Forum Post: Will Concentration of Wealth Kill Us?
Posted 8 years ago on Dec. 15, 2015, 7:15 p.m. EST by agkaiser
(2516)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Not right away. But it's been picking off the poorest and/or drastically shortening our life expectancy for millennia. It's already significantly shrunk the middle class, especially in the past thirty to forty years. It will eventually, if not corrected, get the ninety percent of people who supply the labor that does the real work making real products that feed, clothe and house everyone. Final answer: YES! Concentration of wealth will kill us all! The first symptom of the disease manifests as a shrinking middle class.
The middle class had been shrunk in the forty to fifty years leading up to the great depression. There'd been quite a few panics and recessions in that period too. The Roosevelt recovery and the resulting post war boom rebuilt the middle class and brought it and the nation as a whole to the greatest prosperity the world has ever known. Conservatives were appalled that any but the rich masters had it so good. They see our freedom and well being as a threat to theirs. We see the results of their reaction playing out as the middle class shrinks and poverty grows today. What rich capitalists are free to do in America would be illegal in a sane world.
The freedom of the psycho billionaires and banksters [and their pampered ministerial CEOs and politicians] to avoid taxation and to dictate our work and pay; to make debt slaves of the overwhelming majority, is perverse. But conservatives don't see that. They foolishly conflate their own desire for freedom to make their own way and profit by their own hard work with the freedom of the masters to coerce us to work for the profit of the elite class and to train us to falsely believe that's our choice. And so far that programming, conditioning and training of the general population works appallingly well.
If it's suggested that we tax the rich to slow the concentration of wealth or, heaven forbid, even take back a little of their hoard so that we may have life, many, I repeat, conflate their own petty incomes and comparatively tiny [negative in most cases] net worth with the massive extortions of the ruling elite parasites. Any common sense solution is then rejected by a "thought" process that we've been conditioned to undergo in response to radical ideas like doing something to save our lives.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/12/demise-of-the-us-middle-class-now-official.html
Why must investment concentrate wealth inexorably? An excerpt (condensed) from "How Does That Work: A View ..." explains it.
"In a hypothetical casino card game the house takes 5% of every pot. If 10% of the money at the table is on average played on each hand, then the house takes 0.5% of the money in the game on each rake. After 200 hands, 100% of the money that is on average at the table has been taken by the house. The only way the game may continue is to have new money come to it. The winners, of course, smell the new blood and even anticipate it greedily. And the biggest winner over a time is always the house. Until the free market ideologues took over, the biggest difference between a casino bank and finance was that the gaming house took a bigger cut of the handle."
Compound interest operates on the economy just like a Casino card game. When investment profits are reinvested and generate more income, profit is compounded just like the interest on the money they loan us to live and which is, today, the preferred investment vehicle. In the end, they must have it all and we have nothing but debt as they loan the profits back to us and "earn" even more by the sweat of our brows. And if you think we chose this, you're an idiot!
"How Does That Work" https://www.createspace.com/3852916
> "We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." - Louis Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." - Justice Louis Brandeis' famous words bear repeating + fyi, watch:
I think that you will find this fascinating documentary - despite its bleakness, much in tune with this OP! Ruppert is a man of knowledge & compassion & even if I don't fully agree with his solutions - I do get his analysis and I emphatically agree with his final conclusion - which in the original Latin, would read as ...
radix omnium malorum est cupiditas ...
No God or Hero Will Save Us
If we're gonna be saved, We have to save ourselves. We have to see that our interest in survival is more important than the compound interest on investments that enslaves us through inexorable concentration of wealth.
So how do we avoid going into debt to the rich to get us out of the hole they put us in? Really?! Wake up fool! All we have to do is tax them instead of borrowing from them and paying them interest to get what we need to live.
Still don't get it? It's the FIRE [sector] that's burning down our world! Investment by the rich just leads to more concentration of wealth. It's functionally the same mechanism as compound interest on debt. It's just another form of usury which is destructive to real economy. We can't count on "free market" capitalists to create a sustainable [local or any other] economy. They have no interest in anything that works for us. All the FIRE sector can do is create the worst of all possible worlds.
If you don't see the existential threat of for profit finance, you need to open your eyes. Services that produce no real goods must be (in addition to necessary) reduced to the lowest possible cost that they do the least damage to us all. The lowest cost services are non-profit. What we the people need in common we must do in common on a non-profit basis. We can pay the managers we hire well, say two or three times the average, but not so well that they threaten our existence with theirs.
Start by putting out the FIRE. Then deal with big pharma and corporate medicine. Then energy. Then communications. Then mass transportation.
And, on a personal note, I hope to some day see sports teams that truly represent the communities they pretend (with the exception of the Green Bay Packers who are community owned) to represent. Do away with private ownership and profit from sports. Billionaire owners are an abomination. Their existence is a threat to ours!
This is my 52nd email post of 2015. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I'll be back in 2016.
That last is for the members of my email list. You'll probably hear from me sooner at the OWS forum.
Greg Kaiser in BumFucked, TX
communication is insanely easy to set up with cell phone towers
the people need basic income
to invest in projects they want to see done
vote with your dollar
voting with your ballot is a good ideal too
on a multiple choice test with no right answers
Take a picture of your ballot and posting online is also good
if we must count
there is a thing called a primary, the GOP proves most anybody who wants to can jump in, so say there is a thinning out process, but it's a big country, I support Bernie Sanders I wish you did too but you are more concerned about keeping your hands clean because in your mind the world doesn't matter so much as you and your hands
The D/R primary is a draft, not an election. Only a fool would think otherwise.
Check this out: http://usuncut.com/politics/dnc-sabotages-bernie/
only a fool sits on the sideline bitching when they could get involved and change shit
Thats really cute that you think your primary votes mean shit.
Its the delegates that matter, your primary votes are meaningless. Apparently you didnt catch the RNC/DNC conventions last election where they blatantly went against the people as usual.
You say I am sitting on the sidelines doing nothing. Well, at least I am not actively egging them on like a useful idiot.
You dont get change by helping the ones that are screwing you. Shocking, I know.
you think anybody believes your GOP electing bullshit? you are the stupid tool of the 1% doing just as they want you to sitting it out and letting them run the show
Yes, absolutely, unless the trajectory changes as it has changed before. The eventual abrupt changes were abhorrent, to put it mildly. Much worse still, they created long-lingering backlashes, repercussions, and retaliations for generations. World history shows that it occurred everywhere, both in the Old World and the New World.
I see an economic system as an ecosystem, subject to analogous constraints. There are invasive species that destabilize an ecosystem as there are similar economic species that destabilize an economic system. There are algal blooms that choked other species to death as there are economic behemoths that get so much free credit for profit making analogous to the fertilizer runoffs to the Mississippi delta that they will create dead zones when the blooms turn to busts.
The only ways that I know of to curb invasive species are pesticides or biological predators but both kinds can create brand-new disastrous blooms, too. Sometimes the medicines can be worse than the diseases so we could enter uncharted territories unintentionally. I hope that our good horse knows when to balk.
No matter the turbulence, choke points, booms and busts, the winners, a small percentage of us whoever they may be today, reap the mathematical certainty of compound interest on investment.
doubling time:
2Pv=Pv(1=i)**t
t=log2/log(1+i)
the fact is: if 1% owns 50% of everything the other 99% have only 1/100 of the wealth on average per unit to share among ourselves. How much of that do you think the lowest 20% will get? The formulas above leave no doubt that the one percent will, in the end, have the rest and the rest of us will ultimately have nothing. I hope that clears the blooms that clog thought processes.
Compound interest was the invasive species that had originated in the Renaissance and built up the wealthier parts of the world (mostly the West).
Increasing the credit supply commensurate with economic expansions into virgin endeavors (with counter-balancing activities using Real resources) is not destabilizing. However, nearly the entire world's central banks are now engaged in credit expansions attempting to climb out of the global economic malaise. Watch the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan for further easing.
We may be staring into the abyss of a Global Panic because there is NO escape valve if a collapse of confidence backing the Global credit expansion should occur. Then the greatly pumped-up balloon of wealth will be pin-pricked. Pop!
excerpt from a Michael Hudson post at Naked Capitalism:
"... In this U.S.-centered worldview, China and Russia loom as the great potential adversaries – defined as independent power centers from the United States as they create the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an alternative to NATO, and the AIIB as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank tandem. The very name, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, implies that transportation systems and other infrastructure will be financed by governments, not relinquished into private hands to become rent-extracting opportunities financed by U.S.-centered bank credit to turn the rent into a flow of interest payments.
