America is now an oligarchy, where the concentration of power into the hands of a small group of the super-rich, Tech Lords, and monopolistic mega-corporations allow these elites to buy political influence and stomp on the rights of ordinary people.
China’s communist regime is sounding increasingly arrogant in the wake of the economic destruction wreaked by the pandemic that originated in Wuhan and could have been prevented by Beijing. China’s communist dictator Xi Jinping boasted in his New Year’s Eve address that China is “the first major economy worldwide to achieve positive growth” in 2020.
How did you fair this year, America?
“China’s economy is projected to grow by 2% in 2020 and by another 8.4% in 2021. By the end of next year, its economy is expected to be 10.6% larger than it was at the beginning of this year,” Axios reports. “By contrast, after shrinking by 3.6% this year and growing by a projected 4% next year, the U.S. economy is going to end 2021 just 0.25% larger than it was at the beginning of 2020.”
Much of this is due to China’s dominance of global manufacturing; and with the whole world still reeling from the pandemic, China is moving to solidify its monopoly on the world’s supply chains through expanded free trade agreements, including a new agreement with the European Union. The pandemic’s economic damage has also allowed China to buy influence in the Third World through its international infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative, which the U.S. government has criticized as imperialist colonization via a predatory debt scheme.
The super-rich broke new records this year, according to a report conducted by PwC and the Swiss bank UBC. The combined wealth of the world’s over 6,000 billionaires grew to $10.2 trillion in July. All of this happened at the height of the pandemic between April and July 2020, as average people the world over were hit by economic devastation, but the world’s billionaires increased their wealth by over a quarter to 27.5 percent, the Guardian reports.
Compare that to the estimated one in five small businesses that closed during the pandemic.
The Washington Post reported that over 100,000 U.S. small businesses – once the economic engine of the American dream – closed forever due to the virus. The pandemic devastated mom-and-pop businesses that were forced to shut down due to government lockdown orders that favored large retail chains like Walmart. These stores were allowed to remain open and rake in huge profits, increasing their monopoly power and driving out smaller competitors for good. This year Walmart increased its profits by nearly 45 percent over last year. The net wealth of Walmart founder Sam Walton’s heirs — Jim, Rob, and Alice Walton – each increased by nearly a quarter during the pandemic.
Workers gained little from this boom. Amazon workers received an extra 95 cents an hour and Walmart workers received 63 cents an hour as compensation over the course of the pandemic, while during that same period, Bezos’ income increased by $70 billion and the Walton family’s fortune increased by $45 billion, according to a Brookings Institute report.
Low-life Silicon Valley Tech Lords used the pandemic to increase their massive wealth and monopoly power, and they also helped get their preferred candidate elected to the White House.
Check this out.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon – companies control the flow of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives sue to online surveillance have leveraged your pain to build more wealth and monopoly power.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (whose net wealth increased by over 85 percent this year) deliberately censored stories about Hunter Biden’s corruption scandal in the lead up to the November election, and Google (whose 2020 third-quarter revenue increased by 14 percent year-over-year) suppressed the Google search visibility of conservative news such as Breitbart by 99 percent in 2020 compared to the same period in 2016.
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald notes that America’s founders would have rightly feared that this “economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political rights and legal equality illusory.”
Greenwald calls Facebook’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden stories “one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years,” noting that “this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.”
“These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency,” he adds. “Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.”
Paul Plante says
As an older American who well remembers when “off-shoring” production to China began, I find this thread interesting because it is WE, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, who gave China all that power over our lives.
China has only been a “modern” country for a short time as such things are counted.
On their own, they could not have built themselves into a world superpower – that took us to do it for them.
Or more specifically, it took people like Jack Welch of General Electric in this country to do it for them, and to do it to us at the same time.
This has been going on since the 1970s and it has never been a secret.
Consider, for example, an article in The Week entitled “Where America’s jobs went” on March 18, 2011, which starts as follows:
Why aren’t U.S. corporations hiring?
