(archived from) May 17, 2010 by willyloman
by Scott Creighton
I was pleased to read about massive groups of people descending on the homes of bankers in D.C. to make their demands… then, unfortunately, I read a little more about it.
You see, that’s my problem. I should just look at the staged pictures, read the carefully worded headlines, and then consider myself “informed” as I move on to something else like Tiger Woods or something like that. But, alas… I read the articles.
And then, depression set in.
There is no real dissent movement in America anymore; it has been co-opted by well-financed, flashy, AstroTurf neoliberal policy support machines. Sunday’s “grassroots” demonstration just proves that point.
The Huffington Post (never one to let a reasonably “populist-looking” event go unnoticed that could support the Clinton/Obama agenda) reported on Sunday’s exercise in fake dissent this way:
the HEADLINE: Class Warfare: Hundreds Protest Outside Bankers’ Houses In DC
the IMAGE:
the FACTS: “Huge raucous crowds converged outside bank employees’ houses on Sunday afternoon to demand banks stop lobbying against Wall Street reform.”
The banking reform bill is so bad, that Chris Dodd is going to quit congress this year after it is passed. It’s so bad that it just gives more and more power to the privately owned Federal Reserve banks. It’s so bad that it actually allows for massive banking bailouts in the future without having to ask congress (ie. THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE) for consent. The banking reform bill is as “populist” as the healthcare reform bill was. The banking reform bill was practically written by bankers, for bankers. It’s a joke. It’s worse than a joke. It’s dangerous.
So how did all these misinformed people come to get to DC to rally FOR the bill that will hand over even more control and more money to the bankers they are supposedly protesting? They were bused in…
The Chicago-based grassroots organization National People’s Action, in coordination with the SEIU, bused more than 700 workers from 20 states to Baer’s neighborhood… Huffington Post
Now, how does a “grass-roots organization put together enough money to rent enough buses to drive around all over the country to pick up 700 “protesters” to take them to DC? For that matter, this is a multi-day event… how do they afford to put these people up in hotels, pay for their food, ect.? Now that has to be a lot of money. Too bad the NPA’s website doesn’t offer any information about where their funding comes from…
Perhaps a clue is the location of the group, the National People’s Action… they are out of Chicago. Obama is also out of Chicago and this “banking reform bill” is his baby. Not just that, but it is also a neoliberal fraud being perpetrated on the “progressive” movement and we all know the big money in America behind the neoliberal movement is also based in… Chicago. So is the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange, by the way.
When I see images that are so obviously staged as this one, I think of others that I have seen in the past.
Yeah right. These guys don't look like they are posing for the camera, do they
”Ok, where these shirts. Ok, hold these signs up. Ok, now give us that big “black power” salute from the 60′s. Oh yeah, that’s great. Now, here’s you hotel room key-card and your Appleby’s meal ticket… don’t be late for the bus”
Where have I seen fake demonstrations like this one before? I mean, ASIDE from the fraudulent “grass-roots” demonstrations for the Obamacare bill? Oh yeah… that’s right… it was for another neoliberal scumbag a decade ago…
You really haven’t got to look too much deeper than the “populist” organization behind this bused in demonstration and their SEIU affiliation to understand what this bullshit really is. Of course, the SEIU supported Obama’s insurance industry bailout plan and his automaker bailout plan and his corporate bailout plan, aka “The Stimulus Package”. In short, the SEIU has sold us out on every single fake reform bill that the neoliberal Obama administration has used to further enrich the very people who are turning this nation into a third world democracy.
As far as the National People’s Action are concerned, let’s see what else they support…
Here is a page where the National People’s Action are taking to the streets to demand real immigration reform as a result of Arizona’s new law (which is not really a “new” law, it just forces the enforcement of a federal law that seems to be ignored). Apparently, the National People’s Action wants to make sure that people here illegally aren’t considered “illegal” and they aren’t rounded up and deported. That certainly benefits people who are here illegally who don’t want to go back to Mexico and work for a neoliberal factory that pays .38 cents and hour and you can understand that. But it also benefits the Obama administration that is going to be pushing for George Bush’s immigration reform bill pretty soon and it also benefits U.S. corporations who just LOVE all that super cheap labor.
However, the National People’s Action efforts certainly don’t support the “national people”, be them born or nationalized, as that the influx of cheap labor will do nothing more than drive up competition for the few jobs that remain and thus drive DOWN wages and the standards of living for the “national people” on those buses.
