Original text and editing by:
A G Kaiser
email to
agkaiser1@gmail,com
Subservience to the rich, whatever alias they may be traveling under, has been constant throughout written history. Morality, ethics and the emotional engagement of populations are in a constant state of change. Only the greed, corruption and treachery of the powerful remains the same.
"A good slave works for food alone."
Q of the week:
Q: Will the Corporate Accountability Bill, being rushed through Congress, make the stock market appear to be safe and restore investor confidence by preventing a few criminal scoundrels from ripping us off in the future?
A: Those TOs [Top Officers] who haven't yet stolen their fortunes and moved them off shore, certainly hope so. I'm hopeful that Americans will wake up and demand real changes, before W. packs up the White House and the treasury and moves to the Bahamas. Yes, that's hyperbole. But packing up the Social Security Trust Fund [so that it may be easily carried off by his corporate friends] is an oft' stated goal of the Bush Administration and its gullible supporters.
Volume II Issue 10:
Distractions:
For those in a position to rip off the earnings and savings of thousands, even millions of people, the American economic system, "free market capitalism", WORKS! Feudalism also worked for the powerful land thieves we called aristocracy. Before that the Roman Republic worked for the most powerful and wealthy patrons (those who occupied the Roman Senate). But the clients did the work and the patrons stole and hoarded the wealth produced. Just as with the serfs in the middle ages and workers today, people do the work and the masters gather the benefit. It doesn't matter whether we call them patron, lord, master or employer; the wealth ends up in the hands of a few and the rest of us struggle miserably to merely survive. The wealthy workless classes live in luxury on material goods they've stolen from us.
They've stolen more than just our money and goods. They've destroyed our economic independence. Before the industrial revolution there were many family farms, autonomous trades and crafts people and small self employed shop keepers who lived free of plutocratic domination. The real work and real economy that they embodied and is still the basis of human culture and survival, has been seized by [abstract] legal persons that we call corporations. They've stolen our economy and made it their busyness to divert our production to the satisfaction of their greed and the indulgence of their sloth.
Most of the busyness of corporations is imaginary. It produces no wealth and it's manipulations of abstract representations of material things are usurious and parasitic to the real economy. It is the means by which the workless class rip us off and it is getting worse not better. No amount of wailing will return us to a simpler time and no amount of prosecutions of corporate officers will change the criminal nature of today's corporate culture or that of its predecessors for the past four thousand years.
The laziest and most useless among us, the workless class rich and their subsidiary TOs and politician overseers, have always banded together in the strongest union. They control police and armies and use them to keep us in line. They break the will and spirit, co-opt, kill or imprison the strong and intelligent, who are born among us in every generation, those who can't be made stupid. The masters are weak and stupid and rely on their gangster like perversions of social instinct to maintain their wealth and power. They have betrayed the human race for the satisfaction of their greed and lust. Their selfish appetites have resulted, with rare exceptions through most of history, in an increase of misery for the rest of us. Look at the past thirty years and see the direction they are taking us. After a period of progress in wages, working conditions and living standard between 1936 and 1970, the buying power of most American families has been on the decline.
From Volume I number 17; 5/19/01:
" In 1970 chicken was 29 cents/pound, hamburger 39 cents/lb. A new Olds Cutlass Supreme(r) was less than $4000. A new starter home was $20,000.00. Compare: $1.29; $1.99; $30,000; $100,000. Prices have increased by a factor of at least 5, in most cases, over 31 years. [Other price increases are hidden by trick packaging. Weights and measures are effectively tampered with by injecting water in meat products and failing to label it properly. That chuck steak you bought on sale will shrink twice the norm for an unaltered specimen, when placed on the grill. If you try to fry it in a pan it will be boiled instead.]
In 1970 minimum wage was about half of what it is today. Wages and salaries in most positions have approximately doubled. A person in a given job can purchase 40% (100 X 2/5) of what one could command in 1970. A woman gets 75 cents for every man's dollar. If a male and female both work, their combined buying power is about 70% of what one of their parents could command in 1970. We are making up the difference with second mortgages and plastic credit."
When automation, down-sizing, job exportation and outright stealing are added to the picture, we see only misery, suffering and death in most of our futures. We are told by George that to curb the greed of the workless rich and their corporations would be an unfair restriction on their freedom. Well George, to allow them to continue to enslave us, so that they may remain free to do so, and for the sake of their greed, is a threat to our lives. Guess whose right to life I support?... Whose side are you on, fool?!
Economy:
Enron was an energy broker. They had no power producing capability. How many of the other great offenders were purely abstract busynesses? In the sense that the stock market is supposed to be a source of capitalization, it is less abstract than entities like Enron. Such "busynesses", because they cause no material wealth or useful service to be produced, [they even used the transmission lines of others] have no product that they themselves create, are purely parasitic on the economy... and on those of us who do real work. They should be outlawed like burglary tools. Their nature is larcenous; what can be expected of their predatory organizers but more theft?
