American Society Would Collapse If It Weren’t for These 8 Myths

By Lee Camp

Source: TruthDig

Our society should’ve collapsed by now. You know that, right?

No society should function with this level of inequality (with the possible exception of one of those prison planets in a “Star Wars” movie). Sixty-three percent of Americans can’t afford a $500 emergency. Yet Amazon head Jeff Bezos is now worth a record $141 billion. He could literally end world hunger for multiple years and still have more money left over than he could ever spend on himself.

Worldwide, one in 10 people only make $2 a day. Do you know how long it would take one of those people to make the same amount as Jeff Bezos has? 193 million years. (If they only buy single-ply toilet paper.) Put simply, you cannot comprehend the level of inequality in our current world or even just our nation.

So … shouldn’t there be riots in the streets every day? Shouldn’t it all be collapsing? Look outside. The streets aren’t on fire. No one is running naked and screaming (usually). Does it look like everyone’s going to work at gunpoint? No. We’re all choosing to continue on like this.

Why?

Well, it comes down to the myths we’ve been sold. Myths that are ingrained in our social programming from birth, deeply entrenched, like an impacted wisdom tooth. These myths are accepted and basically never questioned.

I’m going to cover eight of them. There are more than eight. There are probably hundreds. But I’m going to cover eight because (A) no one reads a column titled “Hundreds of Myths of American Society,” (B) these are the most important ones and (C) we all have other shit to do.

Myth No. 8—We have a democracy.

If you think we still have a democracy or a democratic republic, ask yourself this: When was the last time Congress did something that the people of America supported that did not align with corporate interests? … You probably can’t do it. It’s like trying to think of something that rhymes with “orange.” You feel like an answer exists but then slowly realize it doesn’t. Even the Carter Center and former President Jimmy Carter believe that America has been transformed into an oligarchy: A small, corrupt elite control the country with almost no input from the people. The rulers need the myth that we’re a democracy to give us the illusion of control.

Myth No. 7—We have an accountable and legitimate voting system.

Gerrymandering, voter purging, data mining, broken exit polling, push polling, superdelegates, electoral votes, black-box machines, voter ID suppression, provisional ballots, super PACs, dark money, third parties banished from the debates and two corporate parties that stand for the same goddamn pile of fetid crap!

What part of this sounds like a legitimate election system?

No, we have what a large Harvard study called the worst election system in the Western world. Have you ever seen where a parent has a toddler in a car seat, and the toddler has a tiny, brightly colored toy steering wheel so he can feel like he’s driving the car? That’s what our election system is—a toy steering wheel. Not connected to anything. We all sit here like infants, excitedly shouting, “I’m steeeeering!”

And I know it’s counterintuitive, but that’s why you have to vote. We have to vote in such numbers that we beat out what’s stolen through our ridiculous rigged system.

Myth No. 6—We have an independent media that keeps the rulers accountable.

Our media outlets are funded by weapons contractors, big pharma, big banks, big oil and big, fat hard-on pills. (Sorry to go hard on hard-on pills, but we can’t get anything resembling hard news because it’s funded by dicks.) The corporate media’s jobs are to rally for war, cheer for Wall Street and froth at the mouth for consumerism. It’s their mission to actually fortify belief in the myths I’m telling you about right now. Anybody who steps outside that paradigm is treated like they’re standing on a playground wearing nothing but a trench coat.

Myth No. 5—We have an independent judiciary.

The criminal justice system has become a weapon wielded by the corporate state. This is how bankers can foreclose on millions of homes illegally and see no jail time, but activists often serve jail time for nonviolent civil disobedience. Chris Hedges recently noted, “The most basic constitutional rights … have been erased for many. … Our judicial system, as Ralph Nader has pointed out, has legalized secret law, secret courts, secret evidence, secret budgets and secret prisons in the name of national security.”

If you’re not part of the monied class, you’re pressured into releasing what few rights you have left. According to The New York Times, “97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in plea bargains, with defendants pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence.”

That’s the name of the game. Pressure people of color and poor people to just take the plea deal because they don’t have a million dollars to spend on a lawyer. (At least not one who doesn’t advertise on beer coasters.)

Myth No. 4—The police are here to protect you. They’re your friends.

That’s funny. I don’t recall my friend pressuring me into sex to get out of a speeding ticket. (Which is essentially still legal in 32 states.)

The police in our country are primarily designed to do two things: protect the property of the rich and perpetrate the completely immoral war on drugs—which by definition is a war on our own people.

We lock up more people than any other country on earth. Meaning the land of the free is the largest prison state in the world. So all these droopy-faced politicians and rabid-talking heads telling you how awful China is on human rights or Iran or North Korea—none of them match the numbers of people locked up right here under Lady Liberty’s skirt.

Myth No. 3—Buying will make you happy.

This myth is put forward mainly by the floods of advertising we take in but also by our social engineering. Most of us feel a tenacious emptiness, an alienation deep down behind our surface emotions (for a while I thought it was gas). That uneasiness is because most of us are flushing away our lives at jobs we hate before going home to seclusion boxes called houses or apartments. We then flip on the TV to watch reality shows about people who have it worse than we do (which we all find hilarious).

If we’re lucky, we’ll make enough money during the week to afford enough beer on the weekend to help it all make sense. (I find it takes at least four beers for everything to add up.) But that doesn’t truly bring us fulfillment. So what now? Well, the ads say buying will do it. Try to smother the depression and desperation under a blanket of flat-screen TVs, purses and Jet Skis. Nowdoes your life have meaning? No? Well, maybe you have to drive that Jet Ski a little faster! Crank it up until your bathing suit flies off and you’ll feel alive!

The dark truth is that we have to believe the myth that consuming is the answer or else we won’t keep running around the wheel. And if we aren’t running around the wheel, then we start thinking, start asking questions. Those questions are not good for the ruling elite, who enjoy a society based on the daily exploitation of 99 percent of us.

Myth No. 2—If you work hard, things will get better.

According to Deloitte’s Shift Index survey: “80% of people are dissatisfied with their jobs” and “[t]he average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime.” That’s about one-seventh of your life—and most of it is during your most productive years.

Ask yourself what we’re working for. To make money? For what? Almost none of us are doing jobs for survival anymore. Once upon a time, jobs boiled down to:

I plant the food—>I eat the food—>If I don’t plant food = I die.

But nowadays, if you work at a café—will someone die if they don’t get their super-caf-mocha-frap-almond-piss-latte? I kinda doubt they’ll keel over from a blueberry scone deficiency.

