Imagine being in a dark room not knowing where you are, then someone suddenly lights a candle.

I believe many Americans have been in that dark room with primarily the Republican party for years, but some small candles may be shedding light.

What catches people off-guard with the corporate-owned far right is the fact they form a plan or a goal before they implement the steps to complete the plan.   If you don’t know the planned end result, there can exist a cloud of confusion when the first steps are proposed.  In retrospect, after the goal has been reached,  it makes those having to work with such people look either stupid or part of the plan all along.

Let’s say you are a property manager.  You’re honest and strive to take care of your clients.  You manage a property for an elderly couple who depend on the income from their property.  One day you are delivered information from a reliable source that the property is in danger for some reason and could lose its value.  You feel you should present this information to the owners.  The owners become fearful and decide to sell the property for a small loss to protect themselves from a possible larger loss.  It turns out a year later that a huge shopping center had been planned for the site the property was on.  You fell in the trap of their scam, but your clients will never know for sure.  Were you paid off and part of the deal?  Should you not have trusted your source of information?  Was your source paid off and part of the scam?   It turned out the information you were given had nothing to do with what was really happening.

Simply put, the developers wanted the property for less than its value, and they set up a series of steps to accomplish their goal.  The elderly couple doesn’t have the money to go through the lengthy and expensive process of figuring out who was involved and who knew what, and may never know if the property manager they had trusted was involved.

The pathology of greed has no end.  It never reaches a point where it is satisfied.  When a greedy corporation using unscrupulous methods has amassed hundreds of billions of dollars over many years or even several generations, you cannot underestimate their ability to come up with a devious money-making plan and implement it.  There is no need for the top executives to directly do the dirty work – they are free to go on vacation.  They have the funds to hire as many levels of people as needed to execute their plan and make backtracking next to impossible.  It’s no surprise that one of the Koch brothers could say he has never met Walker face to face.  Here’s a common headline today on Huffington Post:

Executives Behind Financial Crisis Face Little Risk of Being Caught

It’s bad enough what one powerful corporation can do, but what happens when the corrupt corporations (and not all are corrupt) combine their power and come up with a plan?  Their plan can easily involve politicians at a high level who will receive millions for their involvement.  The Iraq war  is an example of that to the highest degree.  Both Bush and Cheney were closely tied to the corporate world who would benefit from war.  Paul Krugman’s article “Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.” on February 24, 2011 connected Baghdad to Madison:

Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence. As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”

The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

While Americans were still in shock and angry over the 911 tragedy, and while Iraqi’s were in greater shock – still mourning the death of family members and friends, with no fresh water, no electricity and no schools for their children, the American corporate world is already implementing their plan of takeover for profit.  That goal of corporate profit was achieved off the backs of Americans.  Americans hard earned tax money went for the bombs that destroyed Iraq and killed tens of thousands of innocent people, not to mention the U.S. soldier’s killed and maimed.  Yet Americans voted to put Bush and Cheney into office a SECOND time – after already being scammed in a horrific manner.

As grievous, destructive, morally wrong as this pattern has been, it has been successful.  Why would this greed stop when the powers that be have figured out how to keep Americans not only in the dark, but coming out in groves to support them at election time?

Well Walker may have at least lit a candle to shine light on how the process works.  At a national level, the plan is so complex and takes place on so many levels, that investigation is a nightmare and would require vast sums of capital.  But Walker exposed a simple form of the process in a 144 page bill.

Corporations buy a politician(s), work through the politician to gain access to taxpayer money, then use that money for their own personal gain.  To keep the taxpayers confused, they constantly, relentlessly, keep the taxpayer distracted with an emotional issue that has NOTHING to do with their corporate greed and overall plan that will severely hurt the taxpayers in the long run.  The end result is a plan that literally transfers money from every “common” citizen to a bank account on the Cayman Islands – so the poor will continue to get poorer and the rich get richer.   The emotional issues used to distract is purposefully pitting taxpayer against taxpayer.  The oldest trick in the book.  But the massive amount of funds available to the corporate world to orchestrate this evil is next to impossible for the average American to comprehend.  Even those who are suspicious and watching are often caught off-guard and trapped by the snares.  Pass the candles – we need more light.