The abstractions of economy, imaginary constructs, are the fantasy worlds of amateurs. Economists and MBAs have lost sight of the real production of goods and services that are the bases of the livelihood of human beings, and their professionalism [of economists et al.], if they ever had any, was also obscured by the new, poorer perspective. The idiots think they can turn paper entities into real wealth. They're mentally diseased. At least the feudal lords had and traditional capitalists have enough sense to rely on real land, property and the sweat of people to turn their delusions of grandeur into riches. Explore the BBC Business News. They seem to be on the verge of awakening to the reality of fantasy land economy in America and the British Commonwealth.
BBC Business News
Search for "corporate scandals", then link to "Wall Street Scandals at a Glance". There is a good summary at that last link plus links to articles and analyses from which you can infer for yourself the fraudulent nature of what I'm about to describe: third level economic abstraction.
"Money is the root of all evil". As the first level of abstraction, in an economy of material goods, our tokens of exchange certainly live up to their description. But money is a useful medium of trade, when its use is limited to such. It is, however, the starting place, the abstract root from which more harmful economic practices grow.
Loaning money at interest, usury(1), is the exploitation of the first level of economic abstraction. As such it is an early essay in the craft of living by the toil of others. According to the Bible, "man must toil and earn his bread by the sweat of his brow." Those who make their livelihood by working their money (i.e. living off our work) can not be said to be morally upright in a Biblical sense. Capitalism is an extension of that sort of evil.
The second level of economic abstraction is capitalism and the stock market.(2) This is a more troubling abstraction because it portends undermining the basic economy of the production and consumption of goods. It does so by concentrating wealth more completely in fewer hands. Consumers are less able to buy goods and create profits because of the hoarding of money and wealth. Greater profits and fewer capitalists result is less cash available to consumers. The cyclic market depressions are accounted for by this mechanism of capitalistic greed. This fundamental flaw in the theory of free market capitalism is a source of childlike denial in the minds of its proponents. Capitalism (the wordy obscuring of greed and tyranny) is not, ultimately, a workable economic system. But as a second level abstraction it is at least based on the ownership of real, physical assets. Farms, mines, factories, energy production, transportation and communication all have a material basis in reality.
Third level economic schemes are purely imaginary. They exist only as thoughts in our minds or on paper. They make money but create no material product or service. They are fraudulent in their nature. They're characterized by the lack of real, physical assets for the creation of products.
They make their money in a purely parasitic way. Companies like Enron who broker but produce no energy or WorldCom who buys telephone time on existing switches and lines and resells it, with no value added, at a profit, are representatives of the third level of abstraction and of economic parasites.
To wonder if there will be more scandals, when the existence of a workless class (without the subsequent evil of the second and third levels of economic abstraction) constitutes fraud, is naive beyond belief. The third level parasites feed off the feeding by capitalists off the work of the people.
Editorial Column:
It seems ironic to me that so many continue to believe that they too can become economically independent in the abstract economy. Even while consumers must borrow money to simply live and keep this fraudulent economy going, they continue to believe everyone can own stocks and no one needs to do any real work. Wake up! That delusion protects the riches of the workless class. It's a carrot on a stick. And it's not even a real carrot. It's mathematically and physically impossible for everyone to do. It's so improbable for anyone to do as to be negligible for most of us. Why do we support a system that must be dysfunctional for the majority?
The rich and the wannabes keep taking more and more. Caught in their insatiable greed and lust, they refuse jobs and living wages to us, in order to increase their profits. They're incapable of seeing that the cumulative effect of their selfish stupidity is the destruction of the consumer fueled economy. Money in the hands of consumers is the fuel of the economic engine. The rich fools and their wholly owned TOs and politicians are trying to make the engine run faster by cutting off its fuel. And they keep telling us they know what they're doing.
Do they know their killing us? If they do, what have they got in the wings to replace us as the providers of their sustenance and wealth? Because if they know what their doing we can only conclude that they are committing premeditated murder on a massive scale. But I don't think they see that yet. I don't think they see that the economy is being destroyed by their blind greed. I think our economic and political leaders are fools. However, they're not as great of fools as we are, if we allow them to continue on this dead end course.
The appropriation of our land, our property, our labor and our lives, for the satisfaction of the greed of a few, is the most evil purpose the human race can be put to. We must find another way. We must rid ourselves of rich parasites and their sycophants or we will die.
(1)The first level of economic abstraction includes loans, bonds and insurance. That is: usury - using money to make money. It is forbidden in the law of Moses as part of the elaboration of the Ten Commandments.
(2)It's arguable that the stock market is the third level of abstraction. But, because it is a source of capitalization and for the sake of a more easily understood paradigm, I'll keep it where it is.
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Greg Kaiser