“All for ourselves, and nothing for other People”
— Adam Smith (1723-1790)
I came from a working-class background & I will always be a working-class guy. The town I grew up in — my adolescence through my twenties — is Paramount. It’s an inner-city, industrially zoned town across the L.A. riverbed from the infamous Compton which for a while had the highest murder rate in America & was where the notorious street gang, the Crips, originated.
In other words, I didn’t grow-up in any Leave it to Beaver or Ozzie & Harriet idyllic community. And I have hated & fought against bullies my entire life. I see my writing as another form of continuing my fight against bullies. The rich & especially the super-rich have bullied everyone who is not as wealthy as them throughout history. If I come across as preaching in my writing, I apologize. My intention is to teach through my writing with the goal of helping others to understand how we ended up with towns like Compton & Paramount and perpetually behind the eight-ball socially, economically, & politically.
At first, reading & books were my escape from the ugly reality that was my family life. But somewhere in my twenties, light bulbs began to go on in my mind & the subjects of philosophy, political science, history, & literature showed me the interconnections, the hows, whys, & ways that the rich were fucking us all. I began to see that knowledge truly is a great, empowering tool for our liberation from slavery by the master class.
In fact, you might find it hard to believe but conservatively, I’d guesstimate that in the last 30 years alone, I have spent 50,000 hours reading, writing, researching, etc. in the subjects I mentioned above. And no, I’m not saying this makes me an “expert” or a genius, but I have done my homework. So, excuse me if I sound a bit pompous or like an authority at times.
I started this essay with the quote by Adam Smith because it sums up the basic belief of the so-called 1% who de facto call all the shots behind the scenes, most notably behind the charade of Congress that is supposed to represent us but actually doesn’t give a shit whether we live or die.
I chose this particular quote by Adam Smith because he is often referred to as the “Father of Capitalism,” and this form of capitalism has caused so much death & destruction around the planet & continues to do so that if we don’t wake-up & organize ourselves to fight it, it may be the end of us all?
What really saddens me about this quote is that this perspective has spread to millions of working-class people around the world. Our most powerful defense against the powers that be is our numbers & if we are to be successful in this class warfare, we need to realize that solidarity is crucial.
The status quo has been cranking-out their propaganda for decades to divide us & thereby weaken us as a force.
In the middle of his presidency, Ronald Reagan created a secret agency known as the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD) with one nefarious purpose in mind: propaganda. This was no ordinary propaganda. It was deemed “white propaganda,” designed to be used on the American people. https://listverse.com/2015/01/15/10-reprehensible-crimes-of-ronald-reagan/
George Orwell said in his classic 1984 that the true enemy of Big Brother (the government) isn’t foreign but rather, its own citizens. This isn’t Alex Jones bullshit conspiracy, but most Americans have been so well indoctrinated that they believe it’s only the Russians & Chinese who use propaganda against their own citizens.
The Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean (S/LPD or ARA/LPD) was an intra-agency propaganda organization[1][2] established in the United States during the administration of Ronald Reagan. It was founded and managed by the Cuban-American Otto Reich, an ardent opponent of Fidel Castro.
In theory, the S/LPD operated under the auspices of the Department of State, but congressional investigations later determined it reported directly to Reagan’s National Security Council aide in the White House, Colonel Oliver North. The S/LPD collaborated with Central Intelligence Agency propaganda experts and Army psychological operations specialists to disseminate what it called “white propaganda” with the goal of influencing public opinion and spurring Congress to continue to fund the Reagan administration’s military campaign against Nicaragua‘s Sandinista government. By covertly disseminating intelligence leaks to journalists, it sought to trump up a Nicaraguan “threat,” and to sanctify the U.S.-backed Contra guerrillas fighting Nicaragua’s government as “freedom fighters.” — Wikipedia
I could list hundreds of examples of U.S. propaganda used to brainwash us but here’s just a sampling.
We’ve all heard family members, friends, co-workers, etc. complain, why should I be forced to pay taxes for other peoples’ kids to go to school, for programs like Head Start, for food stamps, health care for lazy people who don’t want to work, etc. etc. etc.
Because they don’t teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is. (Noam Chomsky)
I’ll tell you why you should pay those taxes, because if we make sure that all kids have food in their bellies when they start their school day, they are better able to concentrate & less likely to be a behavior problem in their classrooms. In turn, this allows their teachers to be more effective because they don’t have to waste their time dealing with behavior problems & the other students aren’t cheated out of the time they need to learn & prosper.
I speak from experience here because I was an educator for over 20 years. And it’s a national disgrace that many schools in the poor areas like Paramount & Compton, often don’t even have enough textbooks for every student & many of their classrooms are little more than warehouses where we attempt to keep them contained until the end of the school day.
Kids may not be able to articulate what’s going on, but they know they’re being screwed & that kids who go to schools in places like Beverly Hills have it a thousand times better than they do. The poor students often grow up angry & turn to gangs for a sense of belonging & people who care about them. This in turn makes our communities more dangerous & it just becomes one horrific, vicious cycle that is far more costly to us all than if we’d treated them fairly from the beginning.
