The Outcast

The Outcast
By David Glenn Cox

Professor Ward Churchill was fired from his teaching position at the University of Colorado for his comments surrounding September 11 attacks. Professor Churchill described the financial and technocratic corps of government as well as the commercial financial interests of America as “Little Eichmann’s.”

I no longer see this government as an entity which represents me or my interests nor do I see it as representing anyone that I know personally. What has taken place is a melding of state and corporate interests to where one can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins. Tens of millions of Americans have faced the terror of losing their homes in this land and this President, this corporate pitchman, pushes for a continuation of the investment tax credit so that corporations can take yet another tax deduction on research before off shoring the manufacturing process.

Officially nearly one quarter of America’s children live in poverty and the political class proposes only budget cuts. At a time of catastrophic national unemployment the political class calls for cut backs on unemployment compensation and healthcare programs. Are they mad? Do they not know the lessons of history? Do they believe that Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck can override the reaction to an eviction or foreclosure? Do they honestly believe that guns or laws will protect them from a hungry, struggling population?

I feel as if I’ve have been immersed in a bad dream from which I cannot awake. I’ve witnessed the changes in myself which unemployment and homelessness have wrought while I have witnessed the playback on our society as a whole. I no longer feel at home anywhere, I no longer have home town; I am from wherever I am at the time. I’ve lost my connection to a national identity and found a connection to these people like myself instead.

These feelings were made even more manifest recently as I tried to obtain a state photo ID card and was told that I needed a Social Security card to do so. I last saw my Social Security card while I still delivering newspapers as a child. I know the number but that is no longer good enough. So I went to get a replacement Social Security card and was told that I needed a photo ID to do so. Without these things I cannot fly on an airplane, nor ride a train, or bus. Under the Patriot Act, I violate the law just by walking the streets, I have become an untermensch, “Papers please.”

I must now prove to the government that I am a citizen and a member of this society. A birth certificate and a food stamp EBT card from Georgia aren’t proof enough. The clerks stood smirking at the counter and turned others away while I was there and it appeared as if that was their goal, to turn away as many as possible. Like a customer service phone number or a Microsoft help box it is doublespeak as its purpose is the opposite of what it is named.

The American media is nothing more than propaganda instrument; take for example the multiple versions of Osama bin Laden’s demise. There is only one true version and we haven’t been told of it yet. How does that make our media any different from the German media of the 1940’s or Soviet media? Our country operates two well known concentration camps, one in Cuba and the other in Afghanistan where we hold prisoners indefinitely who have not been charged with crimes and perhaps many more camps of which we have no knowledge of, are we to sleep better at night because of this? Are we to believe ourselves indemnified from such treatment by our government in the future?

Then this same media tells us that 395,000 new weekly unemployment claims is a good number and a better than expected number, and then the following week they proclaim that 409,000 new claims is a bad number. It is still over one million new unemployment claims per month and two millions workers have left the job rolls entirely in the last year while millions more struggle on working part time. These millions fight a losing battle of trying to keep their heads above water as their cries for help are answered with silence from their representatives. While this government’s answer for the crisis is a tax cut for big business. Government will cut their payroll taxes for each worker they hire, imagine if John Kennedy had offered only tax cuts to build a moon rocket.

The sad fact is, this government don’t give a flying f*ck about us, they live their isolated lives in their little fuehrer bunkers and gated communities. They send their children to private schools which will never feel the effects of budget cuts. They shop at specialty shops and gourmet grocery stores which don’t stock Hamburger helper. A growing trend among the rich is the fractional ownership of private jets. No metal detectors, empting of pockets or removing shoes for them. The wealthy now also receive tax cuts beyond the grave thanks to a gift and estate-tax exemption of up to $5 million this year and next. The exemption is for people who died after Dec. 31, 2010, and now any unused portion of that can be passed by the estate to the surviving spouse, according to tax legislation enacted by Congress in December.

This country invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, we operate militarily in Pakistan. Our military has launched cruise missile attacks on Yemen and airstrikes on Libya as well as covert attacks on Iran. We’ve become this aggressive military predator and the phrase “god bless our troops” makes me want to vomit. Our media no longer question the correctness of these assaults on world peace and all that is ever questioned is the accuracy of our weapons. Of course Republicans in Congress questioned Obama’s use of the war powers act but it wasn’t anything but politics.

The wars will go on as the mob of good Germans will blindly cheer for a flag that doesn’t represent me. I’m neither a star nor a stripe; I’m not red, white or blue. I’m an American and I refuse to be a good German. I’m an American who wants peace, an American who wants prosperity for our people. I want good schools for all of our children and good jobs for their parents and security for their grandparents. This government says that this is time of austerity but in that austerity is nothing more than that same old fraud of guns over butter and war over peace.

Mr. Obama emerged from his corporate headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue the other day and began his reelection campaign. After two years of being the most corporate and most right wing President in American history Obama now speaks of jobs and fighting Republicans. How f*cking stupid does he think that we are? Obama gives tax cuts to the wealthy and give aways to the corporations, a stimulus one third the size per capita as Germany’s. Tax cuts for oil drilling, tax cuts for new cars and new houses. Obama reauthorizes the Bush tax cuts with no thought of authoring his own tax cuts. Obama took three billion dollars of GM’s environmental clean up bill and made it yours and mine. This while Obama was vaporizing the pensions of thousands of mid level managers at GM and Chrysler, meanwhile GM is one of the most profitable companies in China.

Obama’s green energy bill had $17 million in research funds to design new oil drilling bits. He opened the Gulf of Mexico for oil drilling just as Ronald Reagan and both of the Bush boys had tried and failed to do. Obama has called for cuts in the prices oil companies pay to lease federal lands because Obama says it will create jobs. These are Obama’s jobs program; if we give enough to corporations they promise to create a job or two. This is a gross inversion and perversion of an American economy where American workers are forced by their government to compete with workers overseas who earn .83 cents an hour.

Now we are to believe that Obama is on our side? What should we hope for and what change is he promising us this time? Obama is a corporate front man, a face on the faceless warlike criminals who are riding our people into the ground. This is how you become a revolutionary by first becoming an outcast. It begins when the country of your birth no longer knows you and treats you as the problem. They ostracize you and marginalize you while claiming they want to help you as they piss on you and throw peanuts at you.

Of course we could vote for change as long as we can forget that courts stop vote counts and more recently a county clerk mysteriously found thirty thousand votes in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race. Florida was stolen in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 and even in the final analysis it is the parties who pick the candidates. Barack Obama ran for the Presidency in 2008 as a moderate and a reformer and has governed as George Bush’s protégée. The electoral process is dead and what you are in love with is but a ghost of that system.

A billion dollar Presidential campaign unfolds, Barack Obama versus whom? Tweedledee or Tweedledum, are we to be given a choice of President Michele Bachmann or President Rick Perry or four more years of Obama? Given a second term Obama will turn even harder to the right. He will reenter his corporate headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue and won’t emerge until its moving day in January 2016.

Whether you believe it or understand it, no matter whether you want to believe it or want to understand it, the revolution has already begun and the multitudes of ostracized, downsized, foreclosed, evicted, laid off and played off are forming. They number in the millions and their numbers are swelling rapidly.

"In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell