http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com
http://albertpeia.com/corporatistcontrol.htm
’The
Dow is at a record high and so are corporate profits - so why does it feel like
most of the country is deeply suffering right now? Real household income
is the lowest that it has been in a decade, poverty is absolutely soaring, 47 million Americans are on food stamps and the middle class is being systematically
destroyed. How can big corporations be doing so well while most American
families are having such a hard time? Isn't their wealth supposed to
"trickle down" to the rest of us? Unfortunately, that is not
how the real world works. Today, most big corporations are trying to
minimize the number of "expensive" American workers on their payrolls
as much as they can. If the big corporation that is employing you can
figure out a way to replace you with a worker in China or with a robot, it will probably do it. Corporations are in
existence to maximize wealth for their shareholders, and most of the time the
largest corporations are dominated by the monopoly men of the global
elite. Over the decades, the politicians that have their campaigns funded
by these monopoly men have rigged the game so that the big corporations are
able to easily dominate everything. But this was never what those that
founded this country intended. America was supposed to be a place where
the power of collectivist institutions would be greatly limited, and individuals
and small businesses would be free to compete in a capitalist system that would
reward anyone that had a good idea and that was willing to work hard. But
today, our economy is completely and totally dominated by a massively bloated
federal government and by absolutely gigantic predator corporations that are
greatly favored by our massively bloated federal government. Our founders
tried to warn us about the dangers of allowing government, banks and
corporations to accumulate too much power, but we didn't listen. Now they
dominate everything, and the rest of us are fighting for table scraps.
In early America, most states had strict laws governing the size
and scope of corporations. Individuals and small businesses thrived in
such an environment, and the United States experienced a period of explosive
economic growth. We showed the rest of the world that capitalism really
works, and we eventually built the largest middle class that the world had ever
seen.
But now we have replaced
capitalism with something that I like to call "corporatism". In
many ways, it shares a lot of characteristics with communism, and that is why
nations such as communist China have embraced it so readily. Under
"corporatism", monolithic predator corporations run around sucking up
as much wealth and economic power as they possibly can. Most individuals
and small businesses cannot compete and end up getting absorbed by the
corporations. These mammoth collectivist institutions are in private
hands rather than in government hands (as would be the case under a pure form
of communism), but the results are pretty much the same either way. A
tiny elite at the top gets almost all of the economic rewards.
There are some out there that
would suggest that the answer to our problems is to move more in the direction
of "socialism", but to be honest that wouldn't be the solution to
anything. It would just change how the table scraps that the rest of us
are getting are distributed.
If we truly wanted a return to
prosperity, we need to dramatically shift the rules of the game so that they
are tilted back in favor of individuals and small businesses. A much more
pure form of capitalism would mean more wealth, less poverty and a more
equitable distribution of the economic rewards in this country.
But it will never happen.
Most of our politicians are married to the big corporations and the wealthy
elitists that fund their campaigns. And most Americans are so uneducated
that they believe that what we actually have today is "capitalism"
and that the only alternative is to go "to the left" toward
socialism.
Very few people out there are
suggesting that we need to greatly reduce the power of the federal government and
greatly reduce the power of the big corporations, but that is exactly what we
need to do. We need to give individuals and small businesses room to
breathe once again.
With each passing year, things
get even worse. In fact, the founder of Subway Restaurants recently said
that the environment for small businesses is so toxic in America today that he never would
have been able to start Subway if he had to do it today.
For much more on how small
business is being strangled to death in the United States, please see my
previous article entitled "We Are
Witnessing The Death Of Small Business In America".
What I want to do now is to
discuss some of the results that "corporatism" is producing in
America.
First of all, we continue to see
incomes go down even though we live in an inflationary economy.
As Time Magazine recently reported,
personal incomes took a huge nosedive during the month of January...
Data
released by the Commerce Department last week showed that personal income
fell 3.6% in January, the biggest decline in 20 years. The drop was
even bigger when taxes and inflation are taken into account. Real personal
disposable income fell by 4%, the biggest monthly drop in half a century.
But
this is part of a longer term trend. Median household income in the U.S.
has declined for four consecutive years, and it is now
significantly lower than it was all
the way back in 2001...
Real
median US household income -- that's "real," as in "adjusted for
inflation" -- was $50,054 in 2011, the most recent data available from the
US Census Bureau. That's 8% lower than the 2007 peak of $54,489.
Meanwhile,
big corporations are absolutely raking in the cash. The following is from
a recent New York Times article...
“So far in this recovery, corporations have
captured an unusually high share of the income gains,” said Ethan Harris,
co-head of global economics at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “The U.S.
corporate sector is in a lot better health than the overall economy. And until
we get a full recovery in the labor market, this will persist.”
The result has been a golden age for
corporate profits, especially among multinational giants that are also
benefiting from faster growth in emerging economies like China and India.
Today,
corporate profits as a percentage of U.S. GDP are at an all-time high, but wages as a
percentage of U.S. GDP are near an all-time low.
Just
check out the following chart. Corporate profits have absolutely exploded
over the past decade...
Meanwhile,
wages as a percentage of GDP continue to fall rapidly...
Most
of the jobs being created in America today are "low wage" jobs.
Tens of millions of Americans are working as hard as they can only to find that
they can barely put food on the table and provide a roof over the heads of
their children. The ranks of the "working poor" are exploding and the middle class
continues to shrink.
Many
of you that are reading this article are members of the working poor. You
know what it is like to stare up at your ceiling at night wondering how you are
going to pay the bills next month.
Today,
most Americans are living very close to the edge financially. A recent
article by NBC News staff
writer Allison Linn shared some of their stories. The following is one
example...
