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March 8, 2011

Two Visions

By David Cox

Can Capitalism be saved from itself? Will the phoenix rise from its own ashes again only to circle again above the injured looking for to select more innocent victims? With rumors of benevolence, whispers of appetite with the bared teeth of a carnivore.

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There's something wrong going on here and I think most of us all ready feel it even if we don't understand it. We can feel something in our bones, an aching, a feeling, an intuition, a mournful dirge like a collective pit in our stomach, waiting for the other shoe to drop or the hangman to pull the lever. The smell of a grave's fresh turned earth in our nostrils. A sense of loss and of losing, the feeling of a life slipping away. A sense of knowing that something is bad wrong and unsure just to what to do about it.

Can Capitalism be saved from itself? Will the phoenix rise from its own ashes again only to circle again above the injured looking for to select more innocent victims? With rumors of benevolence, whispers of appetite with the bared teeth of a carnivore.

Should Capitalism be saved from itself? More the sales pitch than a system, it is greed in a three piece suit. Clear cutting life's landscape to make pencils and junk mail. Bellicose bragging of job creation while grabbing the lapels of ones own suit. A Janus message of creating higher profits through job destruction and profits are the only god that is worshiped.

A poison, a cancer, infecting and corrupting all that it comes in contact with. The perverted typhoid Mary notion that everything has a price and its only fair value is the the price that it will fetch by the pound. A Grendel that wants to consume everything in the whole world as if it is its birth right. Trying to buy Manhattan Island from the natives again and offering only the same trinkets, chains and death. Exploitation for the express purpose of exploitation, murder on the half shell at our everyday low,low prices.

Capitalism's fatal flaw, it's Achilles' heal is to buy only what it cannot steal, raping what it cannot woo, a big slice for me and none for you. Towers of Babble in ruins among the rabble, dark boiling clouds harbingers of disaster, Capitalism is a carnivore whose favorite food is its own tail.

I'm torn and quartered, clear and distorted, aching from the siren's song in my ears, ready to fight and ready to just get along. Divided and united, pacified and incited, innocent and indicted.

Two visions, the first filled with nonprofit food co-ops expanding into general merchandise. Feeding the hungry and helping the needy with the profits that are driven back into expanding the non profit model. An honest bank with clear intentions, with no fine print offering a safe place to keep one's money, low interest loans designed not to expand credit but to shrink it. Serving up tail to the beast until the beast is no more.

A co-op, a union of Americans working for other Americans for the benefit of Americans rather than shareholders. Carpenters, painters, farmers and electricians working inside the co-op for the co-op. Jobs for workers and help for Americans. A firewall against Capitalism, a Grange, a toe hold, a freehold.

Schools that stay open until six o'clock with intramural sports, study halls, art and music. Americans need jobs, students need schools. The children need athletics and sports, they need art and music and they need thought. They need to learn the concepts of the world, Homer instead of Homer Simpson and Plato instead of Play-doh. These things were once provided to the public for free and they can be again. Schools where each is taught at their own level but where all are taught to look up and to reach higher.

These things are possible, jobs with living wages are possible but the murderous Capitalist Grendel says No! You must live your life in permanent struggle and in perpetual uncertainty. You must fear for your job and fear for your health and fear night and day for the rest of your miserable life because it makes you easier to manage.

The red devil is gone, slipped from sight no need to keep up the pretense of wrong or right or how the superior economic system is replaced now by economic blight. Thirty years war on workers, thirty years of wage decline for the owners of this country. Mass exploitation and in Wisconsin a naked power grab oh, and its happening in Ohio as well. Could that just be a coincidence, is it that hard to tell? Millions forced from their homes as the vultures circle, moving back in to buy up those homes with government assistance and acquiescence to make a nation of home owners a nation of tenants. Their goal is to create a nation of Pottersville's but they've gone too far, they've passed through the Aegis gate.

They want to create nation of nonvoting peasants with two school systems, a private system for the wealthy and an overcrowded and underfunded system for the peasants. A tourniquet around the neck of the middle class held by the Democrats and twisted by the Republicans. A service economy that manufactures nothing but misery and creates new laws to tie you up and tie you down. My yin side says build plan, work, strive to improve the situation.

My yang side says go to war, open up the gates of hell on these bastards. These corporate criminals who are pushing our children's heads under water for a new Mercedes and a house in the Hampton's. There are some principles of civilization that can be taught no other way. Charles the First in England learned a lesson that reverberated throughout Europe. The French Revolution ended forever the rule of monarchy in France. It opened a decade of blood and wars but to a starving French peasant what other real choice was available? To just take it? To make the starving pay the taxes to support the opulent lifestyle of the aristocracy?

Do you think that the issues are so different today? Saudi Arabia is mobilizing troops and opening fire on demonstrators because anti-government demonstrations aren't allowed in the Kingdom. If Saudi Arabia goes the way of Libya, then you'll be looking at nine to ten dollar a gallon gasoline and the economic pain the working people of this country have suffered thus far will go from a headache to a kidney stone. If it comes to a civil war in Saudi Arabia guess whose side of the struggle your government will support?

Bradley Manning is being held incommunicado and forced to endure humiliation and god knows what other punishments. Treated no differently than a Gitmo inmate. Is he a terrorist or a suspect, an American citizen or a peasant? Can stress positions and electrodes to the genitals be far off in the land of the deceived and home of the Whopper? The prison camps in Guantanamo Bay and in Baghram Afghanistan are concentration camps. Do you understand that? Your government operates concentration camps and now is using the same type of tactics on American Bradley Manning

During the last Great Depression the Federal Government under Herbert Hoover made loans to big business and offered nothing but prayer and platitudes to the people. It brought America to the brink of revolution. In this Great Depression the Obama administration has followed in Hoover's footsteps to the letter but it has looked the other way as the largest financial crime in the history of planet Earth goes on unmolested. Can you accept that quietly? The theft of your children's future?

Capitalism is a slaughter house of many mansions and many chutes. Created to give each the illusion of freedom and prosperity until you're pushed up the chute to discover that you are unemployed or sick. Then Capitalism will offer to save you, if you turn over everything that you've worked for in your whole life or are willing to work for what you once earned as a teenager. A crooked crap game where they'll get you sooner or later even if they have to just rob you in the parking lot.

It is a fable, a fantasy, a fiction, a fornication, where you are taught to believe that you are the Brady bunch when in fact you're the Joad family. Living in a representative democracy that neither represents you nor is democratic. Revolution isn't a choice, revolution is a fact of life. War has been declared upon you, your family and your children. This war on the public has forced millions out of their homes and into the streets as refugees. Forced millions out of their jobs into meager existence looking for work hat in hand or a part time day worker without future or benefits. The corporations of America dodge sixty billion dollars in taxes annually while the wealthy pay half the rate of what they paid twenty years ago and a third of what they once paid little more than generation ago.

The war has begun it is only a question of fight or run.



Authors Bio:

I who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that I am really.

Given a front row seat for the generation of the 1960's I lived in Chicago in 1960. My father was a Democratic precinct captain, my mother an election judge. His father had been a Union organizer and had been beaten and jailed for his efforts. His first time in jail was for punching a Ku Klux Klansman during a parade in the 1930's. I never felt as if I was raised in a family of activists but seeing it print makes me think, yes. That is a part of who I am.

We find ourselves today living in a world treed by the hounds of madness, a complicit media covering contrite parties. Multilevel media, giving more access to communication yet stunting actual communication. More noise, less voice, more sound less music, more law less justice, more medicine less life.


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