“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half” – Jay Gould
A cynic might say that the trumped up “vote” in Crimea and voting in the US are not that far apart. No, we don’t have mob violence or killings as a part of our process, just voter suppression and Citizens United. We laugh at those immature democracies abroad that just do the bidding of oligarchs.
Bottom line is, we’re on our way to joining that club. America has sold its soul to the corporations’ bottom line, and we got a good price. “We” got a good price, depending on how you define we. We, in this case, means ‘not you.’
How was the payout distributed? Among the makers and takers. The makers made the deal and took the profits, while the takers took it on the chin. When we look back on the period 1980-2020, the headline will be the corrosive impact of wealth disparity. Now, we are surprised at what happened. We also seem surprised that an airliner can disappear, when an entire middle class has gone missing without explanation. We say, “But, you can’t fight City Hall with a ham sandwich”.
We used to be a nation of shared prosperity. We are now an oligarchy. And power follows money, and back again, through an unbreakable feedback loop. Use the quote above by Jay Gould, one of our original oligarchs, to write this Sunday’s homily.
Crimea’s Referendum:
Putin takes a bite of Ukraine, likes the taste:
NSA acts like an oligarch @ home:
Obama: Oligarch or not?
Oligarchs press advantage against the poor:
Enjoy St. Patrick’s Day. Just don’t drink and drive:
love ’em all, but especially the one about St. Patrick. it is a view of that act that i had not encountered before.