Crystal
Dupont knows what it’s like to try to live on the federal minimum wage.
Dupont
has no health insurance, so she hasn’t seen a doctor in two years. She’s behind
on her car payments and has taken out pawn shop and payday loans to cover other
monthly expenses. She eats beans and oatmeal when her food budget gets low.
When
she got her tax refund recently, she used the money to get ahead on her light
bill.
“I
try to live within my means, but sometimes you just can’t,” said Dupont, 25.
The Houston resident works 30 to 40 hours a week taking customer service calls,
earning between $7.25 and $8 an hour. That came to about $15,000 last year.
It’s
a wage she’s lived on for a while now, but just barely.
Sadly,
the number of Americans that are "just barely" surviving continues to
grow.
But
if corporate profits are soaring to unprecedented heights, then who is getting
all of those rewards?
The
monopoly men of the global elite are.
Just
check out the following video which does
a great job of illustrating how corporatism has systematically funneled all of
the economic rewards in our system to the very top...
Once again, I want to make it very
clear that I am not advocating socialism as the answer in any way, shape or
form. Socialism takes away the incentive to create wealth and it almost
always results in almost all of the economic rewards going to a very tiny elite
anyway.
As
I said earlier, what we need is a return to a much more pure form of
capitalism, but this is so foreign to the way that most people think that most
people will not be able to grasp this.
It
certainly would be possible to greatly reduce the power of the federal government
and greatly reduce the power of the big corporations at the
same time, but this is so "outside the box" for most people that they
cannot even conceive of doing such a thing.
We
need to create an environment where individuals and small businesses can thrive
once again. But instead, most of us are content to continue "playing
the game" and getting enslaved in even more debt.
For
example, according to CNBC, auto loans just continue to get larger and
continue to get stretched out for longer periods of time...
American
car buyers, attracted by new models and cheap financing, are taking out bigger
auto loans and stretching out the terms of those loans to a new record length.
New
analysis from Experian Automotive shows the average new car loan in the fourth
quarter of last year was $26,691 and stretched out over an average of 65
months. The length of the average loan is one month longer than the previous
record set in the third quarter of last year.
What
will they think of next?
Will
we eventually have auto loans that get paid off over 10 years?
By
the way, that is another way that the monopoly men of the global elite get all
of our money. They enslave us to debt, and we spend year after year
of our lives slaving away to make them even wealthier.
They
are very smart. There is a reason why they have 32 TRILLION dollars stashed away in offshore
tax havens. They know how to play the game, and they are very happy that
most of the rest of us are asleep.
Fortunately,
it appears that an increasing number of Americans are waking up.
For
example, I wanted to share with you all an excerpt from a comment that one of
my readers left on one of my recent articles...
In
the past year, I've been slowly but surely waking up to the nonsense happening
around me. There's so many things I need to simply get off my chest, so excuse
the length of this post. Recently in the past two years, I've gotten married
and have been medically discharged from the Marines after being injured in
Afghanistan. Being 23 years old and married, my goal is secure a secure a
future for my family, but with the way things are going, I'm not exactly sure
how much of a future we're going to have in 50 years. I can't explain it, but
I've felt this need to change my attitude and motivations lately.
I
started by turning off the garbage music, television and other mindless
entertainment that seems to plague my generation. It was easier than it looked
- I don't miss most of it really. The next order of business was to educate
myself on world news, so that's what I did. Every day, like clockwork, I check
all major mainstream news feeds (NBC, Fox, Abc, CNN, Reuters, BBC, etc.) as
well as not-so-mainstream news sites - yours being one of them. It's incredible
how fast our world changes and the manner in which it changes. The local 10
o'clock doesn't show anything but local news, sports, weather, lottery #'s and
whatever else they decide to throw in. It's a night and day difference once you
start to actually research and see what's happening all over the world. Look at
the number of comments about a news story on the economy and then look at a
celebrity story on the "news"....People are so blind, it truly amazes
me. My friends, family and classmates at college seem to be under a spell of
some sort. They're distracted - and it's contagious. Nobody I know gives a damn
about global affairs/economics. They're more interested in the newest iPhone,
cars, shows, movies, and just about anything else you can think of. I'm not
saying there's anything wrong with these things, but my friends/family/peers
are CONSUMED by these distractions. When the election was taking place in 2012,
every Tom, Dick and Harry on Facebook had an opinion and rant. After the circus
ended however, everyone simply went back to posting about parties, kittens,
Farmville etc. It's a huge joke. For me, it's little terrifying and exciting to
see history unfolding in front of our eyes. This country of ours is going
through big changes now that will most certainly affect our future, so I strive
to adapt and prepare myself and my family. I'm looking at buying my first home
this summer. Right now I live in an apartment right outside Philly and spend more
money on rent than most pay for a mortgage. I need a house with a little land
to raise chickens, grow fruits/vegetables, store canned food - and to be as
independent from the system as I can. For my job, I wanted a skill/trade that
people would always need, so I picked the funeral business. On the side, I work
in construction and have been learning everything there is to know about
building with my own two hands. I feel as though these old forgotten skills are
going to be handy in a short while.
Hopefully
we can get a lot more people to wake up and start breaking out of "the
matrix" of control that is all around us.
Right
now, the system is designed to continually funnel more money and more power to
the very top of the pyramid. The global elite are becoming more dominant
with each passing day. Unless something dramatic happens, at some point
the American people will become so powerless that they won't be able to do
anything about it even if they wanted to.
The
idea of a very tiny elite completely dominating all the rest of us goes against
everything that America is supposed to stand for. In the end, it will
result in absolute tyranny if it is not stopped.