The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future with Joseph Stiglitz

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The practice of rent-seeking is discussed, basically where a small privileged group controls resources and land and instead of actually benefiting the whole just essentially lives off the labor of others.

For the record, my current living situation, that of homelessness, isn't solely a result of misfortune. I refuse to pay any form of rent whatsoever, purely on ethical grounds.

Let us not forget that the indigenous that used to live here (~30 million, before the "civilized" massacred them) existed, no thrived, in dynamic equilibrium with the broader environment and other life forms and, using revised qualitative indexes, had a higher standard of living than we do today completely for free, and they experienced true egalitarianism, longer life times, an authentic relationship with Nature and stronger social relations with each other.

That is until Empire arrived and changed all that.

Noam Chomsky - The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism


But hey, now we have Ipads and clown cars and are convinced that selling hamburgers to each other is actually an improvement in the Human Condition! Another testament to the efficacy of cultural programming, with its notable "evolutionary leap" thanks to the likes of Edward Bernays, widely recognized as the father of contemporary advertising and consumer culture in general.

The psychosis that grips the more well to do segment of this society (roughly 1%, no this figure is not hyperbole) could be summed up nicely in the response of my biological father to my plea for assistance, even after I told him that daily I struggle with the thought of suicide: "Here's the phone number to the VA, go and collect your $200 a month welfare-check, I am too busy re-reading and committing to memory Atlas Shrugged to help you." Curiously he added, if not explicitly: "I am wealthy because I possess superior traits, if you survive the Apocalypse that I helped engineer then it is because you are of suitable genetic stock". Hmmmm, maybe he doesn't completely understand the way genetic inheritance works. He also doesn't see the correlation between his accumulation of wealth and the impoverishment of the country, particularly the younger generations via gambling, er, "investing" in the stock market during the CFTC de-regulatory phase of the financial industry in the 80's under Reagan, (who also just so happened to read Atlas Shrugged) and now flies a personal plane as a hobby and owns hundreds of acres of beachfront property in Australia, three homes, one of which is in a wealthy neighborhood of San Francisco.

Oh he possesses superior genetic stock alright! When all of this was going on where was I? Oh I was living in Hawaii with my mother, living out of garbage cans and sleeping in cars, and 8 different foster homes until I reached adulthood and the state of Hawaii gave me an ultimatum: join the military, or end up in prison as you will need to commit crimes to survive financially within this socio-economic paradigm. I chose the Army. Honorably separated (if you can call 8 years of military mis-adventures, "For Freedom and Democracy", democracy of resources more like, "Honorable"), attended college and have an associates degree, (I became disillusioned with mainstream academia long before finishing said degree) and have no criminal record whatsoever. And now I spend my days driving from one public library to another, eating out of my car, and sleeping in public parks, with the big question weighing on my mind: "do I go on a shooting rampage (don't worry, I will only target the wealthy and their enablers: gestapo/law enforcement) or just kill myself today?"

Rampage Trailer 2010 Uwe Boll

Or option C, which is inevitable, but for which I cannot wait forever as I am eating through a small pittance of a savings, the coming Revolution. (NO ONE, can actually live off of $200 a month, and a full 1 in 5 Americans today are on welfare) (oh and the "Free Marketeers" want to curtail Welfare even more, while simultaneously increasing the "Defense" budget, a sick joke really)

Man this is going to be like the Bolshevik Revolution all over again! How poetic will it be if all of the impoverished, dis-enchanted gather up all of those who benefit from our current socio-economic arrangement and just hang them, starting with my Father? Fortunately there won't be very many hangings, maybe 5% of the society will be swinging in the breeze.

It seems there is a curious belief that with the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon gone that the systemic problems that created it have also disappeared. No, the problems are still there, and if we do not proactively, collectively address the massive inequality that exists in this country many other, by any reasonable criteria, "good Americans", just like myself, are going to come out of the woodwork and initiate a blood bath. Maybe that is what we need to really jog our collective consciousness.

Marx said, prophetically, that Captialism would consume itself. Well I see the catabolism inherent in the attempt to maintain existing levels of complexity by placing the externalties or costs onto the future generations as a form of eating your children. This is in stark contrast to the philosophy of the "filthy natives" that succumbed to the steam roller of Empire: that of preserving "unto the 7th generation". This has been going on for some time now, and as ethical philosophy goes I am going to state right here and now that I intend to defend myself against the insatiable hunger of the previous generations, and propose that those who have perpetuated this insanity be removed from the physical realm first, and with great haste.

Dad, if youre reading this, when this day comes, which it will, I will have no sympathy for you, none at all, in fact I will take some pleasure in seeing you reap what you have sown.

Why is it that you are a multi-millionaire and I LIVE IN A FUCKING TENT?

Is there a correlation here?

Noam Chomsky - The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination

See Also:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/03/open-letter-to-my-father-republican.html

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable - JFK