Worshiping wealth, an idea piece

[PATRICK]

To re-paraphrase: "You cannot serve both your personal money interests and your nation." You have to hate one and love the other. The signs of hating are stopping the nation from touching your money interests and then making the nation a slave to your money interests, then making the nation your personal cash cow.

Don't we all do this to some extent, greed being the downfall of the nation? We hate taxes and vote against them. We latch onto the financial rewards of entitlements losing sight of the intended benefits to the common good. The nation in fact is a machine for our economic best interests so the lines are blurred? Is this not how the people become so ambivalent in the land that safeguards and praises the individual but united we stand to protect the rights of all?

Is the hate and love merely an emotional seesaw? Or is the idea of hating your country exposed when you consciously work against the nation and thus the interests of most of your fellow citizens? Is there some ambivalence, some ground for fudging, understanding or compromise? The ruling, dull, safe pragmatism of capitalist democracy always suggested the answer was compromise and dialog between greed and idealism. This is what seems to drive the middle road of the party and would succeed in the lukewarm middle of America(largely made of self-occupied non-participants and non-idealists).

Tragically, under ferocious assault by a plutocracy that purely proves the maxim and covers it even more purely with patriotic hypocrisy protected by advanced PR, a big chunk of our leadership rides the center of the seesaw. You have to believe the hearts of most of them are toward loving the national interests, but what frightens them most is upsetting the balance and falling off as they move toward the "left"(if you will).

So who are object lessons that in the end, in practice, and in the falseness of "balance" that people with gold in their souls constantly violate to everyone's disadvantage, show that greed is poison to a nation? The villains and maddening hypocrites surely, but the ever less fleet-footed and effective balance keepers becoming ludicrous and even more infuriating because national order
and public welfare is something they hope to define but cannot defend. The have NO leverage in the center of inaction. The ones preaching for the national interests of the common good think by dampening the efforts of the heavily weighted(in a supposed democracy) populace that they can preserve the balance when the minority on the purely selfish end is piling on the gold and shooting at both the national interests AND the deluded, noble balance keepers.

This is the point when you think you have proved that people should all rally to radical socialism or, God forbid, the practice of individual poverty in redistributing one's own property to the poor to serve an even higher maxim of Christianity. But it is a question of the language and deception allowed to accrue over the reality teetering on the brink of a plunge toward corporatist dictatorship. We are for the national interests and against the ruling interests, because the ruling interests hate America.

By destroying America's social network in order to enrich private interest, the self styled ruling class that destroyed the fulcrum of a fair vote constantly proves the point.

Take the Dubai deal. When the Cole was bombed in Aden the cover issue of terrorism and response was clear. But for those who hate such clarity about lost lives and national interests, this is what it has led to. Forget the terrorists, they have merely opened a door to opportunity. Firstly, Dubai profits from taking up more port security leading to dominance in trade control between Asia and the ME supplanting the long held former sick partnership of Aden and Britain. Both Aden and Dubai financed and coddled terrorists and their ancient dictatorships easily succumb to the principle of loving private economic advantage over all else. They have indeed a smaller population, no democratic fulcrum, even a partnership or enslavement to Western plutocrats to contend with. Despite the fact that their vaunted "security" business may be instead a centuries old protection racket and that the best way to hinder terrorists is to buy them off(under the money rules all principle), a deal is made under the auspices of pure unadulterated "free trade" under the best hypocrisy mask. Sure you could use money to police the criminals but the circle of tribute(a disgrace and a constant threat to the subjugated national interests) has the win/win of recirculating the money(ours mainly, but also extricating the wealth of the sheiks) back to our ruling plutocrats.

In Iraq it is the same. There may be far better ways of helping a people and thus affirming our own democratic values, but when greed rules, it is better to throw bombs at the people and gold to the circular business interests. That trillion dollars or two? Relax, it isn't as crazy as it sounds because our tax money largely is and will come back into the pockets of the ruling interests in America. That is how the purer hypocrisy of today's Coup justifies their seeming destructive madness. The national interests they hate and they oppress in America and Iraq to keep the scales plunging into their fortune favor wear now constantly and unabashedly the mask of hypocrisy, where good is evil and evil good.

Anyone not too busy scrambling for purchase on the tipping fulcrum sees only the mask, an everlasting lie. If the mask falls, which is debatable since all the vices demand the most deception not the most public clarity, one would see a few people worshiping themselves, taking it all for their own benefit. But hypocrisy, infliction of misery and strife among the masses up in the air and falling off is something they must always have because if the pretense dissolves the majority would see, in the heroes of self-interest, that the common good must rule and prevail without equivocating with the forces diametrically working against them.

