written by Billy Geibel printable version send your friend

Friday, 4 November 2011

We seem to have lost our way. It has happened before. It has happened in history and in story tales alike, yet, this time it is no fairytale. This time, we have lost our path in life, in humanity and in dignity. Americans have always been some of the proudest people in the world; indeed, it is this mentality that has kept us secure upon our perch as the world’s greatest power. Yet today, there seems to be something that is happening unlike any other time in history. It has been going on for several decades now and it is now manifesting itself in the heart of our nation, in the pride of our citizens, and in the very fabric that makes America great. We are riddled with corruption and corporate greed. These two evils are pulling America down, but for some reason, through some miraculous apathy, we don’t seem to care. With the country’s major banks having played a game of craps with the mortgages, social security and retirement funds of the people, why has there not been more uproar?

If a storeowner sold me a brand new, top-of-the-line, television for $500, I would think it was a pretty great deal. But then two months later when the television dies and I take it back, the store owner tells that I should have known the television was bad and that it is, “My fault.”

However, what if that was not the end of it. What if the store owner not only scammed me with the broken TV, but he took that $500 and made a bet with a bookie that in two months the TV would break. Now instead of just taking $500 from me for a bad TV, he has ended up making $1,000 dollars. Is this fair? Is this ethical? Those are questions for you to answer. But, I answer with a resounding, “No!” This is the scheme that the financial industry played with all of us and they did it on a scale thousands of millions of times larger than that of the television schemer. In America we have laws to keep this type of callous and manipulative activity from taking place in our department stores, so why when the stakes are so much higher do we simply let it go?

If I were a farmer and someone were to come into my home, pour oil over everything I own. If they poured oil all over the crops that feed and sustain me, would I just sit back and take it? No! I would boycott them from my town, I would tell everyone I know what horrible things they did; I would fight for justice and for this wrong to be made right. Yet, why when BP has poured over a billion gallons of oil over what did not belong to them, but what belongs to ALL of us, why do we sit back and take it? Why do we not fight against them as thousands of sea creatures continue to take the punishment of their acts? 

Why this bewildering apathy and seemingly voluntary disengagement from the very society we have always been so proud of? There are several factors, and I believe that if we are to change our apathy and become engaged we first have to understand what it is that is keeping us disengaged. I think if we understand that, we might just be appalled enough to take back the honor, pride and dignity in our country that these major corporations have stolen away with the implied consent of our tacit acceptance of their immoral and unethical acts. 

Strategically, the corporations of this country and largely the world have done everything in their power to make sure that we know their power is greater than ours. It has even been solidified in the courts, with the new law that has confirmed a corporation’s “right” to give unlimited funds to campaigns. It has been reinforced by the excessive tax loops that reiterate the common doctrine that corporations are more important, they are more powerful and they are untouchable by the normal person.

This is an illusion.

All of this has been strategically designed to keep us quiet, to keep us accepting their heinous acts. We have the power to stop them, it is given to us in all the rights of the constitution, in our rights as citizens. The problem is we simply fail to utilize it. Now, this is not all our fault, the government has also done its best to protect its largest donors from any type of legal repercussions.  But that is no excuse, simply because it is difficult to bring up a lawsuit against Citibank or BP, does not mean it cannot be done. This is where the message needs to go, to understanding that we can do something, and even though it is difficult and may seem impossible, we must realize we can. 

However, we are also constrained by a more simple, acknowledgeable fact: we simply don’t have the time to fight. These very corporations have strategically kept us locked in debt, and living paycheck to paycheck that we have NO time to protest them, we have no time to fight them! We have been kept so busy and so focused on money that we have all but given up are free time, our time to think and our time to fight for what is right. There are people who have lost thousands of dollars because of the banking crisis, so why aren’t they out fighting the banks? Because they are too busy trying to work< fifty hours a week to pay their debts and bills or even worse they are out looking for jobs that these very banks have taken away.

It is a paradox: the more you have lost, the more you want to fight, the less you are able to.

