Democratic Destruction by Design

Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING that has happened in the United States during the past six years has happened by accident. I know that a lot of people in this country are confused by what the Republican Party has been doing, but that’s only because they don’t have any historical perspective. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the trends that we are seeing from the right-wing have been a part of our country’s battles between the average citizen and the wealthy elite since before the ink was dry on the Declaration of Independence. It’s no wonder that U.S. history has been hijacked by the right for their own purposes—everything from Southern revisionism in the myth of the lost cause to the demonizing of critical race theory—because anyone who studies what has actually been going on in this country since the founding—not the myths—can only come to one conclusion: the wealthy in the United States have been trying to wrest control of the country from the people since the very beginning. I know this sounds like a paranoid, conspiracy-theory rant. But if there is an actual conspiracy . . . then it’s not a theory.

It's very simple. From the beginning the moneyed interests in this country were bent on making sure the federal government stayed as weak as possible. The reason? So they could avoid the things that prevented them from making more money: regulations and taxes. That’s the entire reason that so much power was left up to the individual states. Without a powerful federal government, the states could do whatever they wanted and limit voting rights in order to create tax havens and regulation-free operations for the corporations who set up shop there. The Constitution itself was built on the idea of keeping political power away from the citizens themselves, and vesting it in the hands of a wealthy elite. The Electoral College is just one vestige of this oligarchical past. And if it seems maddeningly archaic today, think about what it used to be like in its original design: the individual senators from the states were the ones who picked the electors, NOT the voters. Everything, I repeat, EVERYTHING that is wrong with our country today was designed to be that way. The whole goal, from the very beginning, has been to make sure that rich, capitalist oligarchs were able to wield complete and unfettered control over the country in order to create a capitalist utopia in which the citizens worked as wage-slaves for the wealthy. And it has nearly come to pass.

As I have said over and over on this blog, politicians are employees of the capitalist oligarchy. They have no other job but to make sure that their constituents pay as little taxes as possible, that they have no regulations on their businesses, and that the electorate—the expendable cogs in their money-making machinery—has no way to stop them. There have been a couple of major glitches in the plan, to be sure. The most devastating was the Civil War, which forced Southern aristocrats to forego literal chattel slavery for the less obvious method already in place in the North: wage-slavery. The Great Depression was also a major misstep for capitalists in that it destroyed much of their wealth and ushered in the only socialist era of the country’s history: the New Deal. Since then, however, wealthy capitalists have been working tirelessly to take over the country from within. And now the final phase of their plan has been set in motion. The only question is whether or not the citizens will wake up out of their stupor and resist, or keep their heads buried until one day they find themselves living in a capitalist dictatorship.

The key to achieving this goal is so ionic that it almost defies belief. The cornerstone is getting the most rabid and jingoistic Americans to hate democracy. Essentially, to get them to hate America itself. This is why we saw the former presidential moron cozying up to dictators, because the trick is to float the idea of strength over freedom to his followers. This is why Fox news propagandists recently went to Hungary to tout the authoritarian government there, or sided with Russian aggression over the sovereignty of Ukraine. The idea is to get the anti-intellectual right-wing voter to eventually give up his rights and freedoms to an authoritarian government in the U.S., one that is based on unfettered and unlimited capitalism. And it’s working. Gun rights aren’t about guns for Republicans in Congress, they’re about money, money for their employers who make the guns. Busting unions isn’t about the freedom to work, it’s about freedom to keep wages low in order to make money for their employers. Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING that goes on in Washington D.C. in the Republican caucus is about politics—it’s about MONEY for the people who employ them. That’s it. And a right-wing agenda that is all about curtailing freedoms—in the guise of morality—even when it isn’t directly about money simply works in their favor by getting their base used to the idea of not being free.

