymore to support it, except where needed services and utilities and banks are still extorting us as part of corporate-think.  "If they NEED us, we can charge even more!" = extortion.

But wait, it gets better.

Meanwhile, the secret machinations behind the scenes of "democracy" are at work as if The Cold War never ended.  We sell arms to tribesmen, then double-cross them and watch our towers fall.  "How dare they attack our Empire!", we wonder, idiotically.  Our obvious inattention to realistic outcomes is staggering, and now our countries stagger themselves, like punch-drunk prize-fighters, because we forgot basic maths, economics, human rights, and moral philosophy all at the same time!  No, terror is not credible, it is disgusting, but there IS a twisted logic behind it.  We reap what we sow.  And whereas our official policy used to be that "We will not treat with terrorists."  We always DID behind the scenes.  We do it openly now.  The CIA is now, according to senator John McCain, in Syria training rebels, some of whom have posted videos of beheadings and lining up those heads of their conquests on bookshelves as trophies.  This is the level of atrocity of some of the tribes we throw our weight behind.  We now live by a policy of terror and control and hunt and kill missions because we sold out freedom with The Patriot Act.  It should be called the Espionage Act.  Regardless, our agencies have no discernable oversight by American citizens--until we do.  There is no arena that the People of the world are NOT able to access--period.  We are at a crossroads for how we conduct business.  

It is easy to "armchair quarterback" though.  What we are missing at street level is a desire to understand WHY all of this is happening.  WE are responsible for our countries.  If there are charlatans in charge or on the news blathering propaganda at us, who don't respect us, don't respect democracy or even know what it is, and don't respect the rights and dreams of people around the world the same way as we value our own, then everything that happens IS WHAT WE ASKED FOR.  Complacency or rejection of politics as a whole system in the face of the idiocy rampant within it is easy, EASY, but it seals our fate, it gives our fates over to those self-same idiots.  Doing the work of democracy is hard.  It is EVEN HARDER FOR THE POOR WHO HAVE TO WORK ALL DAY JUST TO EARN FOOD.  THAT is why the rich rise to power, not because they are the cream, but because their path is easier.  It is easiy when there is a powerful dynasty mill at your back.  There are lessons to learn and trials to get through whether we are rich or poor, but the nurturing hand of "entitlement" is something that both sides need to look at in themselves.  It is no longer enough just to keep our head down and go to work.  Our leaders, both business and political (and sometimes religious) have proved they can't always be trusted when we are looking the other way.  We MUST be involved in our Congress and our companies, and in THINKING and QUESTIONING what we are doing.  It is all very well to say IT IS WRITTEN.  So it is.  So the story is still being told, so it is both relevent and off the mark.  So we have righted some wrongs and created others.  How centered are we in all things?  Those buildings in our capital cities are OURS.  Those towers in our cities are ours. Those houses of worship are OURS.  Those Parks and playgrounds are OURS.  Those companies SERVE US.  What goes on there should interest us!  It is NOT too complicated to figure out, but don't just jump on the bandwagon of one news source, or one gang, because more and more they are controlled by these same business conglomerations who have their fingers twisted in the hair of our government.  Find out from TWENTY sources what is going on, and filter out the bullshit.  That is how it works in Rock and Roll.  That is the triangulation of truth.  We have our favourite bands, but there are thousands.  Using that same method across all our activities is the ONLY way to get a broad range of perspectives that is centered around some common kernel of truth.  Then it becomes clear.