If you work at Macy’s, will customers perish if they don’t get those boxer briefs with the sweat-absorbent-ass fabric? I doubt it. And if they do die from that, then their problems were far greater than you could’ve known. So that means we’re all working to make other people rich because we have a society in which we have to work. Technological advancements can do most everything that truly must get done.

So if we wanted to, we could get rid of most work and have tens of thousands of more hours to enjoy our lives. But we’re not doing that at all. And no one’s allowed to ask these questions—not on your mainstream airwaves at least. Even a half-step like universal basic income is barely discussed because it doesn’t compute with our cultural programming.

Scientists say it’s quite possible artificial intelligence will take away all human jobs in 120 years. I think they know that will happen because bots will take the jobs and then realize that 80 percent of them don’t need to be done! The bots will take over and then say, “Stop it. … Stop spending a seventh of your life folding shirts at Banana Republic.”

One day, we will build monuments to the bot that told us to enjoy our lives and … leave the shirts wrinkly.

And this leads me to the largest myth of our American society.

Myth No. 1—You are free.

And I’m not talking about the millions locked up in our prisons. I’m talking about you and me. If you think you’re free, try running around with your nipples out, ladies. Guys, take a dump on the street and see how free you are.

I understand there are certain restrictions on freedom we actually desire to have in our society—maybe you’re not crazy about everyone leaving a Stanley Steamer in the middle of your walk to work. But a lot of our lack of freedom is not something you would vote for if given the chance.

Try building a fire in a parking lot to keep warm in the winter.

Try sleeping in your car for more than a few hours without being harassed by police.

Try maintaining your privacy for a week without a single email, web search or location data set collected by the NSA and the telecoms.

Try signing up for the military because you need college money and then one day just walking off the base, going, “Yeah, I was bored. Thought I would just not do this anymore.”

Try explaining to Kentucky Fried Chicken that while you don’t have the green pieces of paper they want in exchange for the mashed potatoes, you do have some pictures you’ve drawn on a napkin to give them instead.

Try running for president as a third-party candidate. (Jill Stein was shackled and chained to a chair by police during one of the debates.)

Try using the restroom at Starbucks without buying something … while black.

We are less free than a dog on a leash. We live in one of the hardest-working, most unequal societies on the planet with more billionaires than ever.

Meanwhile, Americans supply 94 percent of the paid blood used worldwide. And it’s almost exclusively coming from very poor people. This abusive vampire system is literally sucking the blood from the poor. Does that sound like a free decision they made? Or does that sound like something people do after immense economic force crushes down around them? (One could argue that sperm donation takes a little less convincing.)

Point is, in order to enforce this illogical, immoral system, the corrupt rulers—most of the time—don’t need guns and tear gas to keep the exploitation mechanisms humming along. All they need are some good, solid bullshit myths for us all to buy into, hook, line and sinker. Some fairy tales for adults.

It’s time to wake up.

 

If you think this column is important, please share it. Also, check out Lee Camp’s weekly TV show “Redacted Tonight” and weekly podcast “Common Censored.”

This Viral ‘Feel-Good’ Story Is Actually an Indictment of American Labor Hell

By Luke O’Neil

Source: Observer

In what’s quickly become the feel-good story of the week, a young Alabama man named Walter Carr is being lauded across the country for his perseverance and indomitable spirit. It’s the type of story that can instill hope in a divided nation when it’s sorely needed and serve as inspiration for the rest of us that if you work hard enough and keep a positive attitude, good things will come to you. It also happens to be disgusting horse shit and an utter indictment of the brutal, indifferent hell of the nightmare capitalist wasteland we all suffer in. So, a bit of a mixed bag here. 

Carr, a 20-year-old college student, as nearly every news outlet has pointed out in sepia-tinted coverage—from CBS News and USA Today to the BBC—was set to start a new job on Saturday morning with the moving company Bellhops. At the last minute, his car broke down, and he was unable to find a ride from friends to get there. Instead, he decided to walk. He began the trek, which was roughly 20 miles from his home, at midnight, hoping to get there by 8 a.m. the next day to meet the rest of the movers. 

“I didn’t want to defeat myself,” Carr later told ABC News.

Along the way, around 4 a.m. in the morning, Carr, a young person of color, was stopped by local police officers, who, out of the kindness of their hearts, no doubt, asked him where he was headed. When he explained the situation—and after his story checked out—they decided to give him a ride the rest of the way, even going so far as to take him to breakfast.

“He was very polite. It was ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir,”’ one of the officers later said. I bet he was!

When he arrived at the moving job a few hours later, complete with police escort, they explained the situation to Jenny Lamey, the woman who had hired the movers. Inspired by Carr’s work ethic and apparent decency, she shared the story on Facebook, where it soon went viral. 

The story eventually came to the attention of Bellhops CEO Luke Marklin, who arranged to meet Carr a few days later for a big surprise. 

“This is how you pay it forward… treat your employees with respect and incentivize them and bet you’ll get a much better worker for it,” wrote one commenter on Twitter. “It is awesome to see a young man not make an excuse like it’s too far to go to work, and then see him rewarded for it. Wish the young man and the company all the best in the future,” added another. 

It’s enough to drive you to tears. What kind of tears those are will probably depend on how susceptible you are to the lie at the heart of American capitalism and Horatio Alger nonsense.

Carr who set out the night before with a kitchen knife to protect against stray dogs on the walk, as he explained to The Washington Post, nonetheless floored everyone he encountered along the way. 

“He’s such a humble, kindhearted person,” Lamey said. “He’s really incredible. He said it was the way he was raised.”

“We set a really high bar for heart and grit and… you just blew it away,” Marklin told him, after gifting Carr his 2014 Ford Escape (barely-driven! as alabama.com reported). 

A GoFundMe set up by Lamey to help Carr with his car troubles has since raised almost $40,000. 

“Nothing is impossible unless you say it’s impossible,” she told the Post. 

Nothing except for paying workers an actual salary with benefits, which, you may not be surprised to hear, Bellhops does not do. Essentially Uber for movers, (Marklin came to the company from Uber), Bellhops relies on the labor of young college students, like Carr, who take jobs on a gig-by-gig basis. The company, which operates in dozens of cities around the country, and has raised tens of millions of dollars in rounds of funding since it was founded in 2011, pays movers between $13-16 an hour. 

“It’s a transitional job,” CEO Cameron Doody told BuzzFeed News in a story from 2015. “It’s not a career.”

Alabama, incidentally, is also only one of five states that has traditionally never spent any state money on public transportation. 

Naturally, Bellhops are very proud of themselves, and have been reveling in the attention. You probably didn’t know the company existed before yesterday, and may be thinking about contracting their services in the future now. Win win. 

