America’s Enslaving Freedoms

The White people who came to the American continents and eventually established the many nations of the Western Hemisphere, including the United States of America, were united in their belief in three motivating principles:

1. They wanted the freedom to practice their religion, and to persecute those who did not,

2. They wanted the freedom to practice genocide of the native populations in order to gain real estate,

3. They wanted the freedom to practice slavery, both chattel slavery and wage slavery, to gain wealth.

In today’s United States, these three freedoms are somewhat tempered for political expediency, but their motivational cores remain as the essence of this nation’s attraction to immigrants from around the world.

The freedom of religion is an umbrella under which we gather our many forms of enjoying ignorance and being comforted by bigotry. Racism, anti-science irrationality, paternalism, sexism, child abuse, homophobia and traditional religious intolerance of all kinds are all enthusiastically maintained here.

The freedom to practice genocide is now a systematized slow-motion process of wealth-driven legality degrading and displacing depreciated populations to extract material advantages from those being impoverished. The combine of the banking, real estate and fossil fuel industries, and their many land-grab schemes for: gentrification, urban commercial development, large-scale industrialized agriculture, privatization of scenic areas, pipelines and natural resource extraction, all find their motivational root in this freedom of the wealthy to exclude.

The freedom to enslave remains as popular today as it has always been. Gaining the rewards from the unpaid and even forced labor of others is an enduring desirable among our species. Again, in today’s America the raw slavery of the past is difficult to practice on a grand scale, though many individuals do manage to be masters over their own hidden slavery operations (of economic as well as sexual slavery). The major slavery plantations serving USA owners today are the tragically vast private prison and slavery complex, and the internationally outsourced de facto slavery operations of pittance wage labor producing “low cost” (high profit) products for import to the USA.

One can easily see strong resonances of these three principles as the foundations of many US foreign policies, entanglements and alliances; with Israel and Saudi Arabia for example.

Most Americans adhere to these principles, even if they don’t realize it, because they are easily distracted shallow thinkers whom corporate media indoctrinates without difficulty. Our public political discourse is confined to the narrowest of ranges centered squarely in neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy. The grotesque fluff that passes for political debate, currently between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, is entirely about the inconsequential atmospherics that each presidential contender would prefer to exhibit were they to be appointed the manager of the existing, unchangeable and continuing neoliberal economic regime.

The purpose of the US corporate-owned government is to maintain the conditions that allow today’s corporate wealth-generating schemes to continue their extraction from the national and world common good. There is no room for the voice of wage-slave America in the political process imposed for the benefit of the wealthy. That was the bluntly obvious message, sent by the ownership class to wage-slave America, in the blocking of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Jill Stein and the Green Party valiantly carry on with the most popular yet least supported agenda for wage-slave Americans, but again, too many are imprisoned by their fear-based indoctrination.

Remaining faithful to learned delusions for enslavement is more comforting to most of the electorate than breaking out into a rebellious independence of logical thought, based on facts, that leads to politically disobedient actions. However, in 2016, the sheer odiousness of the leading presidential contenders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, has shredded so much of the camouflage hiding the naked reality of American capitalism, that it is impossible for any sane person to remain unaware of it. Some very optimistic observers are hopeful that this ‘pantsing’ of American neoliberalism will be the beginning of a collapse of wage-slave America’s support for both the Democratic and Republican parties. We have all seen:

1. The loutish honesty of Donald Trump in accurately expressing the attitudes of the American wealth elite; and

2. The smarmy manipulativeness and blatant dishonesty of Hillary Clinton, which has exposed the corruption of the government professionals serving the American wealth elite.

Donald Trump’s popular support has come at the expense of the viability of the Republican Party as a vehicle supporting the careerism of its professional politicians, because that support is a populist insurgency that overwhelmed the pros. By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s support is centered among the careerist professional politicians of the Democratic Party, and has come as a result of excluding the voice of the people, who in turn have lost enthusiasm for that party and its “first female president” candidate.

So now, the Trump-led Republican Party flounders with chaotically amateurish ebullience, while the Clinton-led Democratic Party is a tightly scripted flat tire. Will more of the electorate wake up, and move on? We can only hope.