Talk about it with others.  Our great democracies are LITERALLY founded on cafe and tea-room and smoking court and tavern banter, where people gather to think and converse and cross-chat their ideals.  Democracy is a social phenomenon of free-thinking peoples sharing ideas, and sharing common pastimes with multicultural access, whereas totalitarian societies suppress them with greater and greater controls and strident adamancy through propaganda and prohibitions.  When democracy is working it is a haven for EVERY walk of life.  No one is left behind.  It is under the umbrella of peace and the celebration of knowlege that we can speak our minds and engage in the planning and networking that turns into channels of opportunity.  THAT is the ideal that makes us great.  THAT is the ideal that guides us to change.  The freedom to speak truth, either in the press or in private or in public is what guarantees freedom for dreams to form, and business is beholden to that ideal of truth fertilising and sprouting the dreams of industry and building it into hope AS WELL AS the ideals of our concentric tribes, the more encompassing, the better.  Business FOLLOWS peoples' dreams.  Government is beholden to that idea of truth sprouting peoples' dreams.  Government FOLLOWS peoples' dreams.  To steal our dreams and twist them, and to try to dictate them back to us instead makes an entire country's voices null and void, an entire country's Constitution worthless.   Freedom becomes warped dictatorship.   What a waste of our hard-won emancipation from monarchy!  To react in the OPPOSITE and to degrade public gathering and social rituals and social substances as somehow more harmful than good is PROOF that we are very definitely LOSING the thread of democracy to some idiotic notion of protecting us all as though we were newborns.  Totalitarian morality and health codes are NOT a good alternative to freedom of choice.  We are seeing it not only in religious societies but in democracy as a function of the rise of secretly monitored communications, a crackdown on the press reporting on specious government and business practices, and in our over-zealous banking and energy and insurance monopolies.  This last not only as a function of state help for those who can ill afford it--in other words a good thing--but as part of the massive industrial insurance organisations who are beginning to REQUIRE militant good health and austerity as a function, ostensibly of "good will" and "public welfare", but more transparently as a function of piggish profit margins.  Insurance agencies have turned themselves AND our employers into vice squads (not all, but some major players are represented in the subversion of consumer rights). These are subversive and continual erosions of the ideals of democracy.  It says nowhere in our Declaration of Independence that the "pursuit of happiness" is to be militantly pursued by our companies and our insurance brokers and that it gives them the option to persecute based on whether we smoke, drink, or make love. Where do we draw the line, then? There must be balance between morality and good judgement, and we are losing it.  If we are to be told how to live our lives--that works both ways--we may opt to decide how these companies spend our money as well--one rationale is as good as the other. Institutions are not automatically superior by weight of dollar figures.  What is the rationale behind institutions thinking they are superior to the will of the People?  We are tired of their condescension.  Big corporations are always whining about government intrusion yet they are so intrusive into peoples' lives as to be the worldwide legends of hypocrisy.  THEY ASK FOR CONTROLS BY NOT CONTROLLING THEMSELVES.  The line is drawn at ANY personal health concerns being mandatory.  It is opening the door to oppression like we have not seen before OUTSIDE of fascist governments.  We are losing the thread of responsiblity to maintain our own personal will and choice.  We are losing our freedoms.  The answer to why we might smoke, drink, take drugs, and ROCK AND ROLL is so that we can get through the daily gauntlet of hypocrisy and injustices meted out by our monkey-puzzle existences.  We all share the responsibility to make good choices that INCREASE OUR UNDERSTANDING, and there are many routes back to the truth of all things.  Institutional wisdom is questionable by nature.  How much has it retained of its original mandate to help the People, and how much has it strayed into profiteering.  That is the eternal question for us to ask, AND for us to understand about their jobs in society, and the eternal responsibility for our leaders to maintain those ideals in our name.  Otherwise what good are you?  In return we will try to behave ourselves.  The more respectful those in positions of power are to our freedoms, the more respectful we are likely to be.

Life is skewed right out of the birth canal for our kids as it hasn't been since the first rise of industrialisation opened the door for the moral decay of "robber barons", imagining themselves as feudal lords of society.  It is a situation that is polarising the people into classes and corners.  We are consolodating into our traditional tribes again and that will mean friction and conflict.  You can see it across the globe.  In a distracting sleight of hand "terror" is the word of the day now.  Terror is not terrifying.  It is a desperate means of desperate people to prove something that is immediately negated by their own lunacy.  They lose their own argument.  It is our leaders who are scared shitless and guilty at their own dirty hands, and can't pay attention to domestic leadership issues, their own consciences and corporate raids on society (or are paid off not to).  Indeed most are now a part of corporate-think themselves, they were nurtured in its bosom, are part of its machine, so bent on self-preservation that vast swathes of the planet are being left to fend for themselves including in our own countries.  Hooray!  We are triple-fucked!  We are extorted by weakly restricted monopolies on services and finance and insurance (and are brainwashed to think government control over them is bad); we are caught in the crossfire of "terror" because our secret agencies damage and undermine our ability to negotiate in good faith with idealistically charged foreign nations and we CAN'T claim superiority if our government is corrupt and cancerous too, not just because they are exposed, but because they ARE; and our politicians are increasingly in the pay of the corporations and military who lobby them, then hire them, and then return them to power again to work for them, in a revolving door of crooked politics and war-like ideals, and who now only pay lip-service to American citizens and those around the world, instead of appreciating us, try to dictate control of our ideals, like privacy, and freedom, and a sense of respect, self or otherwise, and peace and good will toward one another and the planet.  Most of us around the world share those ideals, and are forced to live subjugated to our leaders' power plays and one-upsmanship.  A necessary evil?  Then evil will come to visit. While it is true that it is a CHOICE to be peaceful and loving or cutthroat and murderous, or a little of both, we must understand that we teach our kids to be the same way.  It is our faults that things are the way the are.  We can break the cycles of idiocy.

This is NOT "entitlement", except that it is--we are entitled by Constitutional law, the very foundation of our country, to the idea that our government is for us and BY us.  If the definition of "us" is now that a corporation acts as an individual, able to donate in massive doses, as a private citizen, towards a political candidate, this is a giant tear through the meaning of our Constitution.  This is a rend through the fabric of democratic reality.  This grants them the power of feudal lords again. Self-election to Kingship is next.   Read up on ancient and medieval and Renaissance history--we have seen all of this before.  Coupled with the rise of government spying on ALL people in the communications stream, this is setting fire to our Constitution.  These are the methods of the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB--the CIA, the harbingers of doom to freedom.  We tell ourselves we are responsible.  We tell ourselves we are in control.  "We are in control.  We are in control...  We have total control."  No, ALL of our fingers are on the oujia board.  Let's see what it spells out.

"Don't expect me to die/Don't expect me to lie/Don't expect me to die for thee"   www.youtube.com/watch?v=guCku3…  (Nirvana [The Vaselines' {trad.}] Jesus Don't Want Me for A Sunbeam, 1994)

We need balance, and big corporations--including militaries--have a lot of trouble with that.  It IS very difficult, no doubt, to run a company, and that is why we can respect leaders who are good at it, but NOT when they lose touch with the reality of being human beings (plural) first, and a ruthless leader somewhere down the line.  Ruthlessness is rewarded short term.  It wins battles, it MIGHT win a war.  It makes people do what you want right now, and want to kill you later.  Ruthlessness does not win at life; it does NOT win at civilisation; it does NOT hold onto freedom.  It is a gamble to use these tactics with what, inherently, should stand proudly on its own worth--our Constitution--our self-worth.  Would we want these people in our houses, at our dinner tables?  Would we want them representing us?  Freedom is done by example of honour and respect, and in truth.  In fact, no one "wins" at war.  If there is a single solitary casualty it is a loss forever.  Our rationalisations allow us to write off dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people as "the price of doing business, the price of war".  Fuck you, and listen.

We thought politics was bad when it was all lawyers?  Now it is even worse.  Now we have an unending war on "terror" that brings the military and secret police back to the forefront of policy.  Perhaps this is a good thing, because under scrutiny much of what they do is criminally negligent rather than democracy.  It is good that we should be able to see it, to give light to the death machine ever in motion behind our curtain of smiles.  It is good that we should understand how they use copies of our Constitution as an umbrella for their procedure, while behind the scenes stuffing it into the fires of their forges to smelt the weapons of war.  Watch us go into panty-wetting mode when any whiff of "terror" happens!  BOO!  Is that how you intend to live life?  I don't.  I was traumatised by 9/11, [may the souls of the innocent rest in peace], but I was not frightened.  Former CIA director George Bush Jr. and his cronies got caught out by a wily tribesman, and we all paid the twisted price.  OF COURSE these peoples whose lives we disrupt with arms deals, murders and land grabs far over seas are going to be pissed off about it.  It's simple cause and effect--especially when we hire the leaders of these shadow puppet-master agencies as the supreme leaders of our own country.  They are not automatically admirable leaders, they are hunter/killers.  By their standards "the price of business" should only apply when it is foreigners who die, killed by weapons produced in our factories and sold and traded as our commodities and influence, but not when it happens to US.  What a stupid double standard unworthy of anyone who claims to live by democracy!  Now the tribal fear-factor is rampant, fed, in large part, by our own frenetic reactions to it.  The Patriot Act, passed quickly and with blind bipartisan support, guarantees secret agencies and police can do ANYTHING THEY WANT as long as the word "terror" is somehow involved.  We are all set to "fight terror"!  Welcome to the rise of the police state.  Our agencies who engaged with those using terror in the first place have now wrangled even MORE power to engage it, to fan the flames when we are not looking.  Our machine of secrecy is now a few rungs above even where it was during "The Cold War".  Once we were the ideal of hope and freedom against an oppressive, paranoid Soviet empire--and now the shoe is migrating to the other foot.  You have only to read or watch the international news to see how our good name is damaged by t[f]ools with too much power.  We are far better as a nation than a rallying point for any disgruntled asshole the world over to point at and say, "Death!"  We are caring, loving people, just as they are at home.  It is political brushfires and militaristic and religiously radicalised bullshit that make people the world over look like imbecilic mobs. "Death to our own intellect!" is really what they are shouting, and what we are reinforcing when we play into it.  Use your brain, not your fists, or your own teeth will be smashed in soon enough.

