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The Political Rebellion Gathers Momentum
The Political Rebellion Gathers Momentum
When was the last time a monopoly or quasi-monopoly was broken up? A generation ago, or was it two generations ago?
The Ruling Class that wants us to love our servitude incites us to seek divisions: between red and blue, left and right, progressive and conservative, and so on. The Ruling Class in the mainstream media, in Washington D.C. and in Silicon Valley are experts at manipulating language and terminology to divide and conquer.
But beneath the superficial red-blue divide they are hawking, a broad-based political rebellion against the Oligarchy and their Ruling Class nomenklatura is gathering momentum. People left, right and center are awakening to two painfully obvious realities:
1. the political-social-economic system no longer works for the bottom 95%
2. the system is intrinsically unfair–rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
The bottom 95% lack the political influence of the Oligarchy, and so their only means of expressing their disapproval is at the ballot box, by rejecting the approved mainstream candidates in favor of candidates who might move the needle in a rigged system.
What are the core economic issues that people are trying to solve at the ballot box?
1. The systemic lack of fairness: the growing sense that opportunities are not being distributed as widely or fairly as they once were; ruling elites now have advantages the “rest of us” don’t.
This advantage is very basic: capital has accrued most of the gains of the past decade’s growth and asset appreciation, labor’s share of the GDP continues to slide.
Much of the wealth is controlled by corporate-state cartels operating rentier skims: prices rise while quality and quantity of goods and services remains the same or decline. This is more akin to extortion than a free-market competitive market.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Western Peoples Are Being Re-Enserfed
Western Peoples Are Being Re-Enserfed
Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, free farmers were defenceless in the face of Viking, Magyar, and Saracen raiders. The need for protection led to the enserfment of free people who accepted the suzerainty of those able to provide walled defenses and armed fighters to ward off attacks. As time passed, the attacks ceased but the feudal arrangements persisted, and the system became exploitative.
Today jobs offshoring and the financialization of the economy are again enserfing the people, but the cause is debt, not armed invaders. Today’s rentier class, unlike the one that emerged from feudalism, has never provided any service in exchange for the debt peonage that it has imposed.
Below is an excerpt from the Introduction to the German edition of Michael Hudson’s book, Killing the Host to be published in November by Klett-Cotta:
Today’s reversal of progressive values is a historical transition point much like what occurred from the Roman Republic to Empire during the century of Social War, 133-29 BC. Rome’s debtors and plebs lost in a wave of political violence. It was by murder that the oligarchic party prevented the reforms of Tiberius Gracchus in Rome after 133 BC. Julius Caesar suffered a similar fate in 44 BC after moving to take the demos into his camp. Other politicians urging debt cancellation also were killed.
Rome survived not by prosperity at home but by looting foreign regions. Arminius made a brave stand to resist Rome in 9 AD in the Teutoburg forest. But by that time the die was cast. Over the next few centuries the oligarchs imposed debt bondage on a quarter of the population, plunging the imperial economy into serfdom.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
