Capitalism at Its Worst
"We have started out from the premises of political economy [i.e., economics]. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property; the separation of labor, capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit, and capital; the division of labor; competition; the conception of exchange value, etc. From political economy itself, using its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his production; that the necessary consequence of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that, finally, the distinction between capitalist and landlord, between agricultural worker and industrial worker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers." "Human Requirements and the Division of Labor;" Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 48, 1844.
"Necessitous men are not, truly speaking, free men: but to answer a present emergency, will submit to any terms the crafty may impose upon them." --The Lord Chancellor of England, in the case of Vernon v. Bethell, Eden 2, 113,(1762).
We have since 1975 entered into an economically regressive period where twenty percent of our nation's wealth, and fifteen percent of its income has been transferred to the top one percent of the American population, according to statistics from the Federal government's Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as originally presented by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich in his 2011 book Aftershock.
We are now at a crossroads in our history: we may choose a transformational Presidential candidate in the 2016 Election, or simply accept that the game is over, and fall into the neofeudalism of a plutocratic oligarchy that maintains the appearances of our democratic republic, without any of its reality. This is what happened to Rome twenty-one centuries ago where Augustus maintained the appearance of the Republic, while holding Imperial power like a club over the heads of the Senate and the People of Rome.
Bernie Sanders represents a demand for the return of the rights which were recognized under the New Deal, and those others which were promised us under Franklin Roosevelt's Second Bill of Economic Rights.
The reactionary oligarchs do not want us to have and enjoy those rights. But we already have them, implicitly as part of our nature, and explicitly when we agree as a society that for the society to function properly, we must recognize this fact. I explained this in late July 2007 in my OpEdNews article, "Rights, Powers, Privileges, and Responsibilities,"
"However, Thomas Jefferson was a learned man, and recognized that this faith in humanity, together with the concept of natural rights, were not by themselves sufficient for establishing--in a practical sense--a new nation. Especially a nation '...conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...' as President Abraham Lincoln characterized our country at Gettysburg eighty-seven years later.
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