And from the much bigger picture that I alluded to earlier i.e. class warfare, think how much more powerful we’d become if all our children had a top-notch education. Again, the 1% want a nation of illiterates or barely literate citizens because they’re more susceptible to the propaganda designed to keep us divided & blaming one another for our troubles rather than them who become obscenely wealthy while more & more of us become homeless.
You may think I’m saying we should become a communist country, but you’d be wrong. No, I believe we should follow the model of countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc. And I have visited Denmark & Sweden and several other European countries in my vagabonding days — I’ve been to Europe a dozen times — sometimes on a one-way ticket & landing with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. Yeah, they pay what seems outlandish taxes, but they have the best public education through college absolutely free, the same for medical care, clean & safe modern apartments, etc. The way I look at it is, if all your basic necessities are taken care of, the rest of your money is all for luxuries or whatever you want.
I believe to the marrow of my bones that every human being has a natural right to be treated with dignity & it’s inhumane to force people to suffer humiliation, degradation, needless suffering, fear, etc. just so an elite can live like kings. Bottom-line, if you don’t care about those less fortunate than yourself & don’t want to pay taxes to help them but are silent when it comes to our throwing trillions down the bottomless pit we call the Pentagon, I don’t want to even know you or be around you. And some day, you could find yourself in a lifeboat from a ship that just sunk & with a handful of those “undesirables” who may know what kind of person you are & may not help you survive because you are clearly one of the heartless who has no compassion or empathy for his fellow man.
Okay, onward to the broad & rather vague or nebulous term, “Neoliberalism.” To be honest, neoliberalism has only come to my attention in the last several years though it’s been a powerful force for at least the last 40 years. And as usual with the propaganda put out by the corporate cockroaches via the corporate media, they’ve disguised it behind their favorite trigger words like freedom, democracy, patriotism, etc. and of course it’s wrapped in the American flag.
I want to reiterate that I’m a working class stiff & as such, I write for the kind of people like my relatives & the friends I grew up with who mostly just went to high school. So, I’m not going to attempt to give you all the lofty & deceptive economic jargon. Quite simply, neoliberalism is comprised of three programs of assault they employ against us, Deregulation, Privatization, & Austerity. I want to begin by sharing a passage from my intellectual & moral hero, Noam Chomsky. 
Throughout history, Adam Smith observed, we find the workings of “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind”: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other People.” He had few illusions about the consequences. The invisible hand, he wrote, will destroy the possibility of a decent human existence “unless government takes pains to prevent” this outcome, as must be assured in “every improved and civilized society.” It will destroy community, the environment and human values generally — and even the masters themselves, which is why the business classes have regularly called for state intervention to protect them from market forces.
Notes of NAFTA: “The Masters of Man”
Noam Chomsky
The Nation, March, 1993
By the way my imaginary reader, if you’re interested in gaining a truly, top-notch political education, read everything you can get your hands on by Noam Chomsky!
“Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market (and not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties). Of course the goal was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes and deregulate. But “neoliberalism” indicates something more than a standard rightwing wish list. It was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals.” https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world
The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. — Noam Chomsky
You may think I’m beating a dead horse in regard to propaganda but if anything, I’m understating the seriousness of the issue. Do you recall our Pentagon war strategists during the Vietnam war & their “Winning the Hearts & Minds” of the Vietnamese people while we bombed the Hell out of them?
“The war could have never been won in terms of the employment of firepower. The solution to winning the war was to cause reform in the government, to win the hearts and minds of the people.” (David Hackworth)
If you haven’t heard of Colonel Hackworth, shame on you. He served in both Korea & Vietnam and was a living legend. He was often in trouble with his superiors because he’d ignore their stupid commands & he created an outfit that turned the guerilla tactics of Mao against the North Vietnamese & was highly effective. He was shot more than any other soldier since WWII I believe & was awarded over 90 medals & etc. But around 1971, he couldn’t remain silent any longer & started speaking out against our involvement in Vietnam & the Pentagon’s propaganda dept. went after him by trying to destroy his credibility.
Returning to the main topic, neoliberalism, here’s a long view historically speaking that came to me a few days ago. This may be an example of the cyclical view of history in that it repeats itself, and I see the precursors of neoliberalism in this perspective.
It began with the Great Depression, which was caused by the Stock Market crash of 1929, the massive number of bank failures, etc. It lasted from 1929 to 1939 and largely due to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, we slowly pulled out of it. All you “MAGA” fans of Trump & Reagan should note that if it weren’t for the federal government’s assistance, which might’ve spelled the end of America.
You see, the neoliberals have been spreading their propaganda that the government is the cause of all our problems & refuse to see that in fact, it’s the corporate greed of the 1% & the Wolves of Wall St. who are the de facto culprits. And amazingly, even though the federal government bailed Wall St. out after their corruption & greed had dealt such a body-blow to America, the power elite immediately started waging their propaganda campaign against the government.
