The Essential Economics in Politics: Class Warfare, Anyone?

The Essential Economics in Politics: Class Warfare, Anyone?: In the late 50s and early 60s scientists and technologists were predicting that technology would enable a 20-hour work week within a coupl...

Class Warfare, Anyone?

In the late 50s and early 60s scientists and technologists were predicting that technology would enable a 20-hour work week within a couple of decades or so. Our productivity per capita is indeed at an all-time high and growing fast. From the earlier perspective, that meant fewer hours of work per week for most people. 

Instead we need two income sources per family to make ends meet, often working 50- and 60-hour work weeks when one family member working forty used to be enough. Simple arithmetic translates this to real, very substantial income reductions for most of the middle class on down and unprecedented wealth for those above the middle class. 

Yes, we do have a class system. This is anything but a classless society. All the political talk about class warfare is coming from the wrong side of this issue and is a blatant farce. Far too many of those the elite class is busy eating for lunch are willing suckers for this farce and regard their predators as champions of capitalism on whom their very livelihood depends. So these suckers happily vote for those posing as saviors of capitalism and in doing so, vote themselves into economic oblivion in a blind attempt to protect their masters' carnivorous fangs from any attempt to clean up their cannibalistic games.

So let's look at these two trends we've already experienced for some time now and what the implications are:

1. Per capita productivity is higher than ever.

2. For most, both total per capita income AND income per hour has been systematically decreasing for decades.

By the very nature of this situation, it has to change and change soon, especially considering the rate at which this process is accelerating. 

How long do we think this can continue and maintain anything remotely like a viable economy? We can't have all this wealth so concentrated that there is no one to sell to. That is very simply an economic impossibility! So change will come. Only two essential questions remain:

1. How soon will those at the top realize the harm they're doing in the long run to the world and consequently, ultimately to THEMSELVES? 

2. How soon will the rest of us quit allowing ourselves to be suckered this way? 

Which comes first is crucially important, since the sequence in which these two questions are answered determines how smoothly or violently the change occurs. 

Those at the top of the food chain would do well to consider this simple truth. In the big picture, for the foreseeable future we all have to live here. The top of the food chain is literally eating itself out of house and home, since this earth is ultimately the house and home we all share. All of us need to wake up!

P.S. Anyone who still wonders what is really going on, or just plain disagrees with the analysis above, simply needs to follow the money with independent research from publicly available information. All economies essentially do nothing more or less than restructure the environment in some way. That may seem to be an oversimplification to some, but mining, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, information exchange, and even financial activity all amount to nothing more nor less than restructuring the environment, ideally in the service of improving the quality of life on this planet.

There are only two things essential to restructuring anything: intelligence and energy. Any change of any kind in any structure requires energy. If that change is to be economically useful, some intelligence has to direct this energy to achieve the kind of change desired. So we have only intelligence and energy at the most fundamental level of any economy. Financial exchange is just another, very fundamental medium of information exchange. Our current, virtually cashless economy is living proof that this is true, since otherwise it could not exist.

So when we look at the big picture for a socially comprehensive perspective, the transmission and exchange of knowledge, information, and the distribution and employment of energy flow are the natural places to look for prime suspects in the possession of concentrated wealth and the consequent control, both financial and political, that comes with that. Only when we look at this closely can we begin to understand the current state of affairs. 

So the energy industry, the banking and financial system in general, and the media, who controls them, and to what ends...these define the key to understanding current affairs. We only need to look closely at how these key economic players interface with political power and the shaping of information in the major media outlets to figure out what's really going on. This is available to anyone who dares to look. 

The big problem is that extreme right-wing conservatives absolutely don't want to look. They are by definition those who are least able and/or willing to adapt to inevitable change. They have a rigidly fundamentalist attitude, religious or not, that effectively says, "We have exclusive possession of the eternal truth of how things are." However, we don't have to look at a very big swath of history to understand the inevitability of change even before the industrial revolution, not to mention the current, rapidly accelerating technological revolution.

So it is obvious that change is inevitable. If we give too much power to those least willing to adapt or even capable of adapting, we obviously have a big problem. Sadly, those who most resist adapting are precisely those least interested in actually finding out for themselves what's really going on. They pretend to know already and find great pleasure in listening only to those who tell them what they already want to hear. Some media outlets make huge fortunes on satisfying their myopic desires. 

Change is inevitable and is happening faster than ever. We must adapt and we will. How smoothly we do that is strictly a function of how adaptable we are at the collective scale of international, and now global, society.

(See http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf for bottom-line information on financial/political control issues

AND

http://www.cjr.org/the_research_report/news_deficit.php? for information on the level of typical American understanding of both domestic and global news


AND


http://www.wanttoknow.info/johnperkinseconomichitman for a glimpse into how we cynically use economics in our foreign policy tactics.)