“I want people to know this—no matter what the challenge is, you can break through the challenge,” Carr, who also wants to become a Marine some day, said of his story. 

“Nothing is impossible unless you make it impossible,” he added. “You can do anything you set your mind to. I’ve got God by my side. I’m really emotional right now trying to hold back the tears.”

It’s a heartwarming reminder that, much like with getting sick or injured in America, which needs to be done in a tragic but endearing enough way to go viral so people will pay your medical bills, all you have to do to make it in this beautiful country is have your life fall apart in such a way that the news wants to write about it, then hope the benign feudal lords will see fit to offer you as an aspirational example to the rest of us so we remain compliant.

What’s Wrong with the Economy: 9 Toxic Dynamics

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

These nine dynamics are mutually reinforcing.

Beneath the surface signals of an eternally rising stock market and expanding GDP, we all sense something is deeply, systemically wrong with the U.S. economy. These nine structural dynamics generate secondary dynamics, all of which are toxic to social mobility, sustainable prosperity, accountability and democracy:

1. The financialization of the economy, which transformed services, credit, risk and labor into commodities that could be traded globally. Financialization generates enormously asymmetric returns: those with access to low-cost credit, global markets and expertise in finance collect the lion’s share of gains in income and wealth.

2. The technological transformation of the economy, which has placed a substantial scarcity premium on specific tech/managerial/communication skills and devalued ordinary labor and capital. As a result, the majority of gains in wealth and income flow to those with the scarce skills and forms of capital, leaving little for ordinary labor and capital.

3. The end of cheap fossil fuels. The fracking boom/bubble has obscured the long-term secular trend: the depletion of cheap-to-access and process oil. As many analysts have observed (Nate Hagens, Gail Tverberg, Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson et al.), the global economy only grows if energy and credit are both cheap.

4. Globalization, which transformed the developing world into the environmental dumping ground of the wealthy nations and enabled the owners of capital to offshore waste and labor.

5. The destructive consequences of “growth at any cost” are piling up. “Growth” is the one constant of all existing political-economic systems, and none of the current Modes of Production (i.e. the structures that organize production, consumption, the economy and society) recognize that “growth” is not sustainable.

The first two dynamics drive three other dynamics that have hollowed out the productive economy:

6. The dominance of debt-funded speculation as the means of “getting ahead” as opposed to producing products and services of intrinsic value that serve the core needs of communities.

7. The economy’s gains in income and wealth are concentrated in the very top of the wealth-power pyramid: the top 5%–entrepreneurs, professionals and technocrats, etc., and within this class, most of the gains go to the top 1/10th of 1% –the existing owners of wealth, and financiers/speculators with access to cheap credit.

The net result is the bottom 95% have few opportunities to “get ahead” outside of gambling in the asset bubbles du jour: the stock and housing market. While the average middle class household may be able to borrow enough to speculate in the housing bubble, two factors limit the odds of success for ordinary investors/gamblers:

A. The gains in housing are concentrated in specific markets; outside these hot markets, gains are modest.

B. Asset bubbles eventually pop, leaving those still owning the assets with losses. The risks are thus intrinsic and high. The average investor/gambler lacks the experience needed to recognize the bubble has stopped expanding and exit the market before ll the other speculators rush for the narrowing exit.

8. The devaluation of ordinary labor and capital means the bottom 60% of the economy that lacks the requisite skills with a scarcity premium in the Emerging Economy have lost easy access to the ladder of social mobility.

9. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the self-serving few corrupts the economy and democracy. The U.S. economy is dominated by insider and elite rackets, skims, scams and cartels/quasi-monopolies, all of which corrupt the economy by creating perverse incentives for exploitation and gaming the system to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

This corruption in service of maximizing private/personal gains at the expense of the system itself also corrupts the mechanisms of governance, which are now little more than cloaking devices that protect insiders and elites from scrutiny and consequences.

The 20% above the bottom 60% may appear to have some access to social/economic mobility, but this is largely an artifact of the bubble economy since 2009. Once the bubble deflates, the illusion of social mobility for the “middle class” between the bottom 60% and the upper 20% vanishes.

The “upper middle class” between the bottom 80% and the top 5% is being squeezed by the over-production of elites, i.e. the over-abundance of those with college degrees and the relative scarcity of secure jobs within the top 5%. As a result, credential inflation is rampant, with Masters Degrees replacing Bachelors Degrees as the default for a white-collar job, and PhDs replacing Masters diplomas as the new default for positions that lack security and upward mobility.

In other words, the number of people who qualify for and desire a slot in the elite class (top 5%) far exceeds the number of slots available. As Peter Turchin has explained, this competition generates social disorder at the top of economic heap as the top 20% fight over the few positions open in the top 5%. The disgruntled, frustrated losers far outnumber the relatively few winners.

These nine dynamics are mutually reinforcing, meaning that each dynamic strengthens one or more of the others, reinforcing each other so the sum of the nine is far more powerful than a mere addition might suggest.

The New Aristocracy (the top 9.9%) (The Atlantic)

 

Why America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country

Or, How American Collapse is Made of a New Kind of Poverty

By Umair Haque

Source: Eudaimonia

Consider the following statistics. The average American can’t scrape together $500 for an emergency. A third of Americans can’t afford food, shelter, and healthcare. Healthcare for a family now costs $28k — about half of median income, which is $60k.

By themselves, of course, statistics say little. But together these facts speak volumes. The story they are beginning to tell is this.

America, it seems, is becoming something like the world’s first poor rich country. And that is the elephant in the room we aren’t quite grasping. After all, authoritarianism and extremism don’t arise in prosperous societies — but in troubled ones, which are growing impoverished, like America is today. What do I mean by all that?

Let’s begin with what I don’t mean. I don’t mean absolute poverty. Americans are not living on a few dollars a day, by and large, like people in, for example, Somalia or Bangladesh. America’s median income is still that of a rich country, around $50k, depending on how it’s counted. Nor do I really mean relative poverty — people living below median income. While that’s a growing problem in America, because the middle class is imploding, that is not really the true problem these numbers hint at, either.

America appears to be pioneering a new kind of poverty altogether. One for which we do not yet have a name. It is something like living at the knife’s edge, constantly being on the brink of ruin, one small step away from catastrophe and disaster, ever at the risk of falling through the cracks. It has two components — massive inflation for the basics of life, coupled with crushing, asymmetrical risk. I’ll come to what those mean shortly.

The average American has a relatively high income, that of a person in a nominally rich country. Only his income does not go very far. Most of it is eaten up by attempting to afford the basics of life. We’ve already seen how steep healthcare costs are. But then there is education. There is transport. There is interest and rent. There is media and communications. There is childcare and elderly care. All these things reduce the average American to constantly living right at the edge of ruin — one paycheck away from penury, one emergency away from losing it all.

