Everybody's Gone Serfin' — Serfin' USA

By Dan Hagen

Don’t fool yourself. The Republicans — and too many Democrats — are quite serious about using the national debt they have deliberately exacerbated as a weapon to finish off the American middle class.

Remember, also, that ordinary Americans were pushed and manipulated into relying on credit. Their productivity increased, but their wages did not.

Consumption fueled by higher wages would have left the middle class something. But the kleptocapitalists wanted consumption fueled only by credit cards, in order to leave them with nothing but perpetual debt to be repaid to the kleptocapitalists.

They want to effectively reduce ordinary Americans to the level of feudal serfs. So much more manageable that way. Serfs don't dare talk out of turn, do they?

The Republican Party, the party of corporate liberty and individual serfdom, has so far gifted us with the corporate nullification of democratically elected city governments, legalized torture, unlimited police state spying on Americans, permanent war, indefinite imprisonment without legal rights and an economy wrecked by a manufactured debt-ceiling hostage crisis. And they claim we are still unsafe because we have too many rights left. A little more of their kind of “liberty,” and we’ll all be slaves, if we’re not dead.

Now that the corporations are transnational and routinely hoodwink the public through their corporate media propaganda, they are free to buy and consume governments like bottles of beer, extracting the wealth from taxpayers through no-bid contracts and unending, highly profitable wars while leaving those same taxpayers without health care or economic security.

And how do we pretend to pay for all this? The right wingers have only one tax they truly like: sales tax. Sales or consumption tax is regressive, which is why plutocrats love it.

It hits the poor the hardest, because the poor have to spend all their income on sales-taxed items to survive. It hits the rich the least, because the rich spend only a sliver of their ever-accumulating wealth on sales-taxable items.

Sales tax is a means of piling the costs of all public services on the already-overburdened backs of the poor and the shrinking, staggering, soon-to-be-poor middle class, while letting the rich, who benefited most from the community they refuse to support, laugh all the way to the proverbial bank at the fools they've fleeced.

It's yet another way to create a society with a vast number of subsistence serfs supporting an unchallenged and unchallengeable overclass of predatory plutocrats.

And national security? For the corporate rapists, “national security” is just another term for looting the public treasury. They only need the Pentagon to supply them with no-bid, no-performance contracts, now that they have created ruthless private armies like Blackwater-Xe-Academi to protect them and gun down any mouthy serfs who might get in their way.

And when the nation starts to collapse as the middle class and the working class stagger and fall from the effects of corporate rape, frankly, who cares? There are always the mountain resorts of Switzerland to be enjoyed, or the vast estates of Paraguay, or the dazzling, sun-soaked fleshpots of Dubai.

There, the corporate rapists can watch the chaos they've created from a safe, lofty distance. And there are always more easily gulled serfs where the late, great Americans came from.

None of this is news, and if it were you wouldn't be getting it from the corporate media anyway.

As George Bernard Shaw observed long ago, the faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier. To keep the marks distracted, always blame the poor.

The GOP plutocrats, the Wall Street Puppet masters and their Tea Party puppets are aiming at Dickens' England, pre-revolutionary France and finally their utopia, the Dark Ages, where they can live as the feudal overlords they long to be.

Then perhaps Fox News can explain to its little wannabe serfs what a fine tradition droit de seigneur really was.