The need to redefine the term 'criminal'

Greetings good citizen,

I love it when my ideas ‘reverberate’ through our culture! Sadly, while Mr. Sirota expanded on a theme of mine, he’s a little ‘off the mark’ as far as his interpretation of the message goes:

It’s always dangerous to state you were first when it comes to perceptions but I was definitely ahead of the esteemed Mr. S in the category of perception management :

One spot for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (read: the casinos) shows a woman climbing onto her desk to demand a vacation. Another for McDonald’s implores us to fight back against employers and “overthrow the working lunch.” Still another for a Coca-Cola subsidiary seizes on the stress of harsh working conditions to create buzz for a branded “Take the Year Off” contest.

“Marketers are adopting the theme of workers’ rights at a time when unions themselves are confronting declines in membership and influence,” notes the Times. “In effect, some labor experts say, they are turning a pro-worker theme on its head to serve the corporate interest.”

In one sense, this is good news for organized labor — at a moment when unions are under assault, the ads reflect polls showing persistent mass support for both the concept of worker solidarity and the economic outrage voiced by worker protests. Indeed, companies wouldn’t be echoing such themes if they didn’t know they were wildly popular.

Looks to me like Smack Water Jack done dropped his shotgun!

Besides, you KNOW what’s gonna happen if you ‘demand’ anything from our corporate overlords…you’ll be singing that old familiar tune, ‘Hope I like my next job better’. While trying to out distance your newfound reputation for being ‘a difficult employee’.

But if this feeling of persecution is enough to ‘motivate’ you into taking a much-deserved vacation (and you ARE ‘the man’) just go ahead and do it!

Because that’s who these commercials are really ‘targeted’ at. Not the poor cubicle dwellers but the guy that put them there, they’re trying to get HIM to take some time off! (‘The most valuable man in the office’ really believes the company won’t run without him so he doesn’t take vacations…despite being the only one who can afford to!)


You can find this next offering under my rants about redefining the term criminal :

“We had people who were locking down to concrete barrels and other devices to prevent them from evicting the house and we were mobilizing people to come and defend the house,” Espinosa said. Over the course of the five eviction attempts there were 26 arrests. The last time Espinosa was arrested along with 14 others and charged with rioting in the third degree, defined as “Violence or the threat of violence to people or property when more than three are gathered.”

They face up to two years in prison. Espinosa noted, “There are 15 people now facing riot charges who were arrested doing nonviolent civil disobedience, basically sitting down and linking arms on the front steps of a house.”

“The chief of police was there the night I was arrested. Four other officers stepped over us as we were sitting in front of the door,” he continued. “He stepped directly on top of us, on our shoulders and necks, to come into the house.” The previous day police had grabbed protesters by the neck to move them out of the way, and women activists complained of feeling sexually assaulted, having been groped by the police. “Somebody's hand went up one of my friends' shirts,” Espinosa said. One of the Cruzes' neighbors was arrested while standing on the sidewalk outside her house holding up a sign in support of Occupy Homes.

What’s the first thing to strike your eye here good citizen? Was it the fact that you’d never have heard of this incident if you didn’t live in that particular neighborhood or if not for this Alternet article?

The corporate owned media doesn’t grant a forum for ‘lawbreakers’ (not of the >One Percent variety.)

Which only punctuates our need to redefine the term ‘criminal’. We’re locking up the wrong people while the real felons walk free!

Which leads us directly to our third piece, yet another theme I harp on all of the time, the one regarding the ‘purpose of government’

Teaching the middle class to hate their government was an essential part of the plan to implement Corporate Feudalism. A middle class cannot exist without a strong government. This is because only a government has the power to stand up to the giant corporations of today’s world, or the powerful individuals and private armies of earlier times. It is the government that enforces the laws to protect the middle class from those who would like to become their economic rulers. That is why prior to the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the middle class all economies were run according to some version of the feudal system. If you want to put an end to the middle class and replace it with a feudal republic, you would need to change people’s perception of their government.

Obviously a government does not have to be on the side of its people, as can be seen by the existence of countless dictatorships and oligarchies throughout the world. Even the corporatocracy that currently exists in the United States falls far short of being on the side of its middle class. But US history shows that a government committed to serving its citizens can, in fact, help create and maintain a healthy middle class even in the face of powerful corporations whose only interest is maximizing their own power and profits.

It is like the story in old westerns of a big bad landowner who takes what he wants when he wants it, ruthlessly terrorizing a town without a strong sheriff. Any individual who tries to stop the landowner is beaten into submission or killed. The situation continues until the town finds a strong enough sheriff to regain control over the landowner and his gang. This is the Old West version of the feudal system. In westerns, the feudal lord comes first and the sheriff comes later. But in the United States of thirty years ago, the government was the strong sheriff keeping the late-twentieth-century feudal lords from taking what they wanted. As long as the government was supported by its citizens—particularly its middle class—no one could ride into town and steal what belonged to the people. But if the government were weakened or destroyed, a different situation would arise. The intent of the plan for Corporate Feudalism was to convince the middle class to fire their sheriff. And that’s just what happened.

Again, this article is just a touch ‘off the mark’. The ‘plan’ is not to get the ‘middle class’ to ‘fire the sheriff, they can’t!

The plan was to get the middle class to believe it’s a ‘good idea’ to fire the bum who keeps letting the criminals ‘get away’…when it wasn’t really his fault, the ‘judge’ kept turning ‘em loose!

Ever wonder why you can’t do nothin’ to a judge?

Well, now you know!

Like I said months ago, the ‘plan’ is for a coup against the ‘perceived ineffective’ government.

And we all know what’s going to follow once the “Law & Order” types seize control.

Truth(iness) and Goodness, sprinkled ‘liberally’ with some good old fashioned ‘fire and brimstone’ in support of ‘righteous retribution’ (against those who couldn’t pay!)

Which is to say ‘Hell on Earth’…
It will be better known as the ‘war on the poor’.

How fortunate is it that the poor also comprise the largest segment (in the >One Percent’s mind) of the ‘surplus population’?

The only good news is the ‘war machine’ doesn’t/won’t have the necessary energy to roll around the world like it did the last time…unless the stupid bastards do ‘the unthinkable’.

Switching gears here, they’ve already done it once, purposefully bankrupting the global financial markets, so why stop now?

We truly are in a struggle for our species future…who will you side with?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner