Deep State, shallow politics, dumb economics

In 1965, the USA had 780,000 people in prison, jail, on parole or on probation.

By 2010, that population had grown by more than nine times, to 7 million and the prison business was booming as never before, creating profits, jobs and unparalleled human misery.

In 1954, the integration of public schools was seen as a great victory for civil rights and Americans now designated as “people of color”*. Today more than 50% of the prison population is designated as “people of color” and the disintegration of the entire public school system continues for all Americans designated as people.

In 2015, there were 536 billionaires in the U.S.A. In a nation of more than 325 million people, that represents less than 2 millionths of one percent of the population. For the textually challenged, that looks like this:.000002%

Wow.

How hard those truly brilliant people must have worked to achieve those riches. And one of them was Donald Trump!

Imagine how many cases they had to plead in court, classes to teach in school, busses to drive, meals to prepare, floors to wash, crops to pick, mail to deliver and deals to make? Well, actually, they mostly made deals using their great wisdom and brilliance at investing wisely. You and I could do as well if we worked as hard and were as smart and industrious as they are, including Donald Trump!

And if we were paid a thousand dollars an hour for our hard work, and we worked twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, maybe if we stashed all that cash and didn’t spend any of it we might have a billion dollars.

Nope.

In fact, if you worked twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year and did that for ten years, at one thousand dollars an hour, never stopped, never took any time off and never spent any of the money and just stashed it, you still wouldn’t have a billion dollars.

Is this a great democracy or what?

In that same year of 2015, America’s GDP for pets, which was $38.5 billion in 2006, had grown to $60.3 billion. Twelve companies insured 1.4 million pets owned by 79.6 million American families (65% of households) with premiums amounting to 660.5 million dollars.

163.8 million dogs and cats are comfortably housed in a political economy that has half a million of its people homeless and more than 20% of its children living in poverty. This is certainly reason enough for us to demand that Russia, North Korea, Syria and other nations adopt our democratically civilized way of living or suffer the consequences of our superior wrath. Right?

As of March1, 2017, our national debt was close to $20 trillion, which is more than our GDP, which is truly a gross domestic product. We the people of this great democracy pay more than $440 billion a year in interest on that debt.

Who do we pay it to?

Where’d they get the money to loan us?

Who prints and backs this money supply?

If you have any money among your plastic, look at one of the bills of any denomination and note that the power behind the cash is not the dead presidents or Rockefeller, Carnegie, Zuckerburg, Soros, Bezos, Visa or MasterCard but something called “The United States of America.”

That is not a private bank or a billionaire. That’s you. That’s us.

Remember, we, the public, print the money, in our name, and somehow it gets to a private source which loans it to us and charges us interest for the privilege. Would you like to buy a bridge?

Our personal debt, incurred to keep the economy going with our consuming and owed to the same market gods, was over $18 trillion. Almost as high as our public debt. Somehow, we owe it to the same people who loaned us our own money for public expenses. Wow.

Are they really smart?

Or are we really stupid?

Many Americans are treated as lower than scum for being working class and “uneducated.” Why are so many Americans so “uneducated”? Could it have anything to do with the fact that at some point they went through grammar and high schools taught by (drum roll) college-educated people**? And winding up with presidents like a truly brilliant rich guy with degrees from Yale and Harvard (wow!) who starts wars in the Middle East that have gone on longer than any in our history, with the consent of 534 out of 535 democratically (?) elected college graduates in congress?

Whether the organized crime lobby (Wall Street, banks, billionaires) supports guns for individuals, Israelis or the Military Industrial Complex, it remains in control of the political economics of American government. NRAIPAC and its ilk own, rent and control the White House, Congress and Corporate media. That was the case before Trump and still is the case now.

We need resistance to that system of minority control itself, and not simply the servants it hires, leases, rents or outright owns. As long as we allow a gallon of milk to cost more than a gallon of gasoline, as long as we tolerate an economics that will sustain a disease as long as profits for its treatment are greater than profits for its cure***, we not only face long range climate disaster but a much shorter range political economic calamity.

Global capitalism threatens immediate and growing poverty, war, human misery and planetary destruction no matter which political pinhead, pimp or ho lives in the subsidized residency we call the white house. As long as we allow the richest and smallest minority in our history to put only their servants up for our votes, calling this a democracy reduces us to the best-dressed peasants on the Titanic. We need to end the fundamentalist religion of private profit marketing that is becoming a greater menace by the minute and begin democratic action in a social revolution that expresses majority public interest, desire and need. Fast.

Notes

*All members of the human race are “of color” save for a small group called albinos. Some of us have darker or lighter skin but skin tone is of no more racial significance than brown hair, green eyes or long legs. Innocents, the ignorant and morons who still believe otherwise are science deniers at best, and anti-human at worst, no matter their skin tone.

**Those with a stake in maintaining their incomes & consumption are unlikely to participate in efforts to bring about radical change”—Michael D. Yates

***Check cancer, for starters; a multi-multi billion-dollar industry

Frank Scott‘s political commentary and satire is online at legalienate.blogspot.com. Email: fpscott@gmail.com.