When Will We Challenge Them?

Vanilla Rose's comment to yesterday's post:

"Politicians pay lip service to the idea that everyone is "equal", but firmly believe that some people are much, much more deserving than others. And that they are in the very deserving category. The majority of the Cabinet (in the UK) are millionaires and yet food and alcohol at the House of Commons is subsidised. They have many perks and yet many still cheat on their expenses forms.

One Cabinet minister chose yesterday to answer the question, "Could YOU live on £53 a week?" with "Yes". I went into the supermarket this morning and the cashiers and other customers were all of the opinion that he couldn't. And said supermarket is not normally a hotbed of debate."

It arrived as I was reading an article by George Monbiot from the UK's Guardian newspaper: Communism, Welfare State – What's the Next Big Idea? Any attempt to challenge the elite needs courage, inspiration and a truly groundbreaking proposal....

As well as ideas to challenge Establishment's lopsided treatment of The People during austerity situations, or indeed, in just about any situation one could name, it'd help to understand just how we, The People of many countries, have come to find ourselves in such a dire situation.

A couple of clips from the piece:

........Thousands (in the UK) will be driven from their homes, and many more pushed towards destitution. Relief for the poor from council tax will be clipped; legal aid for civil cases cut off. Yet at the end of this week those making more than £150,000 a year will have their income tax cut. Two days later, benefit payments for the poorest will be cut in real terms. A week after that, thousands of families who live in towns and boroughs where property prices are high will be forced out of their homes by the total benefits cap. What we are witnessing is raw economic warfare by the rich against the poor.... .....So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority? Part of the reason is that the minority controls the story..............relentless propaganda..... Divide and rule is as potent as it has ever been.

Much the same thing can be said of US media, also long ago bought and controlled by corporations/the elite. They have power to "control the message", keep the country divided.

George Monbiot goes on

..............But I've come to believe that there's also something deeper at work: that most of the world's people live with the legacy of slavery. Even in a nominal democracy like the United Kingdom, most people were more or less in bondage until little more than a century ago: on near-starvation wages, fired at will, threatened with extreme punishment if they dissented, forbidden to vote. They lived in great and justified fear of authority, and the fear has persisted, passed down across the five or six generations that separate us and reinforced now by renewed insecurity, snowballing inequality, partisan policing.........

That last remark is important, it describes another facet of the reason we are where we are today. And yet, and yet, by those same people, whose ancestors were serfs, scarcely more than slaves, from time to time through the centuries, there has arisen a welling up of passionate and determined rebellion, attempts to bring about a better balance. It can happen!

For thousands of years, in almost every country of the world, a tiny minority of people have dominated and oppressed (to different extent and under different labels) the rest of the population. There has to be a better way. Many great brains have tried to solve the problem in the past. For instance, in the thread of comment following the article linked earlier in the post, a discussion emerged about Marxism. But Karl Marx was a man of his time, for him 21st century economies, policies and technologies were unknown factors. Things have changed beyond all imagination, and will continue to change at what to a 19th century mind would seem like breakneck speed. New political philosophies - completely new, not just re-hashed versions of the old stuff, are urgently needed. Isn't there someone with vision, someone somewhere, who could initiate another great welling up of determined rebellion by The People against the injustices of ruling elites and powerful corporations? The People, I'm confident, would re-discover their courage - it has been found before, it will be found again. Things change, The People do not.