F.D.R.’s “New Deal” which by-the-way would’ve never happened were it not for the solidarity & continual pressure of the American public who had suffered so long & hard. In fact, several of our richest business tycoons were so outraged by being forced to “give” some of their wealth in the form of taxes for New Deal programs, that they planned & organized a coup against F.D.R. If it hadn’t been for the true patriot, Smedley F. Butler whom they approached to lead their coup, the United States might very well have become a fascist tyranny overnight. Butler was another amazing soldier beloved by hundreds of thousands of soldiers whom he’d led in his career.
Fast forward to January 6th & Trump’s attempted coup, another one of the supposed 1% who’s mantra is “All for ourselves and nothing for other People.” And were it not for all the government loans & subsidies that Trump has received over the years along with his fraud, corruption, & Mafia buddies, he’d probably be selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door.
The key point to bear in mind in my cyclical view of history is the nearly total worldwide economic meltdown of 2008. Thanks again to deregulation, specifically Bill Clinton’s repeal of F.D.R.’s Glass Steagall Act, which the supposedly conservative republicans had been trying to do since Reagan was in power, billions of hard-working citizens around the world lost their homes, their jobs, their pensions, their savings, their health care.
Except this time, after the federal government bailed-out the Wolves of Wall St. yet again, and they didn’t put it in writing that the banks had to ease up & make loans for individuals who needed help for either starting up their small businesses or keeping their small businesses from going bankrupt.
Again, and again it’s clear, the government will do everything within its power to protect the uber rich but could give a shit less about the 99% of us who are left to sink or swim on our own & pay our taxes. This is neoliberalism!
Deregulation, Privatization, & Austerity are their weapons of choice & how they are destroying the last vestiges of Democracy & turning America into a fascist, corporate tyranny owned lock, stock, & barrel by the billionaire class that so many of our citizens idolize.
“Reagan installs neoliberalism
From the 1930s to 1981, a period of time spanning more than two full generations, the American political and economic system was run under a “well-regulated capitalism” system conceived by economist John Maynard Keynes and put into place in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A top income tax bracket of 91% that kicked in at around $3 million a year in today’s money guaranteed that nobody became obscenely rich, while strong protections for workers and their right to unionize ensured that a good chunk of corporate profits went to the workers who created that revenue.” https://www.salon.com/2021/08/15/the-crisis-of-neoliberalism-america-arrives-at-one-of-historys-gre
“Friedman, Reagan and the wealthy funders of the Republican Party saw this inflation, which was devastating the Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter one-term presidencies, as a political gift. To a man, they insisted it was caused by FDR’s and LBJ’s “welfare state” policies and the “big spending” associated with them, even though that was a complete lie.” (ibid.)
“America, shaken by that decade of seemingly intractable inflation, bought his sales pitch and Reaganomics — aka neoliberalism — became the operational economic and political system of America in 1981. Everything from trickle-down to busting unions to “ending welfare as we know it” and “tough on crime” policing fell under this single rubric.” (ibid.)
“Reagan’s destruction of American unions had also dried up the Democratic Party’s main revenue source, so by 1992 jumping into bed with giant corporations and the super-rich had become a political survival strategy for Democrats. ”
Embracing multinational corporations that wanted to move their expensive-labor manufacturing facilities overseas meant overflowing campaign coffers for the newly-neoliberal Democratic Party and Clinton’s political arm, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).” (ibid.)
The final nail in the regulatory coffin was the Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001). Clinton repealed laws and prevented government intervention in speculative markets, until they collapsed. These deregulations built upon the Nixon-Reagan era and ultimately contributed to the Crash of 2007, the Crisis of 2008 and the ongoing Recession. https://truthout.org/articles/out-of-control-a-brief-history-of-neoliberal-deregulation-in-the-usa/
“While Obama, like Clinton, had campaigned on themes that made it seem he was rejecting neoliberalism, in fact he was as deeply in its camp as were Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush.
By the time of his presidency neoliberalism was simply conventional wisdom in political circles, having been adopted in the U.K. in 1978 by Margaret Thatcher and in large part adopted by much of the rest of Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s. Onward to Davos to party with the neoliberal billionaires!
But still, as noble and soaring as Obama’s rhetoric was, and as good and decent a man as he was (in contrast to the war criminal and torturer Bush, the horny Clinton or the evil Nixon), neoliberalism still wasn’t working for anybody except America’s biggest corporations and richest individuals. And American workers knew it.
Enter Donald Trump, the political equivalent of the Little Boy Who Said the Emperor Has No Clothes. Trump attacked the neoliberal policies of both parties, although never directly using the word.” (ibid.)
I could provide a lot of financial doublespeak & jargon but that would only bore you. And if your curiosity is aroused, you can do some research on your own, but I want to make clear that our financial troubles aren’t just the fault of the GOP.
Obviously, Clinton played a major role in the destruction of the American middle class but even the beloved Jimmy Carter had a hand in the hollowing-out of our democracy. Moreover, if democrats & liberals were aware of Carter’s role in the assault on Central America, they wouldn’t continue to portray him as a saint.
