Very wonderful polemics from J. Michael Straczynski (Amazing Spiderman, Babylon 5, Twilight Zone), which I have allowed myself to translate freely into German:

RULES FOR THE NEW NOBLE

It doesn't matter how high food prices go, and it doesn't matter if you can only afford fast food, we will always be able to buy steaks. And we're going to be investing heavily in fast food stocks to make sure we make big money off of them. No matter how high the oil and gas prices go, we will always be able to afford them.

In addition to poor nutrition and poor health insurance, your children will grow up without a healthy diet, which causes problems on all levels, from physical to academic difficulties. Our children grow up strong and pure and healthy.

It doesn't matter how much an education costs, or whether you can afford to send your children to college or have to go into massive debt for it, we will always be able to send our children to university. And because much of our income comes from tax breaks and taxpayer-funded rescue packages, your taxes make it possible for our children to be sent to school. But you don't have the right to get money from us to send your child to school.

If your kids want to start a business, they'll find that we're sucking all the money out of the economy and that there are simply no funds available to fund your startup. We just give our kids a check and tell them go out and have fun with it.

Your children will be born under a bell jar from which they will practically never have the opportunity to rise. Our children are born on a marble floor that makes it practically impossible to fall.

If you accidentally provide incorrect information on your tax return, you could lose your home, property, and livelihood. We lie about our tax information all the time without anyone ever questioning it. We hoard trillions of dollars in overseas accounts and do what we can to ensure that your money is never out of our control because we undoubtedly need it to make more money quickly.

You live in a corporate city, we pay you to work for us. At the same time, however, we make sure that we have all the shops in town that sell our goods, doctors' surgeries where you go in town, restaurants where you eat, we charge that high to ensure that at the end of the week there is no money left to put aside and you could get the idea of ​​leaving the corporate city or moving forward and so there is never any danger of the corporate city being criticized. You work for us. We own the city where you live. We own you.

If one of you takes a hundred dollar bill from the till, he'll go to jail for it. If we save billions in common people and crash the economy, costing thousands of jobs, none of us will ever be prosecuted because the new aristocracy is above such things. So let's just keep going. Enjoy the ride.

Your local police is ours. We formed them into soldiers who treat you like terrorists. If you speak out against us, we'll make sure you're tear gassed, beaten and handcuffed and thrown into Free Speech Zone cages designed to make you forget that the whole country is actually a Free Speech Zone " were. But now you are only free to speak when and where we allow you to do so. We can pretty much say anything to you and do anything we want without anything happening.

If you look through the background to our game and talk about it, we will accuse you of waging a class war in order to distract everyone from realizing that there is indeed a class war going on against you and until you realize that the war is over and we have won.

Yes, you have the chance to vote for politicians and senators and presidents. But only after we have decided which candidate to fund, long before the first ballot has started. First and foremost, we fund those we like and those who give us what we want and you can choose one of the two pre-screened candidates we give you. If we don't like them, if we think they are challenging us, we don't fund them and so you will never have the chance to vote for them because you don't get a real vote among the nine aristocracy.

We own the White House. We own the congresses. These lead - we write the invoices. They make the laws we want them to make and thus ensure that they don't limit us, only you, never us. We own the courts. We own the lawyers. They are the association with which we force you to submit.

There are no Democratic or Republican senators, or Congressional politicians or presidents. These parties have not existed for decades. There is only the party of the new nobility. The rest is kabuki theater. It's Mexican wrestling. It is the illusion of choice, of difference, of democracy. This is not a democracy. It's a money monarchy. In this monarchy, we are the nobility, the kings and what we say is made.

If you throw away rubbish illegally, you will be punished and possibly arrested. If we dump hundreds of tons of toxic waste in seas, rivers and streams, none of us will ever get arrested. If we are ever punished, we will simply raise our prices, so again you are the ones who actually pay for what we did.

We are the new aristocracy and we don't pay any fines.
We are the new aristocracy and we are immune to law enforcement.
We are the new aristocracy and we find your poverty and your impotence and your struggles disgusting. So we prefer to stay among ourselves.

Understand: we don't want you to succeed. We don't want anyone to come here to cut the cake into even smaller pieces. We want to own everything. If we really wanted more of you, do you think we would have spent the last 30 years dividing every bigger company into smaller and smaller groups that belong to fewer and fewer people?

We are the new aristocracy because we were born into it. We got our money the old-fashioned, medieval way: our parents gave it to us. We were born in abundance that we have stolen from you and your families over the past fifty years. You were always born into poverty and struggle. You will never belong to us like this. You never have our advantages. And we like it that way.

We like it when you peer through the bars of the cage to see all we have. We want you to think you can have this yourself one day as this illusion keeps you on our side. But you will never have these things. We made sure of that. Because what you are seeing is ours and we do not share.

The world that we have carefully built for you is like a game of chance where you have to knock in the big pens with a baseball bat to win a huge prize. But the pens are weighted and positioned so that you can never, never knock them in. But you pay for it and keep knocking until you are exhausted and your wallet is empty. And we like it that way.

We don't want you to have opportunities, we don't want you to do an education, we don't want you to have a voice to tell what's happening to you, we don't want you to be healthy, we don't want you Can do anything but be scared and helpless, docile consumers, who eat and see and buy what we tell you, eat and see and buy while we keep all the good things to ourselves.

You don't belong to our club.
Because we are the new aristocracy.
And you are the new farmers.
And we like it very, very, very much ...