The capitalist oligarchy doesn’t care if nut cases shoot up grocery stores and schools and churches. In fact, they WANT that, because it keeps the people at large arguing among themselves. And while the people are embroiled in political theater, with the right-wing ignoring the problem and the left losing their shit because they can’t do anything about it, corporations and the wealthy elite continue to work tirelessly behind the scenes to strip away voting rights and entrench unregulated capitalism in order to enslave the rest of us—EVEN THOSE WHO VOTE REPUBLICAN—to the point where eventually we won’t be able to do anything about it short of armed revolution. How’s that for irony? What’s so unique now, in this late-stage end game, is that they don’t even have to pretend anymore. The oligarchy simply orders their employees in Congress to do their bidding and lie about why they’re doing it, and because that works they continue to lie, and even when they’re caught they just lie some more, to the point where it is absolutely clear that right-wing politicians have absolutely no fear of completely ignoring the will of the people who vote them into office. It costs them nothing because most of the country is so stupid that they can’t see what’s happening. People have become so blinded by the very idea of “politics” as it is fed to them by the propaganda arms of the oligarchy in the media that they can’t see that politics itself is meaningless, something merely to distract them from the truth.

The most recent articulation of these historical facts is by Nancy MacLean in her excellent work on U.S. economic history entitled Democracy in Chains. But her work is nothing new. As early as 1955 historian Richard Hofstadter and like-minded academics put out a book of essays called The Radical Right, outlining the multitude of ways in which the right was bent on taking over the country, through eliminating voting rights, controlling the judiciary, and eventually taking over the entire federal government itself. Again, the big push by the corporate oligarchy came in the wake of the New Deal because of how much it threatened to curtail unfettered capitalism. And I want to be clear, this was absolutely NOT a fear about the elimination of capitalism in any way, shape or form, because the New Deal was in no way anti-capitalist. That’s right. The problem for the oligarchy is that ANY government is too much government. Because what they really want are NO RESTRICTIONS of any kind on their capacity to make money. They want to be able to destroy the environment, destroy communities, destroy families, destroy the workers themselves, and do the same to every other country in the world, all in the pursuit of making as much money as quickly as possible. And to accomplish this, all they need to happen is to destroy democracy itself. Because that’s what is finally standing in their way.

One of the first democratic protections to be wiped out in enacting their end game was the gutting of FCC regulations by Ronald Reagan that made it permissible for public news broadcasts to lie to their viewers without any repercussions. This was done so that media oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch could make millions more dollars in the short term, while at the same time the capitalist oligarchy as a whole could undermine the intellect of the uneducated electorate in preparation for their final takeover. Propaganda is a crucial element in the success of this particular takeover. As early as 1944—before the war was even over—the big capitalist lie was formulated by right-wing economist F.A. Hayek in his book The Road to Serfdom—talk about ironic—by doing what the capitalist right has been doing ever since: projection on a grand scale. Because of what he had seen throughout the Roosevelt administration in its attempt to create a more equitable society, he took the truth and turned it around one hundred and eighty degrees to come up with this, Nancy MacLean’s summary in Democracy in Chains:

          “It is because nearly everybody wants it that we are moving in this [socialist] direction.” Everywhere,
          people were deluding themselves “that socialism and freedom can be combined” when in fact they
          were dire enemies. The growth of government, he argued, would in time undermine all freedom and
          usher in totalitarian states. (MacLean 39)

The reason everyone was so positive about the New Deal is pretty obvious, because the capitalists and their employees like Herbert Hoover had bankrupted the country. And at that point in time the ONLY entity that was in a position to help a destitute nation—much less actually care if people lived or starved to death—was the Democratic Party in Washington and the Roosevelt administration. The big lie, propagated to this day, is that socialism and capitalism are mutually exclusive, unable to co-exist together. But that lie has been demonstrably proven as such by the many socialist countries in Europe whose people have flourished under the combination. The growth of government—and not just growth, but a powerful government given the mandate to wield sweeping changes on behalf of the people for their best interests—is now the only way to guarantee freedom. It is the corporate state—a fascist, authoritarian government that has as its only mandate the complete freedom for business interests and the wealthy elite—that is the definition of a totalitarian state.

All of the work that sprang from Hayek’s disciples was based upon the completely false assertion that capitalism couldn’t survive in any kind of socialist context. But that was the whole point, to get rid of any kind of government oversight, no matter how slight, in order to free up capitalist markets that were anything but free. The simple fact of the matter is—again, looking to our own history—that the natural evolution of capitalism is NOT toward free market competition, but toward monopolistic consolidation and collusion between those monopolies to set prices which allows for inflation and artificial spikes, to fix low wages, and standardize poor working conditions, just as we see Amazon and other like-minded corporations doing today. These economic disciples of Hayek broke from traditional economic theory in one very dramatic way: NONE of their work was based on testable and verifiable data. None of it was based on facts. Instead, the goal was to destroy democracy from the inside. “But how to spread that view,” says MacLean, “in an era in which Americans—indeed, people the world over—distrusted markets after the Great Depression and the global conflagration it set off, and found government protection beneficial for more and more?” (MacLean 41)

