ELEGY “What’s coming, and what can we do about it?”
This is an insight into this nation’s future, now held in the hands of a political party that gained power by promising the public, all the things it would take away. This is a forecast of events to come - which I pray, to any deities that may exist, will be proven wrong. For anyone who dares to look, we are witness to forces which, for more than a century have been laboring to deceive and corrupt a nation - for nothing more than their own profit.
What we must first understand, is that the vast majority of people live in the “eternal now”. Which means, the belief that “yesterday” is history and has no real meaning, while “tomorrow” is an unwritten page. Such a delusion makes its impossible to see, that the roots our current political circumstance were really founded in the age of the Robber Barons of the late 19th century. That was an age in which all economic power in this country was held in the grasp of an incredibly few men who, with an iron fist, ruled over all of our major industries. The oil industry was the personal property of John D. Rockefeller - steel was under the fist of Andrew Carnegie, as Gould dominated our railroads and Morgan played the world of finance like a slot-machine.
These few men of power, literally owned the United States, and everyone in it - until, under the administration of Benjamin Harrison, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed. Yet that legislation had to await the will of Teddy Roosevelt to finally be given teeth, and the power to crush the age of monopolies. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act turned raw capitalism, and unconstrained “money power” into our modern age of free-trade and competitive economics.
But the masters of our economy, in that long-gone age, would not go quietly into that good night. In the late 1890s, they literally formed a clique that was determined to insure that this attack on their absolute power “should never happen again”. In the smoke-filled room of a single meeting, they established a simple, but profoundly effective strategy - They would simply buy the government of the United States - and they began, by buying a political party.
All of these events are clearly written, in the history that no one seems to think is important. Go to your libraries - go to Google - go the History Channel, and witness the truth of the origins of today’s world. There you will learn the unyielding truth, that today is the “absolute product” of all of our yesterdays. More than that, empowered by this understanding, you’ll gain an unvarnished perception of what our tomorrow’s will truly be like - as a direct consequence of the election just passed.- an election that will prove to be the ultimate achievement of the ambitions of those Robber Baron’s of more than a century ago. This is a critical turning point in the history of this nation - though almost no one yet realizes it.
The question now at hand is, “what will that party, which had been bought and paid for by the centers of this nation’s wealth, do with their new-found power?” The answer is simplicity itself - “Exactly what they’ve promised to do!”
The policies that they will now put in place will be based on the simple core philosophy of their pay-masters that - “The business of government - is business!” For the past few decades, by inches, the linkage between money and politics has managed to privatize the Postal System, schools, the prisons and who knows how many other “Public Services” that once were the exclusive province of government Evan the catastrophe of the Iraq War involved the employment of more than 30,000 mercenary soldiers, hired from Black Water, for direct combat
- and incidentally, for private profit. But now, we can anticipate how the flood gates will really be opened, to “privatize everything” The tax-payers bill for all of the public servers, that up to now were provided by government alone, will balloon to include the hellish “profits” to be reaped by all of the “private companies” that your government (and you) will now hire to run them. The business of government will truly become “business”.
For a start, every possible action will now be taken to dump the Affordable Care Act, to once more interject the health insurance industry, directly, in between the people who need health care, and the health care provides. Millions of people will once more become “uninsurable”, and the 20% profit limit now applied to insurers, will return to “the sky’s the limit”. More than that, the entire “social safety net” which had begun under the Roosevelt administration, will become fair game for the ax - so that the administrators of government can “balance the books”, while trimming the tax burden of the richest 1% in the country. Medicare and Medicaid, over time, will be manipulated with “profit” as its prime objective, and healthcare as simply an after thought
- that is, to those who’ll still be allowed to have it. Food stamps for the hungry will dwindle into virtual non-existence. The argument will be rampant, that the poor are poor for their own damned fault, and therefore, they and their kids should simply be allowed starve. If you can’t get health care, and then are foolish enough to let yourself get sick - just die. Social Security will be privatized - an action they’ve labored to achieve since Bush 43.
Worse still, the immediate next move will be to solidify a cast-iron grip on the powers of government. The ballots haven’t even been fully counted yet, but the new political leadership is already demanding “Impeachment”. And if you ask “on what grounds”, the answer is simple who needs grounds? Under our constitution, a President can only be impeached under evidence of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors”. What where were the high crimes and misdemeanors cited for the Republican impeachment of Clinton? To begin with, when did sexual dalliance become a crime? And before someone screams “perjury”, the question must be asked, how does someone commit perjury, in response to a question that no one has a legal right to ask? With both houses of congress under their control, along with the current, highly politicize Supreme Court, impeachment becomes a mere formality. Then it only remains to get rid of Biden - by any means necessary - so that for the first time in our history, the Speaker of the House will become President.
The writers of our Constitution, when they structured our Supreme Court, were determined to insulate the nine Justices from public opinion, from politics, or from any other influence that would interfere with their single task of judging every issue “solely” on its “Constitutional” merits. Which is why they’re “appointed for the term of their good behavior” (That is, for life). Yet in today’s world, we have at least four Justices who are so politicized, that in one case alone, they actually voted against Habeas Corpus - just to protect an erring President, with whose politics they sympathized. But as the crowning achievement of these same Justices, we got the decision that “corporations are people too, and are allowed to stuff all the money they want, into political campaigns!”. This was the decision that has finally put teeth into the century- plus determination by the richest elements of the nation, to literally “buy the government of the United States”.
Consider now, the next obvious step. When a political party, with an agenda, holds both houses of Congress, the Presidency and effectively the Supreme Court, how far will that party go to support their pay-masters? What sort of laws can we expect them to pass, particularly in their effort to keep political power in their own hands - as they would hope, forever? For example, is it much of a reach to expect that the wave of voter-restriction laws currently on the books, in Republican-held states, might soon become, FEDERAL LAW AS WELL?
We can be certain of one thing - that what the Republican party has promised to do, in their scramble for power - be assured, they WILL do. And they will do this, in spite of the fact that this nation was founded as a “representative” government. Meaning that its entire reason for existence, was to protect the rights, the security and the economic well-being of ALL of its citizens - not simply the wealthiest one percent. Starting with the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s, the security of our citizens was to be actively achieved by having the government function as the “great mediator” - between employer and employee, between borrower and lender, between buyer and seller. Why? Because it was the only force that was large enough to do that job. Yet the political force that is now coming into power would not only tilt that playing field toward the rich - it is focused on destroying that function of balance and order, altogether.
The reader might consider tacking this discussion to the December page of a 2015 calendar - if only to see how many of these predictions had actually come to pass.
WAKE UP AMERICA! With the wielding and manipulation of money - fashioned into chains more binding than iron - mastery of your livelihood, your future, your very lives, has shifted from your own hands into the unrelenting grasp of monied-power. The question that once “needed to be asked”, is now overwhelming. “What can we do about it.”