Lucky

Watched the John Oliver episode on Police on YouTube. The last minute and a half really got to me. “They are lucky what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.”

Thank you John for the “sentient polo mallet” remark. Make no mistake what is being discussed here is poverty. No job, no income, no savings, no future. The war on poverty is real while the war on drugs never was. Vice…substance abuse, gaming, trafficking, have always been a response to poverty at one end of the spectrum and luxuries taken for granted by the rich at the other end. Violence is also either a flag that people are suffering an unbearable situation at one end of that social spectrum or those in power wishing to steal wealth from another state at the other extreme. Jacob Bronowski: “[War] is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft.”

It was only nuclear weapons that put an end to World Wars repeating ad infinitum. Those wars were about money and race and… we are still dealing with both.

Which brings us to Neoliberalism. I was watching a video of an interview by George Monbiot on a break last night and one of my Trump supporter coworkers came in to the break room to use the microwave and stopped to watch it with me for a few minutes. I watched him while he watched and listened to Monbiot and the look of total confusion on his face was interesting. When you work with someone… after a certain amount of time you come to realize, whatever their faults, they are human beings like yourself. Unless they are sociopaths of course. How we are made to fight each other is the trick.

If war is a cooperative form of theft then the war on poverty must essentially take the form of progressive taxation. If the wealthy want to call taxation legalized theft then why not roll with that? I have discussed the 91 percent tax rate on the rich from the last century with conservative acquaintances and their response is usually “it’s been proven they never really paid that tax rate- they found ways around it.” Which I take to mean that being a criminal is fine if you are rich. After close to a century the cycle is complete and the rich no longer pay a real progressive tax and this is for the most part legal.

Monbiot is fairly well known right now despite his unfashionable tree hugging. The first organization I ever joined was the Cousteau Society when I was a boy and now everything the inventor of the aqualung  foresaw has come to pass in regards to overfishing, pollution, and reef destruction. Greed rolled over the ecology movement of the 60’s and 70’s like the proverbial freight train. It would have been better if we had gone with E-trains. Money has become the all-powerful god of this world and the deity demands human sacrifice. At some point our luck as a species is going to run out.

Last year when they were separating families at the border one of my coworkers commented in my direction that simplistic formula so many Americans hold dear, “they need to fix their own country and not come here and ruin mine.” While I had long ago learned to keep my mouth closed around these types, this time I spoke my mind. I explained, “in those corrupt Central American regimes these people are fleeing from, any activity that does not serve the thugs in power will get a gun pointed at your head. People are disappeared or murdered in public for the slightest reason. If this was not true they actually would be “fixing their own country.” See how that works?” That coworker has since not spoken a courteous word to me and disparaged me to anyone who would listen. It accomplished nothing except make others believe I was “un-American.” I regret speaking out, as many do. The Germans wanted to believe the Jews were ruining their country and any one defending “enemies of the state” bitterly regretted it. Of course, in the end, those Germans who allowed and enabled Nazi ideology lost everything. That is the slippery slope of Fascism leading to death camps, gas chambers, and ovens. When the masses allow manipulation by fear and embrace propaganda the result is predictable: only bribery and violence have any effect while conscience and empathy are mocked as weakness. Then the sociopaths take over.

Gerard K. O’Neill saw poverty as the driver of war and conflict and envisioned Space Solar Power as eliminating those problems. Cheap clean carbon-free energy from Solar Power Satellites would enable space colonization and thus guarantee the survival of the human race through unlimited Lebensraum. Concerning Neoliberalism and profit-seeking there is no cheap and nothing is free. Everything must generate a profit and what does not is discarded as useless. Instead of a Green New Space Deal we have a  billionaire hobbyist with exploding toy rockets and fantasy retirement condos on Mars. Pandemics resurging in police states and shameless obscene greed is the harsh reality nobody seems to be able to admit is happening.

African slaves were a Neoliberal dream come true as they allowed people to be sold as beasts of burden by simply branding them as less-than-human, subhuman, or, using Nazi terminology- Untermenschen. In this new century, if we have less than a million in the bank, as the underclass we are also not really considered human beings either.

The one percent are really pushing their luck.