(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . They want one thing from you: your voluntary enslavement [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-21 If you look at the Republican Party, four large points are obvious: 1) Helping the rich 2) Hurting the poor 3) Deregulating business 4) Regulating bodies That's it. That's the entirety of the Republican Party. Pretty clear dichotomies. But let's drill down in #3 for a second. #3 is a multi-headed attack to denude the Earth for the enrichment of the rich, while taking away all the protections that keep the non-rich safe and healthy, and, its end goal is to destroy the environment, thereby making clean air, water, and food scarce, and adding desperation to the lives of the nonrich. So, #3 is really an octave of #1 and #2. Let's look at #4. On its face, #4 is about removing choice from individuals about procreation. This makes more nonrich people, and diluting whatever power the nonrich have by virtue of the few assets they are allowed multiplied by their numbers. But more, add enough numbers to the ranks of the nonrich, and you get ever-increasing levels of desperation. So, #4 is an octave of #2. So, we're down to "make the rich richer; make the poor more desperate". It isnt even "make the rich richer; make the poorer poorer". They won that race years ago. You can't get poorer than a single mother with multiple children working a minimum wage job and paying for daycare. The homeless have 0. Most of the poor are in debt that they can never pay off. Even upper middle class people are miles below 0, with houses and cars and whatever they put on credit cards years ago that they will never pay off. All but the very VERY rich depend on jobs -- given to them by the very VERY rich -- to service their own debts. It is almost like: the more money you earn, the deeper in debt you are. America lives under the ridiculous fallacy that having negative dollars is "richer" than having none. And there you go. Remove the homeless from the equation just for a second, because they have no political power to effect change, since tge Republicans shut ACORN down a generation ago. Now, you have the working poor, the working affluent, and the leisure class, which lives on a fraction of their interest never touching their principal, do that their wealth multiplies without labor. Let us digress for a moment. Why have the working affluent at all? As a safety valve for the pressure cooker for the ever-increasing levels of desperation they are building in society. Because if the rich fear anything, it is pitchforks and torches, and, an apparently hierarchical society that makes poverty a moral failing helps the nonrich compliant. Because no one thinks of themselves as morally failed. Ok. Back again. So, #2, in addition to the entertainment value it serves #1, is all about bolstering #1. But, keeping the illusion of a free state intact by paying #2 in direct proportion to how much wealth they can generate #1 (increasing the illusion of moral superiority amongst those increasing the wealth of #1 the most), you can bankrupt the teachers of the children of #2, because an educated underclass may educate itself out of being an underclass, and increases the desperation of the poorest so that they cling all the stronger to the pittance they are paid. And the "non-underclass", that which we now call "the working class" or, non-ironically, "the middle class" (the slender buffer between the rich and the desperate), cling, with varying awareness, to the jobs which keep them in their relative comfort, servicing their debt, rather than generating wealth. And, that is where we are. A nation of indebted people not realizing that 0 > -1. And fighting to maintain the status quo, or scraping by enough to get a better position to increase their comfort and their indebtedness. This is the utopia that the rich have built for themselves: that the working class voluntarily enslave themselves, and lose the power to change the system to complacency, while the rich get richer. That doesnt mean that there arent members of the leisure class working to make the world a better place: they are educated and have the resources to effect change. It means that the real fight in society is the monied liberals versus the monied assholes. And, if there is hope for the world, for democracy writ large, for society, it rests on those who have time, money, and the realization that, eventually, there exists "enough" that they do not need to protect their every cent from those they entice to enslave themselves to the current system. I wish them strength. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/21/2154235/-They-want-one-thing-from-you-your-voluntary-enslavement Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/