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This is supposedly what everybody shouts at a "surprise birthday party" when the guest of honor enters a room filled with his best friends and family who have gathered to celebrate the fact of his/her existence:
"Surprise!!" -- and then everybody sings "Happy Birthday" or "Auld Lang Sine" or some crap.
Has anybody ever actually attended one of these parties, or do they only happen in the movies or on television? If you've ever had one -- were you "surprised"? Or did you somehow find out about it in advance -- like they always do on TV?
In this digitized, computerized, sensationalized, homogenized, and hegemonized age of "Homeland Security", is there really any such thing as a "surprise"?
No.
So why is anyone even slightly "surprised" about the recent cabinet appointments by Barack Obama? And I'm not talking about regular people -- the 50-percent of all American households that can't afford Internet access, who therefore also don't have access to "alternative news sources". [1]
No. These people already know they're screwed. Nothing "surprises" them.
I'm talking about the extremely educated and intelligent "Harvard" and "Berkeley" people who write those alternative sources of "news" information, who now feel shocked, appalled, abandoned, betrayed, horse-whipped, cheated, swindled and -- "SURPRISED" -- by President-elect Barack Obama's recent cabinet selections. [2]
Why are these people -- "SURPRISED"?
Let's back up the train a little. It's not hard to do that. Nowadays they usually have a locomotive on both ends of the train, so it can go either way. Back and forth -- back and forth -- It can be lots of fun -- and the rocking motion tends to put babies to sleep -- while they're nursing their mother's breast. But a similar combination can also bring a grown man to sexual climax. So ya have to be very careful about technique, when you're rockin' the boat.
Point is, these are the people who KNEW this "crisis" was coming. They've been predicting the demise of our economic system since the turn of the century or longer, and we've heard predictions of ecological collapse since long before that. We've all read the literature.
These are the same people who write articles and make videos daily about the "takeover of the United States" and "conspiracy theory" and the "SPP" and the "NAU" and "abolish the Fed" and "Freedom to Fascism" and the "income tax is unconstitutional" and the "ecological tipping point" and "overpopulation" and whatever else -- panic, panic, PANIC!!
Are they WRONG?
No.
Not at all. These folks are my heroes, though some of them don't like me very much. Most of them don't suggest much in the way of "solutions" or "alternatives", and I'm not shy about criticizing them for that. But they do all seem to have a fairly common grasp of the "problem" -- overall.
As I understand it, these people insist that the bankers and the corporations took control of this country and our world a long damn time ago -- that the government is little more than an military instrument to maintain corporate power and control -- that the rest of us are nothing more than stooges, serfs and wage-slaves whose lives exist purely for the sake of corporate profit in a capitalist economy -- and that our planet is little more than an economic playground for the wealthy. These people are obviously smart enough to understand that Capitalism IS a "conspiracy" -- against most of the human population and the planet itself.