But this isn’t true for America’s peers. In Europe, Canada, and even Australia, society invests in all these things — and the costs of basic necessities societies don’t provide are regulated. For example, I pay $50 dollars for broadband and TV in London — but $200 for the same thing in New York — yet in London, I get vastly more and better media for my money (even including, yes, American junk like Ancient Aliens). That’s regulation at work. And when basic goods like healthcare or elderly care or education are provided and managed at a social scale, that is when they are cheapest, and often of the best quality, too. Hence, healthcare costs far less in London, Paris, or Geneva — and life expectancy is longer, too.

So if you are earning $50k in America, it is a very different thing than earning $50k in France, Germany, or Sweden — in America, you must pay steeply for the basics of life, for basic necessities. Thus, incomes stretch much further in other countries, which enjoy a vastly higher quality of life, even though people there earn roughly the same amount, because they pay vastly less for basic necessities. Americans are rich, but only nominally — their money doesn’t buy nearly as much as their peers does, where it matters and counts most, for the basics of life.

What happens when societies don’t understand all the above? Well, a strange thing has happened to the American economy. While it’s true that things like TVs and Playstations have gotten cheaper, the costs of the basics of life have skyrocketed. All the things that really elevate people’s quality of life — healthcare, finance, education, transport, housing, and so on — have come to consume such a large share of the average household’s income that they have little left to save, invest, or spend on anything else. And what’s worse, while the basics of life have seen massive inflation, wages and incomes (not to mention savings and benefits and safety nets and opportunities) for most have stagnated. The result is an economy — and a society — that’s collapsing.

Yet all that is the straightforward effect of giving, for example, hedge funds control over drugs, or speculators control over housing, healthcare, and education — they will of course maximize profits, whereas investing in these things socially, or at least regulating them, minimizes real costs, and maximizes accessibility, affordability, and quality.

So the average American, who is left high and dry, must borrow, borrow, borrow, just to maintain a decent quality of life — because handing capitalism control of the basics of life has caused massive, skyrocketing inflation in necessities, while flatlining his income. Healthcare didn’t used to cost half of median income even a decade ago, after all — but now it does. So what happens when, in a decade or two, healthcare costs all of median income? How can an economy — let alone a society — function that way?

Well, what happens if the average American steps over the line? Misses a mortgage payment, gets ill and is unable to pay a few bills on time, can’t pay the costs of healthcare? Then they are punished severely and mercilessly. Their “credit rating” (note how banks and hedge funds don’t have them) is ruined. They can easily find themselves out on the street, without finance, without a second chance, without access to any kind of redress or support . And then they are rejected, shunned, and ostracized. They might not have an address anymore — so who will hire them? They are no longer a part of society — they have fallen through the cracks, and finding one’s way back is often next to impossible. Asymmetrical risk — corporations and lobbies and banks bear no risk at all, precisely because the average American bears them all now.

So Americans aren’t just absolutely or relatively poor, but poor in a new way entirely. First, the basics of life exploded in price, to the point that they are now unaffordable for many, maybe most, households. Second, Americans bear the risks of paying those unaffordable costs to an extreme degree, bearing the risks that institutions should, and so those risks are now ruinously high. A bank or hedge fund or corporation might go bankrupt, and liquidate its assets, and its owners stay rich — but if an American’s credit rating is ruined, loses his job, cannot pay his bills, or even if he declares bankruptcy, he falls through the cracks, hounded, embattled, institutionally black-marked. He finds himself outside society, with little way to get back in. Little wonder then that Americans work so much harder than anywhere else — they are always one step away from losing it all, from genuine ruin, but their peers in truly rich countries aren’t.

Marx probably would have called this immiseration. Neo-Marxist theorists call it precarity. And while there’s truth in both those ideas and perspectives, I think they miss three vital points.

We don’t see America as a poor country, but we should begin to. Americans live fairly abysmal lives — short, lonely, unhappy, full of work and stress and despair, compared to their peers. That is because they cannot afford better ones — predatory capitalism coupled with total economic mismanagement of social investments has made the basics of life ruinously unaffordable. In this way, it’s effectively a poor country — yes, there’s a tiny number of ultra-rich, but they are outliers now, off the map of the normal. Because it’s not just any kind of poverty, yesterday’s poverty, or even poverty as we are used to thinking about it.

America is pioneering a new kind of poverty. The kind of poverty that’s developed in America isn’t just bizarre and gruesome — it’s novel and unseen. It isn’t something that we understand well, economists, intellectuals, thinkers, because we have no good framework to think about it. It’s not absolute poverty like Somalia, and it’s not just relative poverty, like in gilded banana republics. It’s a uniquely American creation. It’s extreme capitalism meets Social Darwinism by way of rugged self-reliance crossed with puritanical cruelty.

The kind of poverty America’s pioneering today isn’t absolute, or even relative , but something more like perfectly tuned poverty, strategic poverty, basic poverty— nominally well-off people whose money doesn’t go far enough to make them actually live well, constantly living at the edge of ruin, and thus forced to choke down their bitter anger and serve the very systems which oppress and subjugate with more and more indignity and fear and servility by the year.

America’s still an innovator today. Unfortunately, what it’s innovating now is a new kind of poverty. Yet poverty is poverty. What happens in societies where poverty is growing? Authoritarianism rises, as people lose faith in democracy, which can’t seem to offer them working social contracts. Authoritarian soon enough becomes fascism — “this country, this land, its harvest — it is only for the true volk!”, the cry goes up, when there is not enough to go around. And the rest of the dark and grim story of the fall into the abyss you should know well enough by now. It ends in words we do not say.

Still, history, laughing, has told this tale to us many times. And it is telling it to tomorrow, again, in the tale of American collapse.

Suicide? American Society is Murdering Us

By Ted Rall

Source: CounterPunch

They say that 10 million Americans seriously consider committing suicide every year. In 1984, when I was 20, I was one of them.

Most people who kill themselves feel hopeless. They are miserable and distraught and can’t imagine how or if their lives will ever improve. That’s how I felt. Within a few months I got expelled from college, dumped by a girlfriend I foolishly believed I would marry, fired from my job and evicted from my apartment. I was homeless, bereft, broke. I didn’t have enough money for more than a day of cheap food. And I had no prospects.

I tried in vain to summon up the guts to jump off the roof of my dorm. I went down to the subway but couldn’t make myself jump in front of a train. I wanted to. But I couldn’t.

Obviously things got better. I’m writing this.

Things got better because my luck changed. But — why did it have to? Isn’t there something wrong with a society in which life or death turns on luck?

