I am very pessimistic about the fate of not only the working/middle class in the US and Europe but the rest of the world too.
Free Market Economics are a failure for most of us, while being a great success at enslaving the bulk of us, for the benefit of a tiny minority that are coming to own all the wealth.
I've started to grasp the elements of control, from use of the spectacle and the psychology of selling via manipulation of desire to 24/7/365 surveillance. The suspension of legal rights and safe guards as well as the strong arm tactics of a full blown Fascist police state.
The funny thing about being a sport shooter is that we meet some ultra right wing paranoid survivalist type folks and we have discovered are often upset about the same things they are even if we see a completely different set of people behind them.
The Tea Party has been an Astro Turf generated movement, aimed at diverting attention of people filled with inchoate rage at having their lives totally messed over by the banks and other corporations from the sources of their pain by getting them to focus on to the common scape goats instead: Hippies, queers and people of color or other national origin.
As for liberals? I tend to find liberals pretty damn useless, more hung up with how wonderfully liberal they are and their versions of the spectacle to see how much pain working people of the class stuck in McJobs without benefits are experiencing.
I am so tired of so called liberals telling me I shouldn't be so angry. I am so sick of the cowardly platitudes citing Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Instead of telling me how violence doesn't work tell it to those subjecting the working poor to the violence of not having a living wage, a life free from constant stress and enough leisure time for anything other than work and consuming toys with out the time to ever play with them.
I've been putting up stuff written by people whose books I have been reading. I wanted answers as to why it seems more and more like a police state and why I feel more and more helpless in the face of this oligarchy that has all the money and can crush anyone it wants.
Chris Hedges wrote: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Posted on Dec 27, 2010
By Chris Hedges
The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.
We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
Continue reading at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2011_a_brave_new_dystopia_20101227/
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