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FROM MY CORNER: The Oligarchy that Controls our Lives

Howell Hurst American News, Corporate Avarice, Economy & Finance, Poverty, Uncategorized

How much longer are we going to continue to live under a self-serving economic system of the immensely wealthy?

America’s Oligarchy is a closely allied 2% or 3% of people who own upwards 90% of The United States. As leaders of gigantic multinational corporations, they collaborate with political leaders of both Republican and Democrat parties to control our country’s economy and our lives.

I would not mind an Oligarchy managing our country if they would consciously incorporate all Americans. But they choose instead to keep ten to twenty percent of all citizens in medium to high poverty, and tens of thousands literally homeless.

Consider the following:

The Federal government they dominate owns 25% of all United States land. As justification they claim this real estate is protecting nature and ecology. This is untrue. There is enough Federal, State, and local land available to provide every American today with a plot to live on without endangering the planet’s ecology and its occupants.

Lending and real estate interests consciously limit the quantity of land available to the U.S. market in order to maintain its high price. Land’s limited availability purposefully insures the real estate industry’s profit levels. Further, of land allegedly owned by private citizens only about 50% is actually owned by them. The remaining 50% of private citizens own only the mortgage debt of their land.

Corporations and government could make enough land available at prices low enough for sale to low-income citizens, thereby directly helping citizens while moderating the real estate market. This could be accomplished by the Oligarchy organizing and providing job training for all citizens needing it and requiring their corporations to organize and share their available work with presently untrained poor citizens.

This would provide all American workers adequate income to live in our economy and make payments on their newly-acquired property. Opponents say this would reduce the profits of the corporations who already own 90% of everything. Yes indeed, it would. It would require they share their profits with America’s laborers which the corporations today refuse to value and compensate as they should.

Opponents protest this would be Socialism. Incorrect. It would be rational and fair sharing of the wealth of the nation with workers. Socialism is what America already has: Socialism for Corporations they have repeatedly bailed out of every recession, a luxury the Oligarchy has never provided for laborers.

It confounds me how reluctant America’s middle class is to confront the economic scheming the ruling wealthy directly profit from at the cost of poor Americans. Even our current allegedly liberal president supports it. He has all his career actively assisted the wealthy to maintain their dominance, largely via Delaware credit and lending laws strengthening corporations’ control over Americans’ jobs and income.

The 80% or so of us managing relatively well financially are complicit in this scheme. We too penalize our poor 20% of fellow citizens with our silence. Our millions of rented self-storage units attest to our own excess income.

I know this narrative does not agree with the accepted thinking by the common majority of  Americans. However, I believe most Americans have not actually studied the Oligarchy’s strategy of limiting jobs, education, and job training to middle class and lower income citizens while simultaneously placing them in debt to the Oligarchy.

I do not believe this Oligarchy is an actually evil conspiracy. It is, rather, an evolved cultural phenomenon. Nonetheless, it is organized. It holds annual meetings in Davos, Switzerland to define its strategy. It is a well-oiled mechanism.

I suspect its leaders are actually in denial as to their real motives. The controlling wealthy Oligarchy is focused on maintaining its own financial and political dominance while refusing to shoulder responsibility for all Americans.

Its present responsibility and loyalty are solely to giant Corporations, in collaboration with politicians – all of whose campaigns they consistently finance. Supporters of our Oligarchical system claim this is the best economic model ever devised.

Who claims this? The 2% or 3%, the owner/officers of the giant corporations; banks, insurance companies, medical companies, real estate companies, agricultural corporations, credit card companies, credit rating companies, giant media conglomerates.

All of these collaborate to do three things:

  1. Keep working jobs and incomes limited.
  2. Loan all workers money to fill in for their inadequate sharing of America’s wealth.
  3. Keep alive the myth that the remaining unemployed, poor, and homeless are lazy or otherwise mentally disabled.

This is a creation of the evolved Oligarchy and we acquiescent Consumers who have long abandoned our responsibility as Citizens in exchange for the relative safety of Complicity with the wealthy.

Our Oligarchy has institutionalized a major collective Hypocrisy so well accepted by most of us that we condone and support it, so long as we remain a member of its tenuously positioned 80%.

America’s discontent and political divide will not be corrected until we once-citizens do something about them. What might we do? How could we initiate real change to secure a cohesive, equitable America?

We now reward financially overconsumption and waste. We must alter our economic system to reward the incorporation of all citizens with their fair share of America’s wealth that is now withheld from them.

In my next From My Corner commentary I will offer an outline a number of steps and policies that would preserve truly equitable Capitalism while newly insuring that all Americans obtain a living wage and accumulate their fair share of America’s wealth.

Hal

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