by Joe Giambrone
The freedom of corporate shareholders to fire your ass and move your job to anywhere that pays less, that’s one of them. We’re going to keep it real now, okay?
Each year on July 4th, the working classes of America drink themselves into stupors and play with innocuous explosives in their driveways. To them, this is some kind of representation of “freedom.” Yes, they can blow up paper cylinders; what they cannot blow up is the system that holds them as wage slaves. Say “no” to your boss, and you are economically destroyed. Not so “free” at work it turns out.
America has a twisted, immoral relationship with the word “freedom.” Each war of the modern age has been disguised, inside mountains of propaganda, as an effort to bring so-called “freedom” to somebody somewhere. If they didn’t ask for it, well, that’s no concern.
Freedom is good because we say it is. We liberate a lot of oil and mineral wealth, which needs to break free and become corporate profit. That’s the kind of freedom that launches the Marines or the Special Forces to invade your land. This “freedom” is not a freedom for your people and their human rights, but the freedom of US big money investors to plunder your land’s resources.
This is proven beyond any reasonable doubt, in 2003, by Paul Bremer’s “100 Orders” of the occupying United States. These illegal “Orders” dismantled the entire government of Iraq and wrote in numerous rights for foreign investors. The entire enterprise remains an illegal war of aggression, and the profit motive of the invaders stands as evidence:
“Bremer implemented his “100 Orders” with the force of law, all but a handful of which remain in place today. As the preamble to many of the orders state, they are intended to “transition [Iraq] from a … centrally planned economy to a market economy” virtually overnight and by U.S. fiat.
Bremer’s orders included firing the entire Iraqi military–some half a million men–in the first weeks of the occupation. Suddenly jobless, many of these men took their guns with them and joined the violent insurgency. Bremer also fired 120,000 of Iraq’s senior bureaucrats from every government ministry, hospital and school. His laws allowed for the privatization of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises (excluding oil) and for American companies to receive preferential treatment over Iraqis in the awarding of reconstruction contracts. The laws reduced taxes on all corporations by 25 percent and opened every sector of the Iraqi economy to private foreign investment. The laws allowed foreign firms to own 100 percent of Iraqi businesses (as opposed to partnering with Iraqi firms) and to send their profits home without having to invest a cent in the struggling Iraqi economy. Iraqi laws governing banking, foreign investment, patents, copyrights, business ownership, taxes, the media, agriculture and trade were all changed to conform to U.S. goals.”
-Spoils of War, In These Times
That’s the definition of “freedom,” literally, as George W. Bush told us so. That was why he launched the war. That is what he did to the nation of Iraq once it was defeated.
So, clearly, there are different types of freedom. There is what the prisoner yearns for, and there is what the CEO bribes politicians for. Do not confuse them, as that is how propaganda turns freedom to slavery, peace to war, intelligence to idiocy.
Corporate CEOs in the Trump era are stockpiling freedom too. They want freedom to destroy unions, thus disempowering their workers further. They want the freedom to pollute the air and water more than it is already polluted. They want the freedom to keep all the profits for themselves and externalize all the costs onto the lower classes. They even want the freedom to steal American’s Social Security trust fund.
Criminals absolutely love freedom, as it gives them a window of opportunity to pounce.
This July 4th watch the words. Watch your ass.
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