That’s right, the economic reality that motivated this crowd was that the socialist policies of the New Deal were actually WORKING, and making lives better for “more and more” people. It’s maddening in retrospect to look at the utter disingenuousness of these so-called economists. The goal was never to make things better for people in society, only to make them better for corporations and the wealthy. And what we see today is the end result of decades of pushing a flawed ideology that is, at its core, anti-democratic. Since the U.S. government was actually working for the people and making their lives better, the only recourse was to destroy the people’s faith in that government, and so that’s exactly what they set out to do. Instead of “positive” economic practice that attempts to measure and quantify through actual experiment and factual data what works, their only recourse was to turn government into the bad guy. “If only one could break down the trust that now existed between governed and governing, even those who supported liberal objectives would lose confidence in government solutions” (MacLean 42).

Thus we have the deliberate sabotage—from the inside, by Republicans—of nearly every government program and department that can be thought of, from the Veterans Administration and Social Security, to Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, Education, Health and Human Services, the CDC, Transportation, Housing, the Interior, you name it. If Republicans can find a way to slow down, disrupt, defund—if not utterly destroy—a beneficial government agency, they will do it. And they will do it with only one objective in mind: to make people believe, FALSELY, that government is inept and incapable, and not to be trusted. Every frustration that you have with the government, from the IRS all the way down to the DMV, has been consciously created by the corporate right, with the sole objective of getting you to hate government and, it is hoped, democracy by association. If you hate what goes on in Washington D.C. and your state capitol, then you will be less likely to vote, less likely to work for change, less likely to care what happens to other people. They WANT you to feel as if you have no rights so that one day when you wake up and find out you actually don’t have rights anymore, you won't do anything about it. Nothing about government ineptitude in this country is an accident. It is a carefully calculated plan to get you to abandon the only chance we have of making substantive change for the better in our society: by renouncing unfettered capitalism and embracing WE THE PEOPLE instead.

And that’s why everything happening today—EVERYTHING—is unfolding as it was designed to unfold. Convince the population that capitalism is the only economic system that works and that socialism is evil. Convince the uneducated that it is democratic freedom that is responsible for their economic destitution so that they will want to destroy democracy. Convince the people that there is no “system” in place—it’s all a conspiracy theory—so that they believe the real enemy is their next-door neighbor and will expend all of their energies fighting with their fellow citizens rather than the capitalists who have actually enslaved them. Distract them with entertainment, sports, and social media so that they stay uneducated, and will believe any crackpot, anti-government lie fed to them. Make them believe that gun control is bad, that unions are bad, that a living wage is bad, that welfare is bad—never mind the fact that the single largest, by a gargantuan margin, recipient of welfare in this country is corporations. Make them believe that price controls are bad, that wage controls are bad, that regulations that make sure corporations don’t kill them are bad. Convince them that EVERYTHING that is good for them and will make their lives infinitely better . . . is bad. That’s what is going on today. The sky isn’t falling, it’s being dismantled on purpose by a corporate cabal that wants only one thing: to transform this country into a corporate dictatorship bent on turning its citizens into batteries that they can toss into the garbage when they’re used up. It's time—long past time—for people in this country—ALL the people—to wake up to what’s really going on and vote—while you still can—like your lives depend on it . . . because they do.

The New Abolitionism

Long before films like The Matrix or The Terminator audiences have been presented with stories of dystopian futures, from novels like 1984 and Brave New World all the way back to ancient times in the story of Plato’s cave. What all of these tales have in common is that they are extended metaphors, allegories that conceal a sobering truth, and that is the fact that whatever enslavement mankind finds itself suffering in the future, it will be because mankind has created that suffering for itself. At that point man will be the only one to blame for the forfeiture of his own freedom. It’s tempting—and comforting—to believe that what is happening in the United States today is a recent phenomenon. But history tells a different story. The attempt to enslave the population in America has been going on since European settlers first arrived on these shores. Things took a detour for a while when the people’s attention was distracted during the rise and fall of chattel slavery, but since the mid-nineteenth century the capitalist forces at work in our country, both North and South, have turned to wage slavery as their objective and have gradually used their considerable wealth and influence toward achieving the goal of taking over the country and turning all of its citizens into wage-slave zombies who have neither the intellect to recognize, nor the will to fight against, the tide of complete corporate dominance that seeks to control every aspect of their lives in pursuit of the single-minded accumulation of wealth.

