© 2008 Greg Kaiser

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The corporations were invented to protect investors’ [other non corporate or not “this” corporate] wealth from liabilities created by the legal persons. They protect their owners from lawsuits due to damage done to the community and individuals, by separating the investor’s property into personal and corporate piles. In other words, they aren’t responsible for the harm they do through their legal [paper] person and agent, in the pursuit of profit. I think there were similar statutes to protect slave owners in ante bellum days.

The cult of individual freedom must be moderated by the freedom and well being of the rest of the individuals. That is the purpose of community and civilization. It is the meaning of the rule of law. There is no individual if there is no social group. The others define the one. There is no action without reaction. For survival, the well being of all must be placed before the well being of one.

The Decline and Fall of the Middle Class

February 29, 2008
      The educated middle class have sold out the Human Race for a few dollars more. Their single minded greed and pursuit of increasingly worthless money and advancement has exacerbated the concentration of wealth that has afflicted Humanity for millennia. And today our dysfunctional civilization is more unsustainable [morally and pragmatically] and economically dissipative than ever before. They’ve invented the service economy to allow an ever smaller fraction of our population get their piece of the pie. No matter how many scams of usury and finance they invent to get a greater share of the money, there will be no more pie - the real stuff and goods that [abstract] money represents - to go around. All they have done is to inflate the money supply with the unnecessary cost of investors’ profits, in order to get a greater share of our common property and production for themselves.
      Meanwhile there’s downward pressure on the value of the dollar - and on the incomes most of US need to consume - on another front. The global economy is a euphemism for the looting and pillaging of America through outsourced manufacturing, which is really the importation of goods. This “free trade” has destroyed [sold to China and the cash stashed in Carribean banks] our ability to produce what we need for ourselves to live and reduced most of our incomes, which we need to buy the goods on whose sale all these magic bean market economy profits are based. [Aside: Milton Friedman is credited with awakening the Chinese to the glories of capitalism and converting them to the one true faith. I suspect they pretended to believe in the invisible hand magic of the marketplace, while they analyzed his delusional theories in order to calculate how best to play US.] Of course, since we don’t even produce what we need for ourselves, there’s no surplus for our elite rulers to appropriate and to trade for profit. All this stupidity and greed of the educated elites has, as it must, resulted in inflation and trade deficit devaluation of our currency. The greed and stupidity of our economic leaders is a threat to our survival. The free trade capitalist economy that works for a small fraction of the population is broken. It is dysfunctional for most of US and if we want to live we must take the power back from the global corporate empire that dominates US; it has weakened our community for its own profit. There is no god or hero to save US. We must save ourselves.
      Barack Obama said, “I embrace the global economy.” Hillary Clinton is a free trade supporter. John McCain doesn’t seem to care what American corporations do. He just wants to protect their freedom to dominate US and the rest of the world. Maybe Dennis Kucinich or to a lesser extent John Edwards or Ron Paul care about the evils of corporatism, but not enough to curb the empire’s power to any great extent. And the extent of that power is very great indeed. They have the power to pursue profit for their investors that ultimately must come from consumer tax payers but have no responsibility to protect the health of the community which is the source of their wealth. We’ve been satisfied until now to allow the system to continue, as long as we had an opportunity to get a share of the wealth for ourselves.
      The middle class income and status was the reward that was accessible, in theory, to anyone with the will to get an education and who would serve to increase the profits of the corporations. This has serious zero sum implications, of course, but we needn’t get too theoretical to debunk the neoliberal free market theory. Just look what’s happening to the middle class and know that, if you’ve not been had yet, it won’t be long.
      “I’ve got mine to hell with you” is beginning to look a bit thin and frayed around the edges. There’s some hope that we’ll get together and call a general strike to get the attention of our politicians away from protecting the gains of the remnant of the middle class and the obscene profits and hoards of our stuff controlled by the rich investor parasites that the bourgeoisie serve. Though small in comparison to the pillaging of the community and looting of the treasury by the rich masters, bourgeois greed is part of the problem and the handle by which they were seduced to use their intellects and knowledge to serve the ends of the masters. There are means and ways to correct our dysfunctional government and economy but there is little will to use them. First things first. What’s happening to the middle class?
      First consider the origins of the bourgeoisie. In feudal times, the disparity of wealth among the classes was huge. What middle class there was consisted of craftsmen and tradesmen, who were often organized under a master much like the feudal estates they served. In any case they owed fealty to the lords and could only operate with their patronage. Later they became merchants and traders but needed financial backing of the royal aristocrats, whose appropriated hoard was established in their estates. That establishment is the means by which the community’s wealth is controlled and possessed. I imagine that as banking houses grew, feudal lords had much influence and power with them, if they didn’t actually own major interests. That’s what’s been done with the rest of our common property that the rich have privatized. As things changed with the introduction of manufacturing industries, energy, communications and all the rest, the need for financing of entrepreneurs, who arose from lower classes but especially the educated middle class, remained a constant.
