“The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.” - Aristotle

November 15, 2007
      Beside the dissembling and lies of omission by conservatives, consider the violent repression of the left beginning with Kennedy, King, Evers, X and other assassinations. Add to those the ‘68 Chicago convention and the May 4, 1970 Kent State Massacre. Don’t forget May 14, 1970 in Jackson, Mississippi. Then there’s the Chicago School Shock Therapy, promoted violently on September 11, 1973 by Pinochet in Chile. The Argentine junta and the imposition of Milton Friedman’s neoliberal free trade¹ [World Trade] on the rest of the Southern Cone of South America also took place in the late ‘60s and 1970s. Is the anti neoliberal attack on the World Trade Center, on 9/11/01, partly a reaction to the shock therapy of state terror in Latin America and elsewhere around the globe?

¹ - “Milton Friedman . . . the father of Neoliberalism” - Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

      The WTC attack certainly shocked the American People and abetted the tightening of corporatist surveillance, supervision and control here. By reducing our minds to a state of fearful malleability it allowed the creation and reinforcement of support for the ruling elite’s neo aristocratic establishment. Did the terrorists intend to make US suffer at home the pain inflicted on peoples around the world by the neo liberal global corporate empire? Increased concentration of wealth and lowering of living standards for most of US has occurred since 911. The losses of the many are partly as a consequence of common funds diverted to mercenary forces and other government contractors involved in the war on terror. Did the real beneficiaries of 911 put the Saudi terrorists up to it, in order to create the state of mind in America that would allow the furtherance of the pyramid scam concentration wealth that’s taken place in the past six years?
      The result of the imposition of Friedman’s economic shock therapy and neoliberal theory has been the further concentration of wealth among the rich and the few sellouts that minister to them. This has been effected by deregulation, low taxes for the rich, privatization and free trade of our livelihoods to maximize their profits. That is the design of the neoliberal formula. It creates increased poverty and debt for the rest of US. It is obvious that for most of US our living standards have declined. Milton and Nixon and Pinochet and Kissinger and Reagan and Greenspan and Becker and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Bernanke . . . all of them are [active or passive ] supporters of neoliberal state terror. Their intention has been to recreate themselves as neo aristocrats. The cumulative effect of their greed is pain and suffering for the majority.
      Stalwart support of neoliberal neo aristocracy is gained by creating the illusion of opportunity. That is: the marks are fooled and stay fooled. The fact that such a small percentage of the population can succeed - and as wealth is concentrated zero sum reality indicates that fraction must grow ever smaller - is hidden partly by blaming the victims for our failure. We’re told that, if we were competent and persevered like they do, we too could have what they have. I suspect that the perpetrators believe that propaganda of vanity and conceit. They don’t understand that because they have hoarded the produce of the community [note that it’s not the product of their own hard work that they have] there’s not enough left for US to have a fair share. But they’ll tell you that all you need is an education and if you don’t have it, that’s your own fault. They ignore the truth. Like more than average wealth is limited, there are not enough college classrooms or middle class professional jobs for everyone even if they hadn’t deliberately sabotaged your elementary and high school educations. And the competition for what does exist is not played fairly.
      Instead of encouraging them, the system deliberately tries to daunt the majority of students in order to make them stupid and feel responsible for their failure to achieve the American Dream. That’s how the education system has been made to serve the rich. The Manchurian Candidate teachers, who came through the system, don’t even know they’ve been trained to hobble most students by stressing the competitive nature of learning. They do it with tests and grades. [Not to be boasting but to forestall specious accusations of jealousy, my college GPA is 3.5/4.0.] Make it now or you're doomed to poverty like your parents before you. But they don’t tell it like it is. They say we all have equal opportunity. Only fools believe the unscrupulous lies that serve the perpetuation of evil that is the status quo.
      Only three percent of students in college are there because of affirmative action. 74% are there because their parents have the money to send them. No one’s discussing class but 15% of the students don’t have the grades or SATs, yet they still occupy space in and receive degrees from prestigious schools. [See Dubya’s Harvard MBA, after he was refused admission to graduate school in Texas.] Their families have donated money or property. These white kids aren’t mentioned by those who oppose affirmative action. Peter Schmidt on Book TV did say this and further that the battle against affirmative action will reinforce the [what looks to me like a defacto caste] system determined by birth [and perpetuated by the corruption of democracy and opportunity]. - Color and Money: How Rich White Kids are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action, by Peter Schmidt

      Patricia acknowledged that greed is the source of the sub prime problem. When I generalized and said that service economy, outsourcing and the profit of greedy investors were also dissipative, she countered and diverted the blame to unions with a patronizing walk down the path. “If you have a choice between a $9 chair and a $900 . . . ” Putting aside the too typical exaggeration employed universally by the bourgeoisie and their masters, I said that the most unnecessary part of the cost of any product was the investor’s profit. She said she was an investor. I tried to explain that economy is a common endeavor but she wasn’t listening. So I repeated the truth that no sellout will hear as well as asking her to imagine a world in which everyone is an investor. Then I went on to talk about the dissipative nature of profit that detracts from the incomes of consumers and that an economy that works for less than one in five doesn’t work. As to be expected with selfish, puerile, middle class fools, she didn’t hear that either.
      Why is Friedman’s “freedom of choice” the touchstone and why is it false? Because it’s not the operative freedom in the “free market” economy, to answer out of order. That would be the freedom of the rich and the sellouts who minister to them to have all the money and property. That assertion is evidenced by the outcomes and especially the slope of the economic “regression” of our “game” for the past 39 years. But it’s the specious convenience of such lies that makes them so popular. The delusion is reinforced by massaging, deleting and otherwise “managing” economic data and statistics.² Then they repeat the neoliberal free market theory that the honest evidence and truth would refute. Don’t bother to confront them. If they know the truth about who and what they really are there’s not enough sincerity or honesty in them to acknowledge it. Denial, whether to self or to US, is the nature of conservatism.

² - See Reagan’s “reform” of the consumer price index and labor statistics.