There are several avenues by which the corporate oligarchy in this country has been able to wrest control of the government away from the citizens so that it works only toward the goals of the oligarchy and against the interests of the people. The most fundamental of these is education. Over the last hundred years—and perhaps even further back—public education in the United States has had as its primary objective to indoctrinate children into accepting ideas and philosophies that will make it easier for corporations to control them in the future. Myths like the superiority of individual freedom over cooperative effort, capitalism over socialism, that anyone can become anything they want if they just work hard enough, the value of working and saving for the future, the more insidious ideas of social Darwinism that manifest themselves through sports and competition, and the most destructive of all, the normalization of religious mythology, have all served to weaken the intellect of the U.S. population over the last century, to the point where the working poor in this country have willingly surrendered their freedom to the very people and corporate entities that are enslaving them. They can’t tell the difference anymore between a lie and the truth. And in the most tremendous of ironies, they seem determined to give away their freedom to those who display the very power that will one day enslave them.

Once the appropriate educational programming has taken hold over a significant portion of the population and disarmed them mentally, the next step is to isolate the individual from a society that has the potential—when people work together—to diminish and ultimately defeat the power of the oligarchy. In the beginning the only avenue available to achieve this was the church. Subservience to an imaginary god and his self-chosen disciples on earth has been unimaginably successful. Brainwashing people into believing that they are inherently sinful, and therefore dependent upon an ideology that denigrates life itself in favor of a fictional heaven has trained people to endure otherwise unacceptable hardships without complaint in exchange for a reward that doesn’t exist. In that kind of environment rampant hypocrisy and suspicion take hold quite easily and serve as a successful tool with which to isolate individuals from one another. But that still leaves out the non-gullible in the population who reject religious mythology, and the way to enslave them is to develope ever more individualized forms of entertainment. The motion picture in the first half of the twentieth century served to further inculcate the masses with the ideas that are promoted in public education and the church, the myths that further the aims of the corporate elite: competition, individuality, the other as enemy, the intellect as enemy, the unquestioned good of capitalism and the evil of socialism, and above all a zero-sum game mentality. Television in the second half of the twentieth century went a step further and was able to isolate family members within their own homes. Finally, the twenty-first century has seen this technique perfected through social media, smart phones and Internet streaming of content in order to completely isolate individuals from one another and render their potential political power inert.

But atomization and indoctrination still aren’t enough. The population also must be enervated to a significant degree by channeling their energies into manufactured conflicts in order to drain them of the ability to resist what is happening to them every moment of the day. The goal, from the perspective of the oligarchy, is to antagonize people, to get them to fight and argue with each other so that they will focus their energies and frustrations in combat with other individuals rather than against the true enemy: a capitalist system that keeps them enslaved to subsistence wages. From the very beginning of this country’s founding, the most effective method of doing this has been hatred for the “other.” Among whites themselves this was—and still is—accomplished through religious division, hatred for those who do not follow the same Protestant doctrine, primarily Catholics and Muslims. Once it became clear to the working poor, however, that it was the rich who were the enemy, the oligarchy changed tactics by promoting white solidarity against those of other races, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and all immigrants, from Black slaves initially, to the Catholic Irish and Italians and Hispanics, the “exotic” Asians, and finally the religious fanatics from the Middle East. This has been an extremely successful tactic, and while it has been transformed and refined over the centuries it is still a potent avenue of control. Anyone who looks different, who behaves differently, or thinks differently, is pointed to as an enemy of the people, responsible in whole or in part for all of society’s ills to distract people’s ire from those who are truly responsible. Most recently, this hatred of the other has been expertly inculcated into those with liberal leanings and has infected the left through the culture wars in a way that is now indistinguishable from the overt racism that has always infected the political right.

