Minority Attacks on the Majority

Now that a Minority of partisans, safely ensconced in gerrymandered districts, thanks to state legislatures influenced by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), which is sponsored by the billionaire Koch Brothers, has created gridlock in Congress, we in the Majority know where we stand: in the crosshairs. A Corporate Coup and take-over of the government is in progress. The ongoing sequester and current government shutdown, and the potential resistance to raising the debt ceiling later this month all indicate a failing democracy. The Corporate elites are winning.

During the Reagan era, the elites of the Corporate Culture accelerated change or the transformation of citizens into consumers. Folks fell into materialism—shop ‘till you drop–and jettisoned the values associated with civil liberties. (Check out the rise of the Walmart shopping cart.) Now, due to the corporate buyout of democratic and republican cadres, Corporatists aim to turn the 99.99% into indentured servants as they have a generation of college students, who are $1 trillion in debt and can’t even file for bankruptcy.

“They” come at us from all angles. Everything costs more as a percentage of income: utility rates, fuel prices, taxes. If the direct costs of doing business don’t get you, the indirect cost of rules and regulations will—regardless of whether the rules and regs are imposed by government or the private sector. Wailing by the Tea Party about Obamacare just distracts the public from the enormous profits due to the health care industry and guaranteed by government for insurance companies and their ilk.

A majority of Americans know that statements to the contrary, the National Security Administration (NSA) and the use of torture on “enemy combatants” by the U.S. military or CIA or private contractors is aimed to send a message to citizens, who disagree with the powerful and the elite. Threats about terrorists or the price of health insurance are meant not only to frighten you but to enslave you. Follow the money until death do us part.

The Message, conveyed by attacks on leakers and free speech advocates, protesters against eco damage or the faux war on drugs, which effectively isolates black and brown people—who are guilty of being black and brown—in prisons, says to would be nonconformists, like supporters of “Food not Bombs”—“don’t be questioning authority and giving stuff away.”

You might be thinking, white corporate person, “There but for the grace of God go I.” But the Corporatists are coming for you and will, soon enough, as Marx predicted, when they can no longer profit from exploiting proles begin cannibalizing the middle and upper middle classes. Actually medical professionals have already been turned into corporate drudges.

Here in Taos we still have access to the democratic franchise just as we can grow our own food–if we can avoid the frost. We have access to water if we can avoid the predators who are funded by the Abeyta-Taos Pueblo Settlement. We can expand, seemingly forever, our own variations on local culture.

Though local government, the Town, County, and Schools are the biggest employers, even unresponsive and greedhead officials—at the Town of Taos—are subject to the vote and reprimands by their primos. (Donald Rumsfeld no longer appears in public in Taos because waitresses, shopkeepers, and gadflies—despite his security detail— reprimanded him for thuggery.) Representatives of private-public corporations like Holy Cross Hospital and Kit Carson Electric or even the Town of Taos can run but they can’t hide.

When Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan and all her luminaries came to Taos back in the early part of the 20th Century, they claimed the primordial forces of this place might awaken the world to its spiritual destiny. I’m not so sure about a spiritual awakening but we still have a civil democracy in Taos and the sign man is still at liberty–despite officially endorsed thuggery. Agree or disagree with them, the Commissioners at Taos County still serve their constituents.

Now we need to re-awaken the elected officials at the Town of Taos and the trustees at Kit Carson Coop to their moral, ethical, and democratic responsibilities. As Hunter Thompson might say, “Let’s throw the greedheads out.”