I wish I could tell my 20-year-old self that suicide isn’t necessary, that there is another way, that there will be plenty of time to be dead in the end. I’ve seen those other ways when I’ve traveled overseas.

In Thailand and Central Asia and the Caribbean and all over the world you will find Americans whose American lives ran hard against the shoals of bankruptcy, lost love, addiction or social shame. Rather than off themselves, they gathered their last dollars and headed to the airport and went somewhere else to start over. They showed up at some dusty ex-pat bar in the middle of nowhere with few skills other than speaking English and asked if they could crash in the back room in between washing dishes. Eventually they scraped together enough money to conduct tours for Western tourists, maybe working as a divemaster or taking rich vacationers deep-sea fishing. They weren’t rich themselves; they were OK and that was more than enough.

You really can start over. But maybe not in this uptight, stuck-up, class-stratified country.

I remembered that in 2015 when I suffered another setback. Unbeknownst to me, the Los Angeles Times — where I had worked as a cartoonist since 2009 – had gotten itself into a corrupt business deal with the LAPD, which I routinely criticized in my cartoons. A piece-of-work police chief leveraged his department’s financial influence on the newspaper by demanding that the idiot ingénue publisher, his political ally, fire me as a favor. But mere firing wasn’t enough for these two goons. They published not one, but two articles, lying about me in an outrageous attempt to destroy my journalistic credibility. I’m suing but the court system is slower than molasses in the pre-climate change Arctic.

Suicide crossed my mind many times during those dark weeks and months. Although I had done nothing wrong the Times’ smears made me feel ashamed. I was angry: at the Times editors who should have quit rather than carry out such shameful orders, at the media outlets who refused to cover my story, at the friends and colleagues who didn’t support me. Though many people stood by me, I felt alone. I couldn’t imagine salvaging my reputation — as a journalist, your reputation for truthtelling and integrity are your most valuable asset and essential to do your job and to get new ones.

As my LA Times nightmare unfolded, however, I remembered the Texas-born bartender who had reinvented himself in Belize after his wife left him and a family court judge ordered him to pay 90% of his salary in alimony. I thought about the divemaster in Cozumel running away from legal trouble back in the States that he refused to describe. If my career were to crumble away, I could split.

You can opt out of BS without having to opt out of life.

Up 30% since 1999, suicide has become an accelerating national epidemic — 1.4 million Americans tried to kill themselves in a single year, 2015 — but the only times the media focuses on suicide is when it claims the lives of celebrities like Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. While the media has made inroads by trying to cover high-profile suicides discreetly so as to minimize suicidal ideation and inspiring others to follow their example, it’s frustrating that no one seems to want to identify societal and political factors so that this trend might be reversed.

Experts believe that roughly half of men who commit suicide suffer from undiagnosed mental illness such as a severe personality disorder or clinical depression. Men commit suicide in substantially higher numbers than women. The healthcare insurance business isn’t much help. One in five Americans is mentally ill but 60% get no treatment at all.

Then there’s stress. Journalistic outlets and politicians don’t target the issue of stress in any meaningful way other than to foolishly, insipidly advise people to avoid it. If you subject millions of people to inordinate stress, some of them, the fragile ones, will take their own lives. We should be working to create a society that minimizes rather than increases stress.

It doesn’t require a lot of heavy lifting to come up with major sources of stress in American society. People are working longer hours but earning lower pay. Even people with jobs are terrified of getting laid off without a second’s notice. The American healthcare system, designed to fatten for-profit healthcare corporations, is a sick joke. When you lose your job or get sick, that shouldn’t be your problem alone. We’re social creatures. We must help each other personally, locally and through strong safety-net social programs.

Loneliness and isolation are likely leading causes of suicide; technology is alienating us from one another even from those who live in our own homes. This is a national emergency. We have to discuss it, then act.

Life in the United States has become vicious and brutal, too much to take even for this nation founded upon the individualistic principles of rugged libertarian pioneers. Children are pressured to exhibit fake joy and success on social media. Young adults are burdened with gigantic student loans they strongly suspect they will never be able to repay. The middle-aged are divorced, outsourced, downsized and repeatedly told they are no longer relevant. And the elderly are thrown away or warehoused, discarded and forgotten by the children they raised.

We don’t have to live this way. It’s a choice. Like the American ex-pats I run into overseas, American society can opt out of crazy-making capitalism without having to opt out.

Big Pay Gaps Are Bad for Business

Would you do your best work for a CEO who pulls in 5,000 times your own salary?

By Sarah Anderson

Source: Other Words

Mattel is one of the largest toy-making companies on earth. Turns out it’s one of the biggest manufacturers of income inequality, too.

Last year, the Barbie doll manufacturer paid its CEO nearly 5,000 times as much as its median worker.

This stunning revelation is the result of a new regulation that requires U.S. publicly held corporations to report their CEO-worker pay ratios to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mattel’s gap is the widest reported so far. But most other big U.S. companies also have staggering divides. According to a new report by the staff of Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, the first 225 large corporations to release their numbers had pay ratios averaging 339 to 1.

“This immense inequality is a crisis for our economy and our democracy,” said Ellison, a longtime advocate of pay gap disclosure.

What’s good for these CEOs, however, is actually bad for business.

A CNBC analysis of the new pay ratio data, for example, suggests that companies with large pay disparities have lower profits per employee.

Why might that be? According to a recent study by a Harvard Business professor, companies tend to perform poorly if workers feel they’re not paid fairly. The study’s author said workers who feel that way are likely to lack motivation and even quit their jobs.

It’s not hard to understand how it could put a damper on your morale to be working hard and struggling to get by while your boss is being rewarded hundreds — or even thousands — of times more than you on payday.

Doug Smith, a former partner at the big McKinsey management consulting firm, argues that the economic costs of huge pay gaps go far beyond the problems of low employee morale and high turnover.

“Instead of building a real economy beneficial to all,” Smith says, “these unethical pay practices spread outsourcing, offshoring, tax avoidance, downsizing, and the substitution of good-paying permanent jobs with temporary, precarious employment.”

There’s a growing movement to use the new pay ratio data to encourage corporations to narrow their gaps. Portland, Oregon will soon become the first city to impose a tax penalty on companies with pay gaps above 100 to 1.

Charlie Hales, Portland’s mayor when the law was passed in late 2016, argued that it made good business sense to encourage narrower gaps.

In a former job at an employee-owned engineering firm, Hales had seen firsthand how a small pay ratio boosted the bottom line. “Everyone worked a little harder because your success was my success,” Hales said. “And that egalitarian culture led to a strong work ethic that drove the corporation to success.”

