Warning- This is an unfunny article.
Things we should have learned from the recession:
That when the chips are down and they are losing money, the big companies will give up their Ann Rand for Karl Marx and take bailout money from the government which is the worst type of socialism there ever was.
That banks, for all their smiley faced clerks and brochures, will slowly leach the financial foundation from under you that you slowly saved from working tedious, survival level paying jobs.
They will do it sneakily through high charges on over drafts and other fees and on low interest payments on your savings because there is no way they are giving up their nice car, their nice house and their societal status for your sake. And they will continue to smile nicely while they do it.
They would rather see you homeless and living in a shelter or losing your car and having to take buses and taxis to work than lose an iota of what they have collected in their homes on the other side of the gated community.
That many employers, especially at the blue collar level, will put you into as servile, slavery like a position as possible to keep you working for as close to nothing as they can make you to maximize their intake of the financial flows of society. This includes paying you as little as possible so that you are always on the edge of survival and must return slave-like to work every day or lose what little you have accumulated.
That 30 year home loans are essentially a way in which you give the banks your hard earned money over long periods of time during which they can pull the house out from under you at any time that you have financial difficulties. And they make sure that you don’t have recourse to do a thing about it.
That America has a class warfare going on in which the upper set has become proficient at manipulating companies, offices and other work situations in such a way as to :
A. never having to do a physically strenuous or dirty job themselves.
B. manipulate you, the worker, in such a way as to make you feel guilty or undeserving if you cannot do a job right or to meet expectations that they themselves cannot not meet.
C. keep themselves at a higher rate of pay so that they can advance in life faster and gloat over being it better off than you.
D. constantly make you look inferior, intimidate you, make you look bad in front of colleagues and other tricks to keep you under their thumb and out of their way.
E. has design legal contracts, laws, governments to their advantage and against yours.
F. and the best part of it is that they will pretend that no such class warfare exists and that everything is all lovey-dovey between all the stratus of our society.
That there are forces on the upper class side of things so talented in the arts of slander, misinformation and intellectual sabotage as to undercut popular and powerful movements like Occupy Wall Street and help cause them to dissolve through the force of propaganda and manipulating public opinion alone.
That many people in positions of economic power and position will defend that position through any means possible even to the point of mass murder. This is very well illustrated by President Assad of Syria’s willingness to massacre thousands of his own people to retain his hold on his nation.
That people in positions of power within companies, businesses or society who are part of the upper elite or aspire to there will look at you and have no interest in what you are as a human but will see in you only what in you there is that can be controlled or is a threat to them or will look for what is the easiest way to manipulate you.
That no matter how friendly, self effacing, servile, or customer orientated a business is, its own bottom line will forever be taking care of itself first, which means either getting money from you or giving you as little money as possible for itself to survive. And, like the stone fortresses of the Middle Ages, they will generally fight to the death to defend their citadel.
That the economists who lead us by the nose through our man- made economic disasters get into the profession because of avarice. They wish to have a lot of money and put themselves into financial positions through study and observation (although not necessarily any hard work) whereby they can manipulate the money institutions they inhabit and the creation of currency.
Their hand over the affairs of the stock market and other financial systems is a selfish one. If they need develop a soft, reasonable speaking tone when they spew out their wise observations of how things should be managed it is because the work demands that he appear congenial and fair. If his society demands that he be strong and loud, he will be so in order to be the man in charge.
Any overtures he makes to the ‘plight of the working class’ or the ‘destruction of the middle class’ are words that he needs to fill the air with to keep the common people believing in him and and that a wise, equality-minded leader is shepherding them through the chaos who has their interests at heart. Their first talent is to be a chameleon, their second to be anything of a ‘scientific’ nature towards economic policies. Their notions and motions in the economics of a nation are all toward their own pockets.
That the working class of this nation are given no respect and no consideration. They are now at the level of the serfs of middle ages Europe; largely landless, at the mercy of the whims of his overseers, afraid to challenge the authority, dumbed down to the level of oxen and moved about like pawns on a gigantic chessboard.
They (we) are fast being pushed in the direction of being the untouchables in a new age caste system, with the recent rules of caste being decided by the new Brahmins- the traditional rich and the new yuppies, both of whose rule is motivated by an intense interest in self and little in ones fellow man. Of course, they would not consider anyone outside their social circle ‘one’s fellow man’ and would sneer their noses up in contempt at the idea.
The same sort of sneer would jump to their faces if the ideals of he Constitution or of any Ghandi-esque ideas of human cooperation at all levels of society. (God forbid, that would interrupt the carefully woven social fabric!)
That ‘recession’ is just a sanitized, polite, non-fear invoking way of saying ‘depression’.