Yesterday, we curled in with our books. Into reading John Lescroart legal thrillers. Took a swim before dinner and it felt good. The pool has a unique design, two shallow ends and the deep part in the middle. Today is also moving day.
I read a lot. Sometimes junk, sometimes serious stuff. And, I thought the following essay by Will Moore had some interesting things to say. He is a political junkie and a member of the World Affairs Counsel.
Humans are a predatory species. We got to the top of the food chain on this planet by preying on everything else. We prey on animals, fish, on mollusks, and the other predators in the seas. Humans don't eat a lot of insects, we prey on them for honey, silk and certain beetles whose shells we use for dyes. We prey upon many more killing millions and millions of tons of insects in the process of agricultural competition with them. All those millions of tons of insects are the food supply for birds, fish and other species, so we're preying indirectly on those species as well.
We prey on everything including other humans. We no longer kill and eat other people, but we prey upon their products, their labor, their lands and their resources. Humans preying on other people is the source of all the wars that are going on.
In the old days raiding distant lands and "lesser" peoples seemed like a good idea. It was profitable. The world has changed. The idea that we have a God given right to raid and cheat "others" and plunder the earth is an idea that has outlived its time like cannibalism and slavery have gone with their times.
Wall Street is now the top predator on this planet and the working man is the prey of Wall Street imperialism for their mental resources, their labor and the products of their labor.
A lot of anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-communist small government advocates think that socialism is evil and capitalism is good. They seem to think that the government is the enemy of the people and Wall Street is our friend. That isn't true. We're the prey species in the unholy marriage of Washington and Wall Street.
There is no such thing as a power vacuum. If you take a bone away from a dog some other dog will take the bone. If you take power from one force in a power struggle, the power struggle doesn't end. Some other power will immediately fill that power vacuum. We're going to have a government whether we want one or not. If we don't have the government we have, we will have something else. We will have a warlord, a dictator, a military junta, a panel of judges, a Pope, or something else. That something else will be Wall Street. We will have a corporate plutocracy, a corporatocracy (which is where we are going). If Washington takes a penny from us in taxes, everybody knows about it; it's a visible tax. But we actually get something for that tax penny - roads, clean air, fresh milk, mail delivery, police protection, paramedics who will rush to your house when you have a heart attack, and many other services that we all take for granted. There can be such a thing as enough taxes. There can never be such a thing as enough profit. The corporatocracy is trying to diminish, defund, demolish, dismantle and disenfranchise the government we have with no clear idea as to what is going to replace it. The government we have is legally limited as to how predatory it can be and it has a constitutional mandate to serve the "general welfare" of "We the people." Those who are trying to dis-empower the government that we have are merely handing more power over to Wall Street capitalism. They are granting an unrestricted license to the primary predator on the planet to prey upon "We the people" with no legal limits and with no mandate to serve the "general welfare." Yeah, taxes are high, but government for profit will be ever more onerous. Perhaps we can agree that there can be no real freedom for debt slaves, and that the greatest threat to us all is the unholy marriage of two powerful predators, government and capitalism and that we should work to dissolve that marriage.
Food for thought.
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