We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, December 13, 2014

The Koch Brothers’ Governors: Butlers Selling the Public’s Silver

Click here to access article by Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson from CounterPunch.
 The Koch Brothers are the closest thing the United States has to Russia’s oligarchs. They fuse ownership of the economy and state, using the latter to enrich themselves while making private gains through the public’s losses. Their idea of a “market economy” is to buy government officials and the assets they privatize at giveaway prices.
The authors ridicule the Koch brothers who hire state governors much like they do butlers. Why pick on the Koch brothers? They are only doing what their fellow class members of the One Percent are doing all the time--just doing it more honestly. After all their ancestors designed our political institutions and succeeding generations of the One Percent have only added improvements to better serve them. And, what is wrong with "selling the public's silver" for any capitalist ruling class? They are only practicing the capitalist religion and its fundamental tenet so well expressed by Margaret Thatcher:
...there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.
It appears that liberals like these two well-educated authors suffer from brainwashing by having spent so much time in educational institutions. Indoctrination is an essential function of the One Percent's educational institutions to secure their class rule. If you, like them, have been taught to worship at the church of capitalism, you must accept its consequences--or find another faith. Personally, I disavowed this religion long ago after coming to the realization that we as humans depend so much on societies for our health and happiness, and that we depend on our planet's limited environment to supply us with our material needs. We must carefully nurture our societies and respect the finite limitations of our planet if we are to survive, and hopefully even flourish.