Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [10]
In true Orwellian fashion, much of this parasitism is described by its practitioners as protecting the "little guy" from the oppressive Elite and State. But as the Plutocracy and State increase their share of the national wealth at the expense of the citizenry, this claim rings increasingly hollow.
Thus we have seniors covered by Medicare receiving multiple costly (and often useless) tests designed less to identify the active causes of disease than to shield the practitioners from lawsuits and to enrich those administering the tests.
Meanwhile, millions of non-elderly citizens cannot obtain even a single test as they lack the benefits provided to the upper-caste State and corporate technocrats.
Rather than face the impossibility of funding such a morally and fiscally bankrupt system of parasitism and profiteering, we as a nation have simply borrowed trillions of dollars to stave off any painful prioritizing.
Very few weapons systems are ever canceled for the same reasons; the profiteering by a few enterprises and the contributions they make to lawmakers insure that every weapons system will receive funding, even if that requires borrowing gargantuan sums year after year.
This evasion of hard choices (and free market forces) via endlessly rising debt will eventually bring down the nation's currency and its debt-ridden State. The irony is that this seemingly carefree self-indulgent adolescent avoidance of cost-benefit analysis guarantees systemic collapse.
Let's begin our search for an integrated understanding with a look at how over-reach, windfall exploitation and the divergence of Elite/State and middle-class interests illuminate the disintegration of post-World War II America into the present Depression.
1. The great postwar income convergence (i.e. the rise of the great middle class, the reduction of poverty and the relative reduction of the Plutocracy's share of national income) reverses in the early 1970s as the "true prosperity" of the postwar era ends and is replaced by income flowing increasingly to the top as stagflation, globalization and the decline of the dollar gut the purchasing power of the middle class.
2. The rising productivity of the 50s and 60s slips to the flatline through the 70s and early 80s, only picking up again as computers revolutionize the back office, sales, manufacturing, just-in-time shipping/production, etc.
3. Concurrent with this gradual return to increasing productivity is the rise of finance as the key profit-center of corporate America. As income skews ever more heavily to the top 1%/5%, then capital (productive assets) become ever more heavily concentrated in the hands of the rentier-financial Plutocracy. The top 1% now owns some 2/3 of the nation's entire productive wealth.
4. As profits rise (from rising productivity) then the profits flow not to wages (which remain flat to down 1975-2009 for all but the top 10% upper-caste professional class) but to those who own the capital.
5. As the middle class experiences a decline in their income and purchasing power (for reasons cited above: declining dollar, rising income disparity, and wages falling due to global wage arbitrage) then they take on ever-larger debts to fund what they have been brainwashed by the media to believe is "the American dream" of imported luxury goods, expansive homes, overseas cruises, etc.
The only other mechanism available to the middle class to increase household income is for Mom/Aunt/Grandma to enter the workforce, which she does in the tens of millions, with sociological consequences which are still unfolding.
6. This advertising/media-driven desire to borrow to fund the "good life" is hugely profitable to the money-center and investment banks, which expand rapidly into mortgage securitization, derivatives and consumer credit to the point