I do not see how we can become a sustainable society with the current economic system that is designed to not be sustainable. How can we have a sustainable world in an endless growth system based on money? As I have often said in economic content within this blog (e.g. see earlier post How the control Happens), money is just a tool to manage the so-called scarce resources. I say so-called because if we actually shared our global resources equitably, we actually have more than enough for everyone. Yet, everything now gathers around this concept called money. Money has NO power in itself, but only through the warped beliefs that somehow the accumulation of money will alleviate our many ‘needs.’ Money has become the end goal in itself.
The resources we actually need are now the way that money is generated – the resources themselves are now the tool. And then with the elite economy (search ‘economy’ on this blog) generating money through the stock market, even the resources have become incidental to the generation of money. Now let’s look at this money – even regular money is now digital. We do have bitcoin, etc., which are developing globally but not yet mainstream. We live from fear. For the older readers, Y2K was a major fear as computer clocks might reset from 1999 to 2000. Nothing happened, but the hype and fear of catastrophe was all the news in 1999. The fear about not enough money is as bad. We have given our power away and become apathetic to change as we focus on our perceived needs and not our lives per se. (Our lives seem to revolve around the money or lack of it. And we do not live as we would like to because at the end of each day, money is the central focus of modern living mythology.)
It is funny to realize that trickle down idea was originally coined by the great American humorist Will Rogers as a mocking commentary on economics of the 1930s. U.S. President Herbert Hoover, who presided during the early pre-WWII depression, said that “money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes it would trickle down to the needy.” Read any history from around the world of that period and you will see just how well that worked for everyone. The Rich got rich and the poor just sank deeper in to the mire of debt and desperation. It didn’t work then and it has never worked. Yet, each year around the world we elect politicians that promise us more of the same. I love it when I keep hearing that the economy is doing well because the uber-rich are making money. The rest of us keep believing them while we continually slide deeper and deeper into debt and poverty struggling to stay afloat. Let me be clear, trickle down has never worked and never will, so why do we stubbornly cling to the notion that giving more money (e.g. tax breaks or incentives) to the elites will somehow change the situation. The Cost of Living has been increasing 8-14% over last 5 years. If you cannot keep up with it, there is what is termed a ‘slow burn,’ which means that the middle classes move into becoming poor and the poor classes move further down into poverty and abject poverty.
Fear and faith as the same thing – to belief in something unseen. We have many debates about faiths, but how often do we actually talk about fears except to exchange that we share them? We imagine fear in to being. We choose our beliefs. And our beliefs about money are no different. In 1981, Ronald Reagan came up with the notion that if we give all our money to the already rich then all the benefits would ‘Trickle Down’ to the rest of us (Trickle Down Theory) in the belief that the rich would invest their money in society. And most politicians in the world went along with it – just like GDP from the 1930s. The uber-rich liked that idea and propagated it through all societies around the world – a very simple excuse for the globalization process that began about that time. And of course, influential right-wing economists pushed trickle down as the panacea of modern economic growth. Trickle-down is believed to benefit poorer members of society by having the rich create new opportunities for the economically disadvantaged to attain a better standard of living. But that assumes the rich want to invest in society and not in themselves or something else that they gain from.
Now you might be thinking, what is it that the uber-rich do with all this money besides simply stock-pile it? That is another story in itself, but the uber-rich are more than simply a group of people. These people also control whole organization and even governments. The money in the world is managed by organization like The World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the private Reserve banks of each country (e.g. The U.S. Federal Reserve, The Bank of England, Federal Reserve Bank of Japan, etc.). Now imagine my surprise when I came across a June 2015 report by the IMF stating Trickle Down economics isn’t working.
The report by five economists shows clearly how this trickle-down belief has been used as justification to increase growing income inequality over the past several decades. A chart by Pavlina Tcherneva of the Levy Economics Institute shows an inverted relationship between income of rich and the rest of us. The majority of national money has been funneling uphill to the uber-rich slowly since 1945. At that time, lower and middle classes around the developed world also prospered a bit with some increase in net wealth while the rich got richer, but that changed drastically after the mid-1980s. In an article by Jared Keller, he says, “Income and wealth inequality isn’t a class problem, but a national issue. The IMF report states, “Widening income inequality is the defining challenge of our time.”
Despite the fact that this report came from the IMF that are as complicit in the wealth gap as any of the elites, how does it help us to move forward and do things differently? Well for one, we can stop believing that somehow the elites will suddenly become philanthropic and starts sharing their money with us by throwing pennies off the table for us to scavenge up. We can start working on how money is a good tool for creating a better world if used properly. For one, we can start electing leaders and demanding accountability from all our politicians and start to put their feet to the fire to reveal how corruption is manipulating the world for the elites’ benefit. To understand how deep this corruption goes we need to understand a little more about how governments work for the elites.
To be Continued……
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