This whole planet needs a hug.
— Shock G
Many still swallow the preposterous notion that the 1% and their finances are too big to fail while the 99% and their lives are too small to succeed. That’s always been the rationale of class division, whether between royalty and serfs, masters and slaves or at present between corporate capital and the rest of humanity.
In the way that royalty bought off some peasants and slavers bought off some house negroes, present wealth divisions rely on turning working people into renters, owners and eventually debt carrying consumers of just about everything except what they might really need. But the commodity culture dependent on endless shopping by a worker majority — newly branded a middle class — to support a small minority’s great wealth has become a culture of jobless debtors and homeless panhandlers.
While the high end minority increases its wealth at fantastic rates which create billionaires where there once were millionaires, the working middle relies on plastic, parents, friends and a shrinking social safety net for survival and the low end is reduced to begging on the streets and sleeping in doorways. That’s not in the less materially developed parts of the world but in morally underdeveloped major American cities.
Fake prosperity, as much mental as material, has come under greater pressure over the last period with capital claiming an ever bigger share of the spoils created by its millions of upper, middle and lower class minions, however labeled by consciousness controllers to hide the fact that we are a mind-muddled class of servants to minority wealth.
An upgrade in material trappings but none at all in political power has served to keep great numbers of people quiet and at least unrebellious while remaining dependent on rich rulers and a market deity which keeps them alive by giving them cotton to pick, goods to manufacture, products to consume, a system to worship and candidates to vote for, all maintaining their condition and status as subservient to their economic masters.
Many are learning as never before that this system is not only bad for them but for the human race itself. A growing global movement is rejecting the 1% MRCP* mentality ruling the great mass of humanity and taking us closer to going over the edge like lemmings answering an un-natural urge towards race suicide.
Whether we are among the consumers or the panhandlers, shop at Nordmarts or Wallstrom, or answer to the branding label of upscale or downscale, we must understand that the scales are controlled by minorities who lean on them to make everything heavier and costlier for everyone in order to create massive profits for themselves. You don’t need to be a Rhodes scholar to see that not only does such a system work against the interest of humanity, but it in fact owes much of its strength to Rhodes scholars who act as academic apologists for a system that keeps them among the affluent.
Whether the politicians and servant professional class of today’s consumer markets or the merchant dealers and house Negroes of yesterday’s slave markets, all operate on behalf of ownership which pays them to protect a reality that never worked for most people but is more obviously unjust at a time when neither royalty, the rich, nor slavers can monopolize information as they still monopolize wealth.
As people see the unfairness and criminality of the system that threatens far more with loss than it benefits the few with profit, it is closer to its end. That’s why there is so much panic in ruling circles and more suppression of freedom of thought and expression, along with threats of even more killing than the normal slaughter that enriches a few with the blood of so many.
Increased pressures in alleged democracies that criminalize knowledge sharing where there were supposed free flows of information and create heavily armed military units where there used to be police departments are high-end versions of the tortures increasingly inflicted on the lower end of the global market. There, in former colonial nations which have never left the system of minority dominated majorities, the suffering increases and the demands for change do as well. This is a time of great hope for humanity, but also increasing danger as both political and natural systems under stress become too much to tolerate any longer.
Social democratic programs that maintained capital by decreasing the worst aspects of market financial anarchy are all under more pressure than ever, more so in Europe than in the USA but with ridiculous policies here catching up to those on the continent. Nonsense about profligate spending on alleged “entitlements” that leave trillions spent on imperial wars unquestioned are commonplace, with resistance only coming from outside the major circles of power. The servant class that benefits most from things as they are, whether living in the house with the master — even if downstairs in shabby rooms — or having the momentary experience of affluence with seemingly unlimited consumption of goods, services, whims and fancies — until the bill comes due — is the base of support that the 1% pays for. But neither it, nor they, can withstand the pressures of a declining ecosystem under attack by private profiteers, and a rising of humanity demanding fairness, democracy and justice.
The ridiculous notion that there is not enough to go around is perpetuated by those who use and abuse the greatest amount of environmental wealth in order to create global poverty. Austerity, if it is to exist at all, should be experienced by those who have played the biggest role in perpetuating a system that destroys and wastes in pursuit of private gain that has brought about an endangered future for the human race. It is time to permanently sequester ridiculous notions of austerity for a majority to benefit wanton waste by a minority.