US: PROUDLY EMBRACING IGNORANCE!

 

America, which once had a system of public education that educated effectively and was the envy of the world, is now busily underfunding and under resourcing its public schools, disparaging and disrespecting its teachers and, most incredibly of all, PROUDLY EMBRACING IGNORANCE. This can’t end well.

And, Arne "I play basketball!" Duncan before her. [BETSY DEVOS]

The post-WWII corporate 'elites' hired Edward Bernays to help them inculcate consumerism in the citizens of this nation. Bernays' primary tool, propaganda, has been used against us for decades now. I may be telling you something you already know, if so, I apologize.

Willful ignorance is a huge psychic wound for our species, and a deliberate one. We are witnessing the predictable outcome of decades of propaganda coupled with a co-opted system of public education designed to spit out factory fodder and service industry drones--with stunted critical thinking skills and a deep aversion to all things academic.

Then we have Dunning Kruger Syndrome sufferers, and cognitive dissonance (something with which we all contend, rendering any denial a classic example). If you are tempted to call these coping strategies 'intellectual laziness,' consider that both are further evidence of just how fucked up is our system of public education (and our poisonous pedagogy, but that's another rant).

Plus, I'm struggling to avoid the insidious blame and shame game, which is a sublime waste of time and energy--and, by the way, an example of the derisive and divisive propaganda inculcated by the corporate fascists.

For whatever reason, most of us seem oblivious to what's happening around us, and that has to change.

We ALL have got to respond to this wound. We ALL must reclaim our critical thinking skills.

If we are to leave our children and our children's children a habitable planet, it is critical for all of us to understand viscerally that a handful of obscenely wealthy corporate fascists--the handful of old white men who own and control most of this planet's resources --are responsible for the wanton destruction of our ecosystem and our democracy. Their behavior, by definition, is psychopathy--a psychopathy that promises our species' extinction event.

We are Earthlings, all of us, to a one. And, putting aside our educational backgrounds, we all have critical thinking skills. In these exponential times, ALL of us are challenged by global events--especially, the global pandemic and the climate crisis--to hone our critical thinking skills and do the reading and research necessary to undertake the initiatives that might mitigate the existential threat we've brought upon ourselves.

If we hope to insure that our children and our children's children will live in a habitable ecosystem, our entire economy will have to change. Our economic behaviors have to change. And, our politics have to be purged of all the neoliberal corporate sycophants infesting both parties who justify and bend over for the corporate fascists.

#OurRevolution

So many in the rarified atmosphere of the plutocracy of the 1 percent have no empathy with the struggles and suffering of their employees whatsoever; in fact are hoping to crush the American middle class under their iron heel.

Sadly, the American plutocracy of the 1 percent, devoid of any patriotism for America or any real love for their fellow human beings, with an unslakable thirst for even more wealth and hunger for the very real power that great wealth brings with it, want to destroy the incomes, wealth, and political power that average working Americans gained during the “Golden Age of the American Middle Class: 1945 to 1973.”

The predatory, kleptocratic plutocracy of the 1 percent has a well thought out plan to further enrich itself and firmly entrench itself in power, all at the direct expense of the average working people of America and by undermining American representative democracy. This reactionary plan has been in slow, steady execution since the 1970s. Instead of attacking the American middle class and representative democracy in a lightening frontal assault, these reactionaries have been chipping away at middle class, "small-d" democratic America in small, but steady steps for over 40 years. Their plan is already far along and bearing fruit for them. Their intention is nothing less than to replace prosperous, middle class America with a Third World style oligarchy, America as it fits in the plutocratic envisioned "New World Order.”

As the "New World Order" quietly, insidiously spreads itself across the American economy, good paying, career track jobs with good benefits are becoming increasingly hard to find, and the wages and salaries of the bottom 50 percent of workers are, according to economist Thomas Piketty and associates, "collapsing.” Twenty-seven year olds are more likely to earn less than $15,000 a year.

The emerging "New World Order" will become a supranational, multinational corporation dominated, worldwide fascist order, a worldwide "neofeudalism,” in which the plutocrats and the corporate executives constitute the very tiny new feudal "aristocracy,” modern day feudal lords. The large, prosperous and powerful middle class America that developed after WWII will evaporate and disappear, being replaced with a small, greedy, servile “retainer class" of people who provide goods and services to the new aristocracy and to each other. And below that will be a huge class of unemployed, underemployed, and sporadically employed people, a huge "reserve army of impoverished labor,” modern day feudal serfs, employed and let go as the aristocracy and retainer class need workers.

We can already see it taking shape. Decent, good paying, full time jobs with good benefits are becoming increasingly rare, as a new economy of poorly paid part time jobs, and temporary "gigs" is taking the place of the old American middle class world of remunerative full time employment. People are desperately clamoring to get themselves, and especially their children, into the elite universities, graduate schools, professions, and firms that will populate the new retainer class.

In effect, there is a perverse game of "musical chairs" being played at the moment, in which currently middle class people march around the shrinking number of slots, "chairs,” in the emerging retainer class, and battle each other to claim a seat when the music stops. All are desperate to avoid slipping down into the emerging neofeudal "serfdom.”

Unfortunately, this is a "game" that most currently middle class people will lose.

 BOTH are entitled to receive a compensation that allows them to live with financial security and dignity.

Sadly, it seems that the whole idea of employment compensation being oriented toward allowing the individual worker in question to be able to meet the financial burdens of life fully and with dignity and confident security from ONE JOB is being systematically destroyed in America today.

Instead, what we have is the employer class, the predatory, kleptocratic plutocracy of the 1 percent, the emerging American oligarchy being able to keep heavy, downward pressure on the wages and salaries of most of the middle and working classes by encouraging jealousy and hostility by the various sections of the average working people of America AGAINST EACH OTHER! Average working people are being encouraged to look at people who earn less than they do as somehow being UNDESERVING of making a decent, comfortable living from their employment. And to make it even worse, many people are often working one, two, or even three additional part time jobs trying desperately to cobble together adequate earnings just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, much less to enjoy a comfortable, traditional middle class American lifestyle.

Meanwhile, as this slow, steady, sickly self-destructive attitude is fostered and encouraged among the middle and working classes, the whole structure of American society is changing from the closest approximation of the classic “Aristotelian Diamond” in history, with its small classes of very rich and very poor people at the top and bottom, respectively, and with the great mass of the people in between making up the comfortable, prosperous middle class to an all too familiar traditional Third World social pyramid, with a tiny, fabulously wealthy elite at the apex, a small greedy, servile “retainer class” providing goods and services to the wealthy elite and to each other immediately below, and, at the bottom, the great mass of the people: unemployed, underemployed, or only sporadically employed, desperately impoverished and deeply in debt — a 21st century “lumpen proletariat,” as the great analyst of capitalism, Karl Marx, would call them.

Ironically, the plutocracy of the 1 percent, feeling strong, confident, and secure in their place at the apex and in their wealth and privileges ever since the collapse of the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia in 1991, and the rise of a vicious, dog-eat-dog neoliberalism in America and the West under their sponsorship and control, seems almost determined to bring about the very revolutionary socioeconomic and political situation that Karl Marx outlined in The Communist Manifesto. The plutocrats laugh, snicker, and toast each other that they managed to drive a wooden stake through the heart of Karl Marx and his followers’ Marxism. Meanwhile, the poverty, desperation, anger and rage of the average working people grows and festers towards revolution.

And from his grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery is heard the guffawing of Karl Marx having the last laugh.