By Timothy V. Gatto

When will the people of this nation understand that those they trust to guide them and protect them have nothing but contempt for them? Everyday there are people who have no work and have used up their 99 weeks of unemployment insurance, they are called the 99%’rs. Every day the people of this nation look into their television sets and hear the propaganda of a nation that is hell-bent on empire because they fear their own imminent collapse. This won’t affect the trans-national corporate hierarchy; they will just move to another country, it’s all the same to them. There is no patriotism and no loyalty to the United States among those that sit on the mantle of power.

The majority of Americans are decent, hard-working people, but they are none the less… stooges. They have been indoctrinated from birth to believe in a set of core values that are designed to keep them subservient and docile. They are the victims of propaganda that emanates from the government and the corporate media, designed to lead them to believe that we are “defending democracy” even though we have no real democracy of our own.

We exist under an oligarchy and have existed under it from the time of our nation’s inception. The Constitution was designed not for the common man, but for those that had the wealth to exercise power. In everything that we see and hear, the powers that be (and have always been), tell us that we under threat. What are these threats? The answer is that a threat is anything that will allow those wealthy people that run this nation to make a profit. The profit motive is what drives this nation. It has destroyed the lives of ordinary citizens, workers and our military and shows no sign of abating.

The current war in Afghanistan was orchestrated so that our military expenditures could be justified, so that military armaments could be produced by the Military Industrial Complex while the American public learns about the war from the corporate media from bloodless, sanitized, government approved footage that makes the war seem more like a football game than human carnage. Meanwhile, as this nation sinks into irrecoverable debt, the military spending goes on and on. The American people know that something is wrong, but they can’t come to grips with the fact that those elected to see to our general welfare, really don’t give a damn what happens to the common man. The corporate world has become global, what happens to America does not concern them, the bottom line; profit…is really their only bottom line.

The fact that 80% of us only own 7% of the wealth of this nation is not talked about. The fact that corporations and the rich pay less percentage of income than the middle class is not talked about. The fact that the middle-class is almost gone is not talked about. While our industry has been outsourced to other countries, Wall Street makes money by moving financial inventions such as derivatives around like a classic shell game.

Capitalism is looked upon as something sacred. The mantra of “Free Enterprise” has been hammered into our heads by corporate propaganda since birth. Rarely does one read about the government’s shooting of men, women and children by the military and corporate goons when this country tried to implement trade unions. Our “revised” history books make scant mention of the imprisonment of the “Wobbly’s’” during the Wilson Administration. Every major attempt to improve the lot of the workers in America has met with resistance from not only from the Capitalist bosses, but from the government that was charged to look out for its people.

The so-called “Tea-Partiers” are deluded and indoctrinated. They oppose taxation in its entirety. They are brainwashed to believe that taxation of the rich will result in job losses and an erosion of the middle-class. They can’t help it; they are hammered everyday and have no idea that they are being manipulated by the oligarchs of this nation to do their bidding. Look at the professional politicians that are supported by the tea party, they are almost to a man (or woman) rich. Who is fooling who?

It is time to hold those in power responsible. This has nothing to do with a political party or even politics itself. The time for politics has come and gone. Working “inside the system” has come and gone. The “system” is their “system”. We need to mobilize and take action against those that would make us serfs. We need to take to the streets, and by our numbers convince this corrupted government that we are becoming ungovernable. Control is their only sacrament, only when they feel that they will lose this control will they be supplicant to the people.

When King Louis the 14th asked his Prime Minister if this was another protest, he replied “No Sir, It’s a Revolution”.

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timgatto@hotmail.com Read Tim's Book "Complicity to Contempt" and his Novel "Kimchee Days or Stoned Cold Warriors From Oliver Arts and Open Press and available on Amazon and all other online bookstores.