As soon as I heard the slogan, “The 99% against the 1%,” I knew any hope that the Occupy movement would affect real change was over because very few Americans qualify as members of the 99% so far as the world is concerned. This liberal platitude was quickly followed-up by demands for reforms and a deluge of pseudo-Occupy organizations, such as “Occupy for Jobs,” ad nauseum, in a sickeningly rapid co-optation of the Occupy movement into a fight for more jobs, more commodities, more of our “fair” share of the loot stolen from the rest of the world’s peoples. Proving, once again, that feigned ignorance of other human beings’ impoverishment is simply a ploy to abet a greedy and self-serving agenda. Occupy, schmoccupy!
We’ve all heard the excuses coming from the so-called “middle class” in America: “I’m only one person. I have a family to take care of. I need to look to my own survival. what can I do?” I’ve heard it from my parents and peers for years. Selfishness couched in the terms of apathy and despair, with the despair stemming from the realization that they’re really just members of the working class after all. A class that’s rapidly losing its economic footing after being thrown into the global competition for low wage jobs by the transnational corporations’ quest to squeeze more capital, and more money, out of labor. Too many people, like the American working class, are willing to place their foot on another’s neck in order to get a leg up. Competition is the bane of the working class and exactly why all movements towards real worldwide economic equity are so easily derailed. All the people with the bulk of the loot have to do is throw some of it around and, “voila!”, the majority is down on its knees picking up the coins.
Of course, we’ve seen this all before. A few bones are thrown to the workers in order to gain their acquiescence in the corporate raging and pillaging of the planet at the expense of everyone else – the status quo! This was FDR’s much-vaunted New Deal. A “deal” never intended to be permanent. It was merely a temporary shelter designed by liberals so that the thieves known as capitalists, or the Scum-in-Charge (SICK), could weather the working class storms sweeping the country and the world at the time. Never mind that the workers created all the wealth and the rich merely expropriated it through financial manipulations as obvious as the three-card monte.
Once the storm clouds cleared, the capitalists proceeded to co-opt and buy-off the workers’ leaders via the rewards of trade union leadership and partial control of pension funds. An easy enough task because, with a few extra bucks in their pockets and the illusion of job security and pensions, most workers went contentedly back to being wage slaves. “Two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot” for the workers and the driver’s seat for the SICK, who immediately set about taking those “few bones” back.
This will happen every time if, when we gain the upper hand, we allow the capitalists, who don’t work except at stealing from us, to continue to amass and control capital or money. Nothing will ever change. Not in America, not in Tunisia, Greece or Spain, all the Occupiers and Indignados, notwithstanding. This is the status quo, the SICKness, again, being proven-out, as the people initially in power remain in power in all the aforementioned countries, with their power, ultimately, devolving from international finance capital. Nothing will change, that is, until the working class starts throwing stockbrokers and bankers out of Wall Street windows and Egyptian generals into the Nile with crocodiles, and takes back the fruits of its stolen labor. Strong medicine, indeed, but the only cure for the SICKness!
If anyone thinks that the kleptocracy that runs the planet is going to allow an equitable division of its resources, aided and abetted by participatory democracy, then they should just shoot themselves in the head, as they’ve got one bullet rattling around in there already. One need look no further than how quickly and easily the capitalists evicted the Occupy movement from the territory it had occupied to see who’s running the show. Why so quick and easy? Because a life and death struggle was not fought as one, with most of the well-fed and coddled Occupiers — no matter now well-intentioned — having no stomach for a fight that didn’t concern their appetites!
No doubt, it’s a life and death struggle for the 22,000 children who die every day from starvation and malnutrition on this planet. Yet, nothing is done about it. And it’s only going to get worse with giant transnational corporations gaining more and more control over arable farmland and fresh water sources (when they aren’t polluting them!) Moreover, the planet is suffering from severe weather fluctuations due to global warming, as evidenced by the rapid melting of polar icecaps and glaciers, resulting in unseasonable droughts and floods that effect the undeveloped countries the most. The fact that the corporate oil-based economy is responsible for this is rarely pointed out and, again, nothing is being done about it. For example, I suspect most of the Occupiers own cars and used them to get to the various Occupy sites, with the possible exception of Occupy Wall Street [Ed. Note: and Occupy Oakland, where bicyclists ruled!!].
So long as they get a cut, and don’t have to think about the consequences too much, most people in the so-called industrialized democracies of the West and Japan are fine with ignoring the deaths of these children and the widespread destruction of the planet for corporate profits. They’ve found it to their benefit to go along with the SICKness. As such, they’ve no problem with their leaders’ innumerable, unending and undeclared wars for markets and resources. No problem with a president who orders torture or one who orders extra-judicial murders, including the assassinations of American citizens. No problem with predator drones bombing villages and NATO, American and other soldiers murdering men, women and children under the banner of the SICKness.
In fact, if Occupy has shown us anything, it’s that the only problem most Americans have is when their extremely high-paying jobs, relative to the rest of the world’s, seem to be going away. So long as most American workers continue to buy into the “American Dream” and blindly accept the control of billions of dollars by thieves like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the Walton family as part of that dream, then human life, if not the planet itself, is doomed. No doubt, Americans, as a people, are down with the SICKness!
Write the author at Rand Gould C-187131, Thumb Correctional Facility, 3225 John Conley Dr. Lapeer, MI 48446.