High Noon at the Boulevards of Good and Evil

Once again in the U.S. as in other countries inequality between income classes has grown to an all time high. When income inequality is increased by public and private policies class inequality soon follows. And let's be clear the class inequality is not crated by any one group or political party for any gain. It's created by the nature of income inequality. The wealthy soon learn to enjoy looking down on the poorer in the nation. Then the wealthy start to become afraid of the poor. Draconian laws and sentences are put in place to protect society and a new criminal class is created.

More often than not income and class inequality brings civil unrest. Sometimes civil unrest results in a more just and peaceful world, other times it results in world war. Yes we call it history because it happened and it can happen again. As Mark Twain said "History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme". We the people are fast approaching that crossroad once again and the way we solve the problem of inequality will determine if the world takes the path of good or travels down the path of evil.

This inequality is really the inequality of the distribution of money. It starts with inequality of wages and then morphs into inequality of opportunity. The opportunity to invest in ones career. The opportunity to invest for ones retirement. The opportunity to invest in a good life alone or with the ones you love.

So let's address the distribution of money. Some have a lot of it and others have very little of it but why? This is not a new question, this problem has been around for several hundred years. Close to one hundred years ago it as described was follows;

Many apologists will try to explain this 'market condition' as a "skills gap". And to a small degree this is may be true but it by no means explains the current level of inequality. However the skills gap in no way can explain what is occurring in the world today.

There has been and continues to be a very determined push for the few to amass large amounts of capital i.e. money. To accomplish this some of the corporations and the wealthy people behind them have simply bought legislation that wrings more dollars from society.

Instead of affordable state run universities and colleges we are offered private student loans at schools which are seeing public funding withdrawn. Roads that used to be built and maintained with taxpayers money are still built with taxpayers money then sold to private corporations and tolls charged. Every day a new scheme is concocted and then brought into effect though the force of law. Laws which are by think tanks funded by the wealthy and then passed to public legislators. The only goal being to squeeze more blood money from everyone.

The money which is the result of this legislation always flows to the top few in the wealthy class. Minus of course the campaign contributions, the funding for the PAC propaganda campaigns and finally the well paid jobs for the retiring politicians.

The "free marketers" of today like those of yesterday ignores the fact that we live in a world which is anything but a free market. The individual has no power or control of the contracts they are forced to accept just to have basic services such as electricity, water, a phone plan or other communications. To those that say they are free to live without those things, well really, do they believe we all just fell off the turnip truck? In reality if enough people rejected these necessities the companies that offer them would soon collapse

Venture Capitalists have a saying, "Will the dogs eat the dog food?" which means will the consumer buy a new product that one of the companies they wish to invest in have created. ? Which also gives a small insight into the mind of the venture capitalist. They don't have any interest in the product itself, or whether it has social value or is good for the environment. They do worry if it is legal but just barely if they think they could get away with it they would mass product nuclear bombs if "the dogs will eat it". And in fact some companies do.

This mindset carries oven into the largest corporations. There is no question of benefit to society just profitability. Which might explain why there are shortages of critical drugs, for example anti snake bite venom, and why there is an explosion of drugs being marketed to cure something they have never been tested to cure.

Companies need consumers more than the consumers need their dog food. But to admit that fact would be to shift the balance of power from the corporations to the consumer. And we can't have that now can we? And this would not be a problem if people had more than enough money to buy the necessities of life and had enough left over to buy the 'dog food'.

But companies have learned to exploit the abundance of labor in a global market by driving down wages in all markets. The current lack of a free market exasperates the problem by further siphoning away money for necessities from a consumer that is already under paid for their labor. With the majority of people hard pressed to pay for the necessities of life they are not in a position to bargain for a fair wage. And the current legislation is moving toward making it harder and in some cases illegal to bargain for a fair wage.

The reality of today is that many people aren't being paid fair value for their labor while others are being over paid for their labor. Money is being hoarded and taken out of circulation leaving pockets of the population without enough money to pay for basic necessities.

All of this is by design. There is an artificial shortage of money for the many who need it for basic necessities.. It forces people to borrow money to meet basic needs, food, shelter, clothing and education. Borrowed money makes the lenders richer and impoverishes the borrowers.

Money has an interesting history. Its roots are a means to facilitate trade of goods and services. Along the way money was elevated to a special status, by the people who set themselves up as the gatekeepers of issuing new money. The question is why was money transformed from an instrument to facilitate barter of goods and services to what it has become today. The answer is that certain people understood that by controlling the issuance of money they would be able to control unearned income e.g. interest and rent.

To achieve this a group has taken private ownership of money with the blessing of governments of the world. Yet the fiat money of today by itself has no value, it is neither a good nor a service.

The mindset of 'will the dogs eat it' is same idea used by banks. We are the dogs and the dog food is credit money i.e. money created from debt. Let's be honest nobody that wants to buy a house goes to a bank and asks the banker to create a toxic mortgage that they will not be able to afford in three years time. No the banks and other financial institutions created these toxic mortgages because they thought the dogs would eat the dog food. And millions of people did.

But do we the people really have to accept this? Who really owns the dog food? And do we really need to eat the dog food given to us or can we create our own? Whose money is it anyway?

In fact the money of today is privately owned. It is owned by the banks that create it. Currently one of the largest creators of money is the Federal Reserve whish is privately owned and the money it created went to other private banks with almost none of it going in to the pockets of the public. This happened because the government abdicated its responsibility of creating and controlling the publics money to the banks.