Returning to deregulation, here’s a perhaps simplistic but nevertheless important fact to keep in mind.
Without rules and control from the government, businesses can commit fraud more easily, putting consumers at risk.
One way President Biden can “Build Back Better” be following the example of one of the greatest deregulators to sit in the Oval Office: Jimmy Carter. Whilst most think of Carter as a standard New Deal-Great Society liberal, deregulation was a major part of Carter’s economic agenda and one of the greatest aspects of his legacy. It’s something that Carter and Reagan had in common, not something that set them apart. https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/jimmy-carter-the-great-deregulator/
Over the past four decades or better, the more I’ve dug into the connections or interdependence of the behemoth corporations, our political system, & our economic system, the more nauseous I have become. Every now & then when a company, a corporation, or a conglomerate of corporations gets busted for wrongdoing, we hear the same old, “it was just a few bad apples,” or “they were the exception to the rule.” Well, this is simply bullshit, fraud isn’t the exception, it’s the rule & the higher up the food chain, in terms of wealth, you go, the more prevalent it is.
I wrote an essay years ago which I titled, “The Business of America is Fraud,” and as the years have passed, my convictions have only been strengthened. And “our” government has utterly failed us ad infinitum. The old adage our grandparents & great grandparents followed, “Buyer Beware,” were/are so fuckin’ true or right. I’m just sharing a few examples with you in this essay of the fraud & corruption that has permeated nearly every crevice of our society & culture. But if you don’t want to become just another victim to the unbridled greed of the 1%, the so-called “Masters of the Universe,” all I can advise is that you put away your “Smart phone,” which is actually making you dumber, and you get busy informing yourself to help protect your loved ones.
Last night I stumbled across a movie from 2019 called, “The Devil Has a Name,” and once again I couldn’t believe that our fuckin’ government didn’t step in to protect us, the consumers and citizens of this wonderful nation.
You’d think that after 40 years or better of studying the corruption in big business & our political system, not much could surprise me, but it still does. I brought up this film because it’s an excellent example of the destructive consequences of neoliberalism or the capture of our political system by what I call the corporate cockroaches.
In brief, for several decades, the oil companies who own those oil derricks pumping oil out of the ground in California’s Central Valley, have been pumping the toxic water that comes from sucking the oil out of the land, into unlined ponds which then leak into the groundwater & contaminate and poison the crops adjacent to the oil fields.
Therefore, California’s Central Valley, which produces roughly half the nuts, fruits, & vegetables which feed our nation, is selling us food that is carcinogenic. So much for all the vegan health nuts & their arrogance & sense of superiority. There’s no other way to put it other than the water companies & the oil companies’ collusion for the sake of ever greater profits clearly outweighs the public’s health & safety. https://psmag.com/environment/california-oil-field-waste-is-threatening-water-supplies
Perhaps the most important takeaway from this film & the issue raised in the film of companies getting busted for illegal & dangerous practices but, they usually just pay a relatively small fine & return to doing the same crime. You see, corporations are about one thing i.e., maximizing their profits & as long as the government just gives them a slap on the wrist, they’ll continue in their destructive behaviors because it basically always boils down to cost-benefit analysis & they even have a term for this i.e. “Net Present Value.”
Remember what I said earlier about the business of America is fraud? I’ll tell you one thing, you can be damn sure that the power elite or the 1% who de facto own America, don’t buy or eat the food produced in California’s Central Valley. They most likely have their own, private organic farms where they know the soil, water, etc. used to grow their food is 100% pure.
Getting back to deregulation, Reagan was probably the most deregulating president we’ve had since neoliberalism began to infest our country. If you recall, one of the first acts Reagan passed after he became president in his first term, was to fire the air traffic controllers who were on strike, for life.
The air traffic controllers were rightfully concerned about the dangerous overcrowding in the skies & the serious understaffing of air traffic controllers so the airlines could increase their profits. Many of the controllers were forced to work long shifts & this of course increased the likelihood of accidents because the more tired a person is, the less sharp & alert their senses are. Think about that the next time you’re on a flight!
Reagan has always been a corporate lackey or lapdog & I’m old enough to remember the television commercials made for G.E. for 20 years as he traveled around America as their official spokesman. He even dubbed it, “The Speech,” which basically boiled down to “The Commies Are Coming, The Commies Are Coming!” In short, Reagan’s job was to keep stoking the fear of the American public, you know, what FOX “News’” role has been for the past 25 years or better.
By-the-way, here’s another couple of interesting “fun facts” for you, G.E. was involved in building America’s first atomic bomb, the one used to vaporize hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima. And the plutonium used came from the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Washington state. Moreover, there are countless newspaper articles from the 1950s about livestock raised along the Columbia River that were born with two heads & various other deformities. Our brilliant leaders allowed Hanford to bury the radioactive waste in cement containers which they buried & they soon began eroding into the groundwater that connected with the Columbia. Bon Appetit fellow citizens, Uncle Sam loves you! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-05-07-vw-3730-story.html
Moving right along, here’s another fine example of good old deregulation, Enron. Do you remember our Howdy Doody president, Georgie “Dubya” Bush & his good friend, Ken Lay? Of course, as soon as Enron got busted, Dubya suddenly forgot Kenny boy as he used to call him & even though Kenny boy let Georgie use his private jet to fly around the country when he was running for the presidency, Bush dropped him like a hot potato when Enron’s grand scam was exposed.
