Neoliberals Should Be Seen As The Tyrants They Are

The despots operating this genocide-based global hierarchy try everything to make themselves look respectable. They present themselves as realists or enforcers of a noble, disciplined order. They address their opponents with condescension and contempt, treating them as inferiors that can’t grasp how things really work. They use the media to engineer language in a way that makes what they do seem acceptable. Their goal is to have a total revolution toward oligarchy be seen as what makes sense.

We need to take away the neoliberals’ ability to legitimize themselves. Whenever someone in a position of power fights people’s right to health care, or promotes war propaganda, or voices the toxic Randian views about wealth reflecting integrity, they should be viewed as the tyrants they are. This harsh rejection of the elite’s worldview needs to be solidified in our minds, because it’s what can counter the tools being used for assimilating us into it.

These tools are uniquely dangerous among the propaganda of oppressive regimes, because they present society in a way that makes it impossible for the oppressed to recognize there’s an oligarchy. Neoliberal propaganda teaches that money is what defines a person’s worth, making wage theft, unlimited money in politics, and all other parts of the repressive system justifiable in the minds of whoever believes the propaganda. The basis for there being any kind of systemic inequity is negated under this logic, and any arguments that inequity is there can be responded to by accusing the arguer of wanting repressive government control.

It’s the fulfillment of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a story where the pigs turn all other animals into second class citizens while assuring them with how no animal calls any another one “master.” Because the humans, it’s pointed out, wanted to be called “master” when they were running the farm. The socialist states that have turned into tyrannies, which the neoliberals always warn we’re moving dangerously close toward, are as different from our current society as Animal Farm under human rule was different from rule by the pigs. Oppression is always oppression, injustice is always injustice. And more and more of the American people are realizing that.

We will continue raising awareness of “neoliberalism,” the term that describes a system which puts profits above all else. We will keep using the term “Deep State,” which was coined to describe an unelected government. We won’t let the Washington Post, among the 90% of media in this country that’s controlled by five powerful corporations, make us believe their propaganda by featuring the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

We’ll do this because we see where things are going under this system, and we want a different future. Right now in Puerto Rico, as an infrastructure weakened by austerity has put the island into pre-modern conditions after being hit by two hurricanes, corporations are carrying out a takeover. Electric companies are negotiating with a Puerto Rican government struggling through massive debt to privatize the area’s power grid, meaning when the electricity comes back in Puerto Rico months from now, it will likely be controlled by racketeers. At the same time the Trump administration has used the Hurricanes to increase police militarization, try to cut social services, and pass an NDAA bill that greatly expands the military budget and the president’s surveillance powers.

These are glimpses of the future we’ll have unless drastic changes are made. Climate change and economic crises have been increasing the militarization and corporate control of society for many years now. The rise in terrorism caused by the destabilization of the Middle East is being used to expand wars, suppress free speech, and persecute Muslims and refugees throughout western countries. Civilization is being divided into the “Green Zones” of the economically secure and the “Red Zones” of the majority who are now living in poverty. The oligarchy’s power is being rapidly consolidated and shut off from everywhere below the very top, with five men now owning as much wealth as half the world compared to eightmen at the start of this year and sixty-two at the start of 2016. 

These elites are building luxury survival bunkers in rural land and on the ocean, from which they’ll try to leverage their influence into creating a one-world totalitarian state in the coming years and decades. The 21st century’s converging crises are exacerbating the corporate takeover, and that takeover could become total as the collapse accelerates.

When that takeover is attempted, we’ll be bombarded with propaganda that reflects another one of Orwell’s assessment’s: that fascism’s appeal comes in its invitation to participate in danger and struggle, to satisfy the human urge for fighting which lets us survive and have strength. Except in this future, we won’t be fighting for survival. We’ll be fighting a war that’s meant to last forever, and that will need to end before we actually get the catharsis fascism claims to offer. We can get that catharsis by not fighting an endless sequence of enemies, but for what we want-living wages, single payer universal health care, an end to perpetual war, climate justice, social equality, a genuinely functioning democracy. Focus on these things even more than on fighting the neoliberals, and they’ll more likely be realized.