As I type this the Rulers of The Island, Our Lord Benefactors, are announcing to the populace a new plan for the expenditure of their vast taxation revenue.
This includes an explanation that, due to their beneficient plans in the face of the inexorable crush of the tides of globalisation, they will raise the taxation rates.
One wonders why they even bother to do so. They control the military and the media, the coinage and the courts, and thus the minds and bodies and, if you like, souls of the underclasses. Why the need to explain?
They hold so much power in the hands of so few that they have not the slightest need to appear beholden to the "electorate" (what a funny, alien concept on The Island). Why bother to explain to the underclasses when you have so much power over them?
Of course, they've done more than mere explaining. They've gotten a full broadside of a propaganda campaign underway, as much as subtlety would allow them.
"Maturity with a Bang"
"Silver Workforce Strikes Gold"
"Why the *** Hike Is a good thing after all"
"Two-point hike- It affects the poor the most, but they will receive help"
(Wait, wasn't the poor supposed to be helped by the hike? Why should the help that they recieve be in spite of the hike?)
and other such good- no, not merely good, incredibly, stupendously, marvellous great- news headlines all over the newspapers.
And on the televised news, they interviewed at least a dozen upper and middle classs people in the Central Business District about what they thought about the impending tax increase. Not surprisingly, they all gave the Thumbs Up.
But not once did the propagandists interview the people who clean toilets, who cook in the hawker centers, who labour day and night to the bone. A cyncially smart move. These people would have given not the Thumbs Down but the Middle Finger Up. They would have spat in the camera lens and hurled expletives at Our Benefactors. And that would not look good on the evening news, would it?
Disgust, disgust. Emotions that reach new heights every time I see the well fed and well clothed Lord Benefactors walking around the underclasses and smiling and smiling and promising more "help"- help in the form of increased taxation.
And, increasing their own pay as well. One of Our Supreme Lord Benefactors has claimed that he and his fellow Benefactors had to have higher, "competitive" pay, or else they might leave for the private sector, and deprive Our Benefactory of their skills, or even worse, become corrupt. So they had to have higher pay in order to help them to resist the temptation to become corrupt.
Isn't that legalising corruption in all but name?
Things are skewed here on The Island.
