You can bet your soul that both establishments poll-tested the “free stuff” trope. I listen to “purported progressives,” read centrists and conservatives alike. And it is amazing how many fall for the trope.
Free Stuff trope by a purported Progressive Democrat
So why is the “free stuff” trope so powerful? Why does it elicit such a carnal response?
The trope creates the false belief that someone or some group is getting something for nothing. In other words, stuff that is either taken away from you or you must work hard to pay for with your hard-earned dollars.
Our corporate masters are successful in doing this because they set the initial narrative and they have the means to keep it in your psyche, the mainstream media. The Powell Memo was instrumental in the methodology. But no more. It is time that we make the narrative reflect reality.
Let’s be clear, the majority of able-bodied Americans are very hard workers. The reason freeways, buses, and trains are clogged every day is that there is a huge workforce doing the same thing day in and day out.
The people controlling our airwaves and media loves showing the exception. They love showing the bum on the street corner on welfare. They love showing unwed mothers with children from different men monopolizing on an ever declining welfare check and food stamps.
Ironically, in the same neighborhoods where they show the above mentioned, they don’t show the thousands of minimum wage workers commuting to dead-end jobs that are making someone else wealthy with their cheap labor. But you see, it is all about a narrative to control you. The idea is for you to have a false mental picture of those causing you harm, those “freeloading” off your hard work.
The media rarely quantifies the dire straits more recent generations are in right now. They talk about a generation living with their parents but fail to explain in detail who created the at times permanent tether.
Most importantly they rarely explain that pricing power gives a certain group the power and authority to take any marginal increases in your pay preventing you from ever saving, developing wealth, or moving ahead. They do this with the constant unnecessary increases in drugs, healthcare, rents, fees, and much more, not because things cost more but a return for the executives and shareholders. They use the concept of whatever-the-market-will-bear especially for things you need and for which they have some sort of monopoly to extort us all.
Progressives must point out how it is the rich, the corporatocracy, the plutocracy that are getting things for free.
- Corporations make billions mining for elements, oil, gas, and much more. These are substances that should belong to us all. After recovering their cost we-the-people should benefit from the country’s riches. Hell, in Alaska, every person gets a stipend from the oil that belongs to all Alaskans. Instead oil companies, mining companies of all sorts get all those riches for free.
- Many companies pollute the environment with the products they make whether it be gasoline, aluminum, gold, etc. Many times they don’t clean up. Worse, people get sick. Shareholders and executives get free money because they don’t pay to clean up or make those they have made sick better. They get free stuff, increased profits for not including healthcare for those they made sick and budgets to cleanup.
- Taxpayers, not Big Pharma funded research behind most new drugs since 2010. But all the profits go to executive bonuses and shareholders. The return on investment that should be due the taxpayer and the excess cost of the drugs are free stuff for the rich shareholder and executives.
- We continue to cut taxes on corporations whose profits are a direct result of hard-working Americans. They get free stuff as they lower taxes and the guaranteed return on the bonds they buy from the treasury to fund our deficits created partly by the same tax cuts — another racket to screw us all.
I could go much further but the picture is clear. It is not the welfare fraudster or the lazy freeloader that should concern you. That fraud numerically is minimal compared to the fraud mentioned above.
Progressives are not looking for free stuff to give to Americans. We want Americans paid for their work, their worth, and paid back for what has been stolen even in cloaked in the legalities of a fraudulent economic system.
I covered this on Politics Done Right on the episode titled “FREE STUFF? No? We want what we earned. It’s the wealthy & corporatists who get free stuff.” Please check it out.