02-06-2019, 01:36 PM
(02-06-2019, 01:08 PM)getta Wrote: Some Americans may have thought that tyranny would never come to the US because the rich, celebrities, media, politicians, and American people would resist.
Who would have thought that the rich would loot the country by getting bailouts and subsidies while being the ones conspiring and building the police state by paying actors, singers, and atheletes to distract Americans with bread and circuses, using reporters to push propaganda, real crises, and false flags, and buying off and corrupting politicians with campaign donations and cushy job promises to start wars, import refugees that weaken and divide the US, drive up the debt, make laws that enslave Americans, and throw crumbs to pacify the 99% in the form of food stamps, Obamacare, Obamaphones, and public housing?
The destruction of the USA is nearly complete.
It is still advantageous to work so that one can more fully participate in the consumer society. I have been on food stamps, and one can live reasonably well on them so long as one avoids junk food. I have been able to buy such luxuries as strawberries and asparagus -- by rejecting potato chips. If not on food stamps I would buy some wine and beer -- and still lay off potato chips.
But this said, the only good public housing is for the elderly. Housing subsidies otherwise keep slumlords afloat with rent vouchers to poor people. Obamacare? I got it for a simulated coronary, and once I found that I simply had a terrible backache I asked for physical therapy and got it. It worked well. The medical problem that we have is a system of payments that depends upon a for-profit bureaucracy (talk about creating incentives to not control costs!) and monopolization in the pharmaceutical industry. It is as if we decided that the best way to solve our problems of transportation were to jack up the costs of automobiles and motor fuels -- and promote profit-maximizing toll roads. The difference would be that people would be priced into immobility instead of the grave.
An Obamaphone? The idea was to ensure that people out of work have a cell phone so that they can have a phone number that a potential employer can call. Once employed at a living wage, someone with such a phone will likely be in the market for a free-market phone that costs $1000 to buy and has a $100-a-month data plan far more useful than an obsolete phone that looks like a cigarette pack. The consumer economy is far more attractive.
People need bread. They do not need circuses. Maybe if people got real educations they would recognize the shallowness of most popular entertainment and would find better use for their leisure time than sitting in front of an idiot screen watching televised sports while devouring chips and mass-market beer. I have known people like that -- a fellow who got into the 400s (in pounds) and died at age 48... he apparently had never cracked a book since he was obliged to do so in high school. Ideally people are able to support themselves on their income, and if they do reasonably well they can choose where they live, what they wear, and what they consume.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.