A newsreel reporter, hot on the trail of the meaning of "Rosebud," is interviewing Mr. Bernstein, Charles Foster Kane's personal business manager. One of the things Bernstein tells the reporter, "It's no trick to make a lot of money ... if all you want ... is to make a lot of money."
When I saw Citizen Kane over 40 years ago, I thought it was a well written line, but not a realistic one. It seemed like a bit of dialogue that a relatively inexperienced 25-year-old Orson Welles might write for effect instead of realism. But I was a relatively inexperienced 20-year-old. Now I know it's as true as gravity -- "It's no trick to make a lot of money ... if all you want ... is to make a lot of money."
Most people aren't capable of doing whatever it takes to make money. The problem is ... some people are.
It takes a keen business mind to knowingly sell mortgage-backed securities filled with loans that were going to fail while simultaneously making side bets that paid off when the toxic time bombs blew up. As soon as the entire house of cards collapsed, taking our economy with it, these geniuses of Wall Street reaped trillions in bailouts from U.S. taxpayers and awarded themselves billions for bonuses on top of that.
Socrates said over two thousand years ago, "All wars are fought for money." Over the last 60 years the United States has spent well over 27 trillion dollars on the military. With that kind of incentive it still takes a special breed of businessman to line up to get a share from that bloody trough.
All of these actions are prime examples of psychopaths at work. Professor Robert D. Hare, renowned in the field of criminal psychology, wrote of psychopaths ... "Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse."
Professor Hare described psychopaths as "intraspecies predators." I don't understand how they think. The same way I have no idea what is going on in the mind of a boa constrictor as it squeezes life out of its prey. But we don't need to know how a psychopath thinks.
All we need to understand is that they have become our masters.
The leaders and lawmakers in the government are psychopaths. The heads of the media, the military, and Wall Street are intraspecies predators. They are in complete control. We are ruled by monsters.
You don't think so? You can't accept the idea that our society is completely dominated by these inhuman freaks? Well ... ask yourself a couple of questions.
Who does the system protect? And who does the system prosecute?
Right now -- Today -- fracking gas wells are poisoning the air, people, animals, plants, land, and water. Now you'd assume in a rational society that squad cars full of cops would have rolled up and arrested everyone involved in this process of harvesting natural gas. Clearly the people carrying out this insane assault against the planet are guilty of dozens of crimes. But if you tried to interfere or protest an ongoing fracking operation ... you'd be the one the cops hauled off to jail.
Wall Street, immensely aided by the government, committed the biggest financial fraud in human history. All the bailouts add up to more than the cost of the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Marshall Plan, the New Deal, and the landing on the moon -- COMBINED! And who's been arrested? The people protesting the corruption.
And one of my favorites ...
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