Today, all money is in some sense rotten. Fiat money is paper money backed by nothing but big banks’ account-balances held and used as credit. A lot of money has been gained by destructive means which need no mention here. Rotten money is what gets spent by rotten spenders whose goal is to buy votes and legislators to get their way while destroying democracy using any means the law now allows, thanks mainly to the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision. Clearly, the Supreme Court became five-ninths rotten with the addition of another Radical Corporatist. (The very word, “Conservative,” is no longer meaningful. “Liberal” has social-intellectual meaning but little or no political meaning. These are ghostly words, authentic only historically.)
By legal custom, treason is defined as action against government. But, where the source of government power rises from The People, action to disempower the people and exclude them from voice or effect on government becomes treasonous. For many centuries, stable government relied on balanced give-and-take between a ruling group and a loyal opposition. Today, the Republican Party with its backers and allies presents administration with *disloyal* opposition. Its leaders engage in treason by refusing to participate and help the president solve national problems so as to discredit him and to take power to themselves.
It is as if opposition leaders redefine The People as only those who support backward policies to radically reverse time, going back to an imagined utopia, a “Golden Age” in which a tiny government did nothing but serve the wealthiest and protect their property, virtually enslaving everyone else by disenfranchisement, forcing them to seek favor or patronage as under the old European monarchies in which royalty and gentry dominated burghers and peasants.
Those engaged in radical treason feel theirs is the natural order of life in which the fittest survive, rule and either utilize or eliminate the weaker or less fit. They think biological success is indicated by financial success. They assume that earning or inheriting property and status denote the general ability and superior virtue that deserve all civilization has to offer. Such “Social Darwinism” vulgarizes 19th Century science into a pseudo-philosophy (ideology) that has long been scientifically discredited. It flies in the face of what has been observed of well-off families through successive generations that deteriorate in performance and human quality as often as they maintain or improve themselves. Creativity and genius keep rising from the populace even against great odds. Family status and property have less to do with these than with choosing particular occupations. Every prominent family seems to produce some “black sheep,” renegades and criminals. Many a supposed “great line” is begun by a successful criminal. This is as true in recent times as in medieval feudality. People get starry eyed about themselves and their class. They spin up new versions of Divine Right and Innate Justification.
Especially troubling about the treason of these radically unrighteous donors who inject big, rotten money into politics is a growing similarity between “maximally efficient” animal husbandry and the management of people. In recent decades we have become aware of the most extreme and denaturing methods now used in livestock keeping and breeding. Farming we knew is gone. Food comes from a small number of factories that turn out huge numbers quickly at minimal cost of things that look like chickens, turkeys and hogs but which cannot survive and reproduce in nature. They are grown in the smallest amounts of space possible, fed the largest amounts of processed food that can be stuffed into them, to which growth hormone, antibiotics and even arsenic maximize efficiencies that increasingly endanger public nutrition. One recalls the forced feeding of geese to produce outsized livers for making paté. The geese are allowed no room to turn or move around in their cages. Some states and regions have outlawed the worst excesses of animal confinement as egregiously abusive. But, that’s okay, animals are not human. Right?
Consider now, how human populations are managed, or would become managed, by the biggest spenders of rotten money. Each person is already confined (as poet e. e. cummings once put it) to his “sternly alloted sandpile.” The poorer the person, the smaller the space, right down to the prison cells alloted to persons caught with certain herbal substances they hoped would make them feel happy, lacking perhaps the prescribed joys of wealth and status, save by gaining wealth and a degree of covert status through purveying said substances to those short on access to joy, whether they be rich or poor.
Populations are benignly controlled by regimes of bread and circus. These need not be centrally planned as in the daze of Rome’s declining glory. Today the elderly and poor are entitled to public aid while banks and multi-nationally rooted (or ruthlessly rootless) corporations are entitled to keep windfall profits but recover severe losses from the public till. The ultra-rich entitle themselves to use their big money (however obtained) to further and permanently tilt the playing field in their own favor. They feel it’s fine to ruin democracy and impoverish everyone else at home and abroad.
There are less benign means for exerting control over people such as imperialist militarization and the encroachment on civil order by police-state mentality and method. One is management of light. Light is metaphoric for true information. Keep the animals in the dark and they will stay peaceful. Shut the barn doors and windows or filter the light carefully through your Rotten Money-Owned or Bought Media. Build conspiracies of Talking Point manufacture. Push the Big Lies constantly. Paint a world as the world is not. Paint the inside of the barn to look like Green Field Paradise. Insist that goats are really sheep. Convince people to follow sheep into the barn. Gut the goats and package as shrink-wrapped lamb.
Equally appalling is the subversion of many, substantial, middle-class folks into false consciousness. They identify themselves with the super-wealthy. They live in denial that by voting Republican, arguing in alignment with Tea Party, Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh, the Faux News gang and continually harping against Obama and Democrats they harness themselves to serve Rotten Money and destruction of the America to which they so loudly claim patriotic loyalty, exerting freedom to betray liberty.
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