It is what I call forced trade with the greater slave, a truly dismal regime rewarding the lowest of standards, punishing the highest, and working to repeal all measure of social security for the great majority.
All this is due to capital's overwhelming control of society and the loss of any real "factor balance" - a term I use in my Book - Cap-Com, The Economics of Balance - to describe a ruling-elite driven economy gone oligarchic and oligopolistic.
This lack of a factor balance in society means that not only is the economy perversely skewed and counterproductive but that all of our institutions are now controlled by capital - thus giving the few the power to control the many, crush the middle class, and ruin your retirement.
In centuries past, before the great enclosures of land and commons, when most were able to repair to their homesteads and eke out an independent existence, this was social security enough. It also provided an escape from the "free market" and wage-dependent living – clearly an essential freedom to achieve any bargaining leverage and a factor balance of power.
In these settings people could take or leave urban factory work as they had a separate means of existence. However, as the Commons disappeared, as land became aggregated in the hands of the few, and urbanites sold their farmettes this option disappeared for the vast majority in the emerging, wage-driven, industrial-age, urban economies.
As a result, most became expendable "labor" desperate for a wage to maintain a simple existence, with only a few days, weeks, or months of pay-check-less "freedom" available. Thus did the power of Capital over Labor become complete, and society become a "managed democracy" – one neatly arranged to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
Unless more seniors combine their resources, this dismal societal arrangement means many more destitute people whose American dream will be shattered, whose dollars will become cheapened, and whose maintenance will further overtax younger generations.
We are facing an economy already bankrupted by idiotic "free trade" policies, the trillion dollar Iraq war racket, and our huge unfunded liabilities. The current "solution" to this problem by our ruling oligarchy is to purposely depreciate the dollar, thus further raising the cost of surviving for seniors on the edge. Idiocy and predation is clearly systemic.
Today we are forced to escape from the society our parents, and several generations of grandparents, built to solve the very problems we are facing today – a lifetime of insecurity, fear, and destitution, all courtesy of a corrupt, capital-driven, society.
This is the primary reason a back to the land, and urban or rural communes, scheme may not simply be a youthful fantasy but rather a mature, necessity-driven, reality of our time.
Author, Exec. Dir. The Center For Balance. Websites: PanditPress.com, OligarchyUSA.com, PublicCentralBank.com, EditorFreedom.com,
FascismUSA.COM & more
