A Different GDP
At a press conference held on the
eve of the last century the head of the US Department of Commerce (USCD) boasted
that his agency's greatest single achievement having the "greatest impact on
America-- was the invention of the national economic accounts--what we now call
the gross domestic product, or GDP." [1]
Pause and think for a moment
about that boast. For a hundred years thousands of bureaucrats have been
working in a tall pyramid of offices with their green eye shades and
calculators and the best they can show for it is a statistic?
Compare that "achievement" to the
agency's official mission: "---to create the conditions for economic growth and
opportunity." The agency's GDP is nothing more or less than a numerical figure,
like a blood pressure index, for signifying a condition, namely, the health or
sickness of America's economy. That America's GDP is roughly $16.7 trillion
today tells us nothing about the real economic health or sickness of America
today.
Gross Domestic Pillage
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
---Confucius
So let's begin by calling the GDP the gross domestic pillage. It tells us everything that has been stolen by the corpocracy, or the collusion between corporations and government, from America and Americans. [2] The USCD would never calculate and tout this different GDP publicly, so I am going to give a selective account of it and with little elaboration. The pillage speaks for itself. My intent is simply to plant in the minds of readers the idea and imagery of gross domestic pillage. What follows is a sample of the pillage of America and Americans by America's corpocracy over the years with no end in sight.
1. The Peoples' Government. Actually,
we the people never really had self-rule, never owned our own government. Many
groups of people were left out of the nation's new blueprint and it was not
long thereafter that corporate America took charge.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
