Jesus W. Christ

Horatio Alger Must Die

excerpted from the book

Dude, where's my country?

by Michael Moore

Warner Books, 2003, hardcover

Jesus W. Christ

p129
George W. Bush comments"

"I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supercedes all human plans."

"I believe God wants me to be president."

"I feel the comfort and the power of knowing that literally millions of Americans I'm never going to meet . . . say my name to the Almighty every day and ask him to help me . . . My friend, Jiang Zemin in China, has about a billion and a half folks, and I don't think he can say that. And my friend, Vladimir Putin, I like him, but he can't say that."

p134
... no more of this "God Bless America" crap. What makes you think you get to be blessed and no one else does? I don't play favorites. You don't hear anyone in Djibouti saying "God Bless Djibouti." I have never heard anyone utter the words "God Bless Botswana." They know better. Let's get this straight- God don't bless America, God don't bless anyone, God has got a tee time on the back nine and he doesn't have time to be interrupted with this patriotic mumbo jumbo. Go bless yourselves and quit using My name as a justification for feeling superior to everyone else. You aren't. You are actually among the dumbest people on the planet. Don't think so? Name the president of Mexico. See? Ask anyone else in the world the name of the leader of the country next to theirs and they can tell you who it is. God bless America? More like God bleeps America.

 

Horatio Alger Must Die

p137
Perhaps the biggest success in the War on Terror has been its ability to distract the nation from the Corporate War on Us. In the two years since the attacks of 9/11, American businesses have been on a punch-drunk rampage that has left millions of average Americans with their savings gone, their pensions looted, their hopes for a comfortable future for their families diminished or extinguished. The business bandits (and their government accomplices) who have wrecked our economy have tried to blame it on the terrorists, they have tried to blame it on Clinton, and they have tried to blame it on us.

But, in fact, the wholesale destruction of our economic future is based solely on the greed of the corporate mujahedeen. There is a master plan, my friends, each company has one, and the sooner you can get over not wanting to believe it, or worrying that to believe it puts you in the ranks of the nutters who thrive on conspiracy theories, then the sooner we have a chance of stopping them. Their singular goal is to take enough control over our lives so that, in the end, we'll be pledging allegiance, not to a flag or some airy notions of freedom and democracy, but to the dictates of Citigroup, Exxon, Nike, GE, GM, P&G, and Philip Morris. It is their executives who now call the shots, and you can go vote and protest and cheat the IRS all you want to get back at them, but face it: You are no longer in charge. You know it and they know it, and all that remains is the day when it will be codified onto a piece of paper, the Declaration of the Corporate States of America.

p138
The fear drug works like this: You are repeatedly told that bad, scary people are going to kill you, so place all your trust in us, your corporate leaders, and we will protect you. But since we know what's best, don't question us if we want you to foot the bill for our tax cut, or if we decide to slash your health benefits or jack up the cost of buying a home. And if you don't shut up and toe the line and work your ass off, we will sack you-and then just try to find a new job in this economy, punk!

p139
In the manufacturing sector, for example, British CEOs make twenty-four times as much as their average workers-the widest gap in Europe. German CEOs only make fifteen times more than their employees, while Swedish CEOs get thirteen times as much. But here in the U.S., the average CEO makes 411 times the salaries of their blue-collar workers.

p140
... in 1980, only 20 percent of Americans owned a share of stock. Wall Street was the rich man's game and it was off-limits to the average Joe and Jane. And for good reason-the average person saw it for what it was, a game of risk, and when you are trying to save every dollar so you can send the kids to college, games of chance are not where you place your hard-earned money.

Near the end of the eighties, though, the rich were pretty much tapped out with their excess profits and could not figure out how to a make the market keep growing. I don't know if it was the brainstorm of one genius at a brokerage firm or the smooth conspiracy of all the well heeled, but the game became, "Hey, let's convince the middle class to give us their money and we can get even richer!"

Suddenly, it seemed like everyone I knew jumped on the stock market bandwagon, putting their money in mutual funds or opening up 401(k)s. They let their unions invest all their pension money in stocks. Story after story ran in the media about how everyday, working people were going to be able to retire as near-millionaires! It was like a fever that infected everyone. No one wanted to be left behind. Workers immediately cashed their paychecks and called their broker to buy more stocks. Their broker! Ooh, it felt so good . . . after working your ass off all week at some miserable, thankless job, you could still feel that you were a step ahead, and a head above, because you had your own personal broker! Just like the rich man!

Soon, you didn't even want to be paid in cash. Pay me in stock! Put it in my 401(k)! Call my broker!