With the new pay ratio data now coming out, lawmakers in six states — California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Rhode Island — are considering Portland-style pay ratio taxes.

Narrowing the divides within U.S. corporations may not automatically leave us all whistling away while we work. But we’ll all pay a price if we keep fiddling while extreme inequality burns down our economy.

Neoliberal Defenestration and the Overton Window

By Stephen Martin

Source: CounterPunch

‘It is difficult to get Artificial Intelligence to understand something, when the Research and Development funding it depends upon its not understanding it’

Paraphrase of Upton Sinclair.

defenestration  (diːˌfɛnɪˈstreɪʃən)

n

the act of throwing a person or thing  out of a window

[C17: from New Latin dēfenestrātiō, from Latin de- + fenestra window

The freedictionary.com

‘If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists of treating another human being as a thing

John Brunner ‘The Shockwave Rider

This small article a polemic against neoliberal hegemony; in particular the emerging issue of ‘surplus population’ as related to technological displacement in context of a free market, an issue purposive to such hegemony which as an ‘elephant growing in the panopticon’  i.e. not to be mentioned?

The central premise is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) + Robotics  comprise a nefarious as formulaic temptation to the elite of the ‘Technetronic era’ as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it: this consistent with a determinism as stems ontologically from ‘Empiricism’  form of a  ‘One Dimensionality’ as Marcuse phrased it over five Decades ago; and which thru being but mere simulacra, AI and Robotics represent an ontological imperative  potentially expropriated under pathology to denial of Kant’s concept of ‘categorical imperative’?  (That Kant did not subscribe to determinism is acknowledged). The neoliberal concepts of ‘Corporatism’ and ‘free market’ are powerful examples of this ‘one dimensionality’ which is clearly pathological, a topic notably explored by Joel Bakan concerning the pursuit of profit within a Corporatist framework.

– ‘One dimensionality in, one dimensionality out’– so it goes ontologically as to some  paraphrase of GIGO as trending alas way of ‘technological determinism’ towards an ‘Epitaph for Biodiversity’  as would be – way of ‘Garbage’ or ‘Junk’ un apperceived as much as ‘retrospection’ non occurrent indeed -and where ‘Farewell to the Working Class’ as André Gorz conceived to assume an entirely new meaning: -this to some denouement of  ‘Dystopian Nightmare’ as opposed to  ‘Utopian Dream’, alas; such the ‘Age of Leisure’  as ‘beckoning’ to be not for the majority or ‘Demos’,but rather  for the ‘technetronic elite’ and  their ‘AI’ and Robotics – such ‘leisure’ being as to a ‘freedom’ pathological and facilitated  by the absence of conscience as much as morality; such the ‘farewell’; such the defenestration of ‘surplus’ , such the ‘Age’ we ‘live’ within as to ‘expropriation’ and ‘arrogation’  to amount to  ‘Death by Panopticon’ such the ‘apotheosis’?

It is being so cheerful which keeps these small quarters going.

But digression.

–  It is a relatively small step from ‘the death of thought’ to ‘the death of Life’under Neoliberal Orthodoxy as proving to be the most toxic ideology ever knownsuch the hegemony as a deliberative, shift of the ‘ Overton Window’ currently occurring as to trend deterministic; such the mere necrotrophy as a ‘defenestration’ – and the ‘one percent’ but a deadly collective of parasitic orifice? For what is ‘Empiricism’ when implemented thru  AI and Robotic Technology in a Corporatist economy as but a ‘selective investment’  as to Research and Development by elite ‘private interests’,  which to a determinism so evidently entailing a whole raft of ‘consequence’ ; such the means, such the production, such the ‘phenomenology’ as ‘owned’ indeed? Under pathology, selectivity is impaired to point of ‘militarization’?

But foremost amongst said ‘raft’ of consequence – the concept of ‘classification’ as incorporates methodological reduction of the particular to a composite of generalities so typical of ‘Science’ as expropriated; the fruition thereof replicated not least thru ‘Consumerism’ – and ‘Lifestyle’ – as much as ‘Life’ reduced as much as abrogated to but correlation way  of ‘possession’ of ‘things’: this  as said replication expressed as much ‘thru’ Linnaeus as Marx  concerning ‘class’- and as results in concepts’ Incorporated’ such as the ‘Overton Window’ – as will be explored by way of ‘extrapolation’ below? The debasing of identity as a correlate of possessions as a necessary ‘abrogation’ by way of engineered ‘bio hack’ is only furthered, such the loss of dimensionality as a potential, by such as social media? An excellent multimedia illustration of such loss is found here.

It’s to be noted that for Empiricism the concept of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ entails an extra dimensionality  as ‘metaphysical’ – and that ‘Politics’ so deconstructed despite abuse under orthodoxy as to ‘mitigation’ remains as  ‘Moral Economics’ – this despite the  mitigative contention of neoliberal orthodoxy that there no morality in the ‘synonymy’; to a pragmatic as ‘Utilitarian’ point of a ‘Killing the Host’ prevailing at paradigmatic as much as Geopolitical level as but explicative of a ‘necrotrophy’; as much as the ‘defenestration’ as euphemism herein proposed this small article  would explicate?

Kudos to Michael Hudson for exposing, and continuing to expose, the ‘death of thought’ which Neoliberalism as an orthodoxy as but a mere ‘racket’ of ‘transfer of resources’ represents.

– Are we ‘on a roll’ here as much as ‘off the leash’ – such the rebellion ‘psycho political’; such the ‘CounterPunch’ by way of digital pamphleteering as ‘restricted code’ rejected evidenced by way of ‘alternative’?

‘Politics’ should mean a diversity biological as much as phenomenological; it should mean more than Empirical ‘utility’, by way of the extra dimensionality which Metaphysics represents; this, as much as ‘Democracy’ demands diversity; ‘thought permitted’ as evidencing same as much as questions allowed to be asked; while Corporatism as antithesis demands ‘line’, a homogeneity, a uniformity, an abrogation as to a contingency?

Whether ‘Empiricism’ as to Philosophy is ‘Essentialist’ or ‘Instrumentalist’ is as of much political relevance as the Medieval question ‘how many angels can dance upon the head of a needle?‘ – the tragic fact remaining in ‘Oceania’  become to Corporatism  is that the economic impact of (AI + Robotics) constitutes a ‘technological displacement’ which under a ‘one dimensionality’ as ‘Orthodox’  is as a ‘political impact’ at a quintessential or axiomatic level, such the ‘formulae’ as (=Ecocide) ‘completes’ under a determinism of hegemony as demands ‘whoredom’? AI and Robotics destroy the symbiotic relationship between production and consumption thru reducing the requirement for human labor as waged in the productive process; AI and Robotics thereby impact upon the distribution of resources as wage based. The fairy tale of compensatory employment opportunities is at best wishful thinking, at worst it is a purposively contrived propaganda?

