America is dying. Our livelihood in a free-market society is our Wage(W). The wage is also the tool by which we are subjugated, subtly and clandestinely, into the blind oblivion of slavery. Let us follow the path of the almighty dollar through the abysmal circuitry of our present society. In this manner, we hope to shed light upon the perverse and malicious nature of our relationship with the established forces responsible for controling and regulating how we are compensated for our sacred efforts and sacrifices.
By and large, the jobs most commonly available are in the construction, service, and retail industries. While the "average American annual income" is stated at around $40,000, remember that the civilian labor force only represents about 140 to 150 out of 350 million people, meaning essentially that every employee has about 2.5 mouths to feed. In other words, the average person has a little over a thousand dollars a month allotted to them in our economic system on which to survive, to self educate, to persevere, and to prosper. For every idealistic, hard-working, and entrepreneurial spirit out there willing to increase his own lot by any measure, somewhere else in our economy, the wealth of another must fall by the same degree, or the wealth of all must decline by a margin. It is important to remember that more than 40% of our national wealth is owned by less than 500 people, and about 10% of the labor force is unemployed. The next 10% makes less than $20,000 a year. The effects of these realities add a considerable burden to the already grim economic situation facing more than 100 million Americans. Consider this as we explore the following social pressures and how they intervene between ourselves and the fruits of our labor.
Religion
The tithe is the oldest form of taxation in known history. Within our predominantly Judea-Christian heritage, we recognize the traditional ten percent tithe as standard. It is first on the list, because religious contributions are tax deductible. This is the first stage of income reduction, where (W - 10% = W1).
Government
Income is taxable at the local, state and federal level after religious (and charitable) contributions have been made. A great deal of variation is to be found when aggregating local and state obligations with federal obligations, especially across the broad and diverse landscape of our economic structure. But for the sake of simplicity, we will confine this step to an average of 15%, or (W1-15%=W2). If something strikes you here as familiar, good. You are paying attention.
Once the money we have spent 40 hours a week being treated like expendable push-button slaves trying to earn finally makes its way into our out-stretched hands, we are reminded that for every dollar's worth of goods for which we hope to barter, we must spend at least a dollar and nine cents as a result of sales tax. This inherently implied reduction may be expressed as follows: (W2=1.09 x W3) or (W2/1.09=W3), where W3 is our effective remaining purchasing power.
The purchasing power of W3 is controlled by the Federal Reserve. This entity operates autonomously and virtually anonymously in its decision making process. Primarily, the Fed expands or contracts the money supply at will, by buying and selling U.S. Bonds. This process takes on one of two monetary policies: Expansionary during recessionary conditions, and restrictive during expansionary conditions. The core objective of this institution's interference in the financial world is to keep interest rates at "optimum levels". The Fed also dictates what fraction of your checking account deposits may be loaned out to others. For large banks, it is about 80%. For smaller banks, it is all of it. The Federal Reserve was directly responsible for the failure of the banking systems that led to the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, preceding the Great Depression. It is said that behind a black curtain, these men manufacture the kind of recessions and booms that forever plague American businesses with uncertainty and unexpected inflation.
Bank Cartels
When we take our hard earned W3 to the bank for safe keeping, they are only required to keep a fraction of it safely on hand. This may be 20%, 11%, 3% or none, depending on the size of the bank. The remaining 80%(in the best case scenario) is loaned out to anonymous strangers, who in turn deposit those funds into a bank(ultimately speaking, even if they go out and spend it, the merchants will deposit those funds generally at least once every week or two). This process is called "money creation", wherein for every thousand dollars you deposit, they may collectively generate up to five thousand in loaned funds, on which interest is earned by the banks. For a fractional reserve requirement of 20%, the process results in a 5-1 ratio of money created to actual original deposit. For a fractional reserve of nothing, the ration of potential money creation is infinite. If you are lucky enough to have checking with interest(and you probably don't), or if your money is stored in a C.D., or a savings account, the interest you earn, or the money they pay you to use your funds, will rarely exceed 2%.
