The American Dream
But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people – white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on – good honest hard-working people continue – these are people of modest means – continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all – at all – at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it. -George Carlin
It’s not even comedy anymore lol
Honestly, it wasn’t then. I remember seeing this for the first time it feels like a million years ago, and I said to my friend, “This man is not a comedian. He’s a court jester. He knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s the only sane man in the room.”
Im glad he’s not around to see just how much of a joke the world is now lol.
My dad, the other day, was talking about how churches have started forming insurance groups to take care of each other and how he and my mom were considering joining one for the lower prices. I made sure to explain to him how a social group contributing to a general fund to use for group needs and to take care of each other when needed is socialism.
I don’t think he got it.
He was right
About what? I didn’t give him any claims in my comment so I’m what you’re alluding to.
To “not get it” when you started babbling about insurance groups being socialism, because they aren’t.
In what way is that not socialism? It’s of course not an entire system of government, but isn’t group insurance at least similar in principle to, for example, social institutions like fire departments or the postal service? It certainly seems like it fits the socialist ethos to me, it’s just on a smaller scale.
Socialism is the workers owning the means of production. There’s a bit more than that, obviously, but it’s in the end the one thing you need to believe in to be a socialist. You don’t need to follow Marxist thought to the letter, you don’t need to believe in the immediate destruction of all heirarchy, you don’t even necessarily need to believe in the anti-racism and anti-nationalism aspects most embrace, but you do need to believe that.
A lot of socialist thinkers believe in mutual aid programs and such but just because a community or nation co-operates towards a mutually beneficial, presumably not-for-profit goal that doesn’t make it a socialist program.
The army is not socialism. The mail service is not socialism. Police are not socialism. Food banks aren’t even socialism, they’re just a charitable organization.
Hell, unions aren’t socialism in and of themselves, but you’ll never catch a socialist criticizing the idea.
All of these are just fundamentally acceptable things for any kind of government to do, be it socialist, liberal, fascist, whatever, under any system except the most hare-brained versions of anarcho-capitalism.
America is just so fucked in the head by Randian neoliberal thought it just confuses any form of beneficial community action as socialism.
So, all that said, a group of churches putting together a mutually beneficial insurance group?
Not socialism. Especially given how many churches are investing their funds into for-profit businesses and property these days.
Now if the churches decided the best way to organize the insurance scheme was to create a worker co-op to run it you’d be on to something.
Thank you for that detailed answer! Very informative. I wonder then what would be s good term to describe such services/groups/agreements? You seem to have a better understanding than I of such social/political concepts, any ideas?
That’s just objectively wrong, poor folks who support the capitalist system don’t believe that they’ll be rich enough to start exploiting some day, they believe that the hierarchy which capitalism establishes is a necessary one which society would collapse without.
They believe this so fervently that they immediately dismiss notions of abolishing or significantly reforming the structure of capitalism as a ploy by some shadowy cabal, or sometimes just the Jews, to replace the existing hierarchy with a new one that will be just as bad if not even more corrupt and incompetent at getting what is needed to whoever needs it and in the quantities they need it in.
Atlas Shrugged is literally Ayn Rand having a hundreds of pages long moral panic attack over this exact fear because she believed it’s what happened to her pharmacologist father with the rise of the Soviet Union, sporadically broken apart by her inability to write for so long without her veering into writing about her CNC kink.
Of course it’s pretty telling that even Ayn Rand acknowledges that this supposed incompetence stems mostly from rich assholes sabotaging the infrastructure they use in a baby mad temper tantrum about not getting to leach off it anymore because whatever vital national industry was being nationalized.
Of course there’s also the high degree of mistrust in the state in the US which aids these perceptions of the capitalist hierarchy as a necessary thing, because now it’s seen as a parallel structure you can opt into in defiance of state provided services, consider how much the right gets a hard-on over establishing privatized alternatives to education, or public transporting, even medicare has section C and D for private options for care and medicine, also C and D are where all those reports of medicare fraud the right raise moral panic about tend to come from.
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around. What do you see? Business people, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it. Were you listening to me, Neo, or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?
*Que Clubbed to Death by Rob Dougan
Cue, unless you’re questioning the song in Spanish
Mi no conprende.
We don’t believe shit, steinbeck (you know i love you). We believe what we are told to believe by the same folks who have money to make policy. Some of us learn that it’s all a lie; those folks are shunted out of the political sphere or otherwise silenced by the overwhelming voices of the folks who still believe.
This is most likely a misquote of Steinbeck by Ronald Wright, a mere 20 years ago, paraphrasing something Steinbeck wrote in the 1960s about the 1930s which was specifically describing the communists that he had personally met.
As an overarching generalization it’s catchy but not really accurate.
as if you can simplify so many people in such short words
It’s brilliant that he can.
Socialism never worked that’s why is not popular here
