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via Liberals Unite

The Rise Of The Feudal Lords

What do you call a system where the will of 90% of the people is ignored? What do you call a system where financial institutions are deemed “too big to prosecute” and are raking in profits while the rest of the country is stagnating in the mess they created? What do you call a system where one party gets one million more votes in an election but loses leadership of the House of Representatives? What do you call a system that allows the theft of people’s homes, even when those people have never missed a payment? What do you call a system that then pays the victims of the theft pennies on the dollar and then those checks are hard to cash?

That system is called an oligarchy, defined by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as 1: government by the few 2: a government in which a small group exercises control esp. for corrupt and selfish purposes; also: a group exercising such control 3: an organization under oligarchic control. Boiled down, it’s just a word to describe the actions of people who are doing what the feudal lords of old did to our forbears – only worse. The feudal lords of today aren’t dressed in velvet head-dresses and long flowing robes. They are attired in Brooks Brothers suits. The power they wield is dizzying and they are drunk with it. They OWN this country and any little irritant, like an upstart black guy in the White House or the will of the people, isn’t going to upset their applecart because they hold all the cards and they intend to keep them.

Just like the serfs cowered in front of the lord who could kick them off the plot of land they farmed for him, the citizens of the United States have been kicked out of their homes, watched their retirements evaporate, and stood helplessly by when our Supreme Court endowed corporations with the same rights as individuals, thus dictating who is important and who is not. And now, the Supreme Court is going for an encore in McCutcheon vs. FEC.

…When a small minority dictates policy for the majority, you no longer have a democratic republic. You have an oligarchy and the people who run it, people like the Koch Brothers and Mitt Romney and Sheldon Adelson, are the ones calling the shots. They keep themselves hidden and send out their lackeys to do the dirty work; those lackeys being people like Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and John Boehner. Those guys want a crack at getting a big piece of the pie from the feudal lords and so they’ll sell you down the river while they look you in the eye and tell you it’s for your own good.

Our system is broken and one wonders if it is beyond repair. When the Attorney General of the United States tells us that the big banks are too big to prosecute, when not one of the fat cat bankers who pushed this country off a fiscal cliff is called to account, when the will of the people for sane and sensible gun laws takes a back seat to the will of the entitled few, then you know we have reached a point in time where we are in danger of losing it all.

The feudal lords use fear and prejudice to divide people. Just look at what happened with the Tea Party. This was a movement that originated in response to the bank bailout. They were angry and they let everyone know it. A lot of liberals were just as angry as all those original Tea Party folks. But the Tea Party has morphed into something else entirely. It didn’t happen because they were all “right wingers.” It happened because they were manipulated by the feudal lords who were behind the scenes and pulling strings. They watched as their puppets danced to their immigrant hating, racist tactics and they loved the great divide. We were already a country deeply scarred by the events of September 11, 2001. We were already at odds with each other about things that heretofore we NEVER would have countenanced, namely war crimes committed by an administration that was composed of oligarchs. Any chance at measured, productive conversation between the two sides is crushed without mercy in a barrage of misinformation geared to widen the gap between people who used to be able to, if not amicably disagree, at least respect that the other side has a right to their opinion. Now it’s just name-calling and shouting and nothing gets done. Which suits the feudal lords just fine because they are getting richer as they continue to steal the wealth of a nation. And those lackeys? When their usefulness is done, they will be turned out just as the serfs who were no longer needed were turned out. In the meantime, the rest of us will be wallowing in the mudpit we have been cast into, arguing about who should be allowed in this country and who shouldn’t.

It’s disgusting, really, how malleable the American public has become. We let it happen. We have allowed the feudal lords to tell us that no matter the cost, we must have our guns because the government is out to get us. They tell us that we have no money, so we must cut police and fire and, their very favorite for the chopping block, education. Education is always the first to be cut and the last to be restored. We are told that women should have no choice and to even think it is tantamount to murder. We are told that climate change is just an unproven theory, even though 97 per cent of the world’s scientists say otherwise. That doesn’t matter to the feudal lords who could care less about an oil spill or a fracking explosion in your back yard. They live in their grand homes, far from the danger and they are so blinded by their own greed that they don’t see that the demise of the environment will mean their demise as well as ours. So they’ll lay down and die covered with thousand dollar bills. But you know what? Dead is dead, whether you’re a prince or a pauper.

The only remedy lies with the people, and I am cautiously optimistic.

…The reason the people in government don’t do our bidding is because we have allowed a system to be put in place that effectively negates our power. People have DIED to protect our right to vote and yet, people stay home in droves on election day.

If you want to take this country back, no matter if you are on the right, on the left or somewhere in between, it is up to you—indeed, it is up to all of us—to stop bickering, to find common ground (because it IS there) and take back our democracy. It has never been easy and sometimes it hasn’t been pretty, but it has always worked. It can work again, but it will take the will of the people to overcome the will and the vast resources of the entitled few. Until then, we must come to terms with the fact that we no longer live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchy where the modern day feudal lords rule and we the people are expendable.

The entire article is here

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