The Trick

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FADE IN:

A newsreel reporter, hot on the trail of the meaning of “Rosebud,” is interviewing Mr. Bernstein, Charles Foster Kane’s personal business manager. One of the things Bernstein tells the reporter, “… it's no trick to make a lot of money … if all you want … is to make a lot of money.”

When I saw Citizen Kane over 40 years ago I thought it was a well written line, but not a realistic one. It seemed like a bit of dialogue a relatively inexperienced 25 year old Orson Welles might write for effect instead of realism. But I was a relatively inexperienced 20 year old. Now I know it’s as true as gravity, “… it's no trick to make a lot of money … if all you want … is to make a lot of money.”

Most people aren’t capable of doing whatever it takes to make money. The problem is … some people are.

It takes a unique kind of individual who can dismiss the massive air, water, and land pollution caused by pumping millions of gallons of water and thousands of tons of poisonous chemicals deep underground to get at the trillions of dollars worth of natural gas entombed in the Marcellus Shale.

It takes a keen business mind to knowingly sell mortgage-backed securities filled with loans that were going to fail while simultaneously making side bets that paid off when the toxic time bombs blew up. As soon as the entire house of cards collapsed, taking our economy with it, these geniuses of Wall Street reaped trillions in bailouts from U.S. taxpayers and awarded themselves billions for bonuses on top of that.

Socrates said over two thousand years ago, “All wars are fought for money.” Over the last 60 years the United States has spent well over 27 trillion dollars on the military. With that kind of incentive it still takes a special breed of businessman to line up to get a share from that bloody trough.

All of these actions are prime examples of psychopaths at work. Professor Robert D. Hare, renowned in the field of criminal psychology, wrote of psychopaths, " … Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse.”

Professor Hare described psychopaths as "intraspecies predators." I don’t understand how they think. The same way I have no idea what is going on in the mind of a boa constrictor as it squeezes life out of its prey. But I don’t need to know how a psychopath thinks.

All we need to understand is that they have become our masters.

The leaders and law makers in the government are psychopaths. The heads of the media, the military, and Wall Street are intraspecies predators. They are in complete control. We are ruled by monsters.

You don’t think so? You can’t accept the idea that our society is completely dominated by these inhuman freaks? Well … ask yourself a couple of questions.

Who does the system protect? And who does the system prosecute?

Right now … Today … fracking gas wells are poisoning the air, people, animals, plants, land, and water. Now you’d assume in a rational society that squad cars full of cops would have rolled up and arrested everyone involved in this process of harvesting natural gas. Clearly the people carrying out this insane assault against the planet are guilty of dozens of crimes. But if you tried to interfere or protest an ongoing fracking operation … you’d be the one the cops hauled off to jail.

Wall Street, immensely aided by the government, committed the biggest financial fraud in human history. All the bailouts add up to more than the cost of the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Marshall Plan, the New Deal, and the landing on the moon … COMBINED! And who’s been arrested? The people protesting the corruption.

And one of my favorites …

In 2009 New York Times journalist David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. He wrote in the run-up to the Iraq War that every single major media network had featured pro-war “impartial experts” who were in fact government sock puppets from the Pentagon. Barstow’s report revealed how the government, the Pentagon, and all the major television networks misled Americans into war.

As Robert Evans wrote in Five Stories the Media Doesn’t Want You to Know About, “When Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2009, most television pundits were busy hyping swine flu. Brian Williams had the balls to report that the paper had won five Pulitzers, and even mentioned the subject of three of the stories they’d won for. He just chose not to mention the one they got for pointing out that he’s a government stooge.“

That Pulitzer Prize winning story went down the Memory Hole and the war criminals walk free.

Do We Know What The Word “Over” Means?

Apparently not.

The other team won. They took the ball, got on the bus, and went back to their gated communities. Just because we’re still wandering around the field doesn’t mean there’s a game still going on.

The Occupy Movement will last until The State moves them out. It will be brutal. It will be violent. And it will not be covered truthfully on the Nightly News. Oh there will be hundreds if not thousands of cell-phone videos of The State wiping out the Occupy Movement on YouTube but the story most Americans will believe will be the one presented on their wide screen TV’s. They didn’t tell us the truth about Iraq … why would we think they’ll honestly cover the routing of the Occupy Movement?

We’ve got to realize that psychopaths play for keeps and they have enough power to use it to stay in power. They don’t play the Right vs. Left Game. They control the game. They push buttons to make Conservatives jump one way and Liberals jump another.

Imagine for a moment McCain winning the presidency in 2008. Imagine the response from Liberals when McCain announces the surge in Afghanistan. Imagine the responses from Liberals about the handling of BP’s blowout in the Gulf, the talk of “clean coal”, or revitalizing the nuclear power industry. Though it might make Liberals cry … Obama’s only job as our first black president was to sell us a load of crap we wouldn’t take from John McCain.

So they won. We lost.

Now what?

As Clinton Callahan wrote in, Beware the Psychopath, My Son, “There are only two things that can bring a psychopath under submission:

1.    A bigger psychopath.
2. The non-violent, absolute refusal to submit to psychopathic controls no matter the consequences.

… If individuals simply sat down and refused to lift a hand to further one single aim of the psychopathic agenda, if people refused to pay taxes, if soldiers refused to fight, if government workers and corporate drones and prison guards refused to go to work, if doctors refused to treat psychopathic elites and their families, the whole system would grind to a screeching halt."


Well … it isn’t possible to fight established psychopaths with bigger, meaner, crazier psychopaths. So we must pursue option 2.

We can’t follow Gandhi’s, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” because personal change doesn’t equal social change. Go ahead. Change yourself all you want to because the psychopath doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your personal growth.

We must commit ourselves to the non-violent, absolute refusal to submit to psychopathic controls no matter the consequences.

We must have a National Strike for starters. We don’t have to get our feet wet. Just stick our big toe in. If we can’t get it together to stay home and unplug from the psychopathic system for One Day … then we won’t ever get ourselves from Step One (a) to Step One (b).

We can’t negotiate with the people who have already won. The only thing left for us is to say … “No.”

People come up with all sorts of reasons for not unplugging from the system for one day. Most of them are financial. I don’t know what to say to that. All I know is that if we continue to cooperate with the system, it will continue. When we stop … it grinds to a halt.

And one more thing …

If we don’t deal with them now …there’s something even worse than psychopaths shambling down the road towards us.

Happy Halloween.

FADE OUT

Regards,

Bob