But perhaps the most effective method to control the masses has been through political theater—a redundant phrase if ever there was one. As I have stated before on this site, politics is a lie. There is no such thing as politics. The capitalist oligarchy has worked hand in hand with the government of the United States since the colonial period. Because the economy of the United States has become so conflated over the years with the government, the myth of capitalism has been able to argue that the government—and therefore the existence of the United States itself—is dependent upon capitalism for its very survival. Without capitalism, so the myth goes, America would cease to exist. Because of that, nothing—absolutely NOTHING—that happens in Washington D.C. is going to change the fact of corporate control of the government and by extension its citizens. Politicians, Senators and Representatives, Supreme Court justices, and even the President, are all employees of the oligarchy and therefore are only there to serve the constituents who pay them—not the citizens who vote for them. What we are seeing today is just the end game of a very long process, cultivated over centuries, and reaching its final, critical phase: either the citizens of the United States are going to wake up to the danger facing them, band together and resist, or they are going find themselves having capitulated without their knowledge to overt corporate control of the government and, by extension, every aspect of their lives.

The goal of the capitalist oligarchy is incredibly simple, and has only one tenet: to appropriate as much wealth as possible by stealing the energy and production of the masses. I realize that this probably sounds Marxist, but that’s only because it is. And, of course, Marxism has been branded as a godless evil in this country precisely because it flies in the face of everything the corporate elite are attempting to accomplish. The demonization of socialist philosophies has been incredibly easy to achieve, far easier than discrediting science has been, because economics has no laws, no process by which to demonstrate its truth. Therefore, capitalists have been able to take the facts and twist them to mean exactly what they want them to prove. This technique has worked so well that it is used in nearly every aspect of right-wing propaganda now, and the easiest way to describe it is projection. Capitalists argue that a free and unregulated economy is necessary in order to promote healthy economic competition. This is a lie, and in fact the opposite is true. What the lack of regulation allows corporations to do is to collude with one another, enabling them to fix prices and hold down wages. But by convincing an uneducated and isolated population with their noses pressed to their phones that any kind of cooperative economics is evil, the people inadvertently have colluded with their captors to reject the only way of life that promises them true economic stability and security. And now, because this technique has worked so well in the past, the right-wing uses the same tactic with everything. If you really want to know what the oligarchy is up to now, all you have to do is listen to what they say about the left. EVERYTHING they accuse the left of doing is a practice they are already engaged in today.

It’s not just about maximizing profit, either. Corporations pay almost no taxes, but that’s still too much. What they really want is to pay nothing. That is why taking over the government is so important to them. Wealthy individuals pay far less in taxes on a percentage basis than the working class, and yet what they really want is to pay no taxes at all. As such, right-wing propaganda would have us believe that taxes are a government plot to steal your money. Once again, projection. The tax cuts enacted by Republicans are aimed exclusively at the rich, and they do absolutely nothing to keep the working classes from paying a far greater share of their income in taxes than the wealthy. The capitalist oligarchy knows they need taxes from the rest of us to pay for their roads and bridges, airports and sea ports and everything from garbage men to the CDC. It’s just that they don’t want to pay for any of it themselves, and want you to pay for it instead. Republican senator Ron Johnson is a perfect case in point. When the seditious traitor who occupied the White House during the last administration led the call for a huge tax cut for the wealthy and corporations, Johnson made it clear to the Criminal in Chief and his Republican colleagues that he could not support such a measure . . . unless corporations that he was invested in personally were allowed even greater economic relief. Republicans gave in to his demands, and Johnson made millions, money that was siphoned off from the rightful coffers of the government and into the pockets of capitalist oligarchs and their corporate arms in order to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of the electorate. But this is nothing new, as it has been going on for centuries. The only difference today is that Democratic DINO’s like Manchin and Sinema have been allowed to infiltrate the left and openly flaunt the system in order to use the same destructive policies from the other side of the aisle.

The brutal reality is, the myths that corporations and the wealthy elite have created around socialism are all lies. Nothing, absolutely NOTHING that critics on the right warn about would ever, or will ever, happen under socialism. In the first place, the very idea that capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive is another of the big lies that have been forced down the throat of the populace. In point of fact, there is nothing wrong with capitalism in the vast majority of cases. There’s no one who feels that shoe stores, or restaurants, or nail salons, or the corner coffee shop need to be government owned. The fact is, ninety-nine percent of existing businesses would—and should—continue to be privately owned and operated. There are others, however, the one percent, that absolutely need to be taken out of private hands and turned over to state control. Those industries are the ones that directly affect the personal health and wellbeing of the citizens of this country: healthcare, insurance, housing and, most importantly, energy, all of which need to be in the hands of the federal government rather than for-profit entities. The reason why is simple. These are the primary areas in human life, and corporations should not be incentivized to withhold these basic human needs in order to make money. Period.

