The Culture of the Rich

So our democracy is finally dead after 235 yrs, replaced by the corporatist plutocracy the rich have always wanted. Our old level-seeking, middle-class-directed economy is no more, replaced by a plutonomy aimed at filling the needs of the rich and ignoring everyone else. Is that as far as it goes? Unfortunately, no.

Unsatisfied with simple control of all the money generated by the society on which it feeds, the plutocracy has been using a sizable chunk of its wealth to pay for propaganda to help "reorganize" the role and goals of the whole culture. Since this is the culture in which we will be living for the foreseeable future, it probably behooves us to start learning and internalizing its rules.

The True Religion

There is no God but Money.

The plutocracy worships money the way Egyptians used to worship the sun. It is the end-all/be-all forever and ever amen. No other considerations shall come before it. Not generosity or community needs and interests or even the simple humanity of common cause and shared realities. The only interests, policies, programs, or ideas that will be entertained will be those which comfort, protect, and/or enlarge the wealth of the already rich. Making or saving money will be the only criteria by which decisions affecting public life will be made. All other criteria, including the possibility that certain policies or programs might save the lives of people other than the rich, will be unceremoniously flushed and declared both irrelevant and frivolous, a waste of taxpayer money which would be much better spent in, say, paying the normal expenses of a corporation or boosting the pay packages of CEO's.

It will not be necessary to justify such policies or programs because it will be an article of unexamined faith that any policy benefitting the rich is ipso facto a necessary and required Good Thing. Anyone who questions that faith will be declared a heretic and may be burnt at the stake or otherwise sacrificed to appease the God of Money, called Moloch. Poor people and other stations of the not-rich will make up the bulk of the sacrifices to this god.

Humanitarianism will no longer be a factor acceptable in either public policy or the general culture since it maintains that there are values higher than those of making the wealthy wealthier, clearly an apostate position of heresy.

The True Law

The entire body of Western Law will be returned to the purity of condition it once had under the rule of the great barons of the Middle Ages when every law protected their wealth and social prerogatives, and the peasants were simply property to be used, treated, and disposed of as the barons saw fit.

The only human rights that will be recognized will be those which have been paid for in hard currency. Those who cannot pay will have no rights.

Any human right, even one which has been bought and paid for, which comes in conflict with any property right will be considered null and void. Any and all so-called "human rights" will be superceded by any and all property rights. IE, property rights will trump human rights in all cases. "Fairness" will only be considered in terms of what is fair to property owners. Non-property owners will be forbidden from using the word in courts of law because they do not own it.

The True Educational System

Humans will henceforth be regarded only in terms of their economic worth if adults or their potential economic worth if children. All decisions regarding their suitability for receipt of medical care, food dispersal, housing units, educational opportunities, etc, will be determined by their worth as economic units. This policy has already been put in place in many schools, for instance, beginning in the 80's.

The problem isn't only that...children are devalued by...mercantile criteria; childhood itself is also redefined. It ceases to hold value for its own sake but is valued only as a "necessary prologue" to utilitarian adulthood. the first ten, twelve, fifteen years of life are excavated of inherent moral worth in order to accommodate a regimen of basic training for the adult years that many of the poorest children may not even live to know. There is no reference to investing in the present - in the childhood of children - only in a later incarnation of the child as a "product" or "producer".

Precisely. The revaluation of all "humans" according to their producer-value which the corporatist rich have been injecting into the educational system for the last 30 years will simply be enlarged to cover adults as well. After all, if we're not making money for somebody, what good are we? Why should we be allowed to exist? If we are not useful to the rich, then we are dragging the economy down like leeches sucking blood that the heart could otherwise use to keep a master of the universe alive. Do we not then deserve to die?

The quote above was written in 1998, before NCLB and the disastrous cuts in education funding of the Bush Era, by Jonathan Kozol in a book called Ordinary Resurrections. In it, Kozol, among other things, documents the slow but sure takeover of educational goals by corporate values. In a footnote, he quotes the Chancellor of NYC's school system on the way public schools have been "moving in the direction of what is called 'industry-specific' education", that is, the way elementary and high schools have been designing earlier and earlier curriculum away from humanities to push students toward specific job training. Said the Chancellor, "Embedding these schools within industry gives us the chance to restructure the way sixth through eighth graders vare taught."

Indeed. No more of that civics nonsense or arts frivolousness. NYC dismantled its libraries, arts programs, and school clinics decades ago and hasn't replaced them despite record surpluses in tax returns from Wall Street. No no. We are to be turned into economic units from birth, if the corporations have anything to say about it.

And they do.

A lot.

Welcome to Corporate America's personally owned and run Monkey House. Eat your banana and STFU.

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Comments

[vwclown]

I might usually take the bait and fly into a wild rampage about how the kids are (mis)treated in the public school system, but not this time. ^_^ I have the image of Prince Charles and his lovely wife, Camilla, out for an evening at the theater, AS THEIR DRIVER TAKES THEM THROUGH A COLLEGE KIDS' PROTEST!!! (My God, however will they be able to properly plan for the upcoming royal wedding after such an upset?!!) I hope the kids in London just show up for classes even if they haven't paid the outrageous fees. It will be tough to go to every classroom to toss them out. They deserve to be in those nice buildings, enjoying the college experience. Without jobs and/or college classes for young adults, there could be some mischief... (I'm fairly certain.)

I bought bananas yesterday...