      You can pull on your bootstraps as hard as you may but you won’t get off the ground with out a helping hand from above. In order to get that help, you must serve their interests. That must further concentrate wealth because your only source of profit is the same as the masters whose profit you must serve. It is we who are about to starve, so that the few may have much, which was gathered from our common produce, which is the source of all wealth. This is the zero sum reality of which today’s middle class, economists and politicians live in denial. It has always been so.
      The pyramid scams of finance are what’s left of our economy today, after we and it have been drained of our life blood. “The $2 trillion market for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), the multi-trillion dollar mortgage-backed securities market (MBSs) and the $1.3[T] asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market have all shut down draining a small ocean of capital from the financial system and pushing many of the banks and hedge funds closer to default.” -
Wall St. Ponzi with FED backing The derivatives are all that remain after outsourcing that creates only paper profits, which were invested in the high yield debt kite and pyramid scam [the derivatives] referenced above.. The American economy is a Ponzi supported by a debt kite. Imagine a world with all lenders and borrowers and no one who makes products to buy. After our credit rating plummets [the dollar fails] we’ll no longer be able to import the goods we need to live from China. But our brilliant MBAs and Wall Street con artists won’t see this. The result of middle class treachery in the service of rich investor parasites is the self destructive suicide pact of free trade capitalism that afflicts US today. Now even the traitors are being sacrificed by the high priests of the money god. To be competitive in the global marketplace means that the investors must make a profit even if the rest of US starve.
      The front page of USA today on Friday, February 29, 2008 headlines a computer generated graphic with: “More Americans using credit cards to stay afloat.” On page 8A of the same issue the publisher tells US that NAFTA is not to blame and that the answer “lies in educating younger workers and retraining older ones.” [see below] The entire editorial is misdirection and distraction. It is not very original propaganda. It’s merely an echo of party line vomit. They spew forth specious observations about the much greater problem of outsourcing to China, which is more treachery that certainly fails to mitigate the fact that while in transit, the jobs went first to Mexico, as they went to the slave states from the North East and Mid West in the 1970s. They also point to automation as part of the increased productivity that forces job losses in the competitive global economy. They don’t seem to understand that outsourced industry is not American productivity. It is imported products, for which American consumers are needed, so the profits may result in “increased productivity has led to rising living standards.” - ibid. The global competitiveness is based on low wages that deny US the ability to supply the morons’ profit by buying the goods they’ve imported. The part about the rising living standards is simply not true, for most of US.
      We no longer have the money to buy the products on which the profit is made. Loaning back the profits is circular like perpetual motion. More debt can only exacerbate the problem, no matter the productivity and low cost of Chinese workers. We don’t have industries to make what we need to live. [See the evidence in the front page article about credit cards and the need to borrow because we no longer have jobs that provide living incomes.] And I repeat: outsourced manufacturing is not production or American industry. It is the importation of the goods we need that are purchased with borrowed money because we have no jobs that pay most of US enough. And we no longer make for ourselves the products that we need to live. The service economy has enriched a few and the sellouts who minister to them at the expense of the destruction of the economy and community that supports our lives. And now the middle class, which they point at to convince US of their success, is getting harder to see.

      See:
By a Thread
The New Experience of America's Middle Class
November 28, 2007
By Jennifer Wheary, Thomas M. Shapiro and Tamara Draut

      The call to educate more engineers that the moron in chief made in the 2007 State of the Union is typical of the specious reasoning and lack of knowledge of those who just want to get “theirs” by any means possible and then find a scapegoat for the inevitable consequences of their greed. [See the training of workers (like domestic animals) above.] In the late 1980s and early1990s, management found they could enhance profitability for investors and their own careers by hiring foreign engineers, educated in American universities, who were dependent on corporate sponsors for visas to remain and work. As a result, American engineers were paid less and students followed the money to business schools. Even in the 1980s engineering and science graduate schools were dominated by Indians, Mid Easterners and Chinese from the Mainland. Now many of them have gone home to train engineers and scientists there. We have not only outsourced our ability to produce wealth: the things we need to live. We no longer have the skilled workers to make the goods or the engineers to develop the processes and technology that we need to get back into the real game. This is what the service economy and short term profit for investors has done to US, besides inflating prices to the point we must borrow even to buy food.

“The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated!”

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Greg Kaiser
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