The political right continually rails against government regulation, for the simple reason that anything that prevents them from making money is seen as evil. The corporate oligarchy wants to be free to collude together to give employees as little as possible in order to make as much money as possible for themselves. As such, it only makes sense that in order to make people’s lives better, MORE government control is necessary, primarily when it comes to employment. While Bernie Sanders and others on the progressive left laud the miniscule movements made by labor unions, the reality is that unions are fragile and ineffective at best, and completely impotent at worst. The goal of all working citizens of the United States needs to be the abolition of wage slavery. There needs to be direct government oversight and control over every aspect of employment of this country. That means that wages—across every single industry and business in the entire country—need to be set by the government at levels that allow for a COMFORTABLE living wage for all. Benefits also need to be standardized and regulated. Business needs to be out of the business of health care. Period. Employers need to be told what wages they have to pay their workers, and relieved off all responsibility for healthcare and other insurance.

Housing needs to be controlled by the government, too. No longer should anyone be at the mercy of landlords who can raise rents at their discretion, evict people without cause, and gouge renters through a multitude of fees and penalties that they are helpless to refuse. With energy regulated, people will have set energy costs that do no fluctuate during the year. Prices of consumer goods will also be fixed by the government so that the exact same produce will cost exactly the same no matter what state or community it is purchased in. Taxes will also be regulated so that EVERYONE in the country, rich and poor, large corporations or small businesses, will pay the same percentage of their GROSS income or GROSS revenue as every other. No loopholes and no exceptions. With the wealthy and corporations paying at the exact same rate as everyone else, the percentage for all will be relatively small. Every aspect of a worker’s life will be supported and sustained by a government that suddenly has absolutely no use for lobbyists, because the vast majority of laws passed by Congress will have nothing to do with economics. Republicans will scream at this idea—as will those who have been indoctrinated to believe the propaganda they are fed. They will say that the government’s track record is horrible. And they are right—but for the wrong reason.

The reason that the Federal Government appears so inept is because it has been designed that way. Those in control of the government WANT it to seem as if it can’t function effectively so that people will naturally be suspicious of any government control. It must be remembered, however, that it is those people working directly for the corporate oligarchy—the employees of capitalism—who are purposely making the government inefficient. At this very moment, the political right is also hard at work attempting to overtly subvert the will of the people at the ballot box so that they can stay in power and do the bidding of their capitalist employers. And while there is some pushback from states and individuals, it is a systematic campaign that must be defeated before it’s too late to do anything about it. The vast majority of those who vote for right-wing politicians do not benefit AT ALL from the policies they enact, and yet because they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated by the right, they willingly vote against their own personal self-interest every time they go to the ballot box. At this point in time, it is arguably true that nearly anyone who votes for a Republican politician is voting for their own slavery.

In 1858 Abraham Lincoln declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” That is the place we have come to in America today. As long as the corporate oligarchy continues to wield nearly absolute power in our federal and state governments, there will be no progress made for humanity. This country has the potential to become the most beneficent state in the entire world, one that takes care of its population, gives them a living wage, a secure future, and the FREEDOM from the wage slavery that has so infected our society that the people don’t even realize that’s what’s going on. Socialism is the only way out. If your response to the word “socialism” is negative, it’s for only one of two reasons. Either you are part of the problem, a cog in the wheel of the corporate oligarchy, someone who benefits from keeping wages low and employee insecurity high . . . or you have been so brainwashed by capitalism that you can’t see how much capitalism has destroyed our society and how much it wants to continue to do so. Freedom from government is not freedom at all, but instead is the opposite, because under our current system the only entities that are free are the capitalist ones. The rest of us have become slaves to an ideology that is completely false. And the only way to combat that control is to ban together and insist that the government, “of THE PEOPLE, by THE PEOPLE, and FOR THE PEOPLE,” begin working for us instead of against us. And the only way that will happen is if we demand, en masse, to get rid of wage slavery for all time and make all of our lives worth living in the process.