America’s former global leadership role in the world had more to do with the impact of the G.I. bill than the fear caused by the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputniks I and II in 1957. Prior to the 1963 coup, the nation’s elite actually felt a little ‘Noblesse Oblige’ over the loss of so many lives during WWII.

So they came up with the GI Bill. Passed in 1944, the GI Bill benefits included free tuition and living expenses to attend high school, college or vocational school; low-cost mortgages and low-interest business loans as well as one year of unemployment compensation. It was available to all veterans who had been on active duty during the war. Exposure to combat was not a requirement.

To this day, American historians consider the G.I. Bill a huge success — especially in contrast to the treatment of World War I veterans — and a major contribution to America’s stockpile of human capital, which encouraged long-term economic growth.

Many vets gave that educational opportunity to their children rather than use it themselves. Those kids spent a year or two on campus, looked around at society and saw all of the lies. They began to question any authority they perceived to be illegitimate. One of the key slogans of the ‘60s was “Question Authority.” America’s youth started to think for themselves, especially after Kennedy’s assassination.

The G.I. bill virtually funded the ‘counter culture’ years. Teaching working class kids things such as logic, philosophy, critical thinking and comparative religion advanced their intellect beyond the pure rote memorization that would normally turn them into compliant drones, and instead turned them into political radicals. The Junta leaders in the MIC (Military-Industrial Complex) saw the huge threat this posed to their totalitarian dream as the 1960s wore on.

Intelligent, engaged young people soon became the most dangerous segment of our society. The Elite had to put an end to that experiment – and fast! It was apparent that in the future, steps had to be taken to limit the average Americans’ access to higher Education.

When the 1% realized that young people were beginning to question authority, voting in large numbers, and taking civic action, they looked for a solution to this ‘festering’ problem from the usual right-wing think tanks: RAND, CFR, the Trilateral Commission, and all the rest.

This coincided with the existential concern within religious organizations that science and scientific research was becoming a serious threat to their power base. This had to be stopped.

The trifecta was complete when the billionaires decided that they wanted to keep all of their money, no matter what happened to the country.

Soon colleges across the nation began charging exorbitant tuition, which greatly restricted the number of potential radicals. Over time, Political activism on college campuses became a thing of the past…

Our much-touted service economy will soon become a ‘servant’ economy: debt-laden 20-something college graduates will become even more debt-laden 30-and 40-somethings; still juggling dead-end “gig” jobs and living in their parents’ homes. Personal dignity will go the way of decent paying jobs. Forget about retirement benefits…or ever even retiring, for that matter. Life at work for most Americans will return to what it was before the New Deal: “right to work” low-paying jobs, subject to the daily humiliations of an economy engineered to benefit only the rich and powerful.

Perhaps the 1% have become so wealthy that they no longer need customers from the general public to buy their crappy products? Most people won’t be able to afford them soon in any case…

This is why the global parasites have no loyalty to states, Constitutions, treaties – or any respect for any nation’s sovereignty (least of all America..). And they absolutely refuse to pay any taxes. They’ve been working very hard for 150 years at destroying those last fleeting illusions of democracy. And let’s face it; they already won.

The oligarchs have created a permanent wage-slave class in America. Their primary tool is the destruction of the Public Education system, and they are quite good at it already. Betsy DEVOs is key to this plan. Along with starving public schools, remaining funds are being diverted to for-profit (Christian) Charter Schools and Private School ‘Vouchers.’ These alternatives are not available to low income Americans, since high tuition is only part of the expense of attending these schools.

Working-class kids are consigned to underfunded, crumbling public schools, where they are not taught to think or to lead or to aspire to anything better than their current status. The same is now virtually true even for higher education, where student loans eat up any financial advantage a college degree may have once generated.

The best colleges still offer scholarships to students most likely to succeed. Fewer and fewer of those students are graduates of public schools. Thus the Koch Brothers – and their super-PAC, ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) are creating a huge swath of Americans who live and die at the whim of the Kochs, the Sacklers, the Mercers and all of their obscenely wealthy friends.

The members of the One Percent think that they are smarter and harder working than the have-nots and those living on the margins; or else they believe that there is something ‘special’ about them – in the same way the nobility and aristocracy of centuries ago believed themselves to have been “blessed” by God and thus deserving of their fortunate lot in life. As a society we have not really evolved beyond that.

Capitalism was once thought to be the democratic antidote to monarchical rule and the social injustice that existed between Lords and serfs; it was looked upon optimistically by many as the “great equalizer”. But unless it is strictly regulated in such a way as to distribute income and profits in a more proportional manner among the owners and the laborers – it becomes just another form of servitude, not unlike that which existed between the Lord and serf.

What we have today is an unfettered, unregulated, highly speculative brand of capitalism favored by an oligarchy which has rigged the rules hugely in their favor. It is not just undemocratic, but simply another variation of the master/slave economic model. But the capitalists prefer it that way and they are trying like hell to rewrite the Constitution to make it a permanent model for America to live by. They don’t give a shit about the will of the people. It’s going to take either an all-out depression-scale economic crash to do away with this system – or a violent revolution…or both.

The end game of Capitalism is not gonna be pretty for anyone who actually works for a living. The greed-mongers will swallow everything up if we don’t stop them. Americans blame each other for our problems, all the while worshiping the Kakistocrats for their utter incompetence…which is really the problem. The US supposedly exports Freedom and Democracy to the world while, really, we export greed and death – which are of course big profit makers for the 1% and the MIC.

But politicized or not, education is essential to our nation’s future survival. Without basic literacy and numeracy and more advanced skills in science and engineering we will lose our technological advantage to nations that invest heavily in education.

The irony of our country falling so far behind is how deeply the GOP hates to invest in the public education system, despite the fact that the future of our technological dominance depends on having a well-educated workforce to maintain that (fledgling) dominance.

Which tells me two things about the GOP: they don’t want to hire well-educated Americans or pay them what they’re worth. They want an excuse to hire foreigners from third world counties who will work for a pittance so they and their corporate buddies can continue making their exorbitant salaries – up to three thousand times what their best workers make!

Sadly, the thing that Americans at every social level refuse to acknowledge is how other countries do things much better than we do. The population at large is convinced that we always have the best solution for everything, even when we clearly do not. Struggling continuously to reinvent the wheel when it is turning so successfully everywhere else in the world is a waste of time and resources…never mind how silly it looks…

But unless some corrupt American conglomerate can make a huge profit off of it somehow, the solution is never to be found.

That’s just the way things work here.