Economics 101 teaches that the quantity of a product or service is determined by the demand, which is reflected by its price and is a function of its quality.The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement might be deconstructed using this same analysis:
The number and size of Occupations worldwide can be determined by the demand, reflected by the price we pay for sympathizing and participating – a direct result of discerning the quality of the values it promotes.The individual making such a discernment wants an assurance of its quality before committing to the OWS Movement. He or she does not want to be bamboozled by some phony color revolution sponsored by a hidden power elite, or a false flag operation carried out by its governmental minions. An individual requires a solid basis upon which to make a reasoned choice that this Movement is in his or her best interests.
If the masses can be steered into demanding what the World Order has been cooking up for at least a hundred years or more – a one-world, socialist dictatorship – then they are simply silly putty in the NWO hands. (Witness the so-called “Arab Spring.”)
G.K. Chesterton has written that “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” What’s Wrong with the World, p.48 (1910). If we transpose “capitalism” (or even “democracy”) in place of “Christianity” we grasp a certain truth that has been eluding the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and many (if not most) of their sympathizers. Has capitalism really ever been given a fair shake – or has it been undermined almost from the start?
Capitalism is a system that allows any man or woman to produce a product or service, which is then vetted by a free market of buyers which determines how much buyers are willing to pay for that product or service. It puts the freedom to choose in the hands of the People – the freedom of sellers to produce and sell, and buyers to inspect and buy, viz., the freedom of both to possess and use money to do as they see fit.
But subverted capitalism is not capitalism at all. The most insidious example of subverted capitalism is corporate “capitalism,” also termed crony, predatory, or crisis “capitalism.” Corporate “capitalism” is not capitalism at all. What is it then? The modern corporation aggregates large amounts of capital in order to make a profit for a shareholder class that expects maximum income. To operate, it forms a semi-monopolistic structure. Its purpose is to dominate a market in order to dictate price by limiting quality according to its own profit-based analysis – buyers be damned! This is not capitalism it is a corporate command economy, viz., private socialism. It is public socialism to the extent that government is involved, and this unholy alliance can be referred to as a “corpocracy.” A corpocracy is a mixture of private and public socialism, i.e., some monolithic WE decides what products and services are allowed into the market, their price, quality, and quantity.
In order to fund the banksters, the governmental part of the monolithic WE taxes your income on the “dollars” from your private labor. These “dollars” are currently called “federal reserve notes” and are used to pay the interest on the money the government borrows from the Federal Reserve. A note is a promise to pay. “Promises to pay” are in fact debt instruments. They are absolutely not true dollars as contemplated in the U.S. Constitution. All of this nonsense is capitalism turned on its head.
Probably one of the few times we enjoyed real capitalism in this country was in the 1840s, when Pres. Andrew Jackson terminated the central bank (what he termed “a den of vipers”). That period was one of incredible growth and plenty for all. But, predictably, it was subverted by the unscrupulous interests of modern corporatism.
Libertarians would have us believe that business can have free reign over all; that government should not interfere whatsoever in the affairs of the individual, including the business sector. And this is essentially what we have had in commerce, beginning with the dismantling of the regulatory function of government in the Reagan years and that culminated in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. All of this deregulation allowed banks to run amok, leading to the current meltdown. Ralph Nader has pointed out two weaknesses of libertarianism: consumer protection and labor unions do not figure into its ideal system – and where does environmental protection enter into the calculus?
Government needs to ensure that the individual retains his or her ability to compete in the marketplace. The regulatory role of all three branches of government is to preserve the rule of law; viz., a rule of law that secures individual liberty by protecting individuals from the depredations of corporate dominance of the marketplace (and from any and all crony government alliances). In commerce, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission probably have the lion’s share of the executive regulatory roles. Let them be what they were instituted to be: watchdogs for the People.
I judge a healthy economic climate by the number of individual enterprises and mom-and-pops businesses I see as I walk down the streets of any town, not by the number of corporate, cookie-cutter franchises that litter the urban-suburban sprawl in the U.S. If the modern corporation cannot be put back into its cage by relegating it to what traditional corporate entities once were, then they must be closely scrutinized under the law to protect the People from its Goliath-like influences in commerce and in politics. Free legislatures from the overwhelming influence of the monied (read “corpocracy”) class! Let the courts actually be the arbiters of fairness and justice for individuals, instead of enforcers for the corpocracy’s values-vacuum-laws! And while we’re at it, free the press from oppressive control by the forces of corpocracy! Ideally, capitalism can only operate within the free flow of information, with real investigative reporting, instead of mind control by presstitutes!
Chesterton’s Christianity, like true capitalism, might be given a fair chance. True capitalism is closer to the precepts of individual freedom than is socialism – by a long shot. Thus, regaining true capitalism should be a professed value of the OWS Movement. And while we’re at it, OWSers (and all the forces of corpocracy) – be sure to remember to give peace a chance!
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Jonathan D. Suss is a cultural mutant multi-career virtuoso (blues piano player and singer, woodworker, poet/writer, one-time military officer, lawyer, English professor, and Ph.D. in Humanties) who is bereft of ambition to “be anything” in this phony baloney world – secular or otherwise. He is always on the look-out for an enlightened patrone from deep in the woods or from the plutocratic elite who also “sees thru the world” and may wish to join forces to further worthwhile underdog agendas by performing weird tasks, such as piercing the veil of corpocracy. Some of his ideas can be further studied at http://spyoptaelip.blogspot.com and he can be contacted at theo4b@gmail.com
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