Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [12]
17. Doubly devastated by the implosion of housing and their stock investments (mostly in 401K and IRA retirement funds), the middle class faces the terrible consequences of its 26-year stupor of ever-rising debt and leverage. Alas, the Emperor's clothes are revealed as remarkably transparent.
18. Having borrowed and squandered trillions of dollars since 1981 on unaffordable entitlements, military misadventures and assorted bridges-to-nowhere pork spending, the Federal government (The Fed and the Treasury) finds its ability to borrow its way out of its current debt hole annoyingly limited. The rest of the world has finally caught on to the con, and Chinese university students are openly mocking the Treasury Secretary's Orwellian claim of "we support a strong dollar." The rest of the world shuns Treasury debt and works to create an alternative reserve currency, shutting down the "dollar con" (we take your tangible goods and give you paper in return.)
19. With the global media concentrated in a scant few corporate hands (less than 10), this pulling away of the curtain is deleted/excised from media coverage in a ruthless campaign of pure propaganda.
20. As the wheels fall off the U.S. economy and the bubbles cannot be re-inflated, fruitless attempts at holding back the tide with incantations (stop, tide, I speak for the U.S. Treasury!) and loopy sand castles (the bottom is in, buy now!) abound. Unresponsive to propaganda, the real world grinds down into a global Depression without visible end.
If we do nothing, we will be swept along in the Great Descent. Alternatively, if we want to prosper, then we must first gain an integrated understanding of all the interlocking crises we face.
Key concepts in Chapter One:
Cui bono (to whose benefit?)
Independent agencies
Self-organizing networks and groups
High-caste, upper-caste (technocrat/government employee class)
When belief in the system fades
Profound political disunity
Adult understanding
Permanent adolescence
A note on underclass and unproductive/productive classes:
I use two terms which partially overlap: underclass and unproductive class, and it's important to distinguish the two.
I have used productive/unproductive classes to differentiate citizens earning income and paying substantial income taxes, property taxes, capital gains taxes, etc., to the State and those who are dependent on the State: retirees, disabled, unemployed, etc. This distinction is critical because the vast majority of entitlements and pensions funded by the State are "pay as you go"--that is, the current productive workforce pays the taxes which fund retirees, the disabled, Medicare, Veterans benefits, etc.
Even public pensions that are paid out of trust funds are partially "pay as you go" because shortfalls due to pension fund losses must be paid out of current tax revenues.
Simply put, 120 million productive citizens (working class and the middle class are essentially equal in my analysis because both are productively paying taxes) are supporting 180 million dependent (that is, not paying significant taxes) citizens as well as millions of non-citizens. As employment, wealth and taxes plummet, this imbalance between the State's gargantuan obligations and its plummeting revenues will lead to insolvency. As millions of taxpayers lose their income, the State will not have enough revenue to fund the promised entitlements and pensions.
We also need to distinguish between unproductive in the sense of not paying substantial taxes and unproductive in the sense of producing little value. By underclass I mean the class of citizens who are capable of producing value, unpaid or paid, but for a variety of reasons do not; they are dependent on the State for their livelihood (i.e. "welfare"). It is this class which receives the modern equivalent of "bread and circuses" to give them a reason to be complicit (silent and passive) in the status quo of Elite