Questioning Authority Globally And Locally In 2011: Will We Resist Domination By Hypocrites And Parasites?
By Tom Stephens
30 December, 2010
Countercurrents.org
Hypocrites and parasites will come up and take a bite
And if your night should turn to day, a lot of people will run away
- Bob Marley, “Who the Cap Fit”
The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.
When a land transgresses it has many rulers… Evil men do not understand justice…
- Proverbs 28:1-5
New Year's Revolutions?
Power and authority will go only to honest, trustworthy persons, for purposes of maximizing fairness and benefit for those most in need.
It can no longer be possible for the rich and public officials to lie, cheat and steal, then get away with it essentially by turning around and saying everybody else from Wall Street to Washington, DC is doing the same thing.
What Wikileaks did will be considered a model of citizenship and public service, not a form of espionage, treason, or other criminal enterprise.
All wealth and resources must be held and used in common. The lying words and hypocritical smiles of the corporate welfare parasites and jackleg politicians will be seen and condemned as the signs of bad intent they are.
We will listen to words of truth and prophesy:
A completely new paradigm of what we do to sustain life is going to have to emerge or things will become far worse than most of us have ever known. Modern civilization simply cannot stand a situation in which a substantial share of its people is destitute. … somewhere in the next five years a critical mass of us will realize that new foundations for civilization, and new ways of life must be found and implemented… [1]
Panic in Detroit?
For example, here in Detroit we'll refute, expose and reject the fork-tongued commandments and contradictions of “business” mayor Dave Bing:
1. Pushing poor folks out of their modest homes in blighted neighborhoods, so the city's resources can be commandeered and further exploited by his rich friends, will be hard, but “It has to be done.” [2]
2. As a government official, unlike a corporate CEO,
“You have to get
buy-in.” (i.e., "You have to buy in. Or else.")
3. It will be completely transparent.
4. “There is no plan.” (transparent or otherwise)
5. It will be data-driven.
6. It will be tough medicine.
7. It will require hard choices.
8. People will be victims of “incentives” to move out of blighted
neighborhoods, by means of cutbacks and denials of services.
9. It's not government's role to create jobs.
10. It's too expensive to provide services in blighted areas (tho this has never
been quantified, and researchers from the University of Michigan found
it can't be quantified in Detroit , due to lack of data). (See # 5 above,
“data-driven”)
11. The city won't be getting smaller.
12. Local government's #1 job is to make sure businesses can make money.
13. In Bing's words: "The biggest problem that we're going to
have, with all the good intentions and the good recommendations that we
got … is that it's a very hard spin to get city workers and people who live
in the city to accept change." [3] (i.e., 'The biggest problem ... is ... city
workers and people who live in the city...')
14. Bing asked Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert
Bobb to stay in Detroit for another few months, after a Wayne County
Circuit Judge found that Bobb is violating the law by usurping control of
academic programs from the elected school board.
We will no longer listen and passively accept the grotesque lie that working folks in Detroit are opposed to change. It's the rich and leaders of the undemocratic corporate system who oppose real change. The system put them where they are, and made Detroit what it is. Who really wants change is not complicated. Nor is the need for change. It's the ones who are being oppressed and ground down by this system, not those who run and benefit from it, who have to drive the changes.
Will the Truth Set Us Free?
Listen: Wikileaks first released graphic, brutal video evidence of war crimes – US military personnel gunning down helpless bystanders and journalists from a helicopter gunship while laughing about it. Then they exposed official military lies – the Afghanistan and “Iraq war logs” that documented among other things first hand bureaucratic reports of torture and other atrocities, and Pentagon body counts which supposedly didn't exist. The ruling hypocrites claimed Wikileaks had “blood on their hands.” People mostly just laughed at the absurdity of these lying, murderous, top-ranking parasites blaming others for their crimes.
Then, near the end of 2010, Wikileaks and international corporate media started releasing state department diplomatic cables that reveal the “thinking” behind US government dealings with the world. The ability of the people of the world to know what US diplomats, spies and satraps are reporting to their puppet masters was just too much, exposing the hypocritical rot at the core of the imperial system. It received the standard mindless label for a recognized “scandal:” “cablegate.” Now Wikileaks' Julian Assange has become an international pariah with a target on his forehead, although the closest thing to any “crime” anyone could invent to charge him with apparently involves stale allegations that had been rejected by Swedish prosecutors in August 2010: a jilted groupie, a suspect provocateur, a “honey trap” casual sex scenario and a burst condom. Some threats to international peace and security.
As financial corporations rapidly moved to cut off Wikileaks' access to funds, the end-of-year tempest of injustice reflected the exposed hypocrisy of the world's rulers, and their parasitical relationships to our peoples and communities. Their credibility in shreds, the Masters of the Known Universe on Wall Street and in Washington are lashing out, claiming the exposure of their dirty laundry is criminal “espionage,” torturing presumed military source Bradley Manning with months of solitary confinement, sleep- and sensory-deprivation and other forms of inhumanity, in an attempt to turn him into a compliant witness. Wikileaks' access to the internet and funding conduits was cut off based on hysterical and unfounded accusations by Power, without evidence. The Masters' trained clowns in the corporate media – the Palins, Becks and O'Reillys – spew cries of “treason” and assassination threats against Wikileaks and Assange. The nuts are running the nut factory of US political economy and culture straight into the ground, and many, many people will be badly hurt in the process.
What does the down-spiraling empire in the cablegate fiasco have to do with Detroit's ongoing struggles as a global symbol of deindustrialization, entrenched poverty, urban decay and racism in the so-called “First World?” The most basic constitutional questions of who does what to whom, who makes the rules, who decides and how. And oh yeah, who you gonna believe? Corporate America's hypocrites or your lyin' eyes?
At long last, a change has come. We face transitions as fundamental, sweeping and wrenching in how they affect the way we live as those that occurred millenia ago, in the shift from hunter-gatherer groups to agriculture-based civilization. Our resource constraints, technical tools for meeting basic needs, economic models, political theories and psychological and cultural stories we tell ourselves are all seriously out of whack with objective physical reality.
From the violence in Afghanistan and Iraq to the violence of poverty; from the corporate media's mind control apparatus to the corporate lobbyists' bribery scams; from Goldman Sachs to British Petroleum to Halliburton and so many other less immediately symbolic corporate parasites, the basic features of our society and our lives marinate in leaders' hypocrisy. The imperial system itself is the source of our communities' and our families' problems. It cannot provide solutions. They don't want us to be able to find out these essential truths.
This is real education and justice: If we ever figure out how much the ancient Hebrews and the early United States' slaves actually had in common with the Rastafarians who were seeing the light when I was a teenager, with the Palestinians trapped under imperial bombs in Gaza today, and with everybody else who ever lived and has to really work to survive, Yahweh, Allah, Jah and all the God/desses together won't be enough to save these fucking parasites.
Party it up. Get ready to fight. The space you occupy is liberated territory. Defend it at all costs.
[1] Tom Whipple, “The Future of Government” (Post Carbon Institute) http://www.postcarbon.org/article/198393-the-peak-oil-crisis-the-future
[2] Bing's so-called “Detroit Works” project which is attempting to shrink the city and neighborhoods where city services would be offered will be tough medicine, "but it has to be done." "It's not like being CEO when you decide something and everyone works to make it happen." said Bing , a former CEO of a steel company. "In government it's quite different as you have to go and get everyone to buy in."
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101211/
NEWS15/101210072/1001/news&template=fullarticle
[3] http://www.freep.com/article/20091006/NEWS05/
310060004/1319/Bing-s-team-finds-savings--but-change-is-a-challenge
Tom Stephens
