Politics is the way a government/society determines who gets what and how much of it. How could you say you're not into politics?

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You Can't Ignore the Class War
(By Saying You're Not Into Politics)

"I'm just not that into politics" sighed the Fly.
"Oh, really?" the Spider brightened.

*         *         *         *         *         *

Politics was once married to economics,
taught as Political Economics in American colleges,
but Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys saw to it
that there was a divorce between economics and politics.

I wonder ... could we sue him
for alienation of affections posthumously
for taking the political out of economics,
as if wealth distribution wasn't based on policy decisions
determining who really pays taxes and who offshores profit

not to mention
who gets that taxpayer money
as no-bid government contracts and subsidies.

(Theories of economic philosophy
don't make economics a science.
It has no immutable laws such as gravity,
and it's constructed with considerable bias.)

Politics, like terrorism, is merely a tactic,
a method, a modus operandi,
a heavily-financed means to the end
of dividing up the American pie.

That means politics is only a way
of deciding who gets what and how much of it.
If you're not interested, can't take the time,
or think it's beneath you, you're perfect. 
That's just how "they" want it.

People losing jobs and benefits,
people whose retirement has just ... disappeared,
even shareholders, whose rarified air
the rest of us may not breathe,
were pole-axed by Ponzi schemes
specifically engineered

by people deadly serious about politics,
who spent billions to purchase political "free" speech
via campaign contribution-bribes and over 3,000 lobbyists
with whom they carpet-bombed Congress from K Street

as a means to deregulate finance,
in other words, to do away with the rules,
to amass pharaonic levels of wealth through gambling and usury,
by playing the American people for fools.

When you put your power of choice in millionaires' hands,
expecting them to represent your interests,
then shut down politically, having "done your duty"
you ignore the fact that their interests
are much more closely aligned with the interests
of the wealthy and transnational corporations
who gave them the money to make a campaign "run"
for their congressional seats in the first place.

Democracy is a philosophy
in which the majority determines policy,
and thus it follows that it serves the good
of the greatest number of the polity.

Capitalism is an economic system
that allows the few to amass wealth and power
and neuter democracy with their influence,
so they can profit off capital created by others, 
meaning that the good for the greatest number
must take a backseat to their ability to plunder.

Capitalism does not equal democracy,
nor does it create it.
Democracy is administered
by the demos, the people,
capitalism by the few who appropriate
profit by paying labor as small a share as possible
of the value that labor creates,
and as that share gets smaller and smaller,
approaches no-wage labor, or corporate nirvana,

which we already had in this country
and when we had it we called it slave labor,
now replaced by a profitable system in which
you don't have to maintain workers - debt slavery.

To that end, corporations advocate right-to-work laws
to prevent groups of workers from bargaining,
so they have to take wages that corporations offer
or opt for their alternative right to starvation.

Corporations, which themselves are combinations,
may combine to prevent labor from combining
and by means of mergers, may combine even further
to create cartels and monopolies to fight them.

Capitalism uses the cheapest materials
in order to increase the margin of profit
and by the 19th century corporations were profiting
by watering down and adulterating food products

substituting lard for butterfat
in condensed milk, ice cream and candy,
ground nut shells for pepper and spices,
coffee "extended" with sawdust and chicory,

jam made from peels, cores and sucrose,
ketchup from pumpkin and saccharine,
colored with poisonous coal tar dyes,
and what passed as butter was oleo margarine.

The difference between value advertised
and the value of the product received
amounted to institutionalized commercial fraud.
as inferior goods were passed off as premium.
And while this annoyed the Middle Classes,
its effects on the poor were more serious.

Without federal oversight there was no guarantee
of the quality and safety of food
and a Congress purchased by corporate interests
was unconcerned about cheating the poor,
who were those who could least afford it,
and also those who most often were.

But, more egregiously, corporations were masking
decomposing foods with "preservatives" like borax,
copper sulfate and sodium benzoate,
formaldehyde and salicylic acid.

So the free market did not, in fact, act
as a foolproof mechanism for allocating resources.
And the larger corporate food manufacturers got,
the greater the opportunity for fraud and abuse was.

Corporations proved they couldn't be trusted,
so consumers had to turn to government
to insure the product information they needed
was printed on labels and, by law, was accurate.