The Enron scandal is a complex story of financial fraud & accounting and manipulation of the energy market with the help of Wall St. The key lesson is that once again, we see how fucked-up things can become when big business isn’t regulated or watched by “our” government. And for the record, when Enron was finally caught for all its illegal activities, especially its massive accounting fraud, it was the fifth largest business in America. Here is a significant snippet for your review.
After the passage of the deregulation law, California had a total of 38 Stage 3 rolling blackouts declared, until federal regulators intervened during June 2001.[60] These blackouts occurred as a result of a poorly designed market system that was manipulated by traders and marketers, as well as from poor state management and regulatory oversight. Subsequently, Enron traders were revealed as intentionally encouraging the removal of power from the market during California’s energy crisis by encouraging suppliers to shut down plants to perform unnecessary maintenance, as documented in recordings made at the time.[61][62] These acts contributed to the need for rolling blackouts, which adversely affected many businesses dependent upon a reliable supply of electricity, and inconvenienced a large number of retail customers. This scattered supply increased the price, and Enron traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of 20 × its normal peak value. (Wikipedia)
By-the-way, something we should all keep in mind when these massive corporations occasionally are punished, they are allowed to file for bankruptcy & in many instances, they don’t even have to plead guilty & don’t even receive a criminal record for their crimes. And the cherry on top is that the IRS keeps cutting the number of auditors whose job it is to audit the wealthy & the major corporations while increasing their staff to audit average citizens. Yep! Another example of equality in America & our respect for Law & Order. Oh yeah, the IRS is also making it harder & harder for working class Americans to file for bankruptcy while streamlining the process for the corporate cockroaches. Aren’t you proud to be an American?
One last gem before I move on, remember my telling you that Jimmy Carter isn’t the good, little Christian he pretends to be & the overwhelming majority of democrats have portrayed him as a near saint? Well, Mr. Peanut signed the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 & he pushed Congress to deregulate the trucking industry & the railroad industry. I’ll leave you to research the deadly results of those pieces of legislation.
Onward & upward to weapon number two used in the class war by the corporate cockroaches, “Privatization.” My hero, Noam Chomsky, summed it up very simply like this (my paraphrase) when the neoliberals want to privatize a public service or program, they simply defund it & when it begins to fail, they suggest it be privatized because everyone knows that private companies/corporations due a much better job than the government does & for less money.
As I mentioned earlier, when FDR passed the New Deal, many, if not most of America’s business tycoons were outraged that the government was going to help the people who were suffering so terribly during the Great Depression. They didn’t want to be forced to help subsidize these “social welfare” programs, remember, the megalithic corporations who go belly-up because of their fraud & greed are the only ones worthy of help from the “nanny state,” the rest of us are supposed to rely only on ourselves as Reagan’s fictional favorite, Horatio Alger, & pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
Moreover, those faux conservatives who cry foul the loudest have a hidden agenda — as far as the average citizen is concerned — they seek to privatize the government-funded programs because they are usually made up of mostly democrats. And they have very large & enticing pots of money like public education.
This is the truth behind the G.O.P.’s war on public education. As Chomsky pointed out, they surreptitiously defund it at every opportunity & by-the-way, this serves their agenda in two respects, 1) it weakens our educational system, 2) with the introduction of charter schools, the G.O.P. gets the vote of millions of phony Christians because they can indoctrinate students with the Bible in charter schools, they can pray in school, & they can indoctrinate/brainwash the students with their hidden curricula.
“Christian” fundamentalists, evangelicals, extremists, etc. fear & hate Secular Humanism with a fierce passion because it’s basically about the principles & values of the Enlightenment or what America was founded upon & it adheres firmly to the separation of church & state. Our founding fathers were scholars of the Enlightenment & were therefore well aware of the centuries of deadly conflicts when the church was an official part of the government.
These self-professed “Christians” are obviously not true Christians because 74 million of them not only voted for Trump, but they support him wholeheartedly. And if I need to point out to you how obviously non-Christian Trump is, you have drunk his Jim Jones Kool-Aid & are part of the willfully ignorant & morally bankrupt.
The U.S. Postal Service is another powerful union & is made up of many democrats. So, the neoliberals passed one of the most outrageous acts ever.
An unprecedented congressional mandate threatens the Postal Service’s ability to continue to provide good jobs and universal service.
July 15, 2019
Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, Brian Wakamo
In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.
If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years. This extraordinary mandate created a financial “crisis” that has been used to justify harmful service cuts and even calls for postal privatization. Additional cuts in service and privatization would be devastating for millions of postal workers and customers.
