Address to the Poor of the United States
Address to the Poor of the United States
  • Korea IT Times
  • 승인 2023.09.27 07:38
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By Emanuel Pastreich (epastreich@asia-institute.org)

Emanuel Pastreich, President of The Asia Institute (Washington D.C., Seoul, Tokyo, Hanoi) and former professor of Kyung Hee University.

 

I am certain, at the very moment I utter these words, that you are astonished to hear them, amazed to be the subject of a carefully-crafted political speech. Why might that be? You are astounded for the most simple reason that, as we know so painfully well, the poor do not exist in American politics.

It is not simply because the two political parties, the Whores and the Pimps, must spend all their time bowing their heads low before the cruel gods, the billionaires, the bankers and their lackeys in order to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. No, there is a deeper denial taking place in America as the wheels come off the cart.

A vast blanket of amnesia has been draped over the country and whereas organizing the poor, or leading the workers in a struggle for justice, was a significant part of politics in a previous age, we have only cardboard progressives today, men and women who talk about the needs of the “middle class” --by which they mean those who are visible from the celestial heights of the billionaires in their spacecraft above.

We hold, however, that if the poor cannot be mentioned, if they are assumed to be as insignificant as cockroaches and maggots to the billionaires who pull the strings, then verily we may pronounce that if the poor do not exist, then democracy does not exist either.

For that matter, if the poor who struggle to earn a few dollars at part-time jobs, or try to keep warm in their make-shift houses rigged up from plastic and cardboard, together with their undernourished children, if they do not mean anything to the over-fed politicians, the corporate lobbyists, the revolving-door bureaucrats, or the plastic journalists, then governance does not exist in America, and the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence are worthless scraps of paper better used to mop up the vomit of a starving man sitting in a private prison in solitary confinement, better used as a diaper for the premature baby born to a girl working at McDonalds who suffers endless diarrhea, better to be used to fill the cracks in the wall where the piercing cold wind gets through to an aged man scrapping dog food into a bowl for his dinner.

Why they want you poor

We have had enough of that ‘middle class” fairy tale that suggests that there is something shameful about poverty, that being poor means that one is a failure. But it is wealth, not poverty, that is shameful in this age.

We have had enough of that “blame the victim” routine. You poor are poor because the multinational corporations want you to be poor. They want you poor so that you will do anything to get a meal so that you can never get the education necessary to oppose their tyrannical rule. They do not think you are people. You are a labor market and the bankers demand flexibility at any cost.
They want you poor so that those who have real jobs will always be terrified that the poor will take their jobs. The billionaires want the so-called “middle class” to be afraid of you, not to be afraid of the billionaires, who are marketed 24-7 as the friends of the middle class, the defenders of Twitter and other psychological operations meant to dumb down citizens.

Yes, we have had enough of this! Somewhere I heard, 
“Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
What does that mean? Could it mean that our salvation lies not with Bill Gates and Elon Musk, and the other gaudy members of the parasite class, but that the promise for our future is there with you, the poor, the downtrodden, and the despised?

Yes, you know exactly how things work and you are not trying to deceive yourself into believing that somehow things are just fine when they are not.
You have no need to deceive yourselves because you have seen things exactly as they are.

You know how things work in America. You know that there is nothing more expensive than having no money. Whether you are forced to ride on horribly overpriced public transportation, forced to pay a fortune for hospitals because you cannot afford healthcare, or forced to eat everyday takeout processed foods because your job will not give you the time to feed yourself, you know that you are forced to pay all your money to survive, and then to go into debt, if you are allowed to go into debt.  Many of you will go slowly into the cold, into despair, and into hunger.

On race and immigration

Let me say a word about race and immigration because these are the two topics that the billionaires love to use to divide Americans, to get the little man to fight the little man while THE MAN makes out like a bandit, leaving us confused and docile, ready to accept his murderous demands.

No one knows this scam better than the poor.

