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

Sunday, March 5, 2017

The Illusion of Freedom: The Police State Is Alive & Well

Click here to access article by John W. Whitehead from Newsbud
...the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep. In fact, many Americans have been so carried away by their blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their respective political gods that they have lost sight of the one thing that has remained constant in recent years: our freedoms are steadily declining.

Here’s the problem as I see it: “we the people” have become so trusting, so gullible, so easily distracted, so out-of-touch and so sure that our government will always do the right thing by us that we have ignored the warning signs all around us.
While I like the efforts of people like Whitehead to shake people up to the increasingly oppressive rule of capitalists, such critics never point to the core of our oppression: a system that supports the rule of a tiny class over the rest of us. 

You see, Whitehead, has enjoyed a very good education that most Americans have not had the privilege of having. He has served the ruling class of capitalists very well and enjoyed having access to many of their media and amply rewarded for his service. He has been rewarded because he has never criticized the system itself, served to put a thin veneer of human rights over the ugly, oppressive self-serving class rule, and often sermonized to ordinary Americans, as in this essay, about their failings much like a preacher admonishing his parishioners about their sinful behavior (their gullibility). He is most useful to our masters by cleverly disassociating fascism from capitalism as illustrated in this essay. In reality fascism always lies just below the veneer of respectability that professionals like Whitehead construct for the system.

Still, I am encouraged that members of this upper-middle class of professionals are feeling the pinch of a ruling class that is starting to cut their opportunities and rewards because it no longer needs most of them in their obsessive drive for more profits and power. Once sufficient numbers of this class become disenamored ("our freedoms [read 'rewards'] are steadily declining") of serving capitalists, the system will be in real trouble. 

Perhaps I'm being too cynical.