Actually, many of them are.
They’re just not hiring Americans.
In the two years after the Wall Street meltdown triggered the Great Recession, large American corporations slashed U.S. payrolls by a net of 500,000 jobs.
At the same time, they hired 729,000 workers overseas.
As globalization transforms the world economy, in fact, many U.S.-based companies are shifting the balance of their workforces overseas.
Ford, for example, reported in 1992 that 53 percent of its employees worked in the U.S. and Canada.
By 2009, its North American workforce (by then Ford had expanded to Mexico) made up only 37 percent of total payroll.
With 53 percent of big U.S. firms implementing offshoring strategies, “there is no job security now,” said Lauren Asplen of the IUE-CWA, an electrical-workers union.
end quotes
That’s ten years ago, now, so why in 2021 are we surprised at any of this?
Getting back to that article, which is one of many on the subject, it continues as follows:
When did offshoring become so prevalent?
The trend began in earnest in the late 1970s at large manufacturers such as General Electric.
GE’s then CEO, Jack Welch, who was widely respected by other corporate chieftains, argued that public corporations owe their primary allegiance to stockholders, not employees.
Therefore, Welch said, companies should seek to lower costs and maximize profits by moving operations wherever is cheapest.
“Ideally,” Welch said, “you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.”
Not only did GE offshore much of its manufacturing, so did its parts suppliers, which were instructed at GE-orchestrated “supplier migration seminars” to “migrate or be out of business.”
end quotes
As I say, NONE of this was ever secret, so why are we at all surprised today by any of it?
And why are we angry at China?
Why aren’t we angry at the people like Jack Welch who made China GREAT at our expense?
Why aren’t we angry at all the GE stockholders out there who cheered that on so they could cash in with their stock portfolios to the destruction of America?
MJM says
Well, most people are simply ignorant that this is going on because big tech and the media corporations have taken over communications in this country. So many Americans do not even read about it, or see it on whatever screen they stare at. Lots of people are also lemmings marching to the sea and just don’t give a sh*t. Too soft. think freedom is free. Well here comes the bill folks. One REALLY BIG THING that President Donald J. Trump did, and most people have no clue, is what is just now taking place on the NYSE. GOOGLE IT. Trump has forced the de-listng of Chinese telecoms. China is freaking PISSED !! This is part of why elitists want Trump out. he knows how to hurt them for what they are doing, and have done, to us. It is disrupting their business big time, and this is one of the reasons Trump was forced out of office. We can just watch Hunter and Joe Biden reverse this when he gets in office and then all of this is going to start simply getting worse. Trump was the stopper and too damn many ignorant Americans fell for the b.s. coming from the swamp creatures.
Paul Plante says
REUTERS
“GLOBAL MARKETS – Stocks climb after Monday’s drop; oil gains 5%”
By Caroline Valetkevitch
January 5, 2021
Earlier, in Hong Kong, China Mobile, China Unicom , and China Telecom rallied after the New York Stock Exchange suddenly scrapped plans to de-list the companies’ shares following a U.S. executive order.
Paul Plante says
And getting back to what we all knew or should have known ten years ago about the globalists in corporate America making China great at our expense, while the people of America calmly chewed their cud and allowed it to happen, content with knowing their investment portfolios were becoming more valuable, the greater China became, that article in The Week entitled “Where America’s jobs went” on March 18, 2011 continued as follows, and again, this is ten years ago now, or six years before Donald Trump, who trumpets the rise in the stock market to a “sacred” number during his administration as one of his greatest accomplishments, to wit:
Is offshoring limited to manufacturing?
It used to be, until the Internet boom of the 1990s made it a white-collar phenomenon, too.
As economic globalization gathers speed and technology erases geographic boundaries, firms now have instant access to educated workers all over the planet, allowing enormous service companies and small businesses alike to hire Web designers in Thailand, graphics specialists in India, and seismologists in Pakistan.
