The Game

We are caught up in a game. A game as sinister, insidious, and complex as The Matrix.

Today’s issue is just another aspect of that game, a game we cannot win.

The game is rigged in favor of 1% of the population and we are continuously being led to believe that if we take care of the 1%, the 1% will take care of the rest of us. They call this trickle-down economics. Sort of the kind of trickle-down you might get being on the first floor of a two-story outhouse.
But the way this game is played, the crimes they commit in the name of profit are considered good, and the situations you might be forced into are considered crimes.

If your family is starving and you steal a loaf of bread, you will go to jail. Because you are taking from the corporations that produce, distribute, and sell that bread. But if they force-feed cattle and poultry with chemicals and animal by-products and people get cancer, who goes to jail? They can lie, cheat, and steal millions of dollars from the people and be fined a few thousand for doing so, a mere slap on the wrist. But if you go down to their offices, stand on a public sidewalk and protest, you’re going to jail.

Freedom of speech in this country has been forced to take a back seat to freedom of greed.

And this is all part of the game, and we are the unwilling players. In many areas where most people live these days, you aren’t allowed to grow your own food. You can’t raise chickens in the cities or the suburbs, and in some places you can’t even have a garden. You can’t go out and hunt; and you might even need a license to fish. You have become a dependent of the supermarket. Feeding your family the way your ancestors did is now criminal.
But here we have a much greater crime being committed, a crime against Nature, a crime against the Earth itself, and nobody’s going to jail.
Why? Because it benefits the 1%. Anybody who has ever watched a detective show knows that when a crime is committed, if you want to find the perpetrator, you see who benefits, you follow the money.

Who benefits from fracking? Who benefits from destroying the planet, from these pipelines ripping through communities? Certainly not the community? Not even society at large! Just a few people and the only money trickling down from them is to the politicians and media they paid for to try to convince us that this is a GOOD thing.

You’ve seen the commercials. Smartly dressed woman tells you that we don’t have to go overseas to find energy, it’s right here in North America. She says North America because she’s talking about Canada. And she tells you how they will create thousands of jobs. That part is true even though she’s only talking about temporary employment. Because they need folks to tear up the Earth and build pipelines from Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico where they want to load the tankers to ship their products to China.

Where is the benefit to society as a whole? Where is the benefit to the Earth? We are destroying the water table, causing earthquakes, and disrupting communities for what?

The people with deep pockets who have a financial interest in keeping things as they are. They have gotten Congress to exclude them from things like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, in order that they can make huge profits from activities such as fracking, or to call it as it is, hydraulic fracturing of the Earth by pumping water and chemicals into the ground at high pressure. They won’t disclose what’s in that chemical cocktail. The say it would give unfair advantage to their competition. As if their competition doesn’t already know. But those chemicals end up in your water, your garden plants, your trees….

Indigenous people were able to maintain the environment here for CENTURIES, by taking the next seven generations into consideration when making decisions. These fat cats, and their paid cadre of less-than-reputable pseudo-scientists, don’t even care about the next seven days. These are the same folks who go around screaming that the government is too big. Primarily because OUR government occasionally gets in THEIR way when they find ways to make a buck at the expense of the rest of us. They want to dismantle all the agencies that protect us from them. Do you see any good in that?

Well the corporations do. Not only do they make a tremendous amount of profit, much of it tax-free thanks to loopholes their lobbyists managed to get put into law, so not even the government gets any, but all the problems they cause open up new avenues of business. We destroyed your water? We’ll sell you water. Not the natural stuff you used to drink. This stuff will be better… comes from a laboratory, same one where we’ve been genetically engineering your food! If an earthquakes destroy your home, we’ll sell you a new one. But until that happens, you’d better buy some earthquake insurance. A policy we know how to weasel our way out of if an earthquake actually happens.

Are we getting screwed? It’s all part of the game.

The game is designed to maximize the profits of the uber-wealthy. Not to benefit society as a whole. This business model is one they learned from drug dealers. First, they give you a taste of the product, maybe even for free. Then once they got you hooked, you will pay every single month for the rest of your life to keep getting what they’re selling. If you don’t believe me, look at your monthly bills. You pay for electricity, gas, some of us are already paying for water. These are all taken from resources that belong to all of us. You pay for television, some of you pay for radio. Television used to be free, using the public airwaves. They took it off those airwaves so you’d have to pay for it. Now we have satellite radio. Your tax dollars paid for those satellites the media companies use. Every industry in this country is working toward getting income from you on a monthly basis if they haven’t gotten it already, and at the same time, trying to figure out how to do it without hiring you as a full-time employee. This is not a sustainable business model.
Which brings me back to sustainability. This is for now, the only planet we’ve got. Creator might not let us have another one if we can’t take care of the one we’ve got. Think of this as the Garden of Eden…

So, what do we do?

Let me close by paraphrasing a Republican President.

We are engaged in a great effort, testing whether this nation, and we as a people can long endure. We have come to preserve and protect the Earth so that we all might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it is for us here today to be dedicated to the great task before us. That we here highly resolve that we shall have a new birth of freedom, -- and that this land of the people, will be owned and managed by the people, on behalf of ALL the people.

Otherwise we may indeed perish from the Earth.