We have been indoctrinated into believing that our economy is ordained. That indoctrination is what allows most to accept our fate, one of eventual indentured servitude for most. I call it benign slavery.
Watch CNBC or Fox Business. There is a class that feels entitled to have ownership of everything on the backs of those they think are beneath them.
Nomi Prins’ article “A World That Is the Property of the 1%: Wall Street, Banks, and Angry Citizens” is probative. She first points out the obvious.
As we head into 2019, leaving the chaos of this year behind, a major question remains unanswered when it comes to the state of Main Street, not just here but across the planet. If the global economy really is booming, as many politicians claim, why are leaders and their parties around the world continuing to get booted out of office in such a sweeping fashion?
One obvious answer: the post-Great Recession economic “recovery” was largely reserved for the few who could participate in the rising financial markets of those years, not the majority who continued to work longer hours, sometimes at multiple jobs, to stay afloat. In other words, the good times have left out so many people, like those struggling to keep even a few hundred dollars in their bank accounts to cover an emergency or the 80%of American workers who live paycheck to paycheck.
She then explains the results of that reality.
In today’s global economy, financial security is increasingly the property of the 1%. No surprise, then, that, as a sense of economic instability continued to grow over the past decade, angst turned to anger, a transition that — from the U.S. to the Philippines, Hungary to Brazil, Poland to Mexico — has provoked a plethora of voter upheavals. In the process, a 1930s-style brew of rising nationalism and blaming the “other” — whether that other was an immigrant, a religious group, a country, or the rest of the world — emerged.
This phenomenon offered a series of Trumpian figures, including of course The Donald himself, an opening to ride a wave of “populism” to the heights of the political system. That the backgrounds and records of none of them — whether you’re talking about Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte, or Jair Bolsonaro (among others) — reflected the daily concerns of the “common people,” as the classic definition of populism might have it, hardly mattered. Even a billionaire could, it turned out, exploit economic insecurity effectively and use it to rise to ultimate power.Ironically, as that American master at evoking the fears of apprentices everywhere showed, to assume the highest office in the land was only to begin a process of creating yet more fear and insecurity. Trump’s trade wars, for instance, have typically infused the world with increased anxiety and distrust toward the U.S., even as they thwarted the ability of domestic business leaders and ordinary people to plan for the future. Meanwhile, just under the surface of the reputed good times, the damage to that future only intensified. In other words, the groundwork has already been laid for what could be a frightening transformation, both domestically and globally.
Ms. Prins went on to give context to the manner in which the 1% got over after the 2008 Financial Meltdown. She showed how quantitative easing inflated the wealth of the capital class while leaving everyone else behind.
Quantitative easing is an unconventional monetary policy whereby the Feds flood the market with created cash by buying up securities. What that meant is that their policy was biased to those who hold securities, rich people. Moreover all that money effectively inflated stocks. As such the wealthy prospered orders of magnitude above and beyond the masses. Are there any doubts that the system is rigged?
It is no accident that the world is in chaos. The average citizen of the world are throwing spaghetti on the walls to see what will stick. In Brazil they’re trying a Right Wing racist sexist ideologue. Of course in America we are trying Donald Trump and man whose soul and ideas are available to the highest bidder.
The chaos around the world is the natural reaction of humanity under stress. The chaos we see around the world is simmering in America. There is one huge difference. The people most taken advantaged of are well armed. When they flip it will not be pretty.
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The problem isn’t the 1%. The problem is us…normal Americans. Most Americans are hopelessly ignorant about how government works. Most Americans are too lazy/apathetic to actually do anything. For heaven’t sake, we can’t get people to vote. The fact that enough voters sat on their hands in November 2015 that allowed a minority to elect an incompetent conman to the presidency says everything. Racism informs so many voters that we have traitorous jerks like Mitch McConnell running the Senate. As Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo said years ago, “we have seen the enemy and he is us”.