The Post Agrarian Times
www.agkaiser.org
01/19/2005
Original text and editing by:
A G Kaiser
email to
agkaiser1@gmail,com
When we’re all rich and live on our investments no one will have to work. There will be no poverty or slums. We’ll all have a PH.D. What a glorious vision it is! If hunter gatherers had envisioned the service economy 20,000 years ago the human race would have achieved its glorious end long before any of US were born. . . .
"A good slave works for food alone."
Volume V Issue 01:
Whether or not we resist Social Security destruction successfully, if we fail to stop "tort reform" it will kill off enough Americans that SS will have even greater surpluses than promised by a mere 45 million Americans without adequate health care. Those are people, by the way, who will never have discretionary money to invest in anything. The neo-con artist propaganda has been demonizing lawyers for years in preparation for the loss of civil recourse that will result from the "high cost of litigation" scam. We are diverted from the real reason for the high cost of medicine. Insurance companies have the highest paid CEOs and the greatest profits of all the corporations on Earth. If they are released from liability for incompetent doctors, more people will die of malpractice and the insurance company CEOs and stockholders will stick the money they save in their pockets. The absurd theory that medical prices will be reduced is the most naive notion I’ve ever heard. But that’s typical of neo-con artists' publicized theories. Whether they believe themselves and are fools or are despicable liars is irrelevant. Our survival depends on ridding ourselves of the plague of workless class rich and all their games. The insurance industry is one of the oldest frauds on Earth. It can be traced back [at least] to the extortion practiced by the richest man in Rome at the time of Julius Caesar. Both were members of the first triumvirate. The high rate of medical blunders resulting in injury and death can be attributed to medical schools that attract the greedy, who displace potentially dedicated healers whose families don’t have the juice to buy a slot. Giving incompetent doctors a get out of jail free card is not going to improve the medical system or reduce costs to our community. Reduce their incomes and not only will medical costs be reduced a little but undesirables will no longer be consistently attracted to medicine. Malevolent, greedy fools will look elsewhere for loot.
(1)
". . .The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 cut benefits further, largely by eliminating benefits for postsecondary students.
"The Social Security Amendments of 1983 made some of the most significant changes in the program's history. Those changes came in response to projections that the Social Security trust funds would soon be exhausted and that the program faced a large, long-term deficit. Spending was cut in the short run by delaying a scheduled COLA for six months. The biggest reduction in long-run costs came from gradually raising the age at which retired workers could receive full benefits from 65 to 67 (for workers born in 1960 or later). In addition, lawmakers increased Social Security revenues by moving up the dates on which scheduled increases in the payroll tax were to take effect, making some Social Security benefits subject to income taxes, and including new federal workers and all employees of nonprofit organizations in the program." -- For more-detailed information about the 1983 legislation, see John A. Svahn and Mary Ross, "Social Security Amendments of 1983: Legislative History and Summary of Provisions," Social Security Bulletin, vol. 46, no. 7 (July 1983), pp. 3-48. -www.cbo.gov
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In agrarian times the size and shape of our communities changed significantly from what they had been. There have been even greater changes in the past 200 years. There were some improvements and some corruption of social structures during the greater period and the subset. Whether we place an overall positive or negative value on the changes of the past five to ten thousand years depends, for rational beings, on the benefits we enjoy. Those attributable to our social/economic position seem to dominate our opinions. Disregarding inequalities inherited from recent millennia, we must all consider the simple sustain-ability of the present economic paradigm for post agrarian times. It’s not morality or fairness but functionality that’s the most important question to me. Whatever else an economic model provides, its first duty must be to serve the survival of the human race. That is the law of God and Nature. That is why we have the social instinct to form communities. Survivability of the species is the most valuable contribution that any economic system can give to the human community. It’s the value to measure in the assessment of functionality of an economy.
XNAT [Multi National] corporations believe their first duty is to produce profit for the stockholders. Less than one percent of the population (probably less than 0.1%) own more than 95% of the stocks and everything else. The duty to the community and to the support for the survival of the human race is ignored by the masters of the flawed social/economic structure of post agrarian times. Profit margins are increased at the expense of an ever growing number of Americans and others around the world. The service economy paradigm for profit by the workless class few is the obvious progression of capitalism. It's excesses of profit, while dismantling the real wealth of production and exporting it, make the old fashioned usury burden of finance look almost harmless to our community. The service economy is destructive to our livelihoods and lives. It’s functional only for the wealthiest and the sycophantic politicians and CEOs who surround them. It is dysfunctional and regressive for most of US. Profit on outsourced products is unsustainable. As dollars accumulate overseas, their value must fall because we don’t make anything anyone wants to buy with them. Consumers at home will have less and less of them to perform our assigned function in the service economy fraud. Our money will be used to enslave US with debt or to by our land and infrastructure. Service economy is unsustainable like a world full of warring raiders will have no one to produce the material goods needed for survival. If everyone is a thief, there is no one to rob. Finance and other service cannot exist in the absence of real production. They are dissipative to the overall economy, because they take a share [most] of the material produced but make no real contribution to production. We need and can support some services but their cost is a burden on real economy. The load must be minimized. The current trend is to maximize it by maximizing profit. Those who do the most harm to the community by their greed take the greatest rewards for their disservice. Financial service lives off the real work of others. It’s parasitic on the economy. That’s just a fact. I place no moral value on the word parasite in this usage. Here it is a technical term not a pejorative. But it is the reason why the system is dysfunctional, unsustainable and is a paradigm that, instead of serving the community, preys upon US in an ever increasingly frenzied fashion.