Now, let me tell you a story. At the risk of being called “racist” and all those other things that will no doubt be leveled against me, I still have to tell you the story. So all you “progressives” and Rachel Maddow fans who are just itching to help Obama and Team Clinton pass George Bush’s immigration Reform and REAL ID Act, get ready to go into serious attack mode…
I have worked in the construction field most of my life. Since my first stint away from college when I went down to South Carolina, till the last job I held full-time building cabinets here in Tampa. Twenty years of related construction experience; union, non-union… commercial, residential… big cities and small… I have seen a lot over the past two decades. The devaluation of the skills of the working class in America is not the “fault” of the men and women who come over the border illegally but they are the instruments being used by those whose fault it is. This is the core of the neoliberal process. Open borders mean a race to the bottom for the standard of living for the working class. That is why each and every single IMF restructuring plan includes some form of “open borders” process.
But let me give you a current example of how this works in real-time.
When I first moved to this home I had a next door neighbor who owned his own painting company. He worked hard, 5 or 6 days a week. He owned his own home and provided well for his wife and daughters. He even employed a few people over the first years that I knew him. At the time, I owned my own design and drafting company. My neighbor had several cars he worked on and raced. He took his family fishing on the weekends and bought a SeaDoo that they loved taking out and running.
I live in a duplex.
Years go by, the economy crashes, I get sick, my business is gone.
My neighbor is one of a few who is holding onto his home, barely. He hardly able to find work… and when I mean “find work” I mean that he is now working for someone else at an hourly wage that is a fraction of what he used to make. He is very close to losing his home, the home his children have been raised in. He sold his race cars years ago and the SeaDoo… he gets by doing whatever he has too in order to keep making that payment that keeps his kids with a roof over their head. Like millions of others, he is a good man, a hard working man, reduced to a subsistence level standard of living by forces beyond his control.
For nearly three years a Mexican family lived in the other unit of the duplex with me. Well, some of them were from Mexico. The husband certainly was. He wasn’t on the lease and he always seemed to go somewhere when the landlord came by. He never missed a day of work in the 3 years he lived here. He was a painter.
When I say “was”… that’s a funny story.
About 9 months ago I got out of the hospital, I was in the heart center for 6 days… the DVT and Pulmonary Embolism had damaged my heart. About a week after I got out, I was in the backyard and my Mexican painter neighbor was in his part of the backyard trying to kick his little white poodle to death so I got fired up and threatened to jump the fence to go after him if he didn’t stop. His wife spoke up for him because he couldn’t speak English. She said I “lied”, that I was “lazy” and “racist”… all charges I found out she later repeated to my landlord and my neighbors, I suppose in some kind of pre-emptive spin control… I don’t know. But the point was, she said her husband wasn’t like that… that he was a “good hard-working man”
Three weeks ago, this “good hard-working” Mexican painter tried to kill his wife and kidnap their daughter to take her with him to Mexico or some place. His wife, the one who accused me of lying and being “lazy”, was leaving him because he beat her pretty regularly. So, this guy kicked in the window of the apartment she had moved into, attack her with a wrench or something trying to bash her brains in, broke her arm in several places instead, and then stole the young girl, tossed her in the company van, and drove off.
Now, the happy end of the story is the wife and daughter are together and happy in their new apartment. The cops responded to the 911 call in less than a minute and the tactical team found the guy in a store while he was trying to buy some candy for the little girl to keep her from crying. Since he didn’t speak English, the tactical team almost had to shoot him to get him to get on the ground, but eventually, the universal language of an MP-5 became pretty clear to the guy and he gave up.
The wife is recovering well and the little girl seems to have put the whole thing behind her. I saw them both when they came by to get the rest of their things out of the apartment. I told the wife that I was glad she had her child back and that everything was going to work out for the best.
The husband faces charges of breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, kidnapping. If he ever gets out of prison, I was told he would be deported, because he was here illegally.
Now why do I tell you this story?
Is it because I think all illegal immigrants are potential felons? No.
I tell you this story because I want to make it clear that simply keeping people here in the States who are being forced to work for next to nothing does NO ONE any good.
The fact is, this man knew he was being taken advantage of. This man knew he was never going to make a decent living even working here in the U.S. and that must have eaten away at him and eventually his frustration poured out all over his own family.
Not all illegals will be effected this way that is for sure. But know this; the damage this neoliberal restructuring is doing to working Americans and illegals alike is taking its toll. You can’t expect some to labor 40 hours a week and get next to nothing in return, week after week and year after year, and not expect to see this kind of thing become more and more commonplace. It just doesn’t work like that.
So as the fake dissent movement, underwritten by organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation or the Ford Foundation, plugs along staging their phony demonstrations, I want you to understand what they are really supporting. These fake movements are designed to give the warm glow of supporting “the people” but what they actually support are the neoliberal policies of the Clinton dominated Obama White House.
… the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been dis-empowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us. Chris Hedges
Like the fake protests down in Florida to stop the recount, these staged theatrical events represent the start of a darker set of consequences just waiting to take shape.
No good will come of this.
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