This is What Trickle Down Economics Looks Like!

Here is where we are. We here in the land of the free are no longer free. We have broken every rule that was created to safegard individual liberty and community vitality. We have replaced government oversight, which in a democracy is or should be the community prerogative, and replaced it with privately-owned, privately-controlled oversight without accountability. We get only to read the annual reports. And we have known since 2002 that we can't trust those. So we have very large corporate-owned collective farms, with the benefits privatized. We are like soviet communists only without the illusion of shared residual benefits. And privatized collectivism used to be called fascism. No, I am not comparing us to the Nazis, I am just saying that our current system, where the corporation gets to tell you, at risk of punishment with unemployment, that you have to follow their principality's governor's whims. And as there is less and less "public" space, you are more and more beholden to their whims. The government has a hard time ruling what you do in your personal sovereign private spaces, but a corporation can tell everyone working for them what to do and how to do it. Government can't do that. So who is oppressing who?

Oh yes, we are like the children of israel who had to sell ourselves into indenturement, which became slavery when everything went subprime. And the blind necessarily become the mentors as freedom goes underground. And then we line up for the trickles that are the latest marketing jingles mixed with free samples. Freedom implies options. What options do we have?

We do have to solve this one. It is not a test. There will not be a do over. Are we going to leave it up to Obama? To Limbaugh? To the Saudis? To the Chinese? Is there any thing at all out there, anything, that could bring all these together for their own and the collective higher and better selves? We have to find it, whether it starts at the bottom or it starts at the top, it has to find us.

Last night I was talking to Arnaud at a cafe. We were talking torture. He was raising the standard argument that if you could save a thousand lives, or the life of one of my children, by using torture, what would I be willing to do? I don't believe there is an intellectual answer to that question. Because the urges are not intellectual. And you do what you do. But there is an intellectual question here that no one is asking: how did we get here? How did we get to the point where torture because an acceptable answer? Therein lies the Way.