So they divide us by race, region, religion, sex, wealth and our jobs; union vs. non-union, skilled vs. non-skilled, tech vs physical laborers, and so on. It may be the best explanation of why a small segment of our society has been encouraged to arm themselves to the teeth and have been convinced to withdraw. Told again and again real men don't need nothin' but a gun. Told despite their actual best interests, they are the same as the Robber Barons who steal from them. Taught that they are equal, because all men are created equal. Guns make 'em so. Of the 300 million guns in America they own most of them. To put it bluntly one might theorize its ready white militia for rich white "plantation" owners who share "their" values. God created men and Sam Colt made 'em equal. The Declaration of Independence says so. While this group has been left to grow and become more popular. Other groups are pushed to the margins and brutalized, labeled for another purpose. The rest of us are left fighting for scraps that are thrown to us by the Robber Barons, as they run off with our money to tax havens far far away. Trickledown economics everybody. Drop the mic.
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We have all been seduced into this state by the idea we could get rich too. It was the American Dream. Anybody from anywhere might make it big. And though upward mobility virtually no longer exists in this country, we all still believe. How can this be? Because after the failure in Vietnam and the Civil rights and anti-war protests, in all their visual horror for anyone to see, the powers that be simply bought all the media. There are just five major media corporations that control everything you read, hear, and see. 98% of everything is controlled by 6 very large, very connected corporations and recently they have focused on the web. They have their fingers on the scale of information. It's why you're sure you're free despite the evidence. The news source you listen to is just the mouthpiece of the different plantation owners. The news is just another way of keeping us apart. MSNBC, CNN, FOX = left, middle, right; let's divide up by channel everyone. It's why we can't get anything done, even when we agree.
Some will angrily assert that this can't happen here. But if you follow history the only real question is how many times has it happened? Prior to 1933 the US economy was a mess. We had a series of crashes that allowed the Robber Barons to control a large portion of our nation's assets and no one could get ahead but the rich. Speculation and back room dealings lead straight to the Great Depression. Which brings us to another manufactured divide, how we recovered from the Great Depression. Was it FDR and the New Deal? Was it Truman implementing the rest of the New Deal or his own initiatives? There can be no question that WWII was what blew the economy up, for good and bad. A very strong argument could be made that our recovery was due to the fact that we had the only manufacturing complex left on the planet, after WWII. Europe and Russia were all just bombed out shells. Making the manufacturing powerhouse we became at least as much or more about timing as it was about our very exceptional workforce.
We built the largest middle-class in the world. Indeed the greatest time of stability and prosperity in the history of our great nation was between 1945 and 1970. The conversation gets sidetracked by which policies got us where. But the argument can be solved without even discussing why or what rules or regulations did what. You don't have to know constitutional law or be able to recite the Declaration of Independence. This is the only graph or chart you need to look at.
When rich people own too much of our nation's assets, everyone but a few hangers on suffer and suffer greatly and our economy. The middle class only exists when we hold the rich in check with rules, taxes and regulations. Period. End of discussion. Income inequality and a few points from Willie Lynch on "How to Make a Slave", keeps us divided and afraid while our economic masters sit back and watch as we lock each other in chains, laughing all the way to the some off shore bank never to pay their taxes, "stimulating" someone else's economy.
Were the 50s, 60s and 70s great for everyone? No we held down minorities and women. But it allowed us a measure of security, allowing us to finally advance civil and women's rights. Hating each other became less important because for once in American history we had finally enough to share.
So do we really live on the American Plantation? I can find no other 3 words that describe our predicament. If one hundred people split a dollar the way income is distributed in America today, you and 79 of your friends and neighbors would get a dime. If you cut a penny into 8 pieces that's roughly your earnings for the year. The next 20 people get forty cents! Woohoo 2 cents each. The last fifty cents goes to one guy, the plantation owner. That guy represents the 1%, the top 200 people in the nation, he gets 50 cents. And the closer you look the worse it gets.
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