By Jim Hoover

Not too much has changed in the graven-god-scene since the early Aztecs used razor-sharp obsidian knives to snatch beating hearts pulsing with blood out of their sacrificial victims. Heart-extraction was viewed as a way to liberate the istli (a fragment of the Sun’s heat) and reunite it with the Sun. The executioners held the beating heart in their hands, dripping with blood, extending it in their hands to the Sun-God Huitzilopochtli as a snack.

Political agents of the rich, through thinly veiled policies of living death, directed at powerless minions, pay their tribute to the plutocratic gods of greed, who demand their own bloodletting. Of course, they don’t condone snatching out living hearts, but their religion involves depriving the livelihood of others.

Plutocratic agents marshal anti-people stands at Republican debates and reject job programs in the Senate, aided by compromised Democrats like Ben Nelson. Their relentless mission has accomplished a great deal in the recent past.

Plutocrats have succeeded in shifting private pensions to 401Ks, giving Wall Street more money for their legalized crap game. They have privatized many government functions through Bush administration policy, continued by Obama, and through hastily-passed state legislation.

They are in control of the media, the Supreme Court, the House of Representatives, and almost half of the states. They can hamstring the Senate with a minority, and intimidate the President – witness Wall Street’s veiled threat of cutting campaign funds to Obama if he supports the “Occupy-Wall-Street” movement.

Their agents want to make social security a gambling venture that enriches Wall Street through private accounts. They want to give chits to seniors to buy Medicare from their private companies, rationing life-giving care. They want to dilute the value of public education, insuring a submissive electorate. They want to kill unions, weakening its bargaining and voting power. But most of all they want to redistribute income and wealth, even more to the rich.

All are ways of draining the life-blood from the middle class. We are the sacrifice on their altar of greed. Their Zombie Capitalism exists to destroy the vibrant beating heart of the old liberal capitalism, reducing the consumer and worker participants to the walking dead, with little or no future. In contrast they are the new Sun-Gods, the bright shining lights of job-creation and elitism.

Don’t get me wrong, the Aztecs did some marvelous things. They engineered an empire with staggering achievements of bountiful crops on floating man-made islands, a dual channel aqueduct that spanned their surrounding lake, a 15 story pyramid, and an empire that encompassed 80,000 square miles.

In the past we have shown great accomplishments as well. We had a vastly successful egalitarian society, one which spread wealth more equally among us. We were instrumental in kicking out tyrants who enslaved others, we helped war-torn nations and built a great country that was a shining beacon of freedom.

But now plutocrats, in the shadow of the Aztec leaders before them, want us to consider them deities whom we worship as “job-creators,” gods who demand our allegiance and our toil at their altar of greed.

But in a virtual sense they would take out the beating heart of a once-vibrant democracy, in the process, making us the walking dead in their world of opulent splendor.