Meanwhile, the collective banking system(centralized and controlled by one entity, the Federal Reserve, who holds at any given time almost half of the money supply in its vaults, and prints more at will) earns interest rates sometimes upwards of 15% to 20 % on the imaginary money they create out of thin air every time we let them hold ours. Think of it this way. How would you feel if every night when you went to sleep, someone took your car out of your garage and loaned it to anonymous strangers, charging them exorbitant rates, generating enough cash to payoff your car six times over, keeping one for themselves, and paying you enough in return to skip about one out of every fifty payments(most car notes are about sixty payments)? It must be mentioned that though the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation(F.D.I.C.) is only capable of covering 1% of the money supply against bank failure, it would take, on average, one out of five Americans withdrawing entirely from the banking system at once to completely bankrupt the entire country. We earn (.02 x W3), while they collectively earn up to 0.15(5 x .8W3). In terms of earning alone(without respect to the disparity between how much energy you had to burn working and how much energy they had to spend), they have us beaten by 30 to 1. This is why there is a 1%.
This is why less than 500 people own more than 40% of America. This is why without significant social revolution, a "working-class majority" will be a permanent fixture in our historical narrative. This is why we endure the guilt of seeing wretched, starving creatures and wanting to help them in some way, but finding ourselves ill equipped to effect any meaningful change. Wealth is moved upwards in volume, and redistributed at retail by the unit.
Higher Education
It is commonly accepted that going to college is the golden ticket out of economic mediocrity, but the "average cost of tuition" ranges from five to forty thousand dollars per year. Interest rates on student loans are astronomical, higher than on houses, cars or any other commodity commonly obtained via credit. The effect of this is a virtual denial of access to minorities and the financially challenged, resulting in a system that keeps poor kids poor, and inflicts the perpetual social consequences of under-education on the least affluent demographics. Ignorance, Belligerence, Profanity, Vanity, Violence, Theft, Prostitution, and Drug Abuse ride closely in the wake of a society that promises rich children a quality Ivy-League education while promising poor children an over-crowded, under-funded public college and a mountain of debt. Try becoming President without a degree from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Berkeley, and so one. It becomes clear that the American Dream has a price tag, and W3 isn't quite enough.
Corporate Media
More Americans can name more celebrities than they can name presidents. Don't feel bad, I'm right there with you. It's hard to have any real and universal perspective of our national narrative when we use the most profoundly useful and important research technology ever conceived for the superficially self-gratifying purpose of entertainment, by default. The American teenager is at this time about as old as the internet as we know it today, and the lives of the two are as perpetually intertwined for time unending as the rest of our lives are with television and radio. Yet among 500 channels, there are less than 15 channels of news, and about 20 for history and science. Among about 20 FM stations in my hometown, there are NO 24 hour news, history, or science stations. Does this surprise anyone?
We may all thank our respective saviors and graces for the objective educational potential of the internet, which, in its current unrestricted state is unlimited in breadth or scope; because for eighty years, the marvelous invention of television beamed information right into our faces in a ceaseless one-way stream of advertising and social engineering, bringing us false dynasties and fiat dictators, flamboyant media constructs, and partisan propagandist power-mongers. They could stand on the stage and tell us it was all B.S., and we just kept right on watching, oblivious to the magnitude of human understanding and wisdom that they could have spent the better part of a century pumping into our hearts and minds, into our imaginations: enlightenment, wasted at the feet of Cribs and Jersey Shore, at the feet of mall-culture, me-culture, and more-culture, and at the feet of addict culture, and of defeatist culture.
Laid end-to-end, the wires and cables of our copper and fiber-optic infrastructure could wrap the planet more times than neccessary for the expression to have vivid meaning. 100 Watts will push an HF signal from Chicago to Beijing. Why isn't the human story being told everywhere at all times? Are we to believe that the narcissistic and detached characters we see on these machines represent us? Is this supposed to be the product of our natural demand? As the Wizard said: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" And for almost 80 years since, we have fearfully obliged, captivated by the endless, mesmerizing charade of smoke and mirrors we can only see when looking the other way.
The War on Drugs
"We" will have spent in excess of 40 billion dollars, seized half a trillion dollars in assets, and forcibly detained 1.5 million offenders, (half of which were for marijuana)...this year alone. Here's the math: "WE" spend 26 thousand dollars per head to investigate, arrest, and prosecute for a profit of better than $300,000 per offender, yielding a thousand percent return on invested capital. If it is not painfully clear to anyone alive that this is a thriving industry of tyranny against personal choice, endorsed and sanctioned and perhaps even depended upon by the establishment, they may ask themselves: What if the War in Iraq or Afghanistan had that kind of built in incentive to keep fighting?
