This article was first published in 2013.
Commentary
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
-Ernest Hemingway
On the first Monday of September, the wage slaves who built the world’s strongest economy are honored. This Labor Day, we the wage slaves, should avoid taking pride in our drive towards economic recovery. By learning new skills and adapting to new challenges however fruitless this will be in the long run, you can expect less than more.
Should we be inspired by job seekers from all walks of life in this country going back to school, taking on piles of debt that they most likely will never pay back, getting degrees in worthlessness?
For more than two centuries, the prospect of work has drawn people to our shores to pursue new opportunities and dreams of a better life. A life of freedom and independence. The demands on us workers have changed over the generations, but we’ve always risen to the occasion until now. Now there is welfare and if you can sign up for all the programs you can rake in 50,000 dollars tax free every year.
During the Industrial Age, factory workers saw their knowledge and paychecks grow as they mastered new processes to mass produce everything from automobiles to armaments. Now days we import cheap Chinese made plastic shit that breaks or becomes obsolete in a few short years.
Following the Great Depression, more than 6 million women joined the workforce, clocking in at shipyards, lumber mills and foundries, and their production helped us win the Great War. A war where the bankers financed both sides of the conflict making them filthy rich. Thanks Prescott Bush!
And the Internet age carried the talents of our workers across the globe, as our ideas and products reached new markets and brought the world closer together.
Within this Internet age, the U.S. government paid your fellow Americans to betray the Bill of Rights and spy on us lesser slaves. They are like a mommy and daddy looking out for our best, right?
No. They do this because they are afraid of losing power in a revolution. A revolution that is sure to happen if the economy keeps sinking. This is according to the C.I.A. psychopaths.
With public schools and the dumbing down of our kids, can we ever expect to meet the demands of a 21st century global economy? The answer is yes. Service sector jobs will be abundantly available. A rewarding career at McDonald’s should be ever boy and girls dream!
Growing Evermore Divided
“The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.”
-Ayn Rand
The Nature of Government
Labor unions operate as political parties. Community organizers (who’s jobs are to split communities, and create division in order to raise one group over another) become presidents and win Noble peace prizes just before they become war criminals.
This is what we labor for. We are the slaves that support a war machine unlike the world has ever seen. We pay for all of this by what is called a “defense budget.” How about “offensive budget?”
Slavery
“A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment-a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all the values of human coexistence, has no possible justification and represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to man’s survival. Life on a desert island is safer than and incomparably preferable to existence in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.”
-Ayn Rand
The Nature of Government
Indentured servitude or voluntary slavery has existed since the Old Testament times. If you tried to renege on your agreement, there was a “enforcer” you would have to deal with.
In the modern age we call this working for a wage. As in the past, the present age of this evil modern slavery is that it denies people their freedom. They have locked themselves into the chains of wages and debt. We all suffer for it. When people are dependent on others such as a corporation, they are constrained from doing what’s right.
Dependency of any kind denies a human the sense of social worth and equality. The dependency cycle built into the wage slavery and debt cycle keeps us from our true potential and happiness. This is corporatism at its finest.
Thomas Jefferson warned the young nation about this.
“I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.”
~Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan. November 12, 1816~
Because of corporatism and Americas military industrial complex, the importance of money in our culture, nearly every aspect of our society that could be arranged to promote freedom has been corrupted by coercion. Without coercion many would not work, pay taxes, or even fight in a war.
The stressed-out wage earners are increasingly growing violent as people begin to lose everything. Random shootings, increase in the homeless wandering our streets, and home invasions grow by the year. Did I forget racial violence? “Some” say America is racist even after electing a black president not once, but twice. Well if you know who these “some” are, you might be the ones buying into the lie. It is the mainstream press that brings this deceit into your homes and you listen to them. For shame, expand your horizons! Study what corporate fascism is about and how it affects you and your family.
Need a job? Crisis actors wanted.
All too true. I’ve spent a great deal of my life trying to eliminate slavery, at least in a personal sense, and have found it to be impossible to root out. I believe this is an especially poignant issue for those of us who once experienced the extremes of Armstrongism. In a sense, the more we try to get rid of it, the more we become conscious of it. Survival, even taken back to the basic lifestyle of the hunter-gather or subsistence farmer mandates slavery in one form or another. If humans were like an air fern, breatharians by nature, living in the tropics, and with no drive to procreate, slavery would be held to a minimum.
I believe at this point in my life that we often enslave ourselves to the concepts and things which we recognize as helping us avoid deeper or greater slavery. We all have a basic level which we define as being functional. While some of us actually enjoy our work, we are also partially motivated by the knowledge that poverty can slowly and torturously destroy us. At the same time, we must be mindful of and careful to avoid eroding influences, protecting ourselves from all things confiscatory. We plan our finances in such a way as to avoid extreme bank fees, or high credit card interest. We drive so as to avoid expensive tickets, accidents, and insurance rates. We prepare our taxes based on paying the legal minimum if at all possible. We avoid codependent relationships. There are literally hundreds of things which could profoundly affect the quality of our lives, and these things increase and change constantly.
The very rich hire consultants to make in depth investigations as to how to circumvent regulations and confiscatory policy. Nationally, the very structure of the work week is being redefined by major employers to respond to Obamacare. This was totally predictable, as we have watched corporate Americana respond to virtually any attempt at regulation throughout the past. It’s why many manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, and the imposition of regulations in developing nations is why some of those jobs are now beginning to return to the USA.
The very poor have lowered expectations. I would probably be ashamed to pay for my groceries with food stamps. I also have a deep need to be able to be productive during work hours. I prefer to live in a safe neighborhood. In the USA, middle class people are motivated by a vision of their life situation improving. Some, however, are conditioned to see life as a downward spiral, and are surrounded by friends, neighbors, and family of the same mindset. It is all they know.
It is good to inform ourselves of the speed bumps and road hazards of life. All classes of people look out for their own interests, and at various times, the deck can be stacked against specific groups. The only prudent course of action is avoiding giving in to hopelessness. Time has proven that hopelessness is readily exploitable, whether by extreme religious teachers, the militias, communists, racial advocacy groups, or anyone else whom we might allow to insert themselves into our lives. What we see as slavery can often become a systemic syndrome if we don’t combat it with effective technique.
As Wet Willie sang, you gotta keep on smiling.
BB
Bob,
That is a damned good analysis of the issues. I see your johnny on the spot as to your views. You lived and worked as I for decades only to see that all that toil will possibly never come to an end. The retirement prospects for Americans is now set into their 80’s. I don’t call that hope, but it is change. Change I wish a certain person that could “drone” me, can stick up his ass along with the rest of the elite scum of this country!
There is more to this post. There is a change taking place in the world that I am looking forward to. Many people have seen it coming for some years now and the time is getting ripe for us to see this evolution in mans thinking. It is about survival as a species.
If you have a hour to spare and a willingness to educate your mind and view this coming change, go to the Painful Truth main page and watch the video “Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview”
Byker Bob, I wonder if I could raise another alarming point about modern slavery and control, in that it has extinguished what once existed during the North American boom time. We had FAMILIES. We don’t do that anymore, because family is now less important than education, a good job, and the “good” life. We don’t even replace ourselves in modern North America. We could be extinct at this rate in 60 years. Perhaps nations that forget the root core of survival deserve to go extinct. It’s a huge issue nobody wants to write about.