Given I have firsthand experience of the reprocessing (term borrowed from my beloved brother known as Dragonstrand) of the middle class, I figured this post might carry some weight when taking into account the status quo for the vast majority of American citizens. In a nutshell, I went from making at my peak $180,000 with bonus, to a three-year period of unemployment or no full-time job, to recently taking a night shift job making $11 dollars an hour with a huge corporation. I still have two years of federal taxes to pay and over ten grand in credit card debt to pay off. I have a few personal reasons for my predicament, but nothing that would realistically prevent me from landing a decent job at a decent wage relative to my experience and education. I don’t really have any other options available. I have tried to pull myself up and applied to over a thousand white-collar professional jobs during that three-year period, but I couldn’t secure a job offer despite over a decade of solid work experience and higher education from well-known undergraduate and graduate institutions.
The middle and upper middle class in America has been downsized and is being “reprocessed”. To understand this phenomena one must agree to a fundamental principle. Wealth, as measured by money, does not grow for the money supply in theory is constant. Sure, those in charge of the money supply can print more money, but that simply waters down its assumed value and purchase power. As such, wealth is merely lost by one and gained by another. There is only one pie to cut up and serve.
In the United States, the few have mastered the art of accumulating and taking more and more and more money away from the many. No other developed nation has such an enormous gap between those few that have most and those many that have little. The art the few have mastered to siphon money away from the majority centers on a multi-pronged strategy and a closely knit group in powerful positions in banking, Wall Street, venture capital, huge multinational corporations, media (advertising and marketing), and government (controlled by lobbyists and big campaign donors).
The only problem with their strategy is eventually the many have little left for the few to take and the well runs dry. And when the well runs dry they have to figure out how to appease or deceive the mob to avoid a rebellion before they take their winnings and leave the country. Currently, the power structure is employing delay tactics to avoid the inevitable – a revolution. The game can best be described as kick the can. Obama, a man of change, says the right things, but his actions are merely status quo. And the republican presidential front-runner wants to return to the Reagan era where the wolves were set free. The truth of the matter is that there is no way out given the current power structure. Politics and your vote isn’t going to create any change to the fascist power complex.
My next several posts will summarize the multi-pronged strategy used by the few to siphon away money from the many. Much of this has been discussed in this blog via previous posts, but I feel now is the time to re-iterate and summarize. The upcoming election between a republican presidential candidate and Obama is all smoke and mirrors. The game ahead of us is quite simply a game of kick the can. We have reached the stage of no way out unless we are willing as a majority to make bold moves. All that is really needed is an enlightened sense of what is and what will be if we do not act. I am the farthest thing from a protestor or revolutionary and I have a son I dearly love, but if there is a movement with intelligent momentum, I would be willing to put all that matters in this one life on the line for the many that are yet to come.
Contemplating The Human Direction 