In the US we’re all free to profit from our own work, after banks, lenders, insurance (including medical), energy corporations, communications, transportation, government taxes etc. have taken their share. Except for the parasitic profit of private sector corporations, that’s as it should be. Taxes are the right way to provide for our common needs. It’s the way they’re gathered and spent that contributes to the deadly dysfunction of the economy. The profit from usury or on the work of others, though, is grossly dissipative to our individual livelihoods and the collective economy that supports human life. The service economy is the culmination of thousands of years of manifold contributions toward disaster for the human race. Myriad examples of the destructiveness of greed and hoarding are apparent to any who are willing to open their eyes and see the truth.
Relief is needed from the unnatural disaster. The service economy manifestation of greed of the workless class rich is causing widespread hunger, malnutrition, inadequate housing and is leaving 45 million Americans without sufficient health care. It is the American nightmare. Hoarding of the produce of our community by the workless class few is a disaster that causes more pain and suffering than any other terror, war against people, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, flood or storm has ever visited upon the Earth. What’s worse is (to paraphrase a Woody Allen joke) it can’t last. The greater the profits on cheap labor products the less money consumers have to buy them. The end of that road is obvious. No products sold means no profit. If only finance and no production there is nothing to give value to the money. What we’ve been taught to call the heart and soul of the economy is a pyramid fraud that cannibalizes its real industrial base to support the abstract financial industries of the rich. They don't promote production. They tax it. They represent the past preying upon the present. It’s a grand self destructive delusion propagated by the greatest criminals the world has ever known. And 60 million Americans voted for more of the same, if you can believe that. This eternal crime against humanity is perpetrated in the name of profit. That you think this all sounds wild eyed and fanatical is a measure of the depth of delusion that propaganda, truth hiding and advertising can induce. Do you wonder why good Germans said nothing about Hitler? Some day I’ll stop pulling my punches. My own survival is dependent in part on your acceptance of the truth [enlightenment] and rejection of the orthodox lies of the greedy, puerile fools, who lead US to destruction with their self serving rule. [Editors note: This applies to both Democrats and Republicans. A liberal is a conservative with a twinge of conscience and some common sense about how badly people may be mistreated before they rebel. Both wings of the one party system of Repu-Dems buy into the big lie.] The "traditional" kind of community serves the few at the expense of the many.
That usury and profit on the goods produced by the work of others (profit on the work of others) are dissipative to economy and are the eternal cause of unnatural disaster is shown by an elementary example. Consider a small, self sustaining community. If 100 people each work at something productive of necessary, useful and desired goods, the community will have 100 times the wealth that the average person can create. If the producers of various goods trade among themselves each will diversify his own holdings. The distribution of wealth will remain approximately equitable. Without a medium of exchange no one will have much more than they could have produced with their own hands. No one will be able to hoard wealth by abstract means. Everyone will have what they need to survive and the community will thrive as long as all the members continue to do their own work. However, if one person manages by whatever means to gain control of half of the wealth of the community of 100, then the other 99 have only half the wealth among them all to sustain themselves. Since the total wealth is equal to 100 times the value of what one can produce, it is impossible for one to work hard enough to create the goods of 50 individuals by the one’s own effort. For one to be rich many must be deprived. It cannot be done by one’s own work so profit on the work of others, or usury where money exists, must be employed to get rich. The community’s well being is threatened by the economic dissipation required to support a wealthy parasite that does not do its own work. Whether the parasite or its grandfather stole the wealth of the community to satisfy individual greed is irrelevant. The possession of great wealth is evidence of crime against humanity.
A "crime against humanity" is not overstatement. It is obvious that no one can have great wealth unless they tax the work of the community one way or another. It makes a difference whether the communal work is violently demanded of slaves or tricked out by an old and accepted fraud like banking. But not much! The pain and suffering caused by deprivation of the majority of the fruits of their own labor may even be worse among free employees. You are morally obligated to feed and care for slaves even if you have no work for them. What’s certain is: for one individual to have much more than their share of the community’s production, many must have less. It’s also certain that our unjust economic system is both legal and generally accepted. We learn that it is the best way to form a society. That anyone can believe that the best and only efficient way to organize a community is to have the majority work to maintain a workless class in luxury is so ridiculous only mass hypnosis or programming can account for it. As employees, we are treated even worse than those who are not free to betray the human race through economic tyranny by becoming a master. The potential for trans class upward mobility doesn’t justify hoarding wealth at the expense of injury to the community any more than does the picayune greed of the average person. If we became aware that we’re slaves by another name, the majority of US who are perpetually condemned to poverty or the mock prosperity of debt bondage would rise up and kill the lazy parasites in a heartbeat. But in post agrarian times we are repressed by powerful tools of propaganda.