Now there is not much we can do about this, but realize there are alternative ways to fight. We can take our money out of the major banks and go to community not-for-profit banks and credit unions, we can give each other loans, and we can write, beg and plead with our local leaders and national officials to hear our cries. Additionally, we can use the one power we still have, our power to put in office those who understand our anger. We can and we must demand candidates that are not connected to the national corporate dictators.  They are out there, but we must look beyond the brainwash of the corporations and their media to find the very people they claim to be so evil.  Perhaps the old saying should be revisited, “An enemy of my enemy is my friend.”  Ralph Nader comes to mind.

We must realize the fickleness of politicians. We must understand that even though politicians are supporting our very repressors now, it is because we are allowing them to. The moment we demand change, the moment we show that we no longer support them is the moment they change their ways. Every politician stays in power only so long as we allow them. This is a simple fact. It is not the corporations that keep them in power, it is us.

Corporations may manipulate us into voting for their candidate and they might force politicians to act out of interest for themselves, but in the end, we are accepting it. This can change and it must change. Power in American depends upon the consent of the people, it is the backbone of democracy and although today that backbone has been hidden behind a heavy layer of corporate fat, it still lives, and we must find it. If we prove to the politicians, through our votes and through our actions, that we will relieve them of their duties unless they adapt to our desires, they will have no choice but to stem the tide and once again join our side. 

There is no better way to manipulate Americans than to focus on their pride. We are proud to be Americans, so the song goes and also our national sentiment. While we hear this repeatedly, we rarely understand its implications and negative consequences. Corporations have played off our pride for our country, and through clever scheming and systematic manipulation they have created an environment in which it has become unpatriotic to criticize them. Americans now believe, whether unconsciously or not, that to speak ill of, or in opposition to, any corporation in America is tantamount to treason.

Denouncing the evils in America has been framed as denouncing the very state itself.

We are under the illusion that to question not only corporations but the government’s privileged treatment of them is showing disrespect for the nation, the kind that is frowned upon and even hated in this land of the free and the proud. Dissent has become unpatriotic, and for a country founded on its patriotism, it has crippled our ability to keep corporations credible and honest. We are so blinded by our love for America; we have sacrificed the very values that caused us to love it in the beginning. It is a sad thing to see, but it is not too late to change. We must stop seeing corporations, most of which do not even base themselves in the United States but only pretend to in order to get our patriotic support, as America. They are NOT America. They do not stand for our values and they do not deserve our reverence. They are foreigners in our land, and while we always have and will accept them, they must meet and subscribe to our values and beliefs. They must display themselves as members, beneficial members of our society and only then will we show them our patriotism. 

Most importantly, Americans have become disillusioned because we have lost our confidence. Americans are like the little children of the abusive, drunken father who beats his kids daily and tells them they are dumb so often that eventually they begin to believe it. That is us. We have been trampled on and told for so long that we should revere the big money powers and appreciate whatever they throw our way.

We have started to believe in our own powerlessness.

This is not by chance or coincidence, this once again, has always been in the plan of those who wish to rule us. We do not protest because we have been told over and over again that it is not possible to win. The people cannot go up against major corporations and win, which has become precedent and has been upheld by our government and our judiciary. It’s just the way it is. Well, the time for this self-deprecation and meekness is over. We must dust our knees off, stand up and reconnect with the power we, the People, have always held. We must channel the power of the American revolutionaries who took justice into their own hands, we must channel the power of civil rights leaders who did the same, and we must reverse the tide of confidence and take it from the corporations and inject it into each and every one of us. We control every change and every action in America. This is the truth corporations do not want us to figure out.

We have not been powerless these last few decades; in fact, we have had all the power we have ever had. We have been approving and allowing everything that these corporations have been doing; with our tacit consent they continued to thrive. Well, it is that tacit consent we must recognize and we must revoke, we must revoke our passive, disengaged consent and replace it with a progressive, engaged and elicit consent. Only when we do this, when we make sure that our consent is only what we say it is and not what we do not say, will we once again regain our power that has been hidden from us for too long.

The Occupy movement has begun to find this hidden power. So must we. They are discovering their voice, but the rest of us must as well. We must acknowledge the beliefs that are keeping all of us from getting out there and voicing our own beliefs, from demonstrating our power. Once we have acknowledged the misguided beliefs of the self-serving few, we can shed them, and in doing so we can take back what is rightfully ours.