Okay, you need to be a resident of a gated community -- or get a call-down from one of the insiders to let you in as a visitor -- to partake of private luxuries.

But when that gated community has the destiny of our nation's economic future inside it -- which is gambled away legally and illegally by many of what Brazilian President Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva [1]calls the soucrce of the global economic crisis "created by men with blue eyes."

In America, we've been played like fools by a game that's fixed from the top to make ensure that only members of the gated community are allowed to abscond with huge chunks of the American economy -- send jobs overseas, receive taxpayer funded corporate welfare, get their taxes cut as a gift of thievery from the working class, and gets hundreds of billions of dollars in "stimulus" money from us to stimulate themselves economically.

Years back songwriter/singer Leonard Cohen wrote "Everybody Knows," which succinctly captures our unending dilemma:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

Thats how it goes

Everybody knows

Only the rich in the gated community are getting richer and the working class is getting poorer.  Mass E-mails to congress, as we noted yesterday, short of mass protests (like the ceaseless, impassioned kind that ended the Vietnam War) are a con.  The fix is in.

As the Chinese crushed dissent in Tiananmen Square with brute force, corporations like EXXON/Mobil -- who just had the largest quarterly profit in the history of the world -- crush an economic fair playing field with hundreds of billions of dollars.  Their are news conferences with e-mail petitions and then they are thrown in a garbage can or deleted from Congressional e-mail, if they ever make it through the spam filter.  Progressive organizations and publications use them to create mailing and solicitation lists, not with a realistic expectation of matching the economic juggernaut of the oligarchy that is comparable to the military might exhibited at Tiananmen Square -- or by the tyrannical regimes in Iran, Honduras, and Burma among others today.

And the corporate media and the corporate ads that even fill progressive cites are the "mind framing" context in which positions are calibrated to favor the casino of corporate America, so that the fundamental injustices being done to America are disguised.

If the Dittoheads and FOX News watchers ever got accurate information on how they are being fleeced and robbed, there would be another revolution in American that would restore our original democracy of the people, by the people and for the people.

What is most unnerving, as I wrote yesterday, [2]is that the enormous potential of American ingenuity and entrepeneurialism is being stifled by the gated community that wants to limit the nation's riches -- built currently on massive debt -- to residents who live in the garden of super wealth.  Our unique American ability to progress without boundaries is being shut down by the brute force of unseemly sums of dollars.

Oh, we can complain that Harry Reid is spineless, that Barack Obama is too cautious and exhibits more timidity than audacity -- and we do -- but the problem is systemic.  Weakness among the Democrats triumphs because too many of them are bought off. And Barack Obama probably quickly discovered that he wasn't top dog: Wall Street and the corporate oligarchy are.  And so he made his piece with them.

Instead of change we can believe in, we are getting more of the same.  In fact yesterday, President Obama chastised progressives [3] -- yes progressives -- for criticizing the "centrist" Dems who are holding up a government healthcare payer option.  That's not change; that's more of the same.

And the corporate media protects the gated village of wealth at every turn.  And while thousands of progresssives have generously and passionately supported BuzzFlash over the years -- beginning when we were about the only feisty voice for democracy on the web in 2000 -- others just want to talk the talk, but rather spend money on "brand" products than support the new economy and new journalism on BuzzFlash.  They'll pay for a corporate newspaper, cable TV and a large plasma screen HDTV, but won't buy progressive products to support progressive journalism.

Not until we feel the passsion that the members of the Green Revolution feel when they take to the streets in masses will we assume the power to restore our economic and political democracy.

Not until progressives with the financial wherewithal decide to put their country above their bank accounts and support corporate-free progressive media will we begin to counter the mainstream media, whose corporate coverage benefits its own owners.

Because unless we have and own the megaphone, the criticisms of the corporate media bounce right off their back.

We must get the truth through unfiltered.  There is no reason we have left for letting the working class be played as pawns to allow the gated community to fix the game and play with loaded dice by creating scapegoats.

No reason at all.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Technorati Tags: EditorBlog [4] Gated Economic Communities [5] The Dice are Loaded [6] Limiting Progress [7]

Links:

[1] http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jpFFnnFhgJCEKUvnhSOe9RI6eUAA

[2] http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/8901

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/03/AR2009070302309.html

[4] http://technorati.com/tag/EditorBlog

[5] http://technorati.com/tag/Gated Economic Communities

[6] http://technorati.com/tag/The Dice are Loaded

[7] http://technorati.com/tag/Limiting Progress

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