Wee The People - 3

In the first and second posts in this series, Dredd Blog focused on the glaring systemic disparities within the current culture of the USA.

In short, we are talking about the disparity between the 1-2%, who own and control 90% or more of the wealth of the USA, and the rest of us who can now only dream uselessly about it.

In The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy we noted that the elite who control the behavior of MOMCOM, so as to protect their wealth and power from wee the people, are aware of the nightmare wee the people have been experiencing.

That post also pointed out that they have a Big Brother Answer for our pain.

That post, The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy, revealed that the MOMCOM elite know very well that as wee the people wake up to realize that there is no longer an American Dream, rather it is in fact becoming the American Nightmare, there will be talk of retaliation.

MOMCOM knows that when we see through their demonization schemes that plague the airwaves before they invade one sovereign nation after another, we will attempt to hold them accountable like the Lilliputians did with Gulliver.

Yes, they know that when we find out that Libya had a much better society than the plutonomy they have produced, in terms of distribution of income, we will look at The Graphs of Wrath.

In this post today, we are going to focus more closely on the nature of a plutonomy, and how the American people are going to react to it once they find out about it, so lets roll:

It’s well known that the rich have an outsized influence on the economy.

The nation’s top 1% of households own more than half the nation’s stocks, according to the Federal Reserve. They also control more than $16 trillion in wealth — more than the bottom 90%.

Yet a new body of research from Citigroup suggests that the rich have other, more-surprising impacts on the economy.

Ajay Kapur, global strategist at Citigroup, and his research team came up with the term “Plutonomy” in 2005 to describe a country that is defined by massive income and wealth inequality. According to their definition, the U.S. is a Plutonomy, along with the U.K., Canada and Australia.

(The Wealth Report, Wall Street Journal). The last paragraph in that quote points out that the nations "we" tend to call "allies" are all plutonomies aren't they?

They fought the war together long ago that General Eisenhower presided over to a great extent.

Later, he became president, and finally, as he exited that office, he warned us to worry about MOMCOM, because he did foresee that "something", a "something" we are now calling a plutonomy.

While Karl Marx also predicted this plutonomy quite competently, Dredd Blog does not agree with the reaction Marx predicted when the lights of wee the people finally come on, which sadly means, in terms of social revolution, that Dredd Blog predicts that nothing will be done about it:

... Kapur ... maintains that the “the rich are likely to keep getting even richer, and enjoy an even greater share of the wealth pie over the coming years.”

All of which means that, like it or not, inequality isn’t going away and may become even more pronounced in the coming years. The best way for companies and businesspeople to survive in Plutonomies, Kapur implies, is to disregard the “mass” consumer and focus on the increasingly rich market of the rich.

(ibid, The Wealth Report). Unfortunately, Dredd Blog agrees with the Kapur expectation instead of the Marx prediction of a social revolution in the USA.

But to be fair, the form of the American reaction Dredd Blog has predicted is a modification of what Huxley also predicted, combined with what Kapur predicts, to wit:

We now continue this post with a quote ... :

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

(Aldous Huxley, emphasis added). I doubt that Huxley really understood how that would happen, since he used a traditional pharmacological mechanism to articulate his vision.

Even though as it turns out he was correct in principle, it is just that he did not understand that the mega-drug would be oil.

Oil is the drug of choice that fits the bill for "a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude", it is just that the "pharmacological method", as it turns out, is not addiction to something you buy at the local traditional drug store.

Instead, we buy the big drug at the local gas station (the "service station" in 1950's parlance), the Quick Stop, the Seven Eleven, or "the convenience store" (in post-peak-of-sanity civilization's parlance).

And we love it, like Huxley said we would.

(Sickology vs. Penology). When Marx long ago predicted a future revolution in the USA once the plutonomy formed, he did not take into consideration the ramifications of our addiction to oil or the impact such an addiction would have on nations world wide.

The oil addiction has produced a criminally insane faction within the elite, as well as a Stockholm Syndrome in wee the people.

We are truly bound to the elite of the plutonomy even though we are not truly united with them.

If either one of us tries to destroy the other by any means, we will both go down, because the civilization, within which the plutonomy exists, cannot survive without the oil drug.

The current oil wars will reach a peak, then afterwards either the Eastern Plutonomy of China with her minions, or the Western Plutonomy of the USA and Europe with their minions, will control the oil.

