Corporate slaves. (photo: Peoples Voice.org)
14 May 13
eeping
our nation divided is an agenda supported by both Fox News and MSNBC.
The media and the politicians both profit from Americans believing they
should hate their fellow Americans. And oddly enough, the one thing that
unites the traditional “right” and “left” in this country is our hatred
for those same media organizations and politicians that make money by
regularly lying to us. The best way to beat them is to find the things
that bring us together in one common purpose and unite around that.
An article in the Atlantic last week talked about how the dominant liberal narrative is broken.
The argument that government is inherently good and is necessary to
provide things like Social Security, Medicare and national parks has
some truth to it, and worked well for both parties in the mid-twentieth
century. Democrats and Republicans from FDR to Eisenhower won landslide
elections using the good-government narrative. But now that our
government is captive to corporations and their lobbyists like the US Chamber of Commerce,
Americans of all ideological leanings are united in the belief that our
current government, as it stands, is completely out of touch and needs
radical change from outside the political system to do it.
In this video
Mark Meckler, a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, talks about how he
had a surprisingly pleasant conversation with several of the co-founders
of MoveOn.org about crony capitalism. It was an incredibly populist
speech about how they found themselves in complete agreement that big
moneyed special interests have taken government hostage and have wasted
billions of tax dollars on bailing out banks (like the Federal Reserve's
$16 trillion in bailouts
to both US and foreign banks that went entirely under the media's
radar). He also talked about how it’s more profitable for the crony
capitalist DC bubble and the media they control to keep us divided than
it is for us to play into those forced divisions.
Another Tea Party founder lamented about how the raw
populist energy that originally inspired the Tea Party back in early
2008 against the Bush administration’s bailouts of the biggest banks has
been overtaken by Republican ideologues
like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich. Karl Denninger, a financial blogger
who runs MarketTicker.com, said the Tea Party’s original message was
against the big banks. After Obama’s inauguration, there was anger over
appointees like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, who were the same
bought-and-paid-for financiers who deregulated the banks during Clinton’s second term and brought about the beginning of the financial collapse. Denninger supported the Occupy Wall Street movement early on, saying it was picking up where the Tea Party left off before it was hijacked by the Republican Party.
Democrats and Republicans are using issues like gun
control, Benghazi and gay marriage to continue feeding the illusion that
there’s a difference between the two and to continue the flow of money
to their corporate masters. Whenever a politician says "gun control," gun sales go through the roof. When the ruckus over Chick-Fil-A's disapproval of marriage equality became mainstream conversation, social conservatives formed lines that went around the entire block
to make their political statement about marriage equality. After their
much ado about nothing Benghazi hearings, GOP members of Congress are fundraising off of their witch hunt.
In either instance, whenever you follow the money trail, gun
manufacturers and allegedly gay-hating fast food restaurants made record
sales and politicians raised more money. Money is the entire point.
When it comes to Republican and Democratic Party
officials’ deference to corporate money, they’re both nearly identical.
The GOP-controlled House is pressing Obama hard to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would endanger an entire region's drinking water supply and create a negligible amount of temporary jobs. Harry Reid’s Senate voted overwhelmingly for a resolution supporting the pipeline in their budget. The Monsanto Protection Act,
which was written by GOP Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri and Monsanto
officials, quietly became law with the signature of a Democrat president
after the approval of a Democrat-led Senate.
Both parties are captive to the for-profit war industry – the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about – and are united in their support for military intervention whenever and wherever possible. Our last Republican president waged wars in two countries without being attacked by either one. Our current Democratic president has extended one of those wars by another ten years and used drones to take military action in several other countries. Even Rand Paul, who made a name for himself filibustering Obama’s drone czar to lead the CIA, has made statements
supporting drones to be used on Americans. Even though traditional
Republicans are united against wasteful government spending, and
traditional Democrats are united against austerity policies, both
parties can agree that there’s entirely too much wasteful spending in
Washington when it comes to an imperial military force with a bloated
budget currently occupying over 130 nations with 900 bases around the world, and the multibillion-dollar security and surveillance state used to monitor peaceful protesters
instead of terrorists. We can certainly find agreement that it would be
much more productive to stop spending money on the dysfunctional F-35
jet, which even John McCain has criticized, than make cuts to early childhood education programs like Head Start.
Americans should be smarter than to allow ourselves to
get thrown into the counter-productive left vs. right fight hyped by
the corporate-owned media and our corporate-owned politicians. If we’re
going to fight a binary struggle, it should be populist vs. corporatist.
That’s the only real division in this country right now. Are you on the
people's side, or on big money's side?
Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a
nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of
thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts
in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and
other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not
Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently
lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at
carl@rsnorg.org, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.
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