There are so many phony economics advisers in America that it’s a miracle we can still count in this country. As a former student of accounting, I know the basics of budgeting, something that the government doesn't seem to be able to fathom. And thanks to several mind-opening books, I've been able to see through a lot of the right-wing propaganda going on. So, if you’d like to be enlightened about the economy, then mark my manifesto and proceed at your own risk!
It's no secret that every executive likes profits. The higher you go up the corporate ladder, the more you’ll find people obsessing on different ways to increase capital. The lengths they go to are often immoral; that's why we have laws now that protect laborers. After the Industrial Revolution, commerce became so efficient that companies all over America saw record profits. Did they use those profits to pay their employees more and give them better benefits? No. They continued exploiting them in every conceivable way. If you’re an experienced laborer you probably know that you’re expendable, can be easily replaced, and that the people upstairs really couldn’t give a damn about you, no matter how hard you work for them. The only thing they care about is making solid profit margins on their quarterly returns. (Ok, maybe it's a stretch to say they're all like this, but it really helps prove my point, so indulge me for a moment.)
When looking at the state of the economy, Gross Domestic Product and stock numbers are irrelevant; the unemployment rate and relative wages are. Relative wages are what laborers get paid compared to the amount of capital earned from their employers. Right now, those wages are at record lows, despite the minimum wage rising in most states. Not only that, but the country has tumbled trillions of dollars into debt because we don’t tax the rich as much as we used to (even though they’re making an astronomical amount of more money). In the 1950s, the top 1% of all taxpayers paid for 90% of our taxes, while today the rate is closer to 40%. It got continually lower before bottoming out in the 1980s at 35%. Lo and behold, the country’s debt began to skyrocket, thanks to the tax policies Reagen pushed. In the 50s we had enough revenue to pay for our record defense spending and social programs because the rich were taxed fairly. By fairly, I mean that they were taxed closer to the percentage of GDP that they earned. It’s basic math, folks. If the people owning 99% of the assets in this country only pay for 40% of its taxes, while sending jobs out of the country by outsourcing- forcing the government to create jobs to combat unemployment- then you have a country whose financial situation is extremely unbalanced. Now the right-wing hysterics still want our government to cut spending in areas like social security and environmental protection, while conserving our defense spending and maintaining these low tax rates for the rich. Look, they’re not stupid ok; many of them know the consequences of these antics. They only do it because they're in bed with the Military Industrial Complex and multinational corporations like Walmart. They don’t care how long the deficit solution is delayed because they don’t care about the future of our country. All they care about is the present, because they won’t even be here in 20 years when the shit hits the fan. If people still believe that trickle-down economics works, they should take a look at what’s happened in the last 30 years. The middle class has almost disappeared, while the upper class has seen an unprecedented rise in the amount of capital they own. Nowadays, when you compare the upper class to the lower, the rich are richer than they’ve ever been before. And yet they still complain. It makes you wonder if they'll ever be satisfied, that if they could get away with it, maybe they'd keep doing it until slavery finally becomes reinstated and they won't have to pay for any labor at all.
Another problem we're facing is all the lobbying, bribery, and backdoor dealings that corporations make to get politicians in the government elected. If you ever wonder why our government never seems to get anything done, it’s because lobbyists and PACs spend millions of dollars trying to get their special interest agendas passed through congress. They make sure to spend money electing people that either don’t know a thing about economics or do know and are good at masking real solutions with old, stale Reagan cliches. Unsurprisingly, the big banks tend to contribute to right wing politicians, while unions and universities tend to contribute to left wing campaigns. The right-wing lobbies against unions because unions were originally formed to combat all the abuse that employers gave their employees, like wage cuts, safety hazards, child labor, and absurd work hours. When the unions finally won these rights for every American citizen (no thanks to FDR’s New Deal) their employers saw a disappointing decrease in profits. If you couple that with the looming phenomenon of globalization, which was a gold mine for the coming multinational corporations, employers found a radical solution to the New Deal that would devastate the world economy for years to come.
The solution was a combination of outsourcing, backstabbing, and terrorism. Outsourcing meant that employers could move their factories elsewhere so that they could continue to abuse their employees the same way they’d done in America. But how did outsourcing become possible? In the 1940s, most countries would have been irate if a bunch of foreigners strolled into their territory and built gigantic, ugly buildings and made their people work 80-hour weeks. The only way to do this was to use force and financial pressure. This was when the Military-Industrial Complex- an alliance of government, weapons manufacturers, and the military- came into being. American imperialism was always a real and dangerous phenomenon, from the genocide of the Native Americans to the conquest of its surrounding oceans, but only for defense purposes and the pilfering of resources. This time a new element was added- the element of profiteering from foreign markets. At this point you might want to take a deep breath, because the number of atrocities that the United States government aided in since 1900 may upset even the staunchest of minds.
Many of the situations here involved the invasion of countries that had adopted communism as their economic model. That was the reasoning behind it, anyway. No country has ever been purely communist, because sadly human nature forbids such utopias. The countries that the United States media penned as “communist oppressors” were in actuality only oppressive because of totalitarianism: an ideology that is directly the opposite of communism. It’s true that there were elements of socialism in these countries (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia), but there are different kinds of socialism, and totalitarian socialism is something that the original idealists of socialism- the Marxists- would have dismissed as oppressive. Regardless, it wasn’t even these types of socialist countries that the U.S. invaded; they were defenseless countries like Vietnam and North Korea, strategically placed as backdoor entrances into China, which, conveniently because of its population, was the biggest potential treasure chest of profits for the multinational corporations.