That is unless those wars "go nuclear", in which case those who live through it will not need oil in order to glow in the dark.

I could talk further about how we have been in this trap since circa the time of The Peak of Sanity, but I think it is time for a song:

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The lyrics to this epic work of art can be perused here.

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Myth Addiction Is Establishment's LSD - 2

Near this date two years ago Dredd Blog published the first post of this series.

Today we post it again since it is still relevant.

The recent arrests at the White House of many who were protesting the proposed Canadian Tar Sands pipeline through the heartland of the nation included a prominent NASA scientist James Hansen, showing a policy that is status quo in terms of destroying the fabric of the Earth's ecosystem.

Here is a repost of that post of two years ago, followed by a video of events which happened today that indicate we have a very troubling foreign and domestic policy:

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New oil discoveries are like finding a new drug peddler to supply the drug a little longer.

That way those riding on their own personal Titanic Ship of Fate can ignore the long term needs of the human species; keeping the earth habitable.

Likewise, a fabled saviour, the Canadian Oil Tar Sands, is just another myth pushed by those looking for brains that feed on myths and false hope.

The oil industry has been a peddler willing to "take care of" its customer addicts, but the scientists have been resisting the peddlers.

Scientists are pointing out that clean tar mythology is like clean coal mythology, and is really as deadly a poison as the product it casts a fog upon:

Alberta's oilsands produce more greenhouse gas emissions than some European countries right now and will produce more than all of the world's volcanoes in just 11 years if the pace of development continues, a new report says.

(CBC News). The propaganda is getting weak ("jobs or coffins", "guns or butter", and "war or terrorism") but will continue to deceive the weak who can only terrorize themselves with a vision of gloom if they do not get their fix.

The press is part of the establishment, however the public is not hoodwinked by the press as much as the press would hope:

The public's assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans' views of media bias and independence now match previous lows.

Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate.

(Pew Research). Good, stay thirsty for the truth and stay sceptical until the press stops being the lackey for the mythology fixated far right.

There is a better scenario: we evolve to become the fittest cosmic adults and the cosmos will be seen as a place where we can survive as a species, having left our addiction to our own death behind us.

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The Morning Joe show on MSNBC this morning featured Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski with statements confirming MOMCOM's utter lack of deftness as to long term mid-east political realities.

At 9:00 on the clip, Mika asks a question about the USA's poverty-to-wealth ratio, which Dredd Blog addressed yesterday, to which Dr. Brzezinski responds with the statement that our nation literally has a crazy and dangerous domestic policy.

Don't miss this clip:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Over at the Ecocosmology Blog, there is a similar post Delusional Government Must Be On LSD.

The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy

In this post I will argue that the direction our nation is headed is to become a Big Brother Plutonomy at home, with a national foreign policy of Wartocracy, and a large domestic Police-Secretocracy to put down any resistance or rebellion within the homeland itself.

I will argue that this end-game is already in place, but at this time somewhat hidden in the corporate media generated shadows, with the full backing of militant forces within and without, all eager and willing to make themselves known, by coming out of the closet.

Finally, I will argue that the phrase "9/11 changed everything" means a departure, in terms of direction, from controlling the populace via propaganda, which has been the model since about World War I, to a model of controlling the public once again by force.

First let's address the notion of plutonomy, a description coined by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ):

... the U.S. is becoming a Plutonomy – an economy dependent on the spending and investing of the wealthy. And Plutonomies are far less stable than economies built on more evenly distributed income and mass consumption.

(The Graphs of Wrath, quoting WSJ). What that means is that the state of the economy (including jobs), good or bad, can be, and is, controlled by the 1-2% wealthy.

Since instability is inherent in a plutonomy, there must be a way to deal with the negative effects it has on the populace:

A new report by the U.S. Army War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks.

“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” said the War College report.

The study says economic collapse, terrorism and loss of legal order are among possible domestic shocks that might require military action within the U.S.

(The Government of The Government, quoting The Phoenix Business Journal). That would mean that the plutonomy, as well as the method of enforcing it, are already in place.

But that type of control in and of itself is not enough to maintain a status quo in the long run, which leads us to the next issue, the Police-Secretocracy:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

(A Hidden World, Washington Post). Earlier today on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Dana Priest indicated that the secret police web is larger than she first reported in her article and book "Top Secret America", further mentioning on the show that Homeland Security is building a headquarters "larger than the Pentagon".

