America, A Penthouse Built On Tenaments

"The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election—a reaction to the corporate coup d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country—have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy."(Photo: Mr. Fish)
(Photo: Mr. Fish)

Western capitalist countries, especially the United States, have become grotesquely unequal, with a significant portion of their populations angst-ridden, miserable, and living within a framework of economic stagnation.

Observing how Donald Trump chooses monologue over dialogue,tweeting and quacking-on about his ‘smartness’, is to witness American exceptionalism firsthand.Smartness appears to be the cloakthat conceals the expropriation of wealth, a practice common to many smart people.The 45th. President parades his celebrity status before millions of his minionswho cravethe material success he revels in. Celebrity culture proves supremely effective in dumbing-down the aspirations of the common people in most Western countries; a paradigm diverting attention away from matters of social justice.

Trump’s numerous followers epitomise a society devoid of a homogeneous perspective that might engender social development.Becoming delusional victims in a culture that leaves most of them indoctrinated to a point where they regard the idea of socialising their institutions as evil, they fall into the role of mini-shills serving king-pin-shills who stack the deck in favour of those who exploit them.Privatising wealth has always been the essential meansused toshore-up patriarchal societies beholden to the practice of acquiring financial and real estate capitalto consolidate their gentrified status.

The corporate footprint dating from the rule of King James 1 until now…300 years and counting… was alwaysabout settlement status maintaining power via deep-state machinations to achieve outcomes that were favourable to the privileged few; building power structures that would enable  conservativeelements to prevail over the aspirations of the many.

The new colony inevitably took on the semblance of the proto-society, where dumbing-down the voice of the peoplehad become a necessity, so that the will of an elitecould be imposed on the amorphous many. The will of the elite manifestedits’ power in every conceivable way, including the right to co-opt everything, which even included interpreting exploitation and predation as exceptional achievements. With the elite co-opting the people’s imagination,a new dark age descended on people living in the Americas.

Over 300 years in the Americas, new settlers…now 300 million and counting…arrived to colonise the fertile plains of this vast continent…bringing bad luck or evil karma…to the indigenous people already living there. As time passed, the replication of a financial capitalist template,honed to perfection in the proto-society, came into play that would send a few (1%) of the population to the top as celebrated monopolists…desiring to live in penthouses close to heaven…while the rest experienced mixed blessings or downright deprivation.The amorphous middle-class, secluded in gentrified gated-communities, and possessed of notions of racial superiority, behaved strangely, believing that thoseof another stripe…Blacks, Hispanics, the working poor and the abjectly poor… should be consigned to a lower tier so that they would notbe an embarrassment to them.Aspiring to live on a higher level within a cultural dung-heap where pride and prejudice caricatured civilised pretentions became the new norm for them.

To understand how grotesque inequality became the order of the day in the United States, might require one to question the memes circulating in the cultural biosphere throughout the 20thcentury…especially in Hollywood,wherethe denizens within the dream-machine, driving the communication machine on ‘probationary plates’ could so effectively disseminate propaganda, pretention and perversity to the masses, using escapist memes that misrepresentedwhat it meant to be free and animated in real terms; Hollywood became the ultimate American icon, quixotically making money by resorting to theatricalmeans to propagate the ‘exceptionality’ of all things American.Exploitingthe words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty was also good for the box-office, as America was in the business of commercialising everything, includingthat paean to the spirit of liberationwhich would be branded for profit;

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

But, the amorphous many failed to achieve liberation because they were continuouslyoutsmarted by wily people who knew how to tweetthe right kind of deal or access easy capital, thus making ‘capital’ accumulation the voice of America.How to make money was the name of the game, and Hollywood became very good at exploiting the potential of the silver screen to obscure the pains of alienation.

Within the spectrum that is settlement America…in my Father’s house there are many mansions …exists the legacy of past ‘deals’ that influence the present status quo in ways that confound the unsuspecting layperson’s understanding of what the term ‘business as usual’ means. McDonald’s, Western Union, Koch industries, caterpillar Inc., Apple Inc., are but a few corporations among hundreds that harness human imagination to Capitalism’s innately facile need to shape society according to its’ own needs…which is making money by harnessingtheculture of consumerism to speculative investment.

What alienates the consumer from the inventive process is the presence of shills in the marketplace coercing the social narrative in ways that infer that mana from tech-heavenwill solve every problem.  What the tech-marketplace is best at doing, is producing tools that require the production of ever more tools toreinforce the need for ever more investment in technologies that insist ondominance over nature as a means towards achieving some imagined future utopia made attainable by the unique smartness of the corporate elite.

But if our future is left to the mercy of the proprietorial Deep-State, the outlook is grim. Private investment will continue the dystopian rearrangement of the fabric of society, unless it is regulated…socialised. Robots replacing humans is a priority designed totransport the average Joe and Jane to a limbooutside the economic system where countless millions will experience an endgame thatconsigns them to irrelevance. It will be business-as-usual regardless of dystopian outcomes, and the Statue of Libertywill be discarded, because its’ words will have no stock value anymore.In time, these words will lose all social relevance, as Wall Street will have succeeded in expropriating the light that illuminates the golden door.