"The focus on a mixed public/private economy sets the AIIB at odds with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its aim of relinquishing government planning power to the financial and corporate sector for their own short-term gains, and above all the aim of blocking government’s money-creating power and financial regulation. ..."
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/12/michael-hudson-the-imf-changes-its-rules-to-isolate-china-and-russia.html
So - ''The nightmare scenario of U.S. geopolitical strategists seems to be coming true: foreign economic independence from U.S. control. Instead of privatizing and neoliberalizing the world under U.S.-centered financial planning and ownership, the Russian & Chinese Governments are now investing in neighboring economies on terms that cement Eurasian Economic Integration on the basis o thef Russian oil and tax exports and Chinese financing. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) threatens to replace the IMF and World Bank programs that favor U.S. suppliers, banks and bondholders (with the United States holding unique veto power).'' - from an alternate link to the same article by Dr. Michael Hudson:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43765.htm & also
see - ''This “Rate Hike” Is A Fraud'', by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43751.htm
fiat lux ...
US government cannot create money and therefor must tax
as the lower 99% seems to be mostly housed and feed
money wealth does not match distributed resources
that the 1% hold so much more is a testament to the power to buy anything, play any game
The only way for the 99% not to lose is NOT to play the rigged game, using the zero hedge. Zero wealth cannot be manipulated by Anyone and that will become the real problem for everyone. When the Global aggregate demand is strangulated by zero wealth, economic confidence will vanish. Then Contagion!
re establish a money system by basic income for everyone
Basic income for all makes sense since we are already doing it in patchwork fashion haggling over a penny here and a penny there. Worse yet, we hire hordes of bureaucrats to check on compliance, respond to inquiries about specifics, levy penalties for breaking rules, etc. and every budgetary cycle, we go through the traumas of proposed tweaks here and there.
It reminds me of the very, very, very stupid Communist way of population control from centralized organization of the distribution of basic necessities. Hey, do I have to do a lap dance on my rationing-coupon dispensing official for me to move from Virginia to Californica? Or do I have to brown-nose the Texass hanging under the suspenders? The ancient truth is: Green turd grows into wholly mouldy guacamole!
food, electricity ,water are centrally distributed now
Therein lies your problem. If you can open up your mind and see for real, food, electricity, and water are available in smaller quantities for free because you live in the U.S. Reducing your needs is the path to freedom. I don't care about market prices if I don't get my supplies from the rigged markets. Let the Big Gay Boys have their potties!
This process has already started:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-group-of-middle-aged-american-whites-is-dying-at-a-startling-rate/2015/11/02/47a63098-8172-11e5-8ba6-cec48b74b2a7_story.html
It is not new. That is why white middle-aged Americans should be banned from purchasing firearms and ammunitions.
I agree that mass shootings should not have become a one-a-day death pill for the U.S. A well-armed citizenry is vital for upholding the Constitution but the stipulation that the citizen-militia be WELL-REGULATED is right there in the Second Amendment. If one is not mentally stable and physically able enough to handle the power to murder, one should be banned from that.
Concentration of wealth can kill in many ways, a mass shooting being one notorious way.
"not mentally stable and physically able enough to handl"
There's already things on the books to get this stuff, they just dont have the man power - or the data - to manage it 100%.
But by all means, lets give them that power and data. For sure. The people that are murdering all over the planet, lets let them into our lives even more.
Unreal...
The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the states from the federal government so I presume that the individual states are the parties intended to be tasked to regulate the citizen-militia well. Perhaps everyone in a state owning guns should be conscripted to the national guard of that state every two years for training and re-certification of mental stability and physical abilities to handle murder weapons.
However, due to the interstate commerce clause, the federal government must be responsible for stopping border arms smuggling between the gun-nuts states of America and the gun-hate states of America.
There IS a place for guns and lots and lots of more guns, especially where the coverage of law enforcement is sparse. Compare Garland, Texas with San Bernardino, California shootings. Guns limited damages. Yes, Texass is a gun-nuts state and Californica is a gun-hate state. I kind of love them both, in the same way as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_People_(1982_film) captured my imagination.