Finally, as to "9/11 changing everything", what I mean is that it changes everything about how the family-nation, parent-government model has been working.

When the government changed from physical control to mental manipulation, about the time of WWI, as the means of insuring the proper behavior of the populace (see The Deceit Business and The Ways of Bernays), it was following, for the most part, The Nurturant Parent model.

But now, after 9/11, it is switching back to The Strict Father model.

In Security: Familyland, Fatherland, or Homeland? we discussed the psychological dynamics scholars use to describe the "subconscious world-view" people have about the government of the nation, in terms of it representing a parenting figure.

If you want to know which model you favor, Strict-Father or Nurturant Parent, see if you can detect your reactions to the following video clip from The Dylan Ratigan Show:

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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In closing, let me say that Karl Marx would not agree with Dredd Blog, in terms of where this will end up, rather, he predicted that the American working class would revolt to take control of the means of production, removing that control from the elite.

Security: Familyland, Fatherland, or Homeland?

The photo to the left is a photo of a family in the NAZI governed Germany of long ago.

Have you ever noticed how many "family" words are associated with the concept of "nation" in literature, politics, and government?

A quick check of a few relevant metaphors: forefathers, father of the constitution, Uncle Sam, motherland, fatherland, homeland, father of the nation, founding fathers, mother of the nation, family of nations, etc., makes me want to look at perhaps the key source-metaphor for this notion:

... a common metaphor, shared by conservatives and liberals alike -- the Nation-as-Family metaphor, in which the nation is seen as a family, the government as a parent and the citizens as children ...

(The Nation-as-Family Metaphor). To expand upon this concept a bit, consider these comments:

It’s no accident that our political beliefs are structured by our idealizations of the family. Our earliest experience with being governed is in our families. Our parents “govern” us: They protect us, tell us what we can and cannot do, make sure we have enough money and supplies, educate us, and have us do our part in running the house.

So it is not at all surprising that many nations are metaphorically seen in terms of families: Mother Russia, Mother India, the Fatherland. In America, we have founding fathers, Daughters of the American Revolution, Uncle Sam, and we send our collective sons and daughters to war. In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the voice of the totalitarian state was called Big Brother.

As George Lakoff discussed at length in his 1996 book, Moral Politics, this metaphorical understanding of the nation-as-family directly informs our political worldview. Directly, but not consciously. As with other aspects of framing, the use of this metaphor lies below the level of consciousness.

(The Nation As Family, PDF). It is important to remember the part of the concept indicating that "the use of this metaphor lies below the level of consciousness", because in this post today we are going to try to take a look at part of that iceberg we can see, which is not only conscious, but is also attached to the bulk that is not conscious.

First, let us wonder if this family-nation metaphor was active in England at the time of the Declaration of Independence, a time when in England "the King can do no wrong" was an official fiction that had the force of law.

If so, then there was a concept of a national structure headed up by "a parent" that could do no wrong, which is the same thing as saying only the children can do any wrong (assuming there is any wrong in the nation).

Remembering that "the children" in this metaphor are the citizens of the family-nation, we can extrapolate to envision how this works:

... the nation-as-family metaphor as a precise mapping between the nation and the family: the homeland as home, the citizens as siblings, the government (or the head of government) as parent. The government’s duty is to citizens as a parent’s is to children: provide security (protect us); make laws (tell us what we can and cannot do); run the economy (make sure we have enough money and supplies); provide public schools (educate us).

(ibid, The Nation As Family). We can see that our Declaration of Independence, original Constitution, subsequent amendments, and laws have tended to move away from the structure the king can do no wrong, because our declaration and revolt was done precisely because the king did way too many wrongs.

In the post yesterday, In Loco Parentis & Parens Patriae - 2, the issue of how to treat "the children", i.e. the citizens, was discussed in a manner that shows an evolution of the concept to a point where completely different forms of parental control are now utilized.

That post indicates that our nation has now moved into the era when "public relations", "spin", and "propaganda" practices are now used to control the public in place of force as the king once did.

If we remember that a substantial portion of the American citizenry did not want to break away from the king back in the day, it should be no surprise that "the king can do no wrong" is still a real subconscious force in our culture, and a real conscious force in our law.

That force manifests as trust in power and as scorn of those who do not have faith in the government to treat the kids with kids gloves, and to always tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.