In its December 2018 report, President Trump’s Task Force on the United States Postal Service reaffirmed current rules related to postal retiree health benefits, calling it “part of a mandate for postal self-sustainability.” https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/
The third tool or weapon of mass destruction used by the neoliberal cabal to keep the rabble under their thumb is “Austerity.” You should take notice that whenever they bring up the importance of austerity, they’re referring to us, the 99%, not themselves.
We’re just the suckers who must pay all the bills & suffer the consequences of their financial “mistakes.” Their fraud, greed, theft, schemes tanked the entire world economy in 2008 but most of them pulled their money out just days before the crash & many of them awarded themselves lavish bonuses before their house of cards came falling down. But tens, if not hundreds of millions of people around the world lost their jobs, their pensions, their health insurance, etc. and were told, “You need to tighten your belts, suck it up, and get through it by following our recommended austerity measures.”
“However, by tracing the roots of these policies back to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, Shefner and Blad show that the “medicine” of austerity actually serves as a cudgel to discipline and control countries across the world.
Since the 1970s, the aim of the neoliberal project in the Global South has been to use austerity as a hammer to destroy the region’s developmental capacity, discipline and control its labor force, and make their economies dependent on international capital. In the Global North, austerity, starting with the Reagan and Thatcher governments of the early 1980s, has slowly hammered away at worker protections, guaranteed pensions, access to health care, and access to well-funded public education. Despite the anti-state rhetoric of neoliberalism, its aim has not been to reduce the size of the state but to reduce state social services and public goods as much as possible by using austerity to privatize the costs of these services and goods, while socializing the costs of the increased public debt that governments have accumulated by providing bailouts and tax breaks to private financial institutions and multinational industries, and requiring those in the working class and middle class to foot the bill by paying higher taxes.” https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2021/0521nawabi.html
Again, neoliberalism began to infect the U.S. economy under Jimmy Carter, but it was full steam ahead once Reagan & Maggie Thatcher were in power. Reagan announced to America & the rest of the world from day one of his presidency that America from now on would be a safe haven for corporations i.e., it was now open season on unions & anybody else who interfered with big business in the U.S. This was as crystal clear a declaration of war against the poor, the working class, & the middle class as possible for the 1% to make.
Trump rode his bandwagon of fear, hate, & racism all the way up the steps & into the White House, pretending that he too hated the government but licking his lips with anticipation at all the plundering he’d now be able to do while pretending to be a populist. And here we are in March of 2023 at the start of another banking crisis & Biden swearing that the 99% will not be stuck with the bill the deregulation of the financial sector has caused once again.
They’ll try to disguise this bailout by using new jargon & hiding the facts & details but mark my word, they’re preparing to fuck us yet again & wipe-out the remaining skeleton crew of social safety net programs. What’s worse, now that the neoliberals have significantly gutted most of our federal & state social safety net programs, they are gradually becoming bolder in their agenda to make significant cuts to Medicare & Social Security.
These used to be referred to as the “third rail” in politics because if a politician dared to suggest cuts to them, it was like stepping on an electrified railroad track & spelled the end of their political career. They still hide their true intentions in public, but the word is getting out & since any suggestion of cutting military funding is a death knell to a politician, they will continue their covert campaigns to push us into a nation of the completely destitute & the obscenely wealthy.
You may dismiss me as just another one of the crazy QAnon nuts, but have you noticed that the police in our major cities now resemble soldiers in the many wars we’re involved in? They no longer serve to protect the people & now they wear military uniforms & their duty is to protect the property of the wealthy. This is what our soldiers in all these foreign lands are fighting for? We are being occupied in our own country.
Remember my friend, they, the 1% are waging a de facto class war against all of us not a part of the power elite. And this isn’t that façade of a war they call a culture war. No, this is a matter of real life & death. Our water is poisoned if we are forced to live next to their factories & industrial plants. Why don’t they ever build these toxic plants next to cities like Beverly Hills?
I could go on & on with thousands of examples of how the corporate cockroaches are endangering & poisoning us and our loved ones, but you’re already aware of these facts. The question is, how much longer are we going to allow them to oppress us, degrade & humiliate us, and to poison us?
Upon reflection, I realize that it’s probably not wise of me to assume the general awareness of the public regarding just how consistent the poisoning has been or rather, the interconnections between the rich getting richer & the rest of us dying in ever greater numbers?
In conclusion, Capitalism is defined as; an economic and political system in which property, business, and industry are controlled by private owners rather than by the state, with the purpose of making a profit:
We often hear the titans of business, industry, & finance in America whining or proclaiming in self-righteous indignation that the “nanny state” is guilty of coddling the public with its social “safety net” programs which only encourage laziness & dependence. Yet every time the corporate giants & Wall St. face a crisis, the first thing they do is go begging to the “nanny state,” for help, for bailouts, for subsidies, etc. I guess they just suffer from temporary amnesia when it suits them?
Like everything else out of the corporate cockroaches’ mouths, their claims about the marvels of America’s capitalist system are a lie & a pernicious fraud. Here is an insight from America’s greatest champion, Noam Chomsky.
