If you like the photos for this story, you can see the rest from this set here...
---
Authored by Dr. Pitchfork.
If there is one article you must read this Winter, it is Angelo Codevilla's "America's Ruling Class -- And The Perils of Revolution." With good reason, it has been likened to Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto," but it turns Marxoid class theory on its head: the real enemy of the People are not the capitalists, but the politicians, the bureaucrats, the corporate insiders and their apologists in the media. Our class enemies are the people behind TARP and all the ongoing bank bailouts.
Indeed, Codevilla begins his essay with the bank bailouts, describing how the politicians, the bankers and their media shills, all pushed for the passage of TARP, even while the People themselves adamantly opposed it.
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.
In September and October of 2008, it made little difference whether your representative or senator were a Democrat or a Republican. The "ruling class" had decreed that the banks would be bailed out. What you thought or wanted didn't matter. (It still doesn't.)
What Codevilla's essay provides is a conceptual framework for understanding our current situation. In brief:
- America is divided between a "ruling class" and a "country class"
- The "ruling class," regardless of party affiliation, share what Codevilla calls "a presumption to dominate"
- The ruling class shares, above all, an orientation towards -- and often a direct dependence upon -- the government
- It is not wealth that distinguishes the "ruling class," but the power and privilege they have through their connection to government
- Nor do achievment and ability distinguish them: successful members of the "ruling class" speak the right language ("political correctness"), recognize the correct shibboleths and show a disdain for those they rule or exploit
- The "ruling class" dresses its agenda in moral and intellectual superiority, often citing "scientific" evidence for support, but their real agenda is POWER
- The "country class" (the rest of us) are largely religious, hard-working, family oriented and share a fundamental belief in fairness and equality
- But the "country class" is also culturally and geographically diverse
- The "country class" lacks obvious coherence as a group or a "class" (in the usual sense), and has thus far been unable to translate its numerical superiority into political power and influence
- Nonetheless, direct and open conflict between the "ruling class" and the "country class" is likely inevitable, just as the outcome of that conflict is uncertain.
The solution is simple. Vote them all out in 2010 and 2012. Except Ron Paul.
---
If you like the photos for this story, you can see the rest from this set here...
---