Racism has existed for a long time in the United States. It is a product of ignorance, of fear, and of the projection of deep insecurities onto others. Racism was used by the man to justify holding black people as slaves, so that workers would be forced to work for less and so that industrialists and merchants could become rich.

Contempt for the native peoples was taught to whites in America so that no one would question the seizure of their lands. Now we know that the rich planned to seize all the land of all men and women. They just started with the native people.
We must not forget the racist tales told to our people that resulted in such cruelty, that caused such pain. But we most certainly cannot allow the billionaires to use the race card to cover over, to obscure, the real battle in our country, the battle of class, the battle of all of us against a handful of the super-rich.

The poor do not exist, but race is a hot topic every day. The radical concentration of wealth never happened, but attacks on minorities are broadcast on TV without end.

Some of those attacks are real, and the sad efforts of certain individuals to blame the crimes they have suffered at the hands of the billionaires on blacks, Asians, or other immigrants.

Many of those attacks these days are false flag operations set up by corrupt parts of the police and private intelligence firms so as to give those watching TV the impression that some sort of race war is going on. Maybe one day we will learn which part of the story was true.

Black versus white, fear of Asians, the Hispanics, would never have become such enormous problems if we had not commercial media telling us for the last 150 years that they are problems.

Some of you are poor immigrants, perhaps forced to come here when multinational corporations seized your land in Haiti or Chile when banks destroyed your jobs in Argentina or Mexico. You know that blaming immigrants for the sins of the rich is the oldest trick in the book. We must defeat our common enemy here, and back there so that we can all go home again.
The tricks of the trade

Our money economy does not offer anything to support the poor. Occasionally the government offers scams and tricks to lure you into fatal “public-private partnerships” created to exploit you, to make you even more desperate. Most of the smiling politicians would rather have you locked up in prisons where you can create tremendous profits for their pals in the prison industrial complex--why they would rather you generate for them 100,000 dollars a year as a prisoner than give you a dollar to feed your children. In fact, there is nothing they would like better than to force you to commit a crime so that they can lock you up so that they can shower money on their for-profit police forces.

If we want to save this country, we must start with you, the poor, the downtrodden. If you have the opportunity to feed yourselves, educate yourselves, and be independent of the parasite economy rigged up by the billionaires, then you will transform our nation with your own hands and create a democratic and equal society.

Democracy can never, will never, be trickle-down. It can only be built from the bottom up.

We know that poverty is what awaits most of those in that “middle class” in the years ahead. The sooner that they figure out that their interests are the same as yours, and that the billionaires are not entrepreneurs and innovators, but their sworn class enemies, the sooner they will smarten up and join you in your struggle for freedom and for liberty.

On socialism

Perhaps you noticed that Congress passed a resolution by an overwhelming margin on February 2 entitled  “Denouncing the horrors of socialism.” The resolution states that “Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.”

You as poor people have never enjoyed the “socialism” for billionaires by which the Federal Reserve and Congress sprinkle trillions of dollars on the rich, so you are no doubt scratching your head about what is so frightening about the word “socialism.”

Socialism has many meanings, and there have been flaws in various socialist projects over the years. However, the United States has embraced numerous socialist policies over the last century. In fact, whether it is public education, social security, Medicare, or workers’ rights to vacations and overtime, the socialist policies adopted by the United States are the most popular policies carried out by the government.

No, socialism is being painted as a devil because the billionaires behind the congressmen never, never, never want you to think that the Federal government might be empowered to seize the wealth of Pfizer and Moderna, and of its owners, so as to compensate you for those vaccines, that the government could be reinvented so as to protect the poor, to stand up for the workers. No, you never heard that idea. Forget that I ever mentioned it.

I stand with the poor

I stand with you, the poor, and I pledge that you will be at the center of our new economy. I do not ask for handouts for you. No! You do not need handouts. Handouts are what our government gives to billionaires and multinational corporations--neither of which are American in any sense of the word.
All you need is to be treated as humans, respected as people with souls and feelings, with families and beliefs. All you need is to be given what those of privilege, those who refer to themselves deviously as “middle class,” what they get for free.

 


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