“Who Should Resist, and Who Will Become Serfs?” This article by Chris Hedges (4/7/09) is an absolute must-read. All who study it should either be galvanized into action or be prepared to kiss their money and asses goodbye.

“America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs.”

We do indeed have a cargo cult democracy now. At regular intervals we check boxes, flip levers, or poke buttons to choose among preselected candidates and so give an illusion of choosing our government. But policy making has long since been outsourced to privately funded and directed to think tanks and corporate interest groups.

Wake up!

Before anything changes people have to understand that despite what they’ve been told, they have no share in civic power. If they can’t stomach this fact, they have to start taking their duty as citizens seriously. They must inform themselves about issues, candidates, the uses and structure of power, and do it everyday. Democracy is much, much more than just donating to a party and hooting for/against branded candidates once every two or four years.

Most of all, shut off the god damned TV. Stonewall American Idol. Boycott professional sports. In the old days, the Romans used bread and circuses to keep the yokels pacified. Today it’s beer and B-ball. The flip side of e pluribus unum is divide and conquer, which is exactly what trivial pursuits and diversions do.

Let us be clear: the capitalist system is at an end. A call for Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman to take courage by outlining specific moves the government must make to stave off the looming threat of tyranny by power-holding lunatics.

Commenting on the Geithner plan in his March 21, 2009 NYT article, In Despair over financial policy, Paul Krugman wrote: “The zombie ideas have won,” and “[f]or the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose.”

Obama under sword of a scared ruling class

While Krugman is quite clear, it would be opportune for him to expose the fact that it is not important if Obama seems unaware that the greed system doesn’t work because Obama is under the sword of a scared ruling class that desperately seeks to save its privileges, no matter how many kids have to die for lack of food, shelter, and healthcare.  When JFK told the truth about their conspiracies, they killed him.

Obama’s precarious position

Obama knows that he would end up like JFK and Martin Luther King were he to admit that capitalism is a savage system run by an unconscious and brutally selfish minority. After all, Obama is surrounded by the types of hypocrites that have ruled the world since time immemorial, no matter by what names they are called, i.e., Conservatives, Republicans, Pharisees, Fascists, Nazis, Falangists, Neo-cons, Stalinists, Imperialists, Colonialists, Zionists.

If Obama were to reveal that the only way to save our country is to nationalize all major industries and services and to govern the people’s commonwealth by common consent under a pluralist, participative democracy, he would be killed.

The good unspoken news: capitalism is dead

What comes next will be a new and better world, unless the power-holding lunatics pull another 9/11 to set the stage for their dream of restoring absolute medieval tyranny as they set up again and again in many unfortunate parts of the world, like the Philippines, Cuba, Chile, Haiti, Columbia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, American Samoa.  In final destructive desperation to retain wealth and power, the vicious oligarchs may soon try to force citizens back into slavery to “protect us from terror.” So be prepared: these monsters are torture aficionados and believe they are superior by the will of an invented lunatic god who made them in his own insane image.

Dramatic moves by the people’s government are necessary to prevent our Ship of State from sinking. But the people have lost their government and these moves won’t happen.  As citizens, we need to give up the false illusions under which we live. A view from the Crow’s Nest.

Pirates still in control

The U.S. ship’s command deck is threatened by a mutinous crew of old capitalist pirates still free to roam about. They are the same rotten gang that stole the People’s wealth and sunk the world into poverty. These bastards are driven by lust for absolute power over us all. The Ship of State is now still in their financial hands. They own it. We, the dispossessed, are navigating in a stormy sea on uncharted waters in the fog of political ignorance, reading false charts created daily by the hegemony of fake news, false values, and weird doctrines. President Obama, smart as he is, has placed too much control in the hands of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who is steering the U.S.’s financial rudder on a perilous course in a desperate attempt to save obsolete capitalism by bailing what is irremediably sinking in a storm of financial troubles that threatens all the people on earth with shipwreck and drowning in a bottomless ocean of debt. Clearly, this is the end of the lunatic empire and, we hope, the painful birth contractions of a new truly human civilization.

Half measures not enough

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is right when he says that the administration needs to stop “taking half-measures and should tackle the recession head-on.” This is, of course, no “recession” by any stretch of the imagination. It is more than a “depression.”  It is much larger and deeper than any economic fall in human history. The President, says Krugman, must prepare public opinion for really bold policies that the President keeps on promising and really act on those. Krugman’s opinion is realistic. We must receive specific and timely orders from the Captain when a ship is sinking.

Ridding ourselves of ridiculous illusions

What are these bold actions Obama must order to save our Ship of State and the future of humanity? First, help the American people to cast aside and let go of the ridiculous illusions fostered by capitalist lies that greed is good and opportunity is equally open to all in the land of the free and the home of the brave. That has never been true and is evermore untrue.

Second, the President must help the People see that the “American Dream” has turned into a nightmare from which we must awake fast if we are ever to save that lost dream and make it a reality.

From the Crow’s Nest, the course ahead is clear and what happened on our course behind us is even clearer in hindsight, as expected. We are sinking. No matter how fast we bail out this old capitalist slave ship (which has been masquerading as a carnival luxury cruise), it is full of holes and the water is coming in faster than we can bail it out. What we must do to save our asses is.  First, the People must realize that we have all been robbed of our commonwealth and our constitutional rights; we have all been raped and deceived by a satanic system of human exploitation run by inhuman monsters that claim to own the entire planet.

Collapse of capitalism

The capitalist system is collapsing and it must die if the planet is to survive, but the evil thieves want to prop up their system of legalized robbery and murder any opposition. They want just enough terror to save their own privileges and their fat behinds. So, Secretary Geithner, one of the privileged money boys, is trying to save the private Robber Bankers with the People’s money. These useless con men deserve to walk the plank after being keelhauled. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Taylor in 1816, wrote, “And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.” To save our nation, all banks must be nationalized. The Federal Reserve fraud must be unmasked for the instrument of oppression it is. It must be permanently removed. All utilities must be nationalized.

Obama won the election for the People, not for the bankers or the speculators who rob us (the working men and women( blind every day of our lives without producing anything of value. The People now have bought and own the banks and the People know how to run them and should run them. Unless we nationalize and regulate all major industries and take back all that the robber bankers and CEOs have stolen from us, our country may soon collapse in chaos. The Federal Reserve’s printing of worthless cash is not going to prevent the colossal fall that will take down with us the rest of the global economy and expose all humanity to the most destructive consequences in the history of the world.

A clear view from the Crow’s Nest

So, this is the clear view from the Crow’s Nest. This is a warning call for all hands on deck. We are about to sail through very dangerous reefs and shoals. We must put the rootless rascals, still unpunished, free among us, and who brought us to this pass, in irons or they will soon try to take the ship back by deceit or force, just as the German right wingers did under the Nazi brown shirt movement after first destroying their own country.  The U.S. neo-fascists have already set up private armies like the Blackwater goons waiting to act with the excuse of terror they will arrange for as they did on 9/11. They have the money to pay killers to do their bidding and keep silent. (See the Kennedy video on this page and you’ll understand what is meant here.)

We must help Obama by protecting his back. We must help him feel strong, even if the super-rich treasonous privateers surround him, ready to cut his throat. We must help Obama stand strong and save our democracy from the threat of the neo-cons’ fascist reactionary violence. Their real domestic terrorism is hiding behind their fake patriotic verbiage. And remember: they are torture aficionados!

We still hope that Obama will bring real change. However, right now we’ve got the same slick mob of capitalists running our economic and military ship from behind the curtains of capitalist propaganda and we still hear that, despite how discredited they are and how indifferent they are to the plight of the people’s rising homelessness and lack of healthcare, profits and tax cuts are their highest priorities. When the People’s patience runs out, then all hell will break loose and the most vicious form of fascism will react with terror and mass killings. The time to ask for nationalization of the assets We the People paid for and own is NOW. We the People, if we had honest elections, would own the government, not the CEO’s of fat-ass corporations.