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You Can't Ignore the Class War (By Saying You're Not Into Politics)

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Message Vi Ransel

You Can't Ignore the Class War
(By Saying You're Not Into Politics)

"I'm just not that into politics" sighed the Fly.
"Oh, really?" the Spider brightened.

*         *         *         *         *         *

Politics was once married to economics,
taught as Political Economics in American colleges,
but Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys saw to it
that there was a divorce between economics and politics.

I wonder ... could we sue him
for alienation of affections posthumously
for taking the political out of economics,
as if wealth distribution wasn't based on policy decisions
determining who really pays taxes and who offshores profit

not to mention
who gets that taxpayer money
as no-bid government contracts and subsidies.

(Theories of economic philosophy
don't make economics a science.
It has no immutable laws such as gravity,
and it's constructed with considerable bias.)

Politics, like terrorism, is merely a tactic,
a method, a modus operandi,
a heavily-financed means to the end
of dividing up the American pie.

That means politics is only a way
of deciding who gets what and how much of it.
If you're not interested, can't take the time,
or think it's beneath you, you're perfect. 
That's just how "they" want it.

People losing jobs and benefits,
people whose retirement has just ... disappeared,
even shareholders, whose rarified air
the rest of us may not breathe,
were pole-axed by Ponzi schemes
specifically engineered

by people deadly serious about politics,
who spent billions to purchase political "free" speech
via campaign contribution-bribes and over 3,000 lobbyists
with whom they carpet-bombed Congress from K Street

as a means to deregulate finance,
in other words, to do away with the rules,
to amass pharaonic levels of wealth through gambling and usury,
by playing the American people for fools.

When you put your power of choice in millionaires' hands,
expecting them to represent your interests,
then shut down politically, having "done your duty"
you ignore the fact that their interests
are much more closely aligned with the interests
of the wealthy and transnational corporations
who gave them the money to make a campaign "run"
for their congressional seats in the first place.

Democracy is a philosophy
in which the majority determines policy,
and thus it follows that it serves the good
of the greatest number of the polity.

Capitalism is an economic system
that allows the few to amass wealth and power
and neuter democracy with their influence,
so they can profit off capital created by others, 
meaning that the good for the greatest number
must take a backseat to their ability to plunder.

Capitalism does not equal democracy,
nor does it create it.
Democracy is administered
by the demos, the people,
capitalism by the few who appropriate
profit by paying labor as small a share as possible
of the value that labor creates,
and as that share gets smaller and smaller,
approaches no-wage labor, or corporate nirvana,

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Vi's works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).
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