I couldn’t help but pick up on a little existential panic in Mark Walker’s Nov. 6 column about the re-election of Obama and the subsequent decline of the American empire. But have no fear Mr. Walker, the largely white, 45-year-old-plus male that make up the majority of the one per cent of wage earners is doing quite all right south of the border. For now.
The United States was set up as a constitutional republic modeled after classical republics like Rome. Modeled after a Roman society that had distinct class lines, the domini (masters of energy) and the servi (providers of energy), masters and slaves. With the domini, a small elite, being the ones with all the privileges and running the show. The American founding fathers were the domini of their time and were white males, 45-years-plus, wealthy and owned slaves. They feared and detested democracy and were hell bent on creating a system that catered to and protected the holders of property, the original one per cent. That’s a fact.
A quick glance at the history of indenturement and slavery in the United States proves my point. It would be the wealthy that had the rights to vote and to run for office just like in Rome, the rest of the ‘rabble’ could rot as far as they were concerned. Case in point, the American Congress and the Senate are made up of largely of white middle-aged men who have a million plus in their bank accounts. Excluding Obama, every American president has been a white man.
Liberty to founding fathers meant the freedom to exploit other human beings as pieces of property for their own advantage, these men were provided wealth, leisure and comfort from the toil of other human beings and this system the founding fathers set up is still functioning as originally intended today. But it has taken a different form, it not only protects wealthy individuals of Wall Street but the corporation as well.
Case in point is that of Cindi Davis of North Carolina. Cindi has stage four breast cancer, her medical bills equal $1,100 a month. Wells Fargo, a financial institution that was bailed out with Cindi’s own tax dollars, is foreclosing on her house because she cannot make the $900 a month payment. This is exactly how the founding fathers set up the United States.
Here we have a parasitic financial institution of the one per cent which shouldn’t exist at all but still does because the system protected it by bailing it out, attempting to extract the remaining wealth from a woman dying of cancer. A woman that may or may not spend the last days of her life living in a pickup truck.
Just imagine for a second a woman that you love having to spend the last days of her life battling cancer in a pickup truck because some psychopaths on Wall Street got their golf buddies to bail them out. It’s a sick system, a system that Mark Walker laments the decline of.
The fate of America was sealed the moment the largely white, 45-year-old-plus male founding fathers created a society that had inequality built into its very structure. Inequality is toxic and was a major factor in the collapse of Rome and will be a major factor in the collapse of the United States. It would have happened a long time ago but FDR managed to save American capitalism by making it less brutal by spreading the wealth around.
Letters to the editor debating whether Obama or Romney would be better for the U.S. kind of miss the point, as Gore Vidal put it: There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party and it has two wings: Democrat and Republican — the system is the problem.
Mr Walker is right the alternatives could be much worse or they could be much better, it depends on where the American people decide to take it. A good start would be to start building an alternative society while gradually dismantling a system that was set up to benefit a small segment of American society. It’s going to happen one way or another and it’s going to happen soon.
Cody Young
Penticton