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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 12/21/16

The Hostile Takeover of America

By       (Page 1 of 2 pages)   17 comments, In Series: Democracy in America
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Takeover

Think of the last election as the last play in the hostile takeover of America. It was vulture capitalism. It was the long con, and most satisfying to Trump was that he beat the economic elite at their own game.

He was probably watching from the sidelines while the economic elite conjured up the takeover of a previously democratic nation and, with cynical pseudo-logic and an almost plausiblideology, drained democracy away and replaced it with an empty, ruthless and mechanical economic system-a new civic religion based on an abstract and digitized market morality that stripped away the life and humanity from decisions and turned them into decisions about people based on the invisible hand of the marketplace, without any human conscience or responsibility.

The market was God and the wealthy its priests and paladins.

As the new civic religion swept across the land, changing laws and institutionalizing its catechism, the old civic religion of Democracy was lost in the dust of the phenomenal "progress" of unfettered free-market capitalism brought to us like Christ brought us Christianity, with the new Christlike figure being Milton Friedman.

The transformation was successful and it was in the process of being spread across the world when the congregants began to notice how little it was doing for their lives. They began to notice that those who did the hard work were actually getting less of the rewards. They notice that all the benefits of the system were being skimmed off by a small group of priests, the wealthy elites. They began to see that the system was being manipulated and corrupted by the very people they were to respect as true-believers and that they were held above the laws of ordinary people and beyond accountability. They saw that the Dow Jones, the giver of truth and direction, only was an indication of how the priestly class was doing and not at all about how the ordinary folk were doing.

Ultimately, they saw that the system did not really work and was only another justification for an economic elite to control the wealth and power at the expense of the ordinary people.

They saw that, once again, the wealthy and powerful had conned them and exploited their trust in leadership.

The people attempted to rise to replace the faulty and empty economic system with democracy to restore a more human balance and return economics to its proper place.

But the economic elite would not allow those with only common stock a place at the stockholders' meeting. Instead they allowed only those with preferred stock to vote. The decision was to continue on with business as usual, putting forward an unexciting, but tried and true, champion of their system.

Of course, by now the system had been exposed as being empty, weak and dying, vulnerable to a hostile takeover. It had also shown itself to be disdainful of any rules, ignoring them or manipulating them as it pleased.

The real threat to such a take-over had been neutralized with their exclusion of the common stockholders from the meeting.

Now it was only a bare knuckles, knock-down, drag-out fight between factions within the economic elites.

Knowing how to manipulate the media and knowing how to find support among those who had been disregarded and forgotten as unimportant (the Republicans had shown the way to develop and use such a group in forming the Tea Party earlier), Donald Trump could expose the weakness of the established elite, ignore the rules and, with ruthless power and chutzpah, simply topple the weakened and empty system and step into the vacuum as the victorious leader.

The economic elite had conveniently gotten rid of his only real threat, the ordinary people, in the elite's arrogant move to diminish the common voice in the election. Without that action Trump's ploy would not have had a chance. By doing so they had made themselves completely vulnerable and ripe for the picking. He simply crashed the stockholders' meeting with a whole other group of enraged stockholders and took over the meeting and the country.

Now he could finish the work by dividing the nation into divisions of Corporation USA and allowing the states to function as subsidiaries being judged by how much they contribute economically or in moving the corporate business plan forward.

The final gamble, of course, was whether the ordinary populace would accept this new turn of events. He was sure they would since they had stood by and allowed him to dominate the entire discourse during the election season. The elite had been, and still were, entirely focused on Trump-bashing while events were passing them by and that, coupled with the shock of the take-over, would allow people to continue in their passive, "take no real risks", submissive direction, never really standing up.

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I have a deep belief in participatory democracy, the value of ordinary people and finding a path to a sustainable future. I also understand the immediacy or the need for significant action to save democracy and our sustainable future on this (more...)
 

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