But wait a moment, don’t the contemporary shills look awfully like the shills of old?The Donald shill and the Hillary shill are shills that aspire to supporting the pent-house privileged class who stash the wealth of the nation in tax havens. Many people have pointed to the fact that America…the largest economy in the world…spends more than any other country on heath care, and receives mediocre results for all that spending. But perhaps we should not be too surprised by the maths after all, the investment class live in a country beyond our reach… as an untouchableclass embedded within the deep-state and setting the agenda.

It should be apparent to everyone, that advancing the argument that not only should an American health-care system match the developed world standard, it should set a new benchmark for the best system in the world. But that as it may be, reforms are blocked by an army of shills who buy politicians to muzzle reform, becausea more democratic system mightadvance the case for sharing the national wealth, and that of itself, is a great threat to the winner-take-all form of smartness we live with.

As well, there is an insidious smartness that identifies the colonial mentality as a force that actively exploits cultural sensibilities. Its’ the baggage of past eras insisting that we should be wary of stranger (culture) danger…danger of the ‘other’. Its’ a smartness profoundly committed to focusing on ancestry…or call it property ownership guaranteeing inherited wealth if you wish…accompanied by emotions thatretainumbilical connections to cradle-time that employ both oral and textual means to promote their case.Tribal-identityinevitably requires a show of strength to protect property andit soonbecomes apparent that anever-expanding defence-network is needed to maintain thebusiness-as-usual mindset from outside interference or competition.

However, common identity in the modern sense has assumed a secondary character that operates behind the cloak of a business-as-usual set of values…and business-as-usual is in fact the Deep State…and within the Deep State there are many economic mansions and alliances mysteriously connected to the business-as-usual use and misuse of money thatinhibit social and political development in many ways.The wellbeing of the majority has no representation in our present era.

It is no secret that Western culture is where the Rothchild and Rambo templates plied their respective trades…think funding and force…under the aegis of traditions that justifiedthe practice of usury, an ambiguous and dubious means of extracting profit by exploiting the penurious masses, became established practice.Over centuries, a facadeof respectability came to cloak the business-as-usual community that had become catalysts effecting change…mostly it was not change for the good, but simply wealth extraction.

Seeking to influence and eliminate opposition to theirown operations by promoting themselves as socially aware…despite evidence to the contrary that connected them to war-for-profit activities…as philanthropic entities living in castles and penthouses, theydecided there was nowhere else for them to go to, but deeper into the states they were operating in.Henceforth,they were to be theestablished faceof the status quo, and would find ways to protect wealthfrom challengesby controlling the social agenda.

So, this became the mentality that imposed a faux notion of order in the colonised mind; I am smart, and I make money, therefore I am right, explains perhaps, how limited attention to the colonisation of Palestine prevails in countries connected to this latest example of colonial exploition. America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, supplicants all, and mainly indifferent to the theft of Palestine, blandly attest to the vagaries of the colonial enterprisein silence as another Western coup-de-force bulldozes a path for the business-as-usual culture to profit from. Wars for profit were always a business-as-usual enterprise…and America has been at war for 97% of its’ history.

By the middle of the 20th. century, America, then harbouring an extensively conservative Jewish community…the ‘United Shills of America’…became deeply imbedded in the Americaneconomy…and with highly effective shills operating for Israel, succeededin their quest to influenceAmerican domestic and foreign policy by having vast amounts of money diverted to the Zionist cause.The tens of billions of dollars of America’s wealth siphoned from the nation’s treasury to support the colonisation of Palestine, was conducted in secrecy by faceless men in suits, shuttered behind closed doors, and whose business-as-usual acumen did not extend to thoughts concerning the wellbeing of the USA, or anything as specific or as efficient or just as a national health system for all Americans…domestic interests were subverted to private interests in the absence of a democratic or people’s party.

So, it came to pass, the 45th Real Estate Mogul, representing the shills of America, revealed all, when his tiny hands punched out his reasons for cancelling the U.K. state visit. It appeared that the visit to the U.K. was essentially a Real Estate visit, rather than a State visit. Trump the plutocrat, had issues with the relocation of the American Embassy in London.The very idea of going to London to cut a ribbon on a deal he himself had not cut, was anathema to him.

The U.S. didn’t own the embassy outright but leased it from Duke of Westminster, whose prestige and wealth owed everything to his ancestors who built castles…penthouses…atop the hovels of the peons. Thestrange lease-arrangement involving the American Embassy in London, was one which uniquely enabledthe mutual parties to cement new levels of prestige intoa tier systembuilt on private wealth.The Duke and The Donald,each a shill for pomp and pageantry, knew that appearances were more important than human-rights or anything else resembling matters of social justice.ThePresident, whose background was in bricks, mortar, glass and steel, had disciplined himself to focus on profiting from deals that elevated his own self-esteem. It was the only means available to him of showing the world how smart he was.Realising that finesse or equalityhad never put food on the banquet tables of the historically wealthypeople of the world, he went on to tweet;

“Reason I cancelled off my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for ‘peanuts’, only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!”

The United States and United Kingdom have enjoyed close ties that Winston Churchill called “the special relationship”…a camaraderie that transcends the Atlantic and the roots of America as Britain’s breakaway colony…no doubt about it, the past forever lives on in the present!

So much for America…God’s own country?

Denis A. Conroy, Freelance writer, Australia

 

 

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