Perhaps you remember some recent accomplishments of propaganda and are even aware of campaigns that haven’t yet born much fruit. Last fall the Labor Department changed overtime rules to allow employers to eliminate overtime pay for firefighters, police, many returning veterans and other classifications. This plays on an at least 100 year old lay of propaganda that has deluded most Americans. Low wages do not, as the chant we hear from cradle to grave and conservative theory would have it, lead to low prices. Low wages give excessive profits and nothing else. It was about 1970 when the century old spell gained control of the majority. Before then, most people were still in possession of their own wills and minds. Though growing more confused year by year, before Nixon most of US still knew or suspected that the abstract economy of insurance, banking and finance are frauds and a non-productive burden on the real economy of material goods and useful services. Some may have fallen and more may have been losing our ability to articulate it due to right wing fascist witch hunts and propaganda programming, which discouraged the practice of thinking for ourselves. But most of US still understood the difference between real work and the workings of the rich con artists who dominate US. I guess when we fell we fell hard, because the Bush II scams are the blatant, transparent lies of a puerile fool and no one seems to notice. The Christian right are mostly made of the working class people who are hurt the most by the changes in Labor Department rules [by executive order] with respect to overtime. But they’ve seen Bush praying. What kind economic system reduces US all to the lowest common denominator of morality and scruples xor the ability to think for ourselves?
Military personnel returning from Iraq, where they fought and many died to extend the influence of the XNAT empire of Bush’s class, find their job classification [from the come on pre enlistment job training/education promise] switched to "exempt". That means the employer is exempt from paying overtime rates. Then they find veterans benefits and VA hospitals have been eviscerated as well. I heard of one soldier, who having lost his leg was returned to his wife and children who had lost their home and then was billed for parts of the humvee that were damaged by the bomb that crippled him. That sounds like a sick joke. At least I hope it’s a sick joke. With the stupidity and arrogance of this administration hidden by any lie that will serve, it’s hard to tell. I know that only a thrall or a fool would believe there’s anything good for most of US behind the screens with which they hide their ripoffs. First the promised tax break and the unbalanced reality. Then the war of acquisition led by the fear of WMD. Many more little but cumulatively great thefts from little guys by fat cats of the Bush league have been secreted in executive orders.
The next big frauds in the works are Social Security and Tort reforms. The propaganda campaigns have been rolling for decades and are gaining huge momentum as I write. The final sprint to Social Security destruction starts with the bold faced lie that it’s insolvent and ends by diverting it’s income to the profit of the stock market parasites who feed on the cyclic down turns. That’s profit in addition to the 15-20% for private administrative costs compared to 1½% for SSA. In the process of perpetrating the fraud the trust fund becomes insolvent, realizing the neo-con prophecy of doom, that their propaganda machine has already projected onto those who resisted the looting at the outset. The latest lie of the Bushites (that’s missing a ll) is the attempt to make it a fairness issue by saying SS insurance is lost to those who die before collecting. That bull manure clearly ignores survivor benefits including those for minor children as seen in the chart below, which was copied from www.cbo.gov. The greatest depredations of social security have been perpetrated by conservative administrations.(1) The neo-con artists lust for profit on money or on the work of others: anything that doesn’t involve real work by themselves. If we all achieved success by their formula there would be no goods to buy or food to eat. But I fear that we are susceptible to their lies in part because the fools believe themselves. Look people. It’s a no-brainer. You can’t make something from nothing. Not even the stock market can accomplish perpetual motion. It’s gotta have new blood to suck for an energy input. That’s where the SS trust fund comes in. Don’t let them flatter your vanity. You’ll be selling the farm for a handful of beans and betraying the rest of US in the hopes of becoming one of them. That’s less likely than getting rich more honestly by winning the lottery or becoming a star. If your well being depends on the misfortune of others you have acted immorally, by means destructive to community. It can’t last. And that’s the most important point. It just plain don’t work!
Politicians, economists and CEOs are traitors to the rest of US. They suck up to the rich by dreaming up new ways loot the community we depend on for life. The sycophants, the top level servants of the wealthy, do this in the hopes of procuring a free ride for themselves by becoming rich like their masters. Their methods grow ever more destructive to real economy. Those people are idiots. They place profit before the well being of the community they exploit. That sort of cannibalism is unsustainable and therefore self destructive. They’re driving the human race to extinction with the cumulative effect of their money making scams. Common sense and even sanity are as foreign to them as is recognition of the impossibility of the pyramid scheme they call an economy. They have no notion of the cumulative effects of their larceny. They may really believe everyone can live from investments and no one has to do real work. They’re way stupid and totally blind to the evil of their empire. It’s a common curse in post agrarian times. People just can’t seem to understand that if you want some real material thing you must do real material work to fashion it. If someone else does the real work you must give something real in exchange for the thing you want. To work for another is to be a slave. To live by the work of others is to be a parasite on the community. Slavery is evil whether you’re a servant or master.
Greg Kaiser