@snoopydawg

It feels like a hundred years since I wrote it.

Yes, I'm not surprised to hear that their go to response is to minimize our legitimate reasons for not voting for her. And just as they deny our agency to vote as we see fit, they simultaneously demonstrate the illegitimacy of their argument to "save" democracy.

#8.1.2.1.1.1.1.1.1

didn't vote for Her. Because of Her emails!!!! (said in the snottiness voice you can imagine)
They think that everyone owed Her their votes because of Trump. Gee, maybe if she hadn't gotten the media to focus so much on him, he might not have won the primary or the general. But no, Her was afraid that everyone else who was running would have beaten her.
They are still pissed at Bernie too because he had the audacity to point out that the democrats were basically the same as the republicans and no longer were helping the little people.

BTW, Zoe. Great essay.

@Mark from Queens

I'm afraid it might get lost so far down this thread that's about to slip off the first page.

They have definitely gotten this!

You know what they want?

They want obedient workers. Obedient workers:
People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

I see so many comments from people saying that the big companies that employ so many people deserve to keep more of their money because they create jobs. If they are taxed more than they are now they will take their companies out of the country. So what if they do? They can still be taxed at a higher rate because they still have to do business here. Apple and other companies kept their money offshore until congress let them bring it back here at a lower tax rate. Why did they eventually bring it back here? I don't remember. But they did for some reason.

Please post this again another day. It's brilliant. I hadn't heard of it before.

#8.1.2.1.1.1.1.1.1

His American Dream piece can not be overstated for its prescience or repeated too much. Every single person in this country should have this, and not the Pledge Of Allegiance, committed to memory.

When Occupy came about I thought Carlin's whole trajectory of work, but especially his last HBO Special "It's Bad For Ya" (2008), presaged the movement's core philosophy pretty eerily, or should I say brilliantly. His whole philosophy of questioning authority, sniffing out bullshit, exposing lies and fake language and not believing your government, was pretty much the whole premise of Occupy.

There’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.
It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it. Be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners of this country don’t want that.

I’m talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice!

You have OWNERS!
They OWN YOU.
They own everything.
They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought—and paid for—the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want:

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right.

They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!

You know what they want?
They want obedient workers. Obedient workers:
People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street—and you know something? They’ll get it.

They’ll get it all from you sooner or later ‘cause they own this fucking place!
It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.

By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy.

The table has tilted, folks.
The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice.
Nobody seems to care!
Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue—these are people of modest means—continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a FUCK about you.
They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL.

And nobody seems to notice.
Nobody seems to care.
That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth:

It’s called the American Dream - because you have to be asleep to believe it.