Folding the Foil

It wouldn't take much to get me to start wearing a tin foil hat. Just a little push to make me a liberal commie reflection of Glenn Beck. Especially if Tea Party nuts win power.

• Never before in my life has government been so completely a wholly owned subsidiary of large corporations. Corporates are openly buying elections. More than every they are absorbing public activities like roads, tax collection, law enforcement, and war into purely profit making enterprises for private businesses. The concept of "the public good" is disappearing. 
• Spying on citizens is at an all time high. There is government spying and corporate spying. Use a debit card, a grocery store discount card, Google, carry a cell phone? Just about any activity is being recorded by some corporation somewhere. Google records every time you watch porn, RiteAid records every condom purchase. Corporate spies know everything about your private life.
• Big Brother is watching. Walk down any city street, get on any subway, and chances are you are on candid camera. There are millions of surveillance cameras operating in the United States alone. 
• Religious fanatics are a constant threat. Muslim fanatics, Christian fundamentalists, extremists of every faith (except Baha'i, they seem pretty mellow) are determined to convert or exterminate the planet. Often both.

It is true that history has seen all of this before but I have never seen this level of crazy. During the Gilded Age, the very rich used government like a dog's chew toy. The 1950's was a time when spying on your neighbor was considered your civic duty. The Inquisition was much like now, religiously.

It is a dangerous time. Prosperity for the powerful has became disconnected from prosperity for the nation. In fact, driving the vast majority of people in grinding poverty made good business sense for the billionaire's club. A paranoid, surveillance society will always find scapegoats to hang. And Karl Marx was wrong. Religion, today, is not the opiate of the masses it is the meth amphetamine. Paranoid hate filled religions are the norm and they tend to go crazy, blood crazy.