Would you believe it, rich people in the United States, Israel, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, and Norway are taking money from their poor and middle classes and keeping it for themselves? A new report put out yesterday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says that these countries wealthy folk are hoarding money away from the people who made it, the working classes. It’s no wonder the world’s economy is falling apart.
Right now what’s causing the economies of the world to cave in is that banks are afraid to lend money to the businesses and workers they made all their money from in the first place. This is because Bush and our congressional leaders have scared the world’s economy into stopping. There’s no problem with it. There’s more product and services available for the human race to take advantage of now than ever before with no lack of a ready, willing, and able labor force being ready to keep our economies growing nor a shortage of new and innovative technologies to found its future on or business models with which to enhance the way we get it all done so we can move aggressively into the 21rst century. The problem is that the people at the top, who are really just the people who regulate our financial systems, have forgotten what money is.
Money equals human effort. It’s a logistics tool that allows workers to trade products and services without actually having to engaging each other personally to make transactions for everything they use and need. Like if my neighbor’s lawn mower breaks down and he has a really nice tomato garden while I don’t have much of a green thumb, then it might be an efficient instrument of trade for both of us if I mowed his grass or let him use my lawn mower in exchange for access to his tomato patch. But then he could break my lawn mower while I might accidently leave his garden gate open where deer get in and eat all his crops. So this kind of trade comes with potential consequences.
But with money, he can go buy a new lawnmower and I can buy tomatoes grown in Argentina without ever knowing the farmer that grew them. So money is a good thing. It provides us with a heightened sense of independence. The problem with money is that although most of us work to provide the products and services that drive the economy that we then spend our money in, a few of us must sit behind desks in nice clothes forgoing the sweat and toil the rest of us take pride in so they can manage the money. They’re the people who control our financial polices and how they are institutionalized. And since they decide where the money goes, of course they are going to give it to themselves wherever they get a chance to do so. I however don’t understand why they do this or are allowed to.
They do their jobs and we do ours but they get to keep all the money because they’re the ones who write the paychecks. Most of them would tell you, if they were willing to speak their mind openly, that if anyone one of us were in their position, we would of course write paychecks for all the money to ourselves as well. Like what Phil Gramm said when talking for John McCain about his fiscal policy how we’ve become a nation of whiners for complaining about the economy falling apart. What he means is that he and other rich people like him understand how we are just jealous of them, that if given the chance, we would all jump at the opportunity to be the guy who writes the paychecks so we can write them all out to ourselves. The problem with that logic, which is clearly shown in this OECD report on what rich people have been doing with our money over the past twenty years and by the state of the economies of the world that this taking from the poor and giving to the rich behavior has lead to, is that rich people have forgotten how they make money.
When we, the people who are not rich, the ones who produce all the stuff that everyone wants to buy, spend money, they, rich people, the ones who take all the money we make for themselves so they can buy everything we produce, make money. And even when we make money, they make money. Personally I don’t know why we need to give them money before we can make or spend money ourselves but that is the model they set up. But now they’ve broken it by writing the paychecks of the world’s work forces to themselves without leaving enough in the economy so we can keep spending and making them more money. Since now we don’t have any money to spend or invest in making more of it, the worlds economy is falling apart. This is making them afraid to put the money they took out of the economy to spend on themselves back in so we can get it running again because they’re afraid they won’t make enough profit off by doing so.
The People that Love Free Money
I call them “The People that Love Free Money.” And they like their money, which is really our money, to become more free money as fast as possible. The problem right now is not a lack of cash that can be pumped through the economy so we have enough of it to keep buying things se we can keep making them more money. But there is a lack of confidence that we can pay our money back to them fast enough along with enough profits to make it worth their effort to lend us our money anymore. And if we can’t find a way to make them as much free money as they want very soon, they will take our money somewhere else and invest it in people that don’t require keeping so much of their own money at the end of the workweek. That’s what the 700 billion dollar bailout and 250 billion dollar stimulus package is for, to inspire confidence in them that we have not fallen out of favor with giving them as much free money as they want.
