These Are Not Freedom Defenders. They Are Bullies To The Poor.

The reigning bullies orient their worldviews and careers around doing harm to the vulnerable. They seem to take pleasure in crushing those below them. The inadequacies they perceive in the poor outrage them more than any of the staggering injustices committed by the rich.

Their toxic campaign has distorted the national landscape. Many cities have put spikes onto the public surfaces to stop the homeless from sleeping on them. The old factory towns have been almost completely deindustrialized by corporate trade deals, with abandoned houses and overgrown streets left behind. A real unemployment rate of 8%, and the United States’ uniquely bad homeless protection system, has driven over 1.5 million people into the streets. It seems only a matter of time before the rest of the 99% joins them.

It’s the job of the system’s propagandists to mock and malign those who’ve been discarded by the rise of corporate capitalism. Their absurd arguments that poverty is a choice, kleptocracy and greed are virtues, and social welfare is evil are supported by a corrupt class of elite academics, pundits, religious leaders and politicians. Facts and statistics are banished to support this worldview. These
 demagogues present themselves as the only ones who should be taken seriously, and denounce those who stand with the oppressed as weak and naive.

Even the homeless are demonized as lazy parasites, just like immigrants, blacks, Hispanics, and the rest of the underclass. And when the growing poverty becomes undeniable, it’s blamed on the very most vulnerable people.

“The wealth siphoning to the 1% is destroying the middle-class, while automation combined with sending American jobs overseas has made it incredibly difficult for hard working Americans to make ends meet,” wrote the author Michael E Sparks in reaction to President’s Trump’s demagogic speech to a crowd of Boy Scouts in July. “And when people are poor, desperate and angry, they look for someone to blame. So when the billionaire, ‘self made’, American dream in a suit stands up and says that he’s going to kill the black man’s health bill and the young white men start chanting ‘USA!! USA!!’, well, we just might have a problem.”

Sparks, who experienced the venomous authoritarianism of the corporate state when he went to the 2016 Democratic convention as a Bernie Sanders delegate, has been the victim of similar bullying from a young age. “Me with my job as whipping boy, they as the neighborhood bullies,” he’s recounted. “My bruised ribs would buy me no sanctuary tomorrow. A new school-day meant we all hit the reset button. You might be wondering what the impetus behind these daily beatings was. I can answer it simply by saying that my family was poor. Looking back, I realized that John Southwood and his gang were also poor. But they weren’t poor like we were poor. They could afford luxuries like cigarettes and beer. And their clothes seemed to fit okay, whereas mine were hand-me-downs from my cousins, who were younger than me.”

As the Trump administration dismantles workers’ rights, attacks health care, and expands corporate power, the same sense of superiority and entitlement prevails behind it all. Trump has gloated many times about how superior he believes his genetics are, and describes himself as a “gene believer” in a way that resembles the ideology of eugenics. This is the conclusion of the worldview that the elite use to justify their rule. Subjection and poverty has been made into the natural state of the poor, and the rich are now innately entitled to infinite wealth and power.

For the last year or so, me and tens of millions of others in the lower classes have been punching back up at the oligarchy. We’ve defeated the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We’ve made the corporate elite scared to the point where they’re now filling the White House with their members to ensure they’ll stay in control. We’ve strengthened progressive institutions while electing dozens of Greens anddemocratic socialists. We’ve become such a threat to the establishment media that the plutocrats have imposed massive censorship measures on our rising online alternative information outlets. We won’t stop fighting until every one of the voiceless, vulnerable people that corporate propagandists attack are given the security and dignity they deserve.

The bullies in power will cling to their possessions as the people continue to revolt. They’ll employ extreme censorship, manufactured war, mass propaganda, covert sabotage of movements, and violence to try to stop the encroachment of democracy and free thought. And they’ll feel justified in it, telling themselves the revolutionaries are violating their freedom and threatening society’s stability, even as catastrophe develops because the system they cling to.