Then, each night, you'd pore over the stock charts in the newspaper as one of the all-finance-news-all-the-time cable channels blared in the background. You bought computer programs to map out your strategy. There were ups and downs but mostly ups, lots of ups, and you could hear yourself saying, "My stock's up 120 percent! My worth has tripled!" You eased the pain of daily living imagining the retirement villa you would buy some day or the sports car you could buy tomorrow if you wanted to cash out now. No, don't cash out! It's only going to go higher! Stay in for the long haul! Easy Street, here I come!

But it was a sham. It was all a ruse concocted by the corporate powers-that-be who never had any intention of letting you into their club. They just needed your money to take them to that next level, the one that insulates them from ever having to actually work for a living. They knew the Big Boom of the 1990s couldn't last, so they needed your money to artificially inflate the value of their companies so their stocks would reach such a phantasmal price that, when it was time to cash out, they would be set for life, no matter how bad the economy got.

And that's what happened. While the average sucker was listening to all the blowhards on CNBC tell him that he should buy even more stock, the ultrarich were quietly getting out of the market, selling off the stocks of their own company first. At the same time they were telling the public-and their own loyal employees-that they should invest even more in the company because forecasters were predicting even more growth, the executives were dumping their own stocks as fast as they could.

In September 2002, Fortune magazine released a staggering list of these corporate crooks who made off like bandits while their company's stock prices had dropped 75 percent or more between 1999 and 2002.

p143
[Between 1999 - 2002] over four trillion dollars was lost in the stock market. Another trillion dollars in pension funds and university endowments is now no longer there.

p144
After fleecing the American public and destroying the American dream for most working people, how is it that, instead of being drawn and quartered and hung at dawn at the city gates, the rich got a big wet kiss from Congress in the form of a record tax break, and no one says a word?

p144
Whatever benefits you may have now are going to get whittled down to nothing. Forget about a pension, forget about Social Security, forget about your kids taking care of you when you get old because they are barely going to have the money to take care of themselves. And don't even think about taking a vacation, because odds are your job won't be there when you get back. You are expendable, you have no rights, and, by the way, "what's a union?"

145
The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever. It's rigged so well that it dupes many otherwise decent, sensible, hard-working people into believing that it works for them, too. It holds the carrot so close to their faces that they can smell it. And by promising that one day they will be able to eat the carrot, the system drafts an army of consumers and taxpayers who gladly, passionately, fight for the rights of the rich, whether it means giving them billions in tax breaks while they send their own children into dilapidated schools, or whether it means sending those children off to die in wars to protect the rich man's oil. Yes, that's right: The workers/consumers will even sacrifice the lives of their own flesh and blood if it means keeping the rich fat and happy because the rich have promised them that some day they can join them at the table!

p145
During the past twenty years, companies including Disney, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Dow Chemical, JP Morgan Chase, and WalMart have been secretly taking out life insurance policies on their low- and mid-level employees and then naming themselves-the Corporation-as the beneficiary! That's right: When you die, the company-not your survivors-gets to cash in. If you die on the job, all the better, as most life insurance policies are geared to pay out more when someone dies young. And if you live to a ripe old age, even long after you've left the company, the company still gets to collect on your death. The money does not go to help your grieving relatives through hard times or to pay for the funeral and burial; it goes to the corporate executives. And regardless of when you croak, the company is able to borrow against the policy and deduct the interest from its corporate taxes.

Many of these companies have set up a system for the money to go to pay for executive bonuses, cars, homes, trips to the Caribbean. Your death goes to helping make your boss a very happy man sitting in his Jacuzzi on St. Barts.

And what does Corporate America privately call this special form of life insurance?

Dead Peasants Insurance.

p148
Look, I don't know how to put it any gentler than to say that these bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control.

p149
... the two bosom buddies, George W. Bush (CEO of America), and Kenneth Lay (Chairman of Enron, the seventh largest company in the U.S.). Before its collapse, Houston-based Enron was raking in a monstrous $100 billion a year, mostly by trading contracts for commodities including oil, gas and electricity around the world. The increasingly deregulated energy market was a gold mine for the company, which was known for aggressive deal-making.

Lay, affectionately nicknamed "Kenny Boy" by Bush, was never shy about public displays of friendship. Enron donated $736,800 to Bush from 1993 on. Between 1999 and 2001, CEO Lay raised $100,000 for his pal, and personally contributed $283,000 to the Republican National Committee. Lay also graciously gave candidate Bush use of the Enron corporate jet during the presidential campaign so he could fly his family around the country and talk about his plan to "restore dignity to the White House."

This friendship was truly a two-way street. Bush interrupted an important campaign trip in April 2000 to fly back to Houston to watch Lay throw out the first pitch at the Astros opening day game at the new Enron Field. Who said men aren't sentimental?

