America was born in the womb of war, has never stopped warring, and her fate will most likely be to die in the arms of war. Her warring addiction has been passed down from one generation to the next as her very few power elites have instigated war for self-serving purposes.
Turning to her repulsive domestic policy; it reveals itself in skyrocketing unemployment; an infinite income equality gap; gun violence; costly and unequally available health care; soaring homelessness; militarized and brutal police; round the clock surveillance of citizens; overflowing prisons; punishment of dissent; and so on and so on to more of the same.
The “Deformative” Years of America’s Power Elite
Sociologist Charles Derber, who wrote a book on the subject, tells us that America is a sociopathic society in which people, regardless of their socioeconomic status, care only about themselves.1 For instance, I doubt that among the power elite neither parents and therefore neither their children have any sense of compassion for the war dead left by America’s military aggression. In any case, that America is a corpocracy ruled by its power elite is evidence enough that we live in a psychopathic society.
In a society riddled with sickening inequality, voyeurestic programming has become a profitable niche for Anglo-American television. BRAVO (owned) by NBC Universal, is the leading purveyor of this kind of fare, making celebrities of people whose lives are a continuous display of the most obscene affluenza and superficiality. A particularly idiotic franchise is the Real Housewives of XYZ, which, however entertaining on occasion (especially its Atlanta chapter featuring the doings of the up-and-coming Black upper middle class) feeds off of the lives of local "success stories."
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Some of the stars of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills show. Only one member, Lisa Vanderpump (third from left), a British restaurateur, shows some sensitivity to issues beyond her immediate personal circle (she's an animal lover who recently opened a dog shelter and a decent employer) and even that is a bit inconsistent. The rest seem to be consumed by an unending string of petty and often ludicrously narcissistic squabbles. California boasts two shows of this kind, the other, which inaugurated the phenomenon, The Real Housewives of Orange County, is simply populated by unremarkable exhibitionists. A related show, Southern Charm, chronicles the lives of vainglorious Southern aristocrats and the well-off in Charleston, SC. It should be noted that for obvious reasons starting with the size of their bank accounts, none of these people are members of the real corporate rich that own and rule the US and the world, billionaires and industrialists in the class of Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers and their ilk. The true dimensions of power and luxury underscoring their lives is still kept a secret.
Deformed by Socioeconomic Status
Rich children become rich adults, and, because wealth usually confers power (i.e., the usually unrestrained capacity to decide ends and means), they also become powerful adults, partly, of course, by the positions they come to occupy. Beyond that simple truism is another one; while socioeconomic status clearly deforms the youth of the powerless, their counterpart among the power elite are also affected, and the effects are mediated by the upbringing of youth by their wealthy parents.
The children of the power elite are expected to become wealthy and powerful adults, and expectations are one of the most potent influences on future behavior. I have often written that “Behind every great performance is a great expectation;” unfortunately, in the case of the powerful the expectations are usually ignoble and the performance exploitative and worse.
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Ironically, Bravo has even launched a funny spoof of the wealthy lives it follows with such drooling obsequiousness. Odd Mom Out, starring and written by a genuine member of the Manhattan Upper East Side fashionista bourgeoisie, Jill Kargman, has become a surprising hit for the channel.
The wealthy place great stock in the education of their children, but it is the wrong kind of education and thus the wrong kind of learning. All three levels of government; federal, state, and local, shape America’s youth not through socially responsible and quality teaching but through administrative policy making and implementation. Students are taught what these levels of governments want them to learn, and so they will never learn in the classroom, for example, about America’s sordid history and current state of domestic and foreign affairs.
And then there is religious education, which is not too different from secular education. Both start with young formative minds. Both fill those minds with doctrines, leaving little room left for critical reasoning to question those doctrines, including learning how to discover and distinguish factual knowledge from beliefs. Both help sustain America’s warring and spying habits. While the power elite don’t push religion as the powerless do, whatever religion the wealthy children get is no less compromised by the corpocracy.
The entertainment industry preys on young people, rich or poor, seducing them with glorified war movies, violent video games, jingoistic patriotic displays at sporting events, and what have you. The industry cheapens real life and thus makes real battlefield deaths less horrifying if at all.
Controlled by large corporations aided by the warfare state, the American people, young and old, are played for fools, more so I suspect the powerless than the powerful. America’s warring is always minimized and defended as just and necessary. Young people grow up accepting and promoting war.
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
Good work, Gary! Now we have to get to work fixing the narratives. The rich are insulated and will be the last we can reach. Their fantasy bubbles of willful delusion keep them in luxurious sociopathic splendor. There is little incentive for them to abandon what serves them well. That leaves the rest of us — a vast, restless majority, who despite the pervasive and powerful false narratives sense there is a lot wrong. These folks are always just a bit anxious, only partially satisfied, suspicious of authority and people who dress too nicely, distrustful (especially recently) of anyone who’s… Read more »
That is indeed the $64 question—or, make it now adjusted for inflation, the $64 Trillion dollar question. How do we wake up the mutually reinforced brainwashed masses? Only by breaking the stranglehold of the corporate media, and that is liable to take a long time, especially if disruptive events begin to take place that stampede the people into the usual wrong paths. One thing is for sure, and it is that, if the day ever comes we get rid of this pestilential system, not only the sociopaths pulling the strings with their huge fortunes, but the armies of prostitutes in… Read more »
First we need to get the people on our side . . . http://peacedividend.us