"It's ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations ..."

[JDPriestly]

16. But what small businesses do not realize is that what keeps them going -- the oil and other

natural resources that keep the small businesses going, even much of the food that the owners and employees eat, is obtained and sold to all those small businesses, their owners and employees thanks to an unseen collusion between the government and big businesses. This collusion is used to grab resources from other countries and subsidize big business in a number of ways using tax revenue. It is also used to keep employee's wages low under the excuse of preventing "inflation."

The small businesses pay big companies for "supplies" and the raw materials with which they make their products or deliver their services. But the small businesses are getting a huge subsidy themselves thanks to the protection that the US government including the military provides to keep up the illusion that we are capitalist.

In fact, our economy is not nearly as capitalist as small business owners think. They just don't realize that the taxes they pay go in part to support a lot of activities by their government that lower the prices on raw materials and permit the US to maintain the illusion of a free market while in fact meddling greatly at a number of points, especially with regard to providing energy resources and especially with regard to oil. And especially through our military and diplomatic sometimes heavyhandedness. And much of that heavyhandedness is labeled top secret. We ordinary people are not allowed to look at what is turning the wheels of our economy. Much of it would disgust us beyond belief at least until we tried living in our country without all that heavyhandedness.

Small business owners do some good things. But . . . . what they don't know and don't pay attention to about what is going on, say, in the State Department or the Department of Agriculture or the Securities Exchange Commission or the Commodities Commission or the Attorney General's office or the Fed that actually determines whether they can succeed or will be allowed to fail. Of course, the government does not target certain small businesses for success or failure (at least I have no proof they do), but it is their job to keep the spigots open for small businesses to do their thing. And part of keeping those spigots open is, in a succession of many years of different regimes in D.C., a matter of doing things Americans might be ashamed of and then making sure that Americans don't find out about it.

And so we are in the surveillance and propaganda state and most people don't know it and don't want to know it and would do anything to fool themselves into thinking we are not.

I suggest you read Greg Palast's saga of corruption, Vulture's Picnic. It is an eye-opener. Chapter 6 is especially interesting, but you need to start at the beginning and read the entire book. Tells a lot of fascinating, eye-opening stories. Not a boring read either.