Parasites Dine on The Body Politic
This
The late William Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan, forecast this 30 years ago: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” *
On Sunday mornings I both anticipate and dread “The Chris Mathews Show” and “Meet The Press” on TV. Everyone who knows me knows I’m a politcal wonk, going back to when I was a child. So I’m a glutton for punishment. When asked by Deb why I continue to punish/agitate myself on a morning I’m supposed to relax, I tell her that I’m just monitoring the Establishment’s reflection of themselves in the mirror.
Last Sunday was no exception. On Mathews’ show, the topic was: In this time of great need and tight budgets, why is there such a reluctance across the board to fairly tax the extremely small group of extremely wealthy individuals AND corporations? The pundits’ explanation is the continuing (and bogus) theory that the public’s problems are caused by the government (owned by these self-same wealthy). They went on to say that the super-wealthy on Wall St. and related special people who got bailed out w/ our tax money and then returned to their profligate ways with humongous salaries and bonuses, think of themselves as the new “creative class.” The rest of us are just “PARASITES” on their brilliant world. Can you imagine that??? I almost threw up in disbelief. Becky Quick of CNBC’s The Squawk Box defended these ideas and spoke of how important Wall Street is to the rest of us. Atlantic Mag former sr. editor and author Andrew Sullivan had the courage to confront her b.s. and ask, “How the heck is Wall Street the creative class - what do they create?” She replied, “They give out loans.” Yeah, of other people’s money! (sez me). Hummphf.
These Wall Streeters are the true parasites, Hoovering up all our money for themselves while they trivialize our hard work and sacrifice. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it a gain: What amazing traitors to our system and to the character of all the salt-of-the-earth people who make it work. When Deb gets frustrated about how things have turned upside-down, I tell her it’s an inside job**: The people who created this crisis are exploiting it for their own ends through fear, disinformation, and manipulation of the marketplace. And trying to make us all feel stupid so that we need to depend on their “superior” logic. Hummphf squared. Capitalism, to all you Ayn Rand fans, is an economic not a political system. Democracy is our political system. And if the rest of us “parasites” stopped working for a week, you wouldn’t have toilet paper to wipe your butts on. Let’s get real here. What an insult to the soldiers sacrificing in our perpetual wars. AGAIN, WHO ARE THE PARASITES HERE?
*quoted from Donald Bartlett and James Steele’s new book and soon- to -be documentary, “What Went Wrong—Betrayal of the American Dream” excerpted in The Philadelphia Inquirer. This is a follow-up to their Pulitizer Prize-winning Inquirer series of 20 years ago, What Went Wrong?” in which their predictions of the destruction of the Middle Class was called alarmist by critics. What has really happened is so much worse than even they predicted.
**Check out the Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job, about the lead-up to the financial meltdown, and how not one of the members of this white collar criminal class who created this crisis are in jail. We heard raves and as we were writing this post, we got a call from the library telling us our copy is in. What a segue-way.
