It’s been a rough and tumble year thus far. So far all “we the people” have been handed and can count on is mostly bipartisan, egregious demagoguery. This our elected officials offer up by the boatload via the two major US right-of-center political party spin machines.
I blog this knowing that in at least two metropolitan regions large segments of the population have been more preoccupied with basketball than that which is good for us as a people and as a nation.
That is at a minimum a part of the larger problem in at least the US and quite possibly the world.
On the world stage we’ve seen more than our share of violence and the struggle for profit. That is what war is all about in the end, simply profit. Leading the fight for profit are gazillionaires. Sometimes those gazillionaires are moderates, usually they are arch-conservatives. Think, Koch brothers. There are no “liberals” left on the planet, gazillionaires or not. I am a very much an endangered species---the non-gazillionaire type liberal.
You might argue power, wealth or control but what is the real bottom line of those but profit? It most certainly is not the well being of “we the people”, our nation, or the best way forward. Unless, of course, the way forward is making still more profit.
Whether the venue is Ukraine, the US, China, Brazil, Syria, Egypt, Iraq or some other country, the answer is the same---profit. It is the mantra of the one-percent who care not one whit about you or me.
What results is what we are seeing most clearly in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and less clearly in the USA.
What took us more than a decade, long, expensive years and the lives of more than 10,000 US young men and women and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, to affect---took insurgents about two days to undo and for a lot less money than the trillions it took us to create US inspired “straight lines and right angles.” And someone walked away with trillions of dollars and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t those putting their lives on the line in the Middle East and then in the VA system.
In the US we see the still reigning majority population ( don’t forget that) sensing its loss of population and influence thus putting their egregious behavior into overdrive.
The Tea Party is mostly a collection of that majority population of misguided misanthropic bigots and racists. They are the majority who realize their day may have come and for all practical purposes gone. That frightens that “guns and bibles” crowd. Given their penchant for brutality and all things discriminatory perhaps they should be.
But that’s only if you happen to be paying attention. The easily distracted and very gung-ho “America” crowd are not. Right now it’s all about fútbol a/k/a soccer.
And why wouldn’t they be? The tragically and egregiously corrupt organization behind the World Cup, FIFA buys and pays for the same type if not the same spin machine as those other egregiously corrupt profit making machines and they are good at what they do. (I do give credit where due, even if it is corrupt, egregious and above all---above the law). That said, the gaggle of vultures in FIFA is even more corrupt than the Olympic Committee. Both however, run a distant second and third, respectively, in terms of corruption behind the millionaire’s club we call a congress.
This millionaire’s club created, be that, bought and paid for by one-percenters are little more than a hedge created by the one-percent against us, “we the people.”
The congress is for all its intents and purposes a fairly useless waste of time, money, resources and effort because that bunch will do little to help “we the people.” No, they are about one thing only maintaining the status quo. If the rock star wannabe, boot licking lapdogs of the one-percent are about anything else it might be about being a distraction. Being a distraction comes easy to the narcissistic.
The present status quo being what it is, the top one-tenth of one-percent owning just about everything and “we the people” not so much, why on Earth would the one-percent want for anything to “change?” Then again, it is catchy, isn't it, "change!"
The two right-of-center majority political spin machines a/k/a parties and their fringe-element third party cousin are there only to confuse, dispense misinformation, enrage or entertain (sometimes both) and mostly to divide and conquer “we the people” and they are doing a damn good job from the looks of it.
From Texas Red: a cratered landscape of for profit prisons, deplorable apartheid public education, lack of healthcare and politicians and majority population intent on keeping it that way…