Big-Pharma
One of the most profoundly heinous and destructive aspects of American culture is the pharmaceutical industry. While the war on drugs wages on- in effect, behind the scenes- the biggest pushers and dealers and scum of the universe go about in broad daylight, in plain sight, without mask or alias, deliberately and openly subverting the entire psychological and emotional fabric of our society. Xanax, Ritalin, Oxycontin, Lortab, Adderall, Valium, are all screaming illustrations of our continued hypocrisy. As adults, these are not the illegal drugs we grew up with. However, they are now the fundamental grocery list for almost all American teenagers. While we struggle to legalize weed, which has never killed or harmed a living soul, any pill-popping idiot can get (and sell) a "scrip" for Xanax. The first thing a doctor tells you is that you will take this pill for the rest of your life. Ask him why, if you dare, and (hopefully) he will tell you that when you try to quit the "amnesia pill", you will find you have magically become an epileptic, and that only Xanax can stave off the seizures that punish you for trying to regain your own sovereignty. Doctors get kickbacks from the drug manufacturers for every new addict they produce.
This process now begins with our school children. The one hyper-active kid in a class of thirty isn't "having a hard time paying attention", the child is expressing the evolutionary effects of more than 50 years of high volume television advertising fragmenting the continuity of story line and content, and of channel surfing, and of multitasking and so on. The child isn't struggling to focus on the lesson; the child struggles because his or her brain has adapted to process the dynamic, high-speed input of tomorrow, while the surrounding education system stubbornly clings to the dry, simplex monologue of yesterdays educational approach. To combat this problem, doctors and teachers arrogantly and despicably unite to pull the student aside, informing child and parent that the child has a "problem" with the way his or her mind works, and that so long as the parent should open the wallet, the solution can be found in drugs.
This gross, collective misunderstanding serves as the prevailing standard method of introduction (and validation) of drugs to kids as a viable, alternative solution to almost any internal problem they may conceive of. It's no longer the suspiciously wonder-bread kid standing by some nondescript locker with an open palm full of pinner joints luring your kid into a mysterious and seedy underworld of hookers and violence. It is a kindly older gentleman, your family doctor, in the warmly familiar lab coat and loafers, offering you only the blue pill, and doping you right out of your money and mental sovereignty and right into the blurry, apathetic, and un-protesting American norm, like so many sheep.
The C.I.A.
I don't want to get shot, or have my family murdered, or have a bag thrown over my head and have my prostrate body forcibly shoved into a van and thrown off a bridge, so even I must apologetically refrain from venturing very far down this rabbit hole. They willfully and deliberately introduced crack-cocaine and AIDS into our society as a form of population control. They are assassins and economic hit-men, who pave the road in blood and debt through third world countries to make way for American corporations and imperialist political interests. They are well paid men without conscience, without restraint, and without moral or social bearing. These are the devil's ferocious dogs. And while most of you won't answer the call for pennies a day to help feed some starving Indonesian child a world away, you blindly and ignorantly and voluntarily fund this corrupt organization with your own hard earned tax-dollars every week.
The time has come, with severe need, for us to individually and collectively review our place in the world. The first step to fighting back is educating ourselves. We have slipped so far behind the information curve that it is not clear whether success in reviving our default sense of freedom is even possible. We have jobs, and we have families to feed. The pace at which we are forced to perform and compete is maddening and overwhelming. But it is also artificial. We are puppets on strings, dancing to the endless whims of insane overlords. Doggedly we march on in the grey, shuffling procession of breadline mediocrity, with sore backs, head-aches, feverishly over-worked immune systems, and the unending promise of purgatory at the end of the tunnel. Our lives have value and meaning, but it is us who seem to need to be reminded the most.
WAKE UP AMERICA! For our great proverbial window of opportunity is being slammed on our fingers. Our sweet land of liberty is quickly becoming corrosive and toxic to our neighbors and our selves. If time is a river, there is a great deal of pollution and stagnation just up the stream. We are rowing the boat. Rowing, rowing, rowing the boat. Reject poison. Reject entertainment. Reject stratification. Reject the norm. The wage of sin is death, and the wage of the sin of ignorance is the death of nations. The wage of education is the liberation of the mind, the body, and the soul.
The wage of failure or surrender in these times, is most certainly the enslavement of the global population in the times to come.
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