Since the 1970’s, the influx of a huge force of baby boomers into finance has led to the hyper-corporatization of the US business economy. This process— in conjunction with increasingly corrupt government agencies— has monetized the American consumer middle class into a “profit farm” harvested by corporate industry, which systematically skims all excess wealth from the working 98% into tax-sheltered troves secured for the exclusive use of the upper 2%.
Since so much of the wealth that formerly supported the Middle Class has been squeezed upward and out of the system, the Middle Class has become locked into an inescapable cycle of stagflation, as the upward money drain demands ever more wealth to feed it while creating larger credit mechanisms to squeeze future wealth from workers— speculative capital that does not yet even exist. It’s an inescapable spiral to plutocratic seizure of all wealth.
The only ones with the power and freedom to investigate and perhaps halt the process are the very ones who set it up, and who profit by it. They spend billions maintaining a media cloud to distract and entertain the masses, all while hiding the seriousness of what’s actually happening. Meanwhile they apply constant pressure to government in order to score massive corporate tax breaks and multi-billion dollar tax subsidies for their businesses, all the while keeping Capital Gains Tax locked down to the absolute minimum— in essence, allowing them to earn massive income from investing personal and business fortunes in cash-making projects without paying taxes on it as if they had worked to earn it. The added tax burden from supporting all these Upper Class financial shenanigans falls onto the shrinking, overburdened Middle and Working Classes.
Elected officials try to push the agendas that will best benefit their contributors and serve the people of their districts. The problem is that “serving the people of their districts” gets narrowed down to “serving the economic and business interests in their districts,” because that’s the only way “serving their interests” gets quantified. Also, businesses are what pay for re-elections. So the “serve the local economy, more jobs, more business growth” model becomes the ONLY model in play.
That plays right into corporate hands. Elected officials serve the business interests of their districts at all costs— which leads to pork barrel spending, deregulation of resources, tax incentives for business at public expense, etc.
The real heart of the problem is the unrelenting push towards unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, which by its very nature (and according to its inescapable purpose and design) eventually corrupts everything and everyone it touches. The monopolies get bigger and bigger until they cut off fair access to opportunity by anyone else, ultimately becoming oligarchies unto themselves. They divert government according to their own wishes and manipulate it to support their money-mining operations, sucking resources from the working and middle classes and swallowing up as much tax money as they squeeze from the system.
Like Walmart, they create and maintain a working poverty class who must lean on government aid to exist.
Still worse— the richest of our politicians sit atop the system and drain it for their own personal ends, while our less wealthy politicians are just as trapped by the constant influence of corporate money grabbers as the rest of us. Fortunately, the power of the vote still exists. The true difficulty of using that power only becomes apparent when one realizes that corporate interests are firmly ensconced on BOTH sides of the government— Democrat AND Republican— and that one cannot just vote a straight party line and expect to deflect the monopolizers. Instead, a concerned voter must pay attention to what individual politicians do (or DON’T do), and either grant, or else withhold, one’s support accordingly.
Forget what they say; instead, pay attention to what they ACTUALLY DO. And use that knowledge— and your vote— to defend yourself.