“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” – Raymond Williams
An old story well known to a few has been brought a new life for many with revelations of the rich stashing their wealth in tax havens that cost the rest of us trillions in their unpaid denial of social bills and national responsibilities. A whistle blower-leaked tale about a Panamanian firm handling accounts for some of the global rich cheats and scammers is being carefully screened by mind managers and consciousness controllers before revealing names, but ultimately the public will be better informed about still another way that the rich rule by their profit and the rest pay for it through our loss.
Initial names dropped in the western, especially American, media repeat Putin and Assad as often as possible, in keeping with propaganda campaigns of demonization that will not stop until the balance of global power has changed for the good of humanity and ended for the very rich these revelations may help finally defeat. It seems that Putin’s daughter had a wedding in a hotel owned by someone whose name appears among those so far revealed, not surprising given that Russia is a capitalist country and numbers a minority of extremely rich people among its population. And wonder of wonders, Putin may even know and deal with some of them. Imagine. Nothing like that could be true in the USA. If we keep our heads stuffed in a part of our anatomy that never sees the sun.
Actually, many American politicians are rich even before elected, and many who aren’t become so shortly after. And ex presidents, and their wives, often become multi millionaires upon leaving office. This should not be a late breaking bulletin to our citizenry but given the status of our education and information dispensing institutions it may be. Nevertheless, with selected releases and even attempted censorship this enormous cache of elitist cash swindling info may ultimately drop some American names. Maybe.
It is important to know that our richest thieves and legal book jugglers really don’t need offshore tax havens since there are many right here in the USA, with Delaware and Nevada long offering comfortable places to incorporate firms without giving any names as to who actually owns them and thus protect identities and avoid responsibility. The issue of money remaining free from tax collection and being laundered so as to clean it from the criminal ways it is often procured by organized crime, corporadoes or politicians, are really very old stories which may not have originated here but have a long history of practice in the good old marketplace culture of the USA
Still, and despite this silly Putin-Assad stress that not only leaves Americans unmentioned but also seems not to notice quite a few Israeli firms and stockholders among the wealthy welfare chiselers – imagine that! – there is much that may be revealed to people for the first time, teaching them more about how they are robbed by the oligarchs in their societies. This, at a time when Americans and Europeans are under great stress having had government services and public spending viciously slashed in favor of private profits for that class of global royalty, may even help produce a bigger vote among the already great outpouring of disgust for established power through new parties in Europe and for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump here in the almost endless American primary race. Sanders and Trump hardly speak the same language but attract some of the same people totally disgusted with the establishment parties they belong to but whose politics they hardly represent.
While the mass of information collected by what seems a major financed media funded source has led to healthy speculation, it has also caused much of the suspicion fueled by establishment lies that finds anything and everything that happens that seems to be even slightly anti-establishment to be a plot, conspiracy or twisted scheme organized by that very establishment. Or nearly mystical manifestations of power attached to often biblical codes, racial theories born of those codes, or simple beliefs that only a chosen few can possibly understand anything and the other billions of us are too dumb to fathom anything beyond the Super Bowl, the World Cup or Downton Abbey.
Just as many if not most American voters are brain bludgeoned into the crack pot realism ordering them to vote for lesser evils since nothing good can ever come from voting, the despair of ugliness at the core of so much of perceived reality can reduce once hopeful people to give up and accept less than half a loaf or no loaf at all.
But the growing reaction of anger at things as they are and desire to transform reality to something much better may ultimately bring even some of the most despairing to see a light at the end of humanity’s tunnel. We should expect that every step forward, including this small one towards revelation of another way in which the rich minority takes advantage of the majority, will be seen as just another ploy by “them” to further induce ignorance and despair such as the wise ones are all too aware of, and continue us on the path to failure. Truly, some of this could almost make the Pope succumb to cynicism, but his inherent hope and faith based on spiritual yearning balanced with material intelligence is very much like what is going on in the world among growing numbers of human beings of different nations and cultures.
Facing a near total breakdown of political economics and the environment that sustains us all, many are saying: enough, we can’t go on this way and must have radical change or the human race, let alone our various nations, will face disaster. Whoever the original revealers were and whatever provoked them, ultimately it is humanity which will be served by what is revealed, however established authority will try to suppress that information, and its gullible handmaidens in communities of perpetual doubt will innocently help by spreading their message of hopelessness and despair.
We live in a time of no secrets, anytime, anywhere. While it can seem that only means gossip, trivia and propaganda, at least to some, the rest of us are learning that there will be no place to hide for anyone on earth if we allow our world to succumb to the ravages of it and its inhabitants being treated like nothing more than a “branded” commodity for sale at a market. We also know that those most responsible for bringing us to this point have to be removed from power and replaced by democracy. Echoing the opening quote, it is time for the truly radical to so convince those remaining in despair.
That is our only hope, and it should be no secret anymore.
Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate
