If this latest mass shooting proves anything it’s that the United States is now both an occupied nation and a nation at war.
However, we are neither at war with a foreign power nor occupied by foreign soldiers. Despite the more than 250 Americans who were killed and wounded last night in Las Vegas.
Instead, we are a nation at war with ourselves. Thanks largely to a generation of toxic elites who view the masses as the enemy, have sought to turn working Americans against eachother via propaganda networks like Fox News, and have gleefully armed us to the teeth.
To quote the comic book character Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
It’s no coincidence that our ability to kill one another has increased dramatically since The Vietnam War. That’s when our toxic elites embarked upon a period of undeclared financial and political warfare against the middle class.
Firearms ownership has grown by 28 percent since 1980, when we had 168 million rifles, shotguns and pistols in this nation. We had 404 million firearms by 2016.
The increase is considerably sharper in terms of firearms per citizen.
Per capita firearms ownership surged 70 percent from 1980, when the U.S. had a population of 227 million, to 2016, when there were 323 million of us. We had 74 firearms for every 100 Americans in 1990 and 125 by 2016. As in more firearms than citizens.
Neither percentage captures the increased lethality of today’s semi-automatic tactical shotguns, assault rifles and pistols.
They’re designed to harvest far more human meat than the pump shotties, bolt action rifles and revolvers of the past. And are more easily converted into the kind of fully automatic rifle suspected shooter Stephen Paddock employed last night.
Their increased lethality is reflected in the Las Vegas death toll, which represents an increase of 443 percent over the fifteen people killed and 31 injured by Charles Whitman during the shooting in 1966.
Both massacres were undertaken by snipers operating from elevated vantage points.
There’s also another big difference between then and now, which is that mass shootings have become a near daily occurrence in an America divided by the group-based rhetoric of today’s toxic elites. A group of fake tough guys led by silver spoon divider-in-chief Donald Trump.
Their political posturing has helped orchestrate a massive increase in mass shootings. The U.S. averaged just 1.1 mass shootings per year in the 1970s,
By 2015, the tally was up to 372 mass shootings, which killed 475 people and wounded 1,870, according to the Mass Shootings tracker.
This is us killing us. With the active encouragement of treasonous elites who no longer view themselves as fellow Americans, but as citizens of the world.
The country club set responsible for this massive increase has actively undermined representative democracy in the U.S. since 1980 via groups like The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, The Business Council and the . The only metrics they pay attention to are stock prices, which have soared tremendously for firearms manufacturers since 1980.
Sales typically surge after each new mass shooting and each new imbecile outburst by our idiot president.
Today was no exception as shares of Sturm, Ruger & Co., Inc. surged $3.15 each to $54.85 in early trading Monday as the gunmaker fulfilled Wall Street’s “profits over people” mantra.
Clearly, the massacre of poor and middle class Americans is good for business for Trump and his pals in the Country Club Set.
The standard bearers for this modern day cloud of financial locusts are the Too Big to Fail Banks of Wall Street, billionaire propagandists like Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone, and opportunistic political hookers like Trump. Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Wall Street Chuck Schumer, and Hillary Clinton.
Garbage to a (wo)man.
These psychopaths are grown in our country now behind the walls of rich enclaves like The Hamptons; exclusive country clubs like the Chevy Chase Club outside Washington, D.C.; and elite prep schools like The Trinity School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Their sheltered graduates are the antithesis of the sacrificial U.S. leaders of old, who led by example and grew to greatness while serving beside poor and middle class Americans during World War II.
These toxic elites are the worst of us. They don’t attend public school, serve in the military, pay taxes, or use mass transit. However, they control all four.
These worthless, sheltered scoundrels are calling the shots now in a relentless bid to establish themselves as new royals in a world government with a single, interconnected global economy. A rich man’s game which ends with the rest of the species as debt slaves.
Guess which one you are?
In the Predatory 1 Percent’s preferred version of globalization, Indian and Chinese workers are not elevated to the living standards of U.S. and European workers. Instead, we’re leveled with them as voiceless serfs in a caste system built on inherited wealth, while toxic elites pocket the difference between First World prices and Third World wages.
That’s why there are no meaningful labor standards in international trade agreements like NAFTA. Even as the World Trade Organization enforces a boatload of rules designed to enhance multinational profit growth.
Painful Truth No. 6.78 Gazillion: Wall Street’s preferred version of globalization is comprised of masters and slaves.
If you want to understand what has happened to representative democracy in the U.S. since 1980 all you have to do is follow the money and count.
Wall Street’s bloodless coup began in the 70s with a frustrated corporate class which wanted to wage unpopular wars at will. Without the consent of a middle class more interested in growing old in peace. That’s why they ended the military draft.
Instead of faulting themselves for habitually backing financial opportunists over principled leaders, our toxic elites decided they’d been betrayed in Vietnam by the poor, middle class and free press.
You have to be rich and sheltered in the first place to reach this kind of idiot conclusion, which produced a steady stream of popular revolutions overseas and a period of undeclared class warfare here at home.
As evidenced by last night’s profitable massacre.
Instead of creating a visible colonial empire, our toxic elites have enslaved the world financially through the World Bank. Instead of backing sacrificial leaders, . Mercenary garbage like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Ferdinan Marcos of The Philippines and Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
The Republic is now occupied by our own Predatory 1 Percent, who have made bribery legal in DC and established “profits over people” as the business standard on Wall Street. They use excessive speaking fees, golf club fees and insider trading fees to wash their dirty bribe money clean.
The only way Wall Street can escape accountability for its hijacking of American democracy is by turning one half of the masses against the other. Which is precisely what the Predatory 1 Percent been doing since 1980.
Bottom line, our society’s new royals won’t stop until the poor and the faltering middle class stop them. And that won’t happen until there’s a huge pile of wrecked middle class families. Just as it did with the The Vietnam War, the Housing Crisis, For-profit Education, For-Profit Medicine, and on and on.
The only question is how high the pile has to get before working people stop listening to silver spoon mofos like Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Chelsea Clinton and start thinking for themselves again.
The painful truth is that the rich don’t have the numbers to rule over the rest of us unless we let them, by buying into their knowing lies. That’s why they’ve bought up our local newspapers and TV stations and made the middle class invisible in film and television.
That’s why white working men are now Hollywood’s preferred buffoons and villains.
That’s why our society’s tolerance for opposing viewpoints seems to diminish each year. It’s happening because the rich want it that way.
That’s why those who question the status quo are now being vilified in a society which once celebrated populist rebels like Martin Luther Kings, Daniel Ellsburg, Karen Silkwood and Smedley Butler.
It’s divider and conquer time for a Country Club set which prides itself on its ability to retain power by paying one half of the masses to kill the other.
It’s the reason why pro-war flicks like Black Hawk Down and Zero Dark Thirty now play on our cable TV systems every day, but anti-establishment flicks like The Sand Pebbles, All The Presidents Men, The Green Zone and MASH have all but disappeared.
It’s the reason mass shootings have become a weekly occurrence as political corruption has been legalized, opportunists have replaced principled leaders, greed has replaced public service, and propaganda has replaced our free press.
It’s the reason working class liberals and conservatives are now programmed to hate one another. Lest we start looking around and realize who our true enemies are.
What’s the moral of the story?
America is at war, but not with any outside nation. We are at war with ourselves. Because turning working families against one another is the only way the idle rich can preserve themselves.
They’re doing a damn fine job of it so far. Courtesy of the rest of us.
If you’re tired of waking up to this crap all you have to do is stop voting for rich people and stop lashing out at eachother.