Civil rights groups had the Patriot Act posted on their websites, encouraging us NOT to support it, but too few read it or cared about how it was worded.  It is a nightmare of open door policy designed SPECIFICALLY to give secret police a loose leash.  Now the National Security Agency thinks it is God with an open door into our living rooms, and wiretaps EVERY communication line, and the Department of Homeland Security and transportation agencies wire public transportation as well, with cameras and now MICROPHONES, profiling every individual with a database and methodology (heuristics) that is proven by science to be fallible and prone to confirmation bias (if you are looking for something/anything ["terror"?] you will find it whether it is truly there or not).

We are not really afraid of bombs, that is a cover story.  We are afraid of ourselves.  We scare ourselves to death.  Whatever our somewhat simplistic idealist enemies think of, we can think of twenty times worse, because we already HAVE thought of it ourselves.  We already HAVE stockpiles of chemical and nuclear weapons.  We already HAVE army bases who have used terror and torture to extract information and dehumanise prisoners held indefinately without trial.  This is still the circle who leads our government (and others) which, as I type this, is currently shut down and about to default on its debts because bullshit has turned to reality for an ever increasing segment of government and the tiny fraction of the populace who ostensibly support them by blindly suckling at single-source disinformation and propaganda streams in the press and on TV like babies who can't think for themselves and who wet themselves at the sound of "terror".  No wonder we are treated like newborns.  America has sold its soul to poor threadbare puppets who can only respond to ego cues or monetary support.  They are like zombies after our brains, and sadly, ours ARE being eaten away by this dissolution, this caving in to corporation and its incapacity to control its own greed, its infiltration of all aspects of society, AND to secret police, who have repeatedly had a poor track record of policing themselves because they are not held to the same standards as "real" citizens.  Sadly these organisations are not leading us towards peace, and people are beginning to crack under the weight.  People are lashing out, both here and overseas.  There are radicals losing it and wasting people every day, because we can't course correct to show caring and support, but have to bicker and thrash and kill, and that is the example we set.  They are not ONLY some fringe, they are OUR citizens losing their minds because our leaders already have.  Our elected and appointed leaders are giving in to baser human predilictions in the face of subverted power and corruption and profit hoarding.  They are a shadow state within our own, a wild card.  How CAN we find balance if we don't know where our own center of gravity lies, our own national identity?  It is patently impossible, and yet we continue to use the same behaviours year after year.  You wonder why higher education is NOT rewarded in our citizens these days?  It is because we are ASHAMED to let anyone figure out how depraved we have become.  We don't want the general population to KNOW they are no longer living in a true democracy.  The ideals for which we purport to fight are being undermined by the machinery of that very fight.  It is Catch-22.  We have to step back and look at the big picture.  Should we do away with secret agencies?  No.  We SOMETIMES need that wild card.  Should they be reined in?  You bet.  They are OUR agencies, not their own.  They are dogs of war masquerading as agents of peace and become entangled in their own warped realities, and drag us down when they fall into their own traps, when their power struggles entangle the lives of billions.  This is OUR world.  We can see you.  We appreciate their bravery, but their philosophy is shown to be defective.  It is time for clear thinking, not fear.

We are now officially, by acts of government, a country of criminals and potential criminals--there is no other category implicit to our natures if our government feels the need to track and store all of our personal information. We are assumed guilty without explicit implication and without due process at the same time as our government IS guilty of breaking the highest laws of our land.  The way it stands now, the bulk of the suspected criminality is now in GOVERNMENT complicit with violation of the Fourth Amendment of U.S. Constitutional law, the highest set of laws in our land, and violation of human civil liberties here and around the world, including search and seizure of personal properties and papers, including fighting and assassinations under the guise of a "war" that has no true legal definition.  If we are cowed by the consideration that we are always being watched and that our government is bent by this programming and can't be trusted, then we are LESS likely to assemble to discuss government infractions in future or make our thoughts known to those representing us because our freedom of speech is muted as well.  Our very democracy is taken away.  No one wants to get on a watchlist, and nobody knows what criteria they use.  Our ability to assemble OR to speak out is disrupted.  Remember that the Occupy movement was infiltrated by the FBI, and assasination threats to protesters were NOT addressed, while disruption of the movement WAS carried out by agents posing as protesters.  With the lack of counter control by The People on lawmakers and law enforcement, either through channels or through protest, our lawmakers are able to make more and more laws of any kind that the public is less and less willing or able to resist, or indeed our own lawmakers as well, when influenced by other institutions.  This is a quantum shift in the balance of power in the United States and the world.  This is erosion of the inherent system of checks and balances with which our country was born.  This is how police states are formed.  This is happening right now.  This is not some paranoid overstatement of the facts.  These ARE facts.  Is America still one of the most beautiful and amazing countries in the world?  Of course, but our proud nation is visibly in decline through our own neglect, greed, corruption and laziness.  What would our ancestors think of us?  What will history think?  What's left of the American Dream?