After Bush became president, he invited Lay to come to Washington to personally conduct the interviews of people who would serve in the Bush administration, primarily for high-level positions in the Energy Department-the very regulatory agency overseeing Enron.

Harvey Pitt-the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission at the time-was a former lawyer for Enron's accountant, Arthur Andersen. Lay and the Andersen team also worked to make sure that accounting firms would be exempt from numerous regulations and would not be held liable for any "funny bookkeeping"-arrangements that would come in handy later.

The rest of Lay's time in Washington was spent next door with his old buddy, Vice President Dick Cheney. The two formed an "energy task force" responsible for drafting the country's new "energy policy," a policy that could affect virtually all of Enron's business dealings. Cheney and/or his aides met with Enron executives at least six times during this period, but no one knows the full extent of the meetings because Cheney has refused to make public the records of those meetings. Meanwhile, Enron's wheeler-dealers were cooking up schemes to manipulate an energy crisis in California that would end up adding millions to their own pockets.

Does any of this ring a bell? You may have forgotten, with all the military distractions that have taken the focus off of Enron, that this was one of the greatest corporate scandals in the history of the United States. And it was committed by one of the "president's" closest friends. I'm sure Bush thanks God every night, for the War on Terror!, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Axis of Evil all but assured that Enron would disappear from the news and from the minds of the voting public. This scandal should have resulted in Bush's early impeachment and removal from our White House, but fate often has a way of working in Bush's favor and letting him escape the consequences of his actions.

p151
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Enron gave nearly $6 million to the Republican and Democratic parties since 1989, with 74 percent going to the Republicans. This meant that when Congress began investigating Enron at the beginning of 2002, 212 of the 248 members of the House and Senate on the investigating committees had taken campaign contributions l from Enron or its crooked accountant, Arthur Andersen.

p151
By the fall of 2001, the pyramid scheme that was Enron imploded. And while the rest of the country was in a state of shock over 9/11, Enron executives were busy bailing out, selling stocks, and shredding documents.

And a national crisis didn't stop them from reaching out to their buddies in the Bush administration. Calls were placed by Enron executives to Commerce Secretary Don Evans and then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, seeking help as the company was on the brink of collapse.

Evans and O'Neill said they did nothing when Enron told them of the company's shell game and impending failure, and the administration proudly used that as evidence that no special favors were granted to one of the president's biggest supporters.

That's right-they were proud of doing nothing while millions of Americans were swindled. And the fleecing was made possible to a large degree by the Bush administration's willingness to let Enron run amok.

p153
When Enron officially went bankrupt in December 2001, Wall Street pundits and investors throughout the country were stunned.

But "bankrupt" has a different meaning for Enron's top executives than it does for the rest of us. The company's bankruptcy filing in 2001 shows 144 top executives received a total of $310 million in compensation and another $435 million in stock. That's an average of over $2 million each in compensation and another $3 million in stock.

And while the big guns counted their millions, thousands of Enron workers lost their jobs and much of their savings. Enron had established three savings plans for its employees and at the time of the bankruptcy, 20,000 of them were members of these plans. Sixty percent of the plans were made up of Enron stock. When the stock evaporated to pennies from an August 2000 high of $90, these employees were left with next to nothing. Losses in 401(k) plans totaled more than $1 billion. J

p154
The only true value your life has to the wealthy is that they need your vote every election day in order to get the politicians they've funded into office. They can't do that by themselves. This damnable system of ours that allows for the country to be run by the will of the people is a rotten deal for them as they represent only 1 percent of "the people." You can't get tax cuts for the rich passed when the rich don't have enough votes to pull it off. This is why they truly hate democracy: because it puts them at the distinct disadvantage of being in the smallest of the smallest minorities. So they need to somehow dupe or buy off 50 percent of the people to get the majority they need to run the show. That is no simple task. The easy part is buying the politicians, first with campaign donations, then with special favors and perks once in office, and then with a goodpaying consulting job once out of office. And the best way to ensure that your politician always wins is to give money to both sides, which is what nearly every corporate PAC does.

Fooling the majority of the voters into voting for the rich man's candidate (or candidates) is much harder, but they've proven it can be done. Getting the media to repeat your words as if they were truth, with hardly a question being asked, is one method. As we've seen, scaring people works well, too. As does religion. The rich have thus had a hardcore army of conservatives, right-wingers, and Christian Coalition-types to act as their foot soldiers. It's an odd marriage of sorts because the rich, by and large, are neither conservative nor liberal, neither right nor left, nor are they devout Christians or Jews.

Their real political party is called Greed, and their religion is Capitalism. But they are more than happy to see millions of poor whites ) and even millions more middle-class people cheerfully pulling the lever in the voting booth for the candidates who will only screw I these poor-white and middle-class people once they're in office.


Dude, where's my country?

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