All roads lead not to Rome but money. This article demonstrates that class,
not creed, color,or belief system, Trumps all ills. Money, as it were, is the
root of all evil.
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Carl Jarvis
<carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2017 12:44 PM
To: blind-democracy
Cc: Matthew; Jennifer Ford; delores selset; jamesjarvis98
Subject: [blind-democracy] ah ha, I found it...
Here's the article I was looking for:
Carl
Palast's reflections go some way toward identifying the disease that
has infected America's disenfranchised people.
Carl Jarvis
Friday, October 13, 2017
By Greg Palast
Mobile home on tracks, Sun Valley CA, birthplace of the Vegas shooter.
From the film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
[Los Angeles] When we were at Francis Polytechnic High in Sun Valley,
Steve Paddock and I were required to take electrical shop class. At
Poly and our
junior high, we were required to take metal shop so we could work the
drill presses at the GM plant. We took drafting. Drafting like in
"blueprint drawing."
Paddock. Palast. We sat next to each other at those drafting tables
with our triangular rulers and #2 pencils so we could get jobs at
Lockheed as draftsmen
drawing blueprints of fighter jets. Or do tool-and-dye cutting to make
refrigerator handles at GM where they assembled Frigidaire
refrigerators and Chevys.
But we weren’t going to fly the fighter jets. Somewhere at Phillips
Andover Academy, a dumbbell with an oil well for a daddy was going to
go to Yale and
then fly our fighter jets over Texas. We weren’t going to go to Yale.
We were going to go to Vietnam. Then, when we came back, if we still
had two hands,
we went to GM or Lockheed.
(It’s no coincidence that much of the student population at our school
was Hispanic.)
But if you went to "Bevvie" - Beverly Hills High - or Hollywood High,
you didn’t take metal shop. You took Advanced Placement French. You
took Advanced
Placement Calculus. We didn’t have Advanced Placement French. We
didn’t have French anything. We weren’t Placed, and we didn’t Advance.
Steve was a math wizard. He should have gone to UCLA, to Stanford. But
our classes didn’t qualify him for anything other than LA Valley
College and Cal
State Northridge. Any dumbbell could get in. And it was nearly free.
That’s where Steve was expected to go, and he went with his big
math-whiz brain. And
then Steve went to Lockheed, like we were supposed to. Until Lockheed
shut down plants in 1988. Steve left, took the buy-out.
And after NAFTA, GM closed too.
Land of Opportunity? Well, tell me: who gets those opportunities?
Some of you can and some of you can’t imagine a life where you just
weren’t give a fair chance. Where the smarter you are, the more
painful it gets, because
you have your face pressed against the window, watching THEM. THEY got
the connections to Stanford. THEY get the gold mine. WE get the shaft.
This is where Paddock and Palast were bred: Sun Valley, the anus of
Los Angeles. Literally. It’s where the sewerage plant is. It’s in a
trench below the
Hollywood Hills, where the smog settles into a kind of puke yellow
soup. Here’s where LA dumps its urine and the losers they only
remember when they need
cheap labor and cheap soldiers when the gusanos don’t supply enough from Mexico.
I’ll take you to Sun Valley. It’s in my film,
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
In the movie, a kind of dream scene, the actress Shailene Woodley
takes me back to my family’s old busted home in the weeds and then
down San Fernando
Road, near Steve's place. Take a look, America. Along the tracks that
once led in to the GM plant, you see a bunch of campers that the union
men bought
for vacations. Now they live in them.
No, Steve’s brain was too big to end up on the tracks. He lived in
empty apartments in crappy buildings he bought, then in a barren tract
house outside
Reno. I laugh when they say he was "rich." He wanted to be THEM, to
have their stuff. He got close.
It’s reported that Steve was a "professional gambler." That’s another
laugh. He was addicted to numbing his big brain by sitting 14 hours a
day in the
dark in front of video poker machines. He was a loser. Have you ever
met a gambler who said they were a Professional Loser?
It’s fair to ask me: Why didn’t I end up in a hotel room with a
bump-stock AR-15 and 5,000 rounds of high velocity bullets?
Because I have a job, a career, an OBSESSION: to hunt down THEM, the
daddy-pampered pricks who did this to us, the grinning billionaire
jackals that make
a profit off the slow decomposition of the lives I grew up with.
But I’m telling you, that I know it’s a very fine line, and lots of
crazy luck, that divided my path from Paddock’s.
Dear Reader: The publication that pulled this story at the last moment
was plain scared — that they’d be accused of approving murder.
Paddock slaughtered good people, coldly, with intense cruelty,
destroying lives and hundreds of families forever. If you think I’m
making up some excuse
for him, then I give up.
But also this: The editor of the Beverly Hills-based publication, a
Stanford grad, could not understand that, just like veterans of the
Vietnam war who
suffer from PTSD even today, so too, losers of the class war can be
driven mad by a PTSD that lingers, that gnaws away, their whole lives.
block quote
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it ...fester like a sore? Does
it stink like rotten meat? Sag...like a heavy load?
Or does it explode?
block quote end
Steve, you created more horrors than your cornered life could ever justify.
But, I just have to tell you, Steve: I get it.
*****Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The
Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud
and racketeering
for governments and labor unions worldwide. His investigations have
appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's and New Statesman. Known as the
reporter who exposed
how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters
from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush. Palast
has written four
New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires &
Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now out as major
motion non-fiction
movie:
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of the Stolen Election
(the brand new, updated, post-election edition).