When our invasion of Vietnam failed, a more subtle kind of financial terror was used to replace socialist, third world countries with capitalist “democracies”. I use democracy in quotation marks because the only thing democratic about the way the U.S.A. sold “freedom and liberty” to these countries was by using the mask of biased (and often rigged) elections. War isn’t democratic, nor is financial manipulation. The way the U.S.A. would manipulate other economies was by using undercover agencies like the CIA to stage coups run by people who had been educated abroad in the “free market”- people in Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, and Russia who sold out their countries. “Free market” was another way they advertised capitalism. [But a market isn’t really free when 99% of its people are in debt, is it?] Once the coups were complete, the free marketers who'd replaced the socialists were betrayed and manipulated even further. The U.S. wouldn’t invest in modernizing these countries; they had to do it themselves, and the only way they could build the type of infrastructure the U.S. had was to borrow money from them. This would put them in even greater debt, causing instant inflation, making them become monetary slaves to the U.S. bankers. The only investments the U.S. banks had to make was for the multinationals after the foreign countries’ debts couldn’t be paid off and they were forced to sell their businesses to the same corporations in bed with the bankers who’d given them loans! After that, it became much easier for the multinationals to purchase local companies, expand, and open their own chain stores. That’s why we now have a McDonald’s in just about every country. Put simply, terrorizing countries via the Military Industrial Complex and subsequently running them into the ground with debt was a staple strategy for controlling them and garnering profits from their citizens.
Not only that, but the federal bank deliberately hurt the credit scores of other countries that hadn’t even failed to pay their debts (like Canada), due to fraudulent accounting. Hurting their credit scores meant that they couldn’t get as many loans and compete with the United States' investment abilities. It also meant that they’d have to sell their assets since no loans were available. This, along with the bankers’ inflation scam, is what's made half of the world slaves to our monetary system.
Let me explain about the bankers. Inflation happens when money comes from nothing, not because companies compete with one another. When you take out a loan for a car or a home, you’re practically giving bankers anywhere from 2-6% of the market value for that purchase. This number is also known as the interest rate. If you buy a $200,000 dollar house, over the course of 10 years you’d have to pay a total of $10,000 additional dollars to your bank if the interest rate were 5%. That is money created from nothing, and it adds up year after year, like a snowball. Every time you make a monthly payment, the federal inflation rate gets microscopically higher than before. Not only that, but the more loans that the banks give out, the more these microscopic fractions accumulate and increase the inflation, which causes the market to become even more unstable. When a market crashes, it's because the banks have lent out so much money that people can no longer afford to keep up with inflation rates. Consumerism abruptly drops; there is a sinkhole in the road. It’s important to know that bankers offer no service that has market value; they simply hold your money. The interest they charge is like your grandma charging you to keep a pack of marbles in her drawer. Virtually no labor is required and she doesn’t have any assets to sell you (besides a scolding for leaving them on the dinner table).
Now, the banks couldn’t do this unless they had direct authority and funding from a federal bank. In the United States, the Treasury department actually prints all the money we use, but the Federal Reserve authorizes all federal loans and transactions. This is how bankers are directly involved with the government. They regulate the interest rates and cause all the market bubbles that suck debt holders dry. Every time the market crashes, the banks garner huge profits because people are too busy paying off their debts to buy anything else.
The solution:
• Don’t vote for any of the major parties. Republicans are the worst. Some Democrats engage in this same type of behavior and are really good at hiding it, so be wary. You can also vote for third parties, like the Green Party, which is the party I voted for in the last two elections. Do not vote Libertarian. They have hijacked the word “liberty” and disguised it to promote the free market and unregulated capitalism. I commend them for being against the wars, but it isn’t enough.
• Unionize the world. Coordinated strikes and boycotts across the globe are the only way to bring multinational corporations to their knees. Protesting and revolting in individual countries won’t get the job done, because unsynchronized actions mean that the corporations can temporarily go elsewhere until the local scene gives up. The idea is basically union-organizing on a macro scale. A hundred years ago, unions figured out that they’d only make a real impact if they went outside their communities and formed national alliances. That was the only way real change was made. Now we need to up the ante and coordinate international alliances.
• Don’t buy into branding. Most corporations like Apple and Nintendo already know how advanced they can make a product. They purposefully stall these products and only add one new feature each time they brand something so more people will buy their products. For example, the difference between Nintendo 64 and a Wii U is almost negligible. There would have been no point in tweaking their consoles every 5 years if they didn’t profit massively from their devoted fan base.
• Buy local. Not only does it make the multinationals suffer, but it helps the environment by limiting the transportation of goods.
* Most importantly: be responsible with your debts. It’s not fair to solely blame the banks for market crashes. People requesting loans when they can’t afford them need to be more responsible, because they’re practically giving away money they don’t have to rich bankers who don’t need it. We need to take these matters into our own hands and stop letting them bully us around. The demand for loans is like any other; it effects the prices of them. If less people request loans the interest rates will go down, along with the filthy bankers, the warmongering militias, and the politicians who speak for them. Rise up together now; unionize the world; fight the power!
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