The game of pretend is over. If the spiteful Coup flees of a sudden they think to let the seesaw slam down the people with a painful fall. The fulcrum sitters really have no power in the matter
except they are personally saved from most of the blow. So the nation is blackmailed into inaction, in the end, by the other side which cannot sustain its dirty tricks. Now, to reassert truth and the national interests we have to absorb the pain and end the game.

The campaign cannot take the purest form but it can energetically rally people for the needed sacrifice to win this battle, people stuck and lost. By moving to the left leaders think they will cause them harm and they are right, but the longer this goes on the worse it gets. The GOP is a lost party that no longer, by even the slightest margins, supports the national interests or common welfare above private interests. That is a fact. Furthermore, they work against the common man and the needy and the national interests to further those private interests and protect them by crippling civil government itself. Not only are offices of service filled with people appointed to destroy the national welfare, they loot and corrupt everything they touch. it is hell incarnate. Sustainable capitalism? Whatever gymnastic arguments one could make have been made a veneer of hypocrisy and hopelessness. It's them against us, as before, as now, as they wish forever.

And whenever the GOP serves the national interests they have to be bribed, to find a buck in it, and always enlarge the opportunity to consolidate their win/win system. The inner mask tells them that eventually the people will profit too and that the harm is rationalized away easily. This is why such thinking creates the poor, creates and finances organized terrorism, profits from eternal war among the duped masses, creates tyranny, ruins education and progress, and in the final throes of greed gnaws away the last resources until the whole human race is swallowed up into it own moral black hole. In the end, quickly approaching, there is no sustainable balance, only sacrifice to make the common good work- for all or none.

And all this without putting on the Christianity mask like the Coup does!

[Sammy Pepys]

1. "You cannot serve both your personal money interests and your nation."

I don't think that's true at all. One's personal money interests aren't necessarily driven by pure greed. My personal money interests are an extension of the fact that I have a habit of enjoying eating, shelter and being clothed. My personal money interests are also an extension of less important or less immediate things: being able to save enough for a comfortable retirement, being able to afford a nice vacation, being able to survive a major hardship or emergency and being able to buy nice guitars.

I challenge anyone to suggest that any of the above has put other folks in a bad place or has done wrong by my nation.

[PATRICK]

2. I downplayed precisely that

because that is the place where we are all supposedly trapped. Of course in any given system of common welfare using any means ordinary people profiting from and sharing the fruits of labor etc. are decent, good and justified.

I did not talk much about the aspect of worship, the de facto religion of wealth which deigns to allow anything else into the pantheon beneath so long as it pays homage. Unless you put your neighbor's right to the same things you enjoy, neighbors denied or incapable or even one might say "undeserving" you are moving to the purer form of the dialectic of which the mammon side now rules all branches of the government with a golden hand without even the full consent of those who believe very innocently as any prosperous, but decent citizen would. Not enough the general permission to defend economic interest by blurring moral ideals, not enough the distractions of the good life, the play of fear, the general goodwill toward economic achievement, the successful indoctrination or confusion of the consumers and workers, the very widespread and general blindness to their being a radical conflict at all!

When we speak about sheeple, well fed, apparently prosperous, moving steadily in goodhearted ignorance to the slaughter pens or shearers(the growing hope being that oneself will only have a little taken off the top) we mean unfortunately, this fair and innocent belief.

When I speak about a dualistic armageddon I am merely commenting upon the abused reality. You can't put your ultimate values in your personal pocket book or the general welfare(and all too soon your own) will be enslaved to the special interests now going for the gold, all of it.

The argument I would have though, in these times, would be whether a balance can actually be restored and justified by simply running the current crooks out of town. These times have put everything to the test and the ones losing and found wanting include all those enabling and admiring the fallibility of materialism. No, or very few, humans- unfortunately- have the purest form of enlightened self-disinterest, but the other side avidly seeks or desperately masks the viirutous opposite, the most oppressive form of topdown criminal greed absolutized, replacing God.

If we (I) are essentially good and decent and headed in the right patriotic direction why were we not in the streets defending democracy, why are we are where we are today, the softest victims to overthrow perhaps in world history? Is it despite or because of our material blessings and real beliefs? Every human being living under tyranny works heroically to achieve the personal advantages and blessings of life under any conditions. The responsibility of the democratic citizen is, at the least, to save this and themselves by banding together for the true patriotic national common interest. Have we? Why not?

The inhibiting factor is where our true acted out values meet the road, where even innocently small personal self interest or slightly larger circles, are uninvolved(at least) with protecting the common welfare. I plead guilty about not doing enough, not applying Kennedy's challenge "what can I do?", and doing no harm lessens or removes guilt. But in fact the national religion has been selected and not denied or exposed and even the least of us pay our dues for each bullet slaughtering each new target of greed among many other tangible products of the Coup ruled commonality. We may not be guiilty but we are duped and we are in the system.