While watching the news from Spain, I wonder what it would be like to live there now during the global depression and ongoing class war. Or Greece. Or Iceland, or Italy, or Portugal, or any other country threatened with what I call “national devaluation.” I would be angry.
Because I’m not an economist but I can smell a scam. I have studied some difficult subjects but I never dared try the dismal science. I am actually proud to have spent a lifetime ignoring the theories of economists. Years ago I thought I just didn’t understand them, but now I’m starting to think economists are intentional liars rather than just confused and confusing observers of the marketplace. Paid shills whose job is to mystify and distract us while the ultra rich steal what little we have left.
We have all heard reams of economic analysis in the last few years, but of course no one would dare say out loud what is really happening. I’m not an economist – I’m a logician. Let me have a try at it.
Suddenly many countries, including the one I have the misfortune to reside in, have announced that they are running out of money, and the solution they offer, everywhere on the planet, is pretty much the same. Normal people worldwide are told to expect less employment, lower salaries, inflation, health care that is less available, more expensive, and lower quality, reduced pensions and benefits, fewer government services, higher retirement ages, etc. You have heard the endless mantra, that we all must tighten our belts.
But logic intercedes. Did we normal people cause this problem? Weren’t we all working hard and paying most of our bills on time before the global collapse of 2008? Didn’t we have lousy overpriced healthcare back then too?
In other words, normal people – the 98% -- didn’t do anything different! We lived exactly as we lived when we were being told that times were good! Whatever happened to the global economy was not caused by us. That is a fact. Yet it is also a fact that we are being asked – forced – to pay for it, for years if not decades to come.
Meanwhile another fact intrudes. The rich really are getting richer. Not even they deny it. Now how exactly is that happening, when all the rest of us are hard pressed to feed the kids?
Yes, it’s that simple. Economists want you to believe that it is not simple, that it is so complicated that we couldn’t possibly understand it. But if you drop the economic jargon and look at reality, the facts are indisputable and crystal clear. The rich are getting richer while the rest of us are getting poorer because they are actively and intentionally (and cleverly, I might add!) taking our money.
All the rich have to do is just announce that times are hard! It’s such a simple scam! Then they announce that of course wages and benefits must be cut and prices will have to rise. Spain cannot pay its bills and has been “living beyond its means” and now everybody will have to chip in to save the nation. They have “squandered” their national wealth and are in need of “austerity.” That’s what the economic pundits tell us.
But the truth is different. The rich cut wages and pay everybody less, while demanding greater productivity. Then they charge us more for everything. So their profits are soaring but of course they don’t pay taxes. And the middle classes, who usually pay most of the taxes, are too poor to pay much, so counties, states, nations, and whole continents (!) are going broke.
The war of the rich against the rest of us has been going on since time immemorial, but it has entered a new phase. They have militarized the police in every country, with unprecedented electronic surveillance. The ultra rich are playing hardball now. They have put the squeeze on the whole planet, because they feel they are holding all the cards and that the ability of normal people to fight back is less than ever. And so far it is working out just fine for them. They control food, energy, employment, real estate, health care, the police, the army, and the air force, and we control nothing.
So trillions of dollars have been transferred from the bank accounts and retirement accounts of the middle class, from the pitiful savings of the poor, and from the government services that keep the poor alive, to the overseas tax havens of the ultra rich. This is a fact. And it is not over; it is ongoing. In progress as we speak. Whole countries will be broken on the rack if they don’t pay up.
It is not just the downside of an economic cycle. This is active theft by the ruling class and amounts to class war on a global scale, and they have, quite literally, all the big guns. So don’t expect anything to get better quick, but at least now the cat is out of the bag and we can speak honestly about what is being done to us.
