Land of the Free?

This. Absolutely.

The ruling class regards you as their greatest natural resource, and theirs to be exploited. America’s wealth was built on exploitation. First we exploited the Native Americans, by killing them and taking their land. Then we exploited the forced labor of African slaves. Then, economic policies have enabled predatory lenders to exploit multiple generations of immigrants and the otherwise poor.

If you think you aren’t being regarded as a slave or an Indian, ask yourself:

Are the richest 1 percent not enjoying the most wild-eyed orgy of prosperity since the time of the robber barons? Have financial lending institutions not taken your homes, after fiscal policies were put in place to enable predatory lending?

Have American wages not been suppressed, since 1980, until they are now essentially incompatible with actual living expenses? (Moyers points out that the income of average Americans — the bottom 90 percent — has increased by only $303 dollars in the last 28 years. The super-rich, on the other hand, have been having a real lulu of a decade.) Have insurance companies not been empowered to deny you health care and medical treatments, because their greed is regarded as being more important than your health? Have corporations not cut your pensions and benefits to the quick, while enjoying record profits? Are American children being given a fair and equal public education which can enable them to reach any goal or opportunity in our new globalized society? (No, actually: 2005, according to an article in the New York Times, was the year that 12th-grade reading and math scores were at an all-time low in the U.S. This is what happens when you keep cutting public school budgets.)

It is not unreasonable to infer from these nauseating statistics that if you make less than $250,000 a year, our leaders are casually planning for your children to grow up desperate and stupid, so that the ghoulish libido of imperial expansion will have warm bodies for America’s “voluntary” army — the employment of last resort. Alternately, they may go to a privatized, for-profit prison — the new American gulag of slave labor. The War on Drugs and the Three Strikes laws enabled a for-profit prison industrial complex to flourish, and now the U.S. incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world, including China. The middle class is the new wretched refuse of our own teeming shore.

This is institutionalized rape of 90 percent of Americans at the hands of a klepto-capitalist, plutocratic minority acting in lockstep with itself. Our Congress and our corporations are now Imelda Marcos, and the boots are walking all over you.

It’s still not a race-war, a holy war, or a culture war. It is, it always has been, a class war.

Waaaa! Socialfascinazicommunism!!! Jesus! Librul media!! Uhmerkanexceptionalism! Guns!