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Edited on Tue May-02-06 02:29 PM by newswolf56
literally until I drop dead -- I am finally recognizing the extent to which I have been conned and ripped off: the endlessly bitter truth that the so-called American Dream has always been a scam. It was NEVER anything more than a Madison Avenue ploy to buy off the working class (that is, to sedate all of us who depend on paychecks because we are not independently wealthy). The intent was to ensure our compliance until the Soviet Union could be destroyed and the world made absolutely safe for for the resumption of capitalistic savagery. Then of course -- like the pyramid scheme it always was -- the American Dream was quickly reduced to the present-day nightmare: downsizing, outsourcing, pension-looting, wage-reduction, destruction of the social-service safety net and skyrocketing prices, with the ultimate measurement of capitalist "progress" the fact executive pay is soaring beyond a ratio of 421:1 (421 'zecutive dollars for every dollar we workers make): robbery of a scale and magnitude so breathtaking it is almost impossible to comprehend.
And it's obviously no accident of "market forces." What it's all about -- the quintessence of the New Corporate American intent from top to bottom -- is the forcible concentration of wealth: the strategy and tactics by which the rich prepare themselves (stealing all they can from the rest of us) to weather the storms of the environmental apocalypse they themselves have inflicted on the planet: the exhaustion of natural resources, the onset of global warming, the unprecedented technological, economic and cultural collapse that is the inevitable result. No, they will not give up their limousines no matter what -- and that is precisely why they are condemning the rest of us to homelessness, starvation, disease: worsening degradation of which post-Katrina New Orleans was but a gentle preview.
I probably won't live long enough to see the worst of it -- the nation I once loved reduced to the socioeconomics of a Somalia or a Sudan -- at least I prayerfully hope I don't live that long. But it is coming: make no mistake. The rich have no intention of ever again sharing their wealth, and they will do whatever is necessary to retain the absolute power given them by Bush -- the ultimate achievement of capitalism. Which means it is utter nonsense to believe conditions for the American working class will ever again improve even marginally.
For me personally, as for many other physically relatively healthy but otherwise viciously oppressed working-class elders, the ultimate symbol of all that is incurably wrong with America is the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit: written by the Bush Regime on behalf the Prescription Drug Lords but enacted by Republicans and Democrats alike -- enrollment in which (contrary to Bush Regime lies)is absolutely mandatory, and which is nearly TRIPLING my prescription drug costs: the infuriating subjugation of all of us working-class elders merely to further fatten the already obscenely fat bank accounts of the rich. Nor will it ever be reformed: beyond its smokescreen of lies, the bipartisan vote that imposed this outrage on all of us absolutely guarantees that its present form (and ever-escalating fee-structure) is here to stay forever.
Indeed nothing demonstrates like the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit the wrenching bottom-line political truth that absolutely nothing can rescue America from its corporate overlords. We elders are the most powerful voting block in the nation; we are the largest single demographic faction of the electorate and its most dependably regular voters. But even we were not powerful enough to counteract the infinitely greedy demands of the rich and their corporations -- and if our votes are not sufficiently powerful, no votes are: not now, not ever again. Not only is the American Dream dead; the American Experiment is dead too: murdered by capitalism in the name of its sociopathic fulfillment.
Though I know it is too much to ask of politicians who no longer even make a pretense of representing working-class folks like myself, perhaps some future administration in this nation that is now wholly owned by the rich and is run exclusively by, for and of their corporations will nevertheless exhibit a bit more commitment to truth-in-advertising and will thus chisel that baldfaced lie off the foundation of the Statue of Liberty -- you know, the Big Lie that begins, "Give us your tired, your poor..." Perhaps too they will replace that colossal falsehood with carnival-barker words more befitting the One Big Sweatshop the United States is now (and in truth always has always been): on the seaward side of the foundation, "Step Right Up" -- and on the landward side (in fine print of course), "There's one born every minute."
_________
Edit: elaboration.
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