Nice rant. :) Did you ever read Joe Bageant’s work?

“ We may be being lead around by our stomachs and our dicks with our eyes taped shut, but we’re not total ideological slaves yet. Because even the worst ideology requires at least a modicum of thought, and as a people with no authentic intellectual culture, we haven’t enough collective intellect or education these days to pull it off.”

You may also like this by Joe Carpenter. “We Don’t Need Them”

“It’s OK, just hop in the SUV and go, we’ll take care of everything!” Government will help; government will heal; government will bring us together.

That’s not going to happen, of course. The elites are too busy dividing us, setting us against each other, exacerbating every animosity, every misgiving, every anxiety, however slight. They insinuate themselves into every new crack and crevice and offer convoluted, expensive legislation and bureaucracies to bring us back together again. “There oughta be a law,” says the old complaint. Well, there will be, to be sure — but it will just make things worse.”

The funny thing is that, like any machine, it works only when it has all of the parts. Americans think that open-loop consumptionism is the greatest thing since store-bought bread, but only as long as they never see the real cost at the decision point. The missing leg of the stool is consumption taxes that reflect the real costs to community and humanity and the planet. The religion of ‘free’ market consumerism that the ‘Greatest’ generation built is a train with no brakes, monkeys for engineers and we’re laying track across a frozen lake while the Invisible Hand Job holds a gun to our heads.