Mainstream America: A Mess of Pottage
Editor’s Note: See http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/23511-new-mexico-governor-martinez-accused-of-wholesale-disregard-of-the-law for the real story on what Gov. Martinez and her Tea Party cohorts are doing to the state of New Mexico. The democrats might be screaming but there’s the sound of silence at the Albuquerque Journal, a republican newspaper. Read it and weep but vote for a democrat in the June primary. The state you save may be your own.
Foot soldiers in the war against nonconformists.
In Oklahoma, the state executes the condemned as if it were administering an overdose at a shooting gallery. Here in New Mexico, the triple threat Albuquerque Police Department (APD) acts as “judge, jury, and executioner” under the guise of an old fashioned firing squad when SWAT Teams are called out to confront the mentally ill. The “SuperDrone” (President Obama) has become the No. 1. hero of Marvel Comic fans here in the US of A.
In Santa Fe, Journal North, reporter Andy Stiny wrote, “[Officer] Wilson fired 16 shots at Anaya and her car as she tried to drive away after he had knocked her Honda sedan into a wall on Camino Carlos Rey following a high-speed chase. Santa Fe police refused to join that pursuit in the early morning hours of Nov. 7, because a State Police dispatcher did not provide a reason for the pursuit, dispatch recordings indicate” (No discipline for officer who killed driver, May 3, 2014).
The NM Corporate Governor and Franchisee Albuquerque Mayor, not to mention the POTUS, require old Testament obedience because, as Chris Hedges writes, “The fusion of corporate and state power means that government is broken. It is little more than a protection racket for Wall Street.” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_post-constitutional_era_20140504
The millionaire members of the political class have become handmaidens to the billionaire Wall Street elites. “Political equality” does not exist in a capitalist state where social and economic inequality prevail. Like the APD, the federalized neo-cops of capitalism send a message every week. “Stop and desist or raise your hands and we’ll shoot you.” Either way you’re dead.
Today’s college students, tempted by easy loans, are trading in their future prospects for a life of debt slavery. Members of the lower and middle classes who invest in the American Dream have seen private home equity turn into a nightmare of foreclosure subject to bankster fraud. The Corporate elite control the means of communication and use agitprop to protect themselves from ballot box reversal.
As economist Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize winner in economics, notes in a review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, “Why We’re in a New Gilded Age’ (NYRB, May 8, 2014), “Upton Sinclair famously declared that `it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ Piketty, looking at his own nation’s history, arrives at a similar observation: `The experience of France in the Belle Époque proves, if proof were needed, that no hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interest.’”
The Cops understand who gives the orders on Wall St. On Monday May 5, a kangaroo court in NYC convicted an “Occupy Wall Street Activist,” aka police victim, of criminal acts. Fascism rules in Manhattan, like the rest of the country. Krugman notes that “Piketty ends Capital in the Twenty-First Century with a call to arms—a call, in particular, for wealth taxes, global if possible, to restrain the growing power of inherited wealth.”—Paul Krugman (NYRB May 8, 2014)
Will revolution arrive? Lewis Lapham, “says, those of us alive today are always in the midst of the revolution announced by Karl Marx in 1848, which is `the constant change in the means of production and the reducing of all human meaning and endeavor to a money transaction.’” http://www.truthdig.com/
When everything becomes a money transaction decisions are based on short term quarterly economic “realities” and the elite send a message, via “unconscious” (?) agencies like the APD. The message here is divide and conquer the hoi polloi: “shoot the schizophrenics as examples to show we mean business is business.”
Numerous books focus on the fraud committed by banksters or the abrogation of civil liberties committed by the National Security Administration (NSA) surveillance bureaucrats or the way wealth is being transferred from the bottom up in a war the rich declared on the poor. But where are the prosecutions, whether for fraud, torture, or domestic spying and illegal detention or homicide by cop?
(A state cop in Taos carefully shot at the tires and the ground of a runaway vehicle. He missed. Nobody was hurt. So the state police fired him. He wasn’t sending the right message: kill the disobedient.)
The POTUS (President of the United States) orders out drones that kill American citizens and innocent women and children. The SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) authorizes the extra-constitutional powers of an executive, allowing the latter to kill and/or detain American citizens without “due process.” Policy deniers aid and abet corporate chieftans, who poison the planet and reduce the quality of life for generations to come, including their own grandchildren.
It’s an absurdity. The whole catastrophe can be traced back to the egregious expansion of what Hunter S. Thompson would have called the culture of “greedheads” i.e. the elites and their foot soldiers, who have traded in their birthright as human beings for a mess of pottage. It’s also Biblical.