The Policy "Me Like Me Take" Declines

When both the foreign policy and the domestic policy of the U.S. are represented by the pooch having its way with the cat, the robber baron warmonger era of "me like me take" has been put upon us once again.

I say once again because we have been there done that, and the results today are the same as they were then:

Robber baron is a term revived in the 19th century United States for businessmen and bankers who dominated respective industries and amassed huge personal fortunes, typically by anti-competitive or unfair business practices. The term may now relate to any businessman or banker who used questionable business practices to become powerful or wealthy.

(Wikipedia). What is quite different today is the degree of damage the modern day robber barons, which we usually call plunder barons on Dredd Blog, do.

Their realm of influence is encapsulated with our nickname for them, which has been described in the post MOMCOM - A Mean Welfare Queen.

One of several factors that allowed the change from robber baron to plunder baron was the loss of the "free press", an institution that was supposed to be free of government and robber baron influence, free to speak truth to power so the populace could remain informed.

An informed mind is a free mind of an informed populace which is a free populace, while a deceived mind is not free and can devolve into dementia, that is, become unattached to reality.

One of the "M" factors in MOMCOM is "media", a.k.a. the free press, is no longer free but is part and parcel of MOMCOM.

Long ago the robber barons were able to take over ownership of the media because they wanted to control, so their philosophy and domestic policy of "me like me take" resulted in that take over:

Two scientists who are well respected by their peers were interviewed about the subject matter of deceit.

Deceit is defined as "concealment or distortion of the truth for the purpose of misleading; duplicity; fraud; cheating".

One of the two who participated in that interesting interview is a world renowned professor of linguistics at MIT:

"Noam Chomsky: One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.

And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries—in Britain and the US — roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control"

(Dredd Blog, The Deceit Business, emphasis in original). The oil barons are the "O" in MOMCOM, who are drug lords in today's incarnation of the robber baron era, drug lords in the sense that a recent president said we are "addicted to oil".

The military barons or lords, the first "M" in MOMCOM, have hidden themselves from the public eye better than the other two have, so, it usually takes one of their own to point out that they too have the robber baron "me like me take" foreign and domestic policy spirit:

The reality of these wars is a story of the shame of the warmongers among us:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

(President & General Eisenhower, emphasis added). MOMCOM has sold herself via the main stream media as the saviour, yet she is actually the crucifier.

(The States of War Budgets). The foolish notions that compose the wanton greed of MOMCOM, like the barbarianism of past empires, eventually leads to the decline of the reputation of the offending empire, then the full-on decline of the empire itself.

The policy of "me like me take" naturally declines because it is inhumane, unenlightened, and counter productive to the presence of a decent society within a neighborhood of good nations.