Finkel: How do you assess the Bush administration, especially in terms of domestic policies? Where does it continue the Reagan era and where is it a departure?
Chomsky: It’s a continuation of the Carter-Reagan policies. Remember that the Reagan policies were proposed by Carter, who didn’t have the muscle to push them through. Carter proposed essentially the military buildup that Reagan carried through, except that Reagan escalated it more rapidly in the beginning and leveled it off later.
The Carter administration also proposed to attack welfare spending and the social support system for the poorer sectors, which the Reagan administration then carried through with bipartisan support. What these policies amounted to is turning the state, even more than before, into a welfare state for the rich: a much more interventionist state that pours public resources into high-technology industry and distributes resources away from the poor, combined with attacks on labor and civil rights. Don’t forget that it was Clinton & Biden who slashed our welfare system for the poor & the working class!
It’s objectively a sound policy, I believe, for the privileged and powerful in an internationally complicated environment. They’ve internationalized capital to take advantage of cheap labor abroad, and intensified the class war that business has always waged against labor and the disadvantaged. https://chomsky.info/1991____02/
Chomsky has pointed out in thoroughly footnoted & documented detail in books for decades that America is not a capitalist economy but rather, a State/Capitalist system. Our government intervenes consistently in the operation/running of our economy & overwhelmingly on the side of private corporations. In fact, the corruption has become so brazen that in effect, the corporate behemoths’ lawyers de facto write the legislative laws that “govern” business affairs in the U.S. See “A.L.E.C.” (American Legislative Exchange Council) https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/What_is_ALEC
Yep! The good old “free market” and “Capitalism” in all their glorious hypocrisy. And don’t forget “free trade,” another one of those pernicious myths that were created to brainwash us into believing that ours is the best economic & political system in the world. If you’d care to empower yourself, I strongly recommend “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. I just started reading it a couple of weeks ago & I’m sure that I’m going to learn a lot from it. Here’s a link to an interview with Naomi Oreskes on a radio show I’ve been listening to for over 40 years, Background Briefing with Ian Masters https://www.backgroundbriefing.org/2023/02/26/background-briefing-february-26-2023/
In a nutshell, a corporation’s top priority is to make as much profit as possible so it can continue to grow & increase the profits for its shareholders. You may think, well, of course, this is simple common sense. But have you heard of what they call “Externalities?” This is where “common sense” goes right out the window and the monstrous side of corporations is revealed.
Recently I was watching a You Tube video clip of Noam Chomsky, and he commented that the economic collapse of 2008 was one of these “externalities,” and I felt as if I had been struck by lightning or had an epiphany. I had never thought of that.
Externalities are basically any costs of doing business that corporations can pass on to the public and claim that they aren’t their responsibility. Many, if not most of these “costs” are often clearly connected/related to the corporations’ business. And the ramifications of Wall St.’s “housing bubble” that resulted in the near total collapse of the world’s economy is truly mind-numbing!
An estimated 10 million people lost their homes in the U.S. alone thanks to the fraud of Wall St. in its “housing bubble scams.” Anywhere from six to twelve million Americans lost their jobs.
“The morbid joke about the Great Recession was that it turned Americans’ 401(k)s into 201(k)s. Indeed, the nation’s 401(k)s and IRAs lost about $2.4 trillion in the final two quarters of 2008, and the average loss that year for workers who had been on the job for 20 years was, according to one estimate, about 25 percent.” https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/the-recession-hurt-americans-retirement-accounts-more-
“Also, the combined peak loss from declining stock and home values totaled nearly $100,000, on average per U.S. household, during the July 2008 to March 2009 period.” https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2010/04/28/the-impact-of-the-september-2008-econo
“According to the report, entitled “Cost of the Crisis“, the financial and economic crisis cost Americans $12.8 trillion, including:
But $12.8 trillion is a conservative estimate, says Better Markets president & CEO Dennis Kelleher, who joined The Daily Ticker’s Henry Blodget in the accompanying interview.
The report also highlights the current impact to the U.S. economy, including:
- 1 million Americans, or 15% of the public, are out of work or unable to find full-time jobs using the broadest measure of unemployment, or U-6.
- 3 million Americans have lost their health insurance.
- 11 million homeowners, almost 1 in 4, are saddled with mortgages higher than the value of their homes.” DP during the period. DP during the period.
This is from an article at yahoo finance.
“ A dramatic spike in suicides between 2008 and 2010 can be linked with the economic crisis, according to a study published today in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Researchers from the University of Oxford compared suicide data from before 2007 with the years of the crisis and found more than 10,000 “economic suicides” associated with the recession across the U.S., Canada and Europe.
‘There has been a substantial rise in suicides during the recession, considerably more than we would have expected based on previous trends,” says lead author Aaron Reeves, a postdoctoral researcher in the sociology department at Oxford University.