Let’s look at Israel who turns out to be the worst hoarder of their working class citizen’s money as reported in the OECD report. What is Israel? Why is Israel? We give billions of dollars to them every year so they can defend themselves against the people they took the land they built their democratic nation on. Ariel Sharon is the richest man in Israel. He was prime minister from 2001 to 2005. He created much of the problems Israel suffers from now through his and the Likud party’s harsh treatment of Palestinians. He did this on the heels of Bill Clinton negotiating a peace agreement in 1993 between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and then Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat who has since died.
The worse it has gotten for Israel in the Middle East, the more money we give them, money we obviously don’t have. This report makes it clear whose pockets that money is going into. I just can’t help thinking that Israel wouldn’t have such a deep divided with the indigenous Arabs they took the land they live on from if the money we give them had been used to pay their workers decent salaries instead of strengthening their military to better harass the Palestinians with. I mean the Palestinians over there are digging caves out of their neighborhoods that the Israelis have turned into prisons just so they can bring in what little basic supplies they can afford to buy. Now it turns out that the same people who kept this war going after a peace deal had been solidly brokered don’t even like their own citizens to have money to spend even though they would make more money if they allowed their economy to flourish by paying them enough to live off of.
So it isn’t greed that drives the worlds wealthy to steal all the money. If they were greedy, they would know we are better able to give them the life of privilege they believe they deserve if we have enough money to provide for ourselves life’s basic necessities, a roof over our heads, food to eat, gas for our vehicles, vehicles. This is not rocket science. It’s basic economics.
So what’s their goal? What do they expect to spend all our money on if we are what that money represents and they’ve taken it all away from us? In a free market, the free and transparent flow of money allows for the brilliance and ingenuity of mankind to rise easily to the surface of society where it can be highlighted and taken advantage of by everyone who can afford to engage the process. But even rich people won’t be able to afford to buy products that don’t exist if we can’t support ourselves so we can inspire a competitive economy. How are we suppose to come up with the products and services they want us to invent and provide for them if they turn us back into wild animals living from day to day with no secured vision for the future?
But these principles are just basic socioeconomics. So what do they think they’re doing by reigning in the worlds wealth? Do they have a plan? Have they discovered the secrets of space travel and have decided the human race needs to branch out to colonize the universe so they‘re putting us out of work by the millions in order to rehire us to take on this new and important work?
What I mean is that basic economics would tell them that we need money for them to make money. But as conservatives like John McCain calls Obama a socialist because he wants to “spread the wealth around,” the same kinds of people who refuse to allow minimum wage jobs to pay enough money for someone to live off of who argue that it would make companies that make money off low wage workers go out of business, they seem to miss that fact that if low wage workers make more money, they spend more money. This would obviously be good for the companies that employ them who currently don’t pay their workers enough to be able to buy the same products they produce.
It’s like with the housing market. 20 years ago, before more liberal mortgage lending rules for buying homes were instituted, the same rules conservatives are complaining now about being what caused the economy to crash because the housing bubble has burst, the one that only became so inflated because the people that love free money decided to throw all our money at property which overinflated its value, a carpenter or bricklayer could barely afford to buy a hone, certainly not a new one like the ones they spent their days building. Those were for the people who work in the offices the same workers built for them so they have a nice place to write paychecks to themselves for all the money the construction workers made for them. And of course they’re going to give themselves all the money so they can buy the news homes just like any one of us would do if we had the chance, that’s just the way it is. You know what they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s a rule.
It’s like with the trilogy written by JR Tolken titled “The Lord of the Rings.” It was inspired by a series of works dating back to Plato who wrote about a ring that makes the wearer invisible, which is a metaphor for the phrase about absolute power being perfectly corrupting to all human beings. It’s about what our human instincts force us all to do if we know we will not get caught doing it. But the Lord of the Rings is about these little guys called Hobbits who try to destroy the ring rather than wear it and steal all their neighbors money.
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