‘Biodiversity’, alas, becoming more limited to a ‘Thanatos‘ of ‘Military Industrial Corporatist Complex’  as explicates the ‘Age of the Anthropocene’as of the ‘1%’ as funders of ‘hegemony’ such the transfer of resources?

‘As ‘we’ view the world so it becomes’, indeed – this as much as how ‘Others’, through hegemony as ‘Utilitarian’, would have it viewed – and that such a large part of ‘Currency’ as ‘it’  to the permit of ‘Hegemony’ which would control and issue views – such the window as ‘Overtonian’ as can be shifted?

How long before the ‘collateral damage’ concerning premature fatality and reduced life expectancy as evidenced in homelessness, withdrawal of social welfare, militarization of policing, drug abuse, including prescription of synthetic opioids, incarceration all as obscenities explicating the ‘cheapening of life’  becomes ‘formalised’ under neoliberal orthodoxy as euthanasia? To such an Overton Window would it at first be ‘voluntary’?

It was ‘Utilitarianism’ as gave the World the concept of ‘Panopticon’ back in the Eighteenth Century.

Apropos to such ‘Thanatos‘ identified:

Wherefore art thou ‘Eros’: as represented by checkout operator, bank teller, driver, warehouseman, barista, cook, secretary, journalist, lawyer, receptionist, ‘ human voice at the end of the line’ – such the insidious inroads being made consequent the advance of Empirical based Technology?

The ‘Litany’ of such ‘displacement/defenestration’ could go on, as it undoubtedly shall under prevailing Hegemony ‘Western’ as ‘Oceanic’ as much orthodox as ‘deadly’, such the invasive penetration of ‘one dimensionality’ as ‘technological displacement’ evidenced under neoliberal orthodoxy as entailing a transfer of resources to mere ‘Stateless Bastards’, such the point of a determinism as would prevail woeful?

Ponerological questions such as would not be asked commensurate:

Is the ultimate ‘stateless bastard’ satan?

Can ‘synonymy seen’ be’ revolutionary’?

‘Technological displacement’ under an ontology of ‘One Dimensionality’ aka‘Corporatism’ but a euphemism for ‘surplus population’; this as much as ‘Corporatism’ promotes the illusion of ‘Democracy’ by way of ‘mental cheating’; such the synonymy as ‘simulacra’ an ‘illusion’ denied – but ‘real’ under ‘doublethink’?

‘Trickle down economics’ is as real as much as ‘technological displacement’ to be compensated for in the ‘opening up of a whole new vista of opportunity’, such the death of thought as neoliberal orthodoxy represents some parallel of tales told by such as Horatio Alger to point of ‘illusion’ encouraged?

These small quarters would ‘rip a new one’ in Neoliberal Orthodoxy by way of polemic.

It remains a ‘big’ question under contemplation of the genius of Orwell and the highly perspicacious ratio of ‘1/15/84’ (hence the ‘one percent’) as to why, within an undoubtedly comprehensive as prescient Dystopian vision where ‘oligarchic collective’ a synonym of ‘technetronic elite’, he ‘permitted the currency’ of the ‘Prole’ as ‘84%’ to prevail as a presence rather than but a memory disappeared by way of ‘memory hole’?

Under neoliberal orthodoxy the political utility of the ‘Proles’ and in particular the ‘Lumpenproletariat’, alas, is as to but fear as a ‘stick’; a basis of control and manipulation same sense as Upton Sinclair explicated ‘carrot’ contingent by way of synonym seen: to wit;  accept control and manipulation as ‘rewarded’ or be ‘expelled’; be but as a ‘Prole’ subsisting and awaiting death, such the economic incarceration as ‘CAFO’ epitomises the cheapening of life under a hegemony as has corollary of alienation, marginalization and impoverishment wielded under Dystopian imperative; this to a ‘transfer of resources’ from ‘Eros‘ to ‘Thanatos‘ reinforced thru contingency of profit such the ‘ponerology’ of ‘Biodiversity’ reduced by way of paradigm Geopolitical?

To love Life is to loathe the deadly; such the philanthropy as would only be evidenced, such the irony, by the ‘ragged trousered’ as so reduced, such the divide et imperaevidenced?

-And so to ‘defenestration’ as ongoing 21stC. by way of ‘surplus population’ generated deterministically as to be dealt with ‘Utilitarian’ as much as the elimination of ‘Biodiversity’ such the ‘technetronic era’ as much as of Dystopia for Humanity as opposed to a Utopia for (AI + Robotics)?

In the annals of International Finance, in which ‘usury’ figures large as polymorphous(?), the power of (AI + Robotics) ‘growing’ as ‘metastasising’ –  as evidenced by the concept of ‘Dark Pools’, and in political manipulation to point of control and issue of currency  by algorithms, such as  infamously deployed by the now defunct Cambridge Analytica using data ‘supplied’ by Facebook are on the rise – such the ‘technetronic era’ furthered?

When neoliberal orthodoxy states Say hello to my little friend!‘ way of the militarization of ‘AI +Robotics” then a ‘defenestration’ form of ‘take all to hell’ will occur, such the shift of the ‘Overton Window’ in progress?

As to the ‘Overton Window’ as in title this small article; a fellow ‘CounterPuncher ‘sees thru it’ most apposite:

Overton described the evolution to broad public acceptance as a process that develops by degrees: “Unthinkable; Radical; Acceptable; Sensible; Popular; Policy.” The right used this model and stuck with it for 30 years to achieve its current dominance. Ideas like slashing unemployment insurance and welfare, privatizing crown corporations, gutting taxes on the wealthy, making huge cuts to social programs and signing “trade” deals that give corporations more power, were all “unthinkable” or “radical” in the beginning. But after 30 years of relentless promotion and the courting of politicians, all of these ideas are now public policy.

Murray Dobbin

– You see it is really quite ‘simple’ when boiled down, such the reductioad absurdumas ‘one dimensionality’ the result of Empiricism embraced to an exclusion of alternative, as ‘Evolution’ circumscribes as much as theoretically delineates?

‘The Talking Heads’ got it right regarding the consequences of neoliberal orthodoxy as concerns the masses and the ‘death of thought’ whereby a ‘Road to Nowhere’  becoming more ‘incorporative’?

