Friday, November 30, 2012

We Should Then See the Multitude Oppressed

We should then see the multitude oppressed from within, in consequence of the very precautions it had taken to guard against foreign tyranny. We should see oppression continually gain ground without it being possible for the oppressed to know where it would stop, or what legitimate means was left them of checking its progress. We should see the rights of citizens, and the freedom of nations slowly extinguished, and the complaints, protests and appeals of the weak treated as seditious murmurings. We should see the honour of defending the common cause confined by statecraft to a mercenary part of the people. We should see taxes made necessary by such means, and the disheartened husbandman deserting his fields even in the midst of peace, and leaving the plough to gird on the sword. We should see fatal and capricious codes of honour established; and the champions of their country sooner or later becoming its enemies, and for ever holding their daggers to the breasts of their fellow-citizens.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Discourse on the Origin on Inequality (1754)

Friday, November 23, 2012

Missive to the Republican House

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice.  

Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess?

Ye have no more religion than my horse. Gold is your God. Which of you have not bartered your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices?

Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance. 

Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God's help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do.

I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place.

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. 

In the name of God, go!

Oliver Cromwell
"Dismissal of the Rump Parliament" (1650)


Sunday, November 18, 2012

Vulture Capitalism and Its Apologists

Some simply cannot accept the reality of a vulturous brand of capitalism that strips assets and destroys jobs, even when the evidence is abundantly there, right before their eyes. These people are like the old-style Bolsheviks, who defended the revolution even as the muzzle touched the back of their necks. Lemming-like ideologues, they'll work their whole lives long on shrinking wages and lost benefits, and in the end it won't be their god that failed them, but rather specters of "over-regulation, unions," etc. They'll die never knowing what really killed them.

Monday, November 5, 2012