Last week I wrote about the disappearance of the America that those of us who are middle-aged or older once knew. One reader queried me on my reference to the United States of Fake, asking me what I thought all the fakery was intended to hide. Good question.
The broad answer is that it’s intended to distract from the fundamental transformation of America that is occurring at an accelerating pace. However, there are two specific truths, in particular, that I believe the purveyors of fakery don’t want Americans to think about.
First, much of the fakery is for the purpose of continuing to deceive those who would rather hear warm and fuzzy lies about America’s greatness than the harsh truth that the collapse of the U.S. economy is irreversible and that it is not coming back in our lifetimes.
Second, the fakery is used to distract people’s attention from the fact that they are nothing more than modern-day serfs (i.e., serfs with smart phones, flat-screen TVs, iPads, etc.). It is critical that American serfs be deluded into believing that they still live in a free country, and bread and circuses play an important role in maintaining such a delusion.
When, in early 2009, Newsweek proclaimed on the cover of one of its issues, “We Are All Socialists Now,” it created a lot of anger on the right. But, in reality, Newsweek was merely stating the obvious. While it may be true that not every American thinks like a socialist, it’s equally true that we all live in a socialist country.
Even though there are millions of Americans who still cling to the ideals of liberty, capitalism and the Constitution, those who pull the strings – the elected lowlifes in Washington and all 50 states, as well as the corporate captains who benefit most from state capitalism – do not believe in personal freedom or free markets. Mind you, it has nothing to do with right or left. It’s all about maintaining the structure of an elite class that is immune to the traumas that result from socialism.
When I say “corporate captains,” I’m talking about statists like Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google. But even worse, because they are so much more visible, are the media people who call themselves capitalists or conservatives while supporting statist policies at almost every turn.
These include unprincipled talking heads such as Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill Kristol, Dana Perino, et al., as well as pseudo-conservative politicians like Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Mush McCain, Lindsay Graham and Jeb Bush, to name but a few of the more visible frauds in our government.
I thought about this as I (shamefully) watched a bit of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. It was a love fest to behold. Right and left dissolved into one big, mushy mass. From Newt Gingrich and his beloved Callista to Barbra Streisand and gigolo hubby James Brolin, from Fox News’ Ed Henry to MSNBC’s Chris “Spittle” Matthews, the yuks were deafening.
No doubt about it, love permeated the air. It was the ultimate fakery, a lavish distraction from the reality that we are, and long have been, in an invisible depression from which there is no return.
In the meantime, the same liars and fools who were present at the latest Washington extravaganza continue to tell us that we’re in a recovery. I give the malevolent liars a pass, because lying is what they do for a living. They don’t really believe it when they tell us that all the economy needs to recover is more food stamps, more unemployment benefits, more government-subsidized green-energy companies, more free cell phones and more government-controlled health care.
It’s the well-meaning fools who are of greater concern to me, because they actually believe what they’re saying. In their delusional world, they insist on talking about our phantom economic recovery as though the national debt did not exist. That’s right, just ignore $100 trillion in debt (possibly closer to $200 trillion, depending upon who’s doing the counting), and it will magically disappear. I am convinced they do not understand that the debt can never be repaid.
In fact, the well-meaning fools insist that we can “grow our way out” of our economic troubles. And, at least in theory, you could argue that they’re right. But there are two overriding factors they fail to take into consideration:
- Economic growth is guaranteed to get worse, not better, because the policies coming out of Washington are anti-growth, anti-capitalistic and anti-entrepreneur.
- No matter how much government increases taxes or borrowing, it will never pay down one dollar of the national debt. As has always been the case, any increase in revenues would be used to supply more food stamps, more benefits for illegal aliens, additional unemployment benefits … etc., etc., etc. There is no constituency for cutting any benefits – and politicians on both the left and right are well aware of it.
This raises the question: Are we better off to have purposeful liars at the controls in Washington – who are trying to destroy America – or well-meaning fools who are too impotent to do anything to reverse course? When we end up in a bankruptcy court in Beijing someday, will it really matter if we got there because malevolent politicians and media people purposely lied to us, or well-meaning fools were too naïve and too spineless to do anything about it?
What a great choice. Come to think of it, it’s not a choice, because you and I don’t have much say in the matter. We can, of course, continue to fight back against statism/socialism, but the more I hear the well-meaning fools blather, the more convinced I am that, at the end of the day, they don’t really give a damn what us liberty freaks think.
|
|