Thru Empiricism as an ‘Ontology’, Man in process of nurturing a necrotrophy, such the orifice as existing to be stuffed to a ‘friction of the finitude’. Each ‘Billionaire’ as become so Empirically quantifiable as under such ‘neoliberal jungle’ such the paradigm of abrogation is as to to an obscene ‘transfer of resources’ whereby egocentricity a ‘Thanatos‘ as opposed to ‘Eros‘, and whereby in such land of the blind as a ‘Kingdom’, the ‘one eyed’ as ‘one dimensional’ as much as Empiricism lack any sense of empathy let alone mercy, and which AI and Robotics to epitomise?

Under such ‘paradigm’ of necrotrophy as debasement as much as abrogation it is as blessed to be a Prole? As Martin Luther so humorously said:

‘So our Lord God commonly gives riches to those gross asses to whom He vouchsafes nothing else’

The rationale for composing this small article is not to be pessimistic, rather such the pretension it is as to be a ‘gadfly’ against the manifestly ongoing cheapening of life thru which such a small minority profit from, and which yet remains mutable, as future submissions shall propose.

America is Disneyland

By Chris Kanthan

Source: Activist Post

Disneyland is the Happiest Place on Earth! Millions of families visit the theme park every year to enjoy the magical place of rides, spectacular shows and cheerful cartoon figures. Everything is clean, perfect and joyful. Unless … you realize that Cinderella might actually be homeless. That’s right, 10% of Disneyland’s employees are actually homeless, many more are on food stamps, and 75% struggle to make ends meet.

Does this ring familiar? Think of America. Behind the façade of being the greatest country on Earth with the largest GDP and the wealthiest billionaires, there are tens of millions of Americans who are left behind just like Disney’s employees.

This neo-feudalistic model isn’t isolated to Disney or Walmart, it’s systemic. For example, the bus driver at Apple – which has $280 billion in cash – is forced to sleep in a van because he can’t afford the Silicon Valley rent; Facebook’s cafeteria workers live in a garage; and thousands of American Airlines’ employees are forced to depend on food stamps.

America is being eaten alive by corporate greed; and Disneyland has been taken over by Scrooge.

Let’s look at some Disney Inc. statistics.

Total profit per year: $9 billion

Total employees: 200,000

Notice that the profit reflects what’s left after all the expenses, including the salaries, have been paid. So, in a utopian world, the Disney management will do the math ($9 billion / 200,000 = $45,000) and send a check for $45K to every employee, Mickey included. That kind of profit-sharing would really make Disneyland the happiest place on Earth. Does that happen? No way!

Does Cinderella get a check for perhaps $20K, $10K, $5K or even $1K? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Cinderella gets nada, zero, zilch. She should be content with the $12/hour salary and must smile happily for the kids.

In Disneyland, Cinderella never gets to meet her prince.

Disney’s CEO gets paid $46 million a year, which translates to $23,000 an hour. Imagine Disney’s CEO coming to work on Jan 2nd. He wishes a few people “happy new year,” orders coffee, sits on his desk, makes a few phone calls … and he has already made more money than what Ariel would make during the rest of the year.

Of course, the CEO should get paid more, but does he deserve a salary that’s equivalent to 2,000 Disney employees? If the CEO doesn’t show up for work for a day, Disneyland will continue running. If 2,000 employees take a day off, the park would be shut down.

In the 1960s, the CEO-to-worker salary ratio was 25. Today it’s often 600 or more, sometimes even more than 1000 (for example, at Walmart). Much of the executive compensation comes in the form of stock options and bonuses based on stock performance. In a rational and unrigged world, the CEOs would increase their revenues and profits to get bonuses. Not anymore.

Now, the CEOs simply use a no-brainer solution to boost the stock prices – it’s called stock buybacks or share repurchases. This involves a firm using corporate profits (or even borrowed money) to buy its own stocks. BTW, this used to be illegal until the 1980s.

Since 2007, US corporations have spent trillions of dollars on stock buybacks. In 2018 alone, they will spend $800 billion on this financial engineering tool (which has also led to a massive stock market bubble). They won’t use the billions to hire Americans, boost wages or innovate new products. Instead, the CEOs will buy yachts and tell you that Chinese or Mexicans stole your jobs.

Do the low-wage employees of Disneyland get any shares or stock options? A silly question, indeed.

Thus we have a situation where American employers ruthlessly exploit American workers. This isn’t a good model for a country. China and Mexico don’t make us poor; predatory capitalism does.

Paying good wages to hardworking employees is not socialism or communism. Henry Ford understood this when he more than doubled the wages of his workers in 1914.

However, hundred years later, maximizing profit has become a fundamentalist dogma. You can imagine a conversation among the factory-farming executives:

Guy #1: Why the heck are these chickens roaming out in the farms? We would save so much money if we lock them up in cages.

Guy #2: Brilliant idea! Let’s lock up five chickens in a cage. We will save more. More is always better.

Guy #3: I really don’t understand why we feed them expensive salads and healthy stuff. Let’s feed them cheap GMO corn and GMO soy from my friends at Monsanto.

Guy #4: Experts tell me that if we give them caffeine and anti-depressants, the chickens will stay awake longer, eat more, and get fatter.

Guy #5: And when they get sick, load them up with antibiotics and steroids.

Guy #5: These stupid chickens are also so small. Let’s drug them with some growth hormones. I am getting a lot of pressure from the private equity funds about profits per chicken.

Apart from being inhumane and psychopathic, this system forgets or ignores the fact that we have to eat these chickens. Sick chicken = sick people. Call it Karma or “revenge of the chickens.”

Similarly, poor workers = poor country. And you can imagine a similar conversation among corporate executives regarding workers – “cut their wages and benefits”, “make them work overtime”, “hire part-time employees rather than full-time” and so on.

You can’t grow the economy if American workers don’t get paid enough, especially by profitable multi-billion dollar corporations. 2/3rd of our GDP is based on consumer spending. It’s no wonder that in the last ten years, the US economy cumulatively grew only by a dismal 35%. Compare that to China, which grew by an astounding 200% during that same period.

And it’s not a coincidence that China’s average wages have more than doubled in the same period:

The solution for low wages primarily lies in the hands of corporate elites. Labor unions are almost non-existent in the private sector these days; and the government doesn’t have much control over corporate America – in fact, corporations control the U.S. political system. Free market doesn’t have to translate to cancerous greed and extreme exploitation. Free market also means that corporations are free to share their profits with their employees. Finally, free market can and must also incorporate patriotism, responsibility to the society and strategies for sustainable prosperity.

 

Chris Kanthan is the author of a new book, Deconstructing the Syrian War. Chris lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, has traveled to 35 countries, and writes about world affairs, politics, economy and health. His other book is Deconstructing Monsanto. Follow him on Twitter: @GMOChannel