And, says senior author David Stuckler, also of Oxford: “Suicides are just the tip of the iceberg. These data reveal a looming mental health crisis in Europe and North America.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2014/06/12/more-than-10000-suicides-tied-to-economic-crisis-study-
Here’s a short video clip to lay it out for you.
Remember, the greed & unregulated corruption and fraud of Wall St. bankers, hedge fund managers, the insurance behemoth A.I.G., the corruption of the three major credit rating agencies, etc. became fabulously wealthy because their criminal behavior was basically considered an “externality,” and the public was stuck with the bill and forced to bail them out because they were “too big to fail.”
As Chomsky has pointed out time and time again, “Capitalism for the 99% of us and Socialism for the 1%,” who look down upon us as peons & consider themselves the “Masters of Mankind,” because they write the laws in Congress with their bought and paid for politicians.
Oh, it gets better my friend. Here are a few more examples of “externalities” sure to warm your heart:
- The toxic contamination of nearby rivers, lakes, aquifers, oceans, etc. whether willfully or innocently
- The pollution of the air so terribly that it causes respiratory problems & death of the nearby residents.
- The poisoning of the soil and the food supply i.e., Monsanto’s GMO foods
- The death of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of animal species & plant life
- What they euphemistically call “climate change” but more accurately, climate destruction & the end of life on Earth
- The infrastructure necessary for companies/corporations to conduct their business i.e., roads, highways, airports, harbors, bridges, tunnels, etc.
- The police who protect their businesses & property and the military who protect their companies overseas from angry citizens who they exploit and invade & occupy their countries (see Smedley F. Butler)</li>
I’m sure there are many other examples of externalities that corporations & their owners, the 1%, believe they shouldn’t have to pay for. We hear them complaining & we see them dodging paying their fair share of taxes ad nauseam i.e., Trump. But we are the leeches, the moochers, the unpatriotic bums.
A lot of Americans don’t realize that corporations are private tyrannies. And this isn’t hyperbole, Chomsky has repeatedly shown us this for most of his career. When you walk through the door of the company you work for, the Bill of Rights is de facto null & void. The owner is in effect a tyrant or a dictator. They can search your work locker whenever they choose & don’t need probable cause or a search warrant. They can surveil your phone calls & spy on you when you’re using their restrooms. Some employees are fortunate & may have a benevolent tyrant and others, like Amazon employees, aren’t so lucky.
Moreover, to really rub salt in our wounds, we, as taxpayers are forced to subsidize many of the wealthiest, corporate conglomerates on the planet like the oil industry, big pharma, high tech, big agriculture, automobiles, & health care.
Take the world-wide Web for example. The research for developing it came mostly via the Pentagon and its funding of the research through mostly M.I.T. And once they began to realize the vast money earning potential of the Web, the government turns over the research funded by our tax dollars to private corporations so they can reap all the rewards i.e., the privatization of the profits generated by publicly funded research. And we, the public, are forced to pay through the nose for the privilege of using the Internet twice over.
But hey, I could be full of shit & just spinning a web of conspiratorial lies to support my general thesis that the 99% of us are being fucked over in so many ways that we’re not even aware of. So, do your own work i.e., research if you doubt me.
The most critically important thing that I hope you’ll bring away from this lengthy essay is that this battle plan of the Haves against the Have Nots isn’t some benign goal like the Culture War meant to distract & divide us. No, we are being systematically killed off or silenced.
Reflect on the so-called War on Drugs and the “opioid crisis” which the FDA, Big Pharma, the Justice Dept., & the sell-outs in Congress gave us and has killed over half a million American citizens in the past 20 years. And consider the fact that we have over 1,877 “Superfund Sites” (toxic death concentrations) around our nation. Over 24 million Americans live within a mile of these toxic pits.
These toxic dump piles are the result of either willful or criminally negligent corporations who don’t feel it’s their responsibility to clean them up. They’re “externalities” that they can dump on the taxpayers’ shoulders. And what does our racist con artist Trump do, he slashes the EPA’s budget by 31%. 
The police departments in our largest cities are gradually morphing into Robocops & this isn’t just because they thought it’d look cool. No, the police are becoming a de facto domestic, military force whose mission isn’t to protect & serve we, the citizens, but rather to protect & serve their corporate cockroach masters.
It really upsets the masters of society when their property is vandalized by angry citizens in protests. So, we are now witnessing the outlawing of protest & dissent in America and more & more protestors are being labeled terrorists so the masters can more easily dispose of them.
But hey, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” like the New Age faux hippies counsel us to be. And when the tanks in our streets start blowing up our homes, if we’re still fortunate enough to have one, oh well, at least we were entertained as we circled the toilet of history.
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
— Will Durant
“If you read the debates at the Constitutional Convention, Madison said, “The major concern of the
society has to be to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” And he had
arguments. Suppose everyone had a vote freely. He said, “Well, the majority of the poor would
get together and they would organize to take away the property of the rich.” And, he said, “That
would obviously be unjust, so you can’t have that.” So, therefore the constitutional system has to
be set up to prevent democracy.”
— Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream
— Rob DeLoss, May 10, 2023