But if people chose to use oleo rather than butter,
or drink chicory coffee or whiskey "aged" overnight,
take worthless or addictive tonics and remedies,
under the Food and Drug Act, they still had that right.

But manufacturers and retailers of food products
would find it harder to pass off cheap goods as premium
or make hidden substitutes in lists of ingredients
and deliver products that weren't what they claimed to be.

And since capitalism is about growth and profit,
businesses' politics weren't based on support
for free enterprise or the overall economy,
but their own position in a competitive market.

They saw the Food and Drug Act as a way
to serve corporate interests via the government
through direct subsidies and the control
over product entry into the market,

laws affecting substitutes and ingredients
as well as price-fixing and uniform laws,
regulation to protect existing business
through rules that affected them all,
to ensure higher than competitive rates,
and for protection from new players in the market.

Some corporations tried to have taxes imposed
on the products of their principal competitors
via "concern" over adulteration or mis-labeling
bolstered by "moral" arguments made by business representatives

who sought to protect industrial productivity
by ensuring workers were adequately nourished,
since improper nutrition lessened productivity,
through the inefficient use of human resources.

If workers couldn't provide a full day's labor
as a result of food additives and adulteration,
this was inefficiency that business
committed to increasing productivity
should not be expected to tolerate.

This argument coincides with the appearance
of scientific management practices and theories,
and the concept of the body as machine.
The input of food into the worker/machine was linked
directly to its output, or worker productivity,
since workers were essentially extensions
of machines they operated in various industries.

And as interstate commerce grew,
a uniform law was more rational and cost-effective
than different laws in individual states
and reputable manufacturers needed government protection
against other states' adulterators and product mis-labelers
who tarnished their fine reputations.

And exports also needed to increase
to absorb increased worker productivity,
but this was impeded by the tainted reputation
US food products had acquired overseas.

The way to earn consumer confidence
was to work in partnership with a regulatory agency,
so when such agencies were advocated
corporations endorsed and supported these

because it provided official notice to the public
that fraud and hazardous practices wouldn't go unpunished,
consumers would get accurate product information,
and that Congress hadn't completely been purchased,
since it still could establish policies promoting
the will of the majority and the general welfare.

Thus, regulation would make industry more trusted,
a bankable achievement far beyond any price,
but since agencies were staffed with corporate advocates
corporations owned consumer protection all-but-outright.

In addition agencies acted as a buffer
between corporations and the public's interference
and served as an example to other industries
of how to keep the public at arm's length from business.

The definition of capital has expanded
as has corporate control of government
and corporations are flaunting their impunity
to the regulations they originally wanted
and with the looming financial "crisis" they plan
to take us back where they didn't have to address
consumer safety, satisfaction or class action suits,
nor fraud, adulteration and corporate ethics.

Thus, capitalism and democracy work at odds with each other,
and in spite of this glaring opposition
those who  point this out are deemed "dangerous radicals"
greeted with howls of "class war" and "That's socialism!"
And those on the receiving end of the system's excesses
are just "whiners" rather than capitalism's victims.

Voting is not an end, but a means.
Democracy is not a spectator sport.
When you stop participating, democracy stops working,
and you usually get just what it is you deserve.

And the unfortunate fact is that your children
are going to get what you deserve, too.
Your responsibility goes deeper than pulling up boot straps,
because it determines who is allowed to have boots.

Yes, "they" want you to be responsible -
for interest, fees and paying their share of taxes,
and they shudder to think you'd want to run your own country,
which would knock them flat on their fat, privileged assets.

So...

How much melamine is there in your baby's formula
to create how much profit for the corporation that made it?
How much profit was created by the BPA-laden bottle
you give your baby each night in his cradle?

The CEOs and the shareholders of those corporations
know exactly how to spend ill-gotten profits
from melamine in formula and BPA in baby bottles.
They use it to send their babies to college.

How much education will you be able
to buy for your baby?  And with what?
If you're not into politics, don't have time
and don't care who gets what and how much,
you're condemning your baby
to a life of wage slavery.
That is, if your baby
grows up.

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." 
 Abraham Lincoln

"Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other."
 Oscar Ameringer

"Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right and wrong."
 Richard Armour

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
 Warren Buffet

For "extra credit" see Fritz Lang's "METROPOLIS".

Authors Bio:
Vi's works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).