White-collar workers who once seemed immune to offshoring — lawyers, financial analysts, even local newspaper reporters — are now in peril of seeing their jobs shifted to India, Eastern Europe, or China.
In recent years, 13 of every 100 U.S. computer-programming jobs shifted overseas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, making it the most at-risk occupation in America.
end quotes
So, again, what are we surprised about?
If you shift all your computer programming jobs elsewhere, you make those countries stronger while making America weaker, which again, is just great for the stock market, which under Trump attained unheard of before this records this year.
But incredibly stupid, when it comes to national security, which to the globalists is nothing for them to be concerned about, given their ability to simply shift the flag they are flying at any given time..
Getting back to what we all knew ten years ago, the story continues as follows:
“Any job you can think of now can be done by someone on the other side of the world for less cost,” said Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelance.com, which matches employers and freelancers around the world.
Are labor costs the driving factor?
Yes, but they’re only one reason companies prefer to hire foreign workers.
By offshoring, firms can also sidestep more-stringent U.S. workplace and environmental regulations, and take advantage of foreign government subsidies designed to lure foreign investment.
They can also tap a labor pool that in many cases is better versed in math and science than the U.S. workforce is.
Thus, offshoring has evolved from a simple matter of cutting labor costs to “a multidimensional value proposition,” as the Conference Board’s Ton Heijmen puts it.
Part of the value is that foreign workers can be required to work under conditions that would be illegal in the U.S.
In Shenzhen, China, for example, Foxconn, the subsidiary of a Taiwanese company, employs 250,000 people to assemble iPods and iPhones for Apple, working long, monotonous days with a handful of timed bathroom breaks.
Foxconn workers earn an average wage of $292 a month.
Last year 18 Foxconn employees at the Shenzhen complex attempted suicide, 14 successfully.
end quotes
In the meantime, according to our financial news, 2020 was an astounding year for tech investors with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite jumping 43% over this timeframe with some tech stocks performing even better than this tech-weighted market index, like Apple with its stunning 81% gain during 2020.
The moral there, and this really is bidness management 101, is the less you let your employees go to the bathroom, where they get no productive work done, at all, the greater your profits are going to be, which is really what it is all about, as Apple is a testament to.
Getting back once again to what we all knew ten years ago now, we have:
Is the offshoring strategy working?
For employers, absolutely.
In the third quarter of 2010, U.S. corporate profits hit an all-time high of $1.659 trillion, despite a U.S. unemployment rate hovering above 9 percent.
By no coincidence, in 2009, nearly half—47 percent—of the revenues of the 500 largest U.S. public companies came from outside the U.S.
And economic growth rates are much stronger overseas.
From 1995 through 2008, the U.S. gross domestic product grew at an annual average of 2.9 percent — a crawl, compared with average annual growth of 9.6 percent in China and 6.9 percent in India.
end quotes
And again, there is another example of how making China great while making America weak has been very good for those in America who are in the stock market, because businesses go where the growth is.
“For a lot of American companies, their actual and psychic energy is focused abroad,” said Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business.
And that was ten years ago, people.
So what is there to be surprised about today?
Paul Plante says
And going back to the opening statement of the original post that “America is now an oligarchy, where the concentration of power into the hands of a small group of the super-rich, Tech Lords, and monopolistic mega-corporations allow these elites to buy political influence and stomp on the rights of ordinary people,” that in turn takes us back to Tuesday, February 19, 1788, and FEDERALIST No. 57 by either Al Hamilton or Jemmy Madison, titled “The Alleged Tendency of the New Plan to Elevate the Few at the Expense of the Many Considered in Connection with Representation” from the New York Packet, where the author tried to assure us that we would not have an oligarchy in this nation, as follows:
To the People of the State of New York:
THE THIRD charge against the House of Representatives is, that it will be taken from that class of citizens which will have least sympathy with the mass of the people, and be most likely to aim at an ambitious sacrifice of the many to the aggrandizement of the few.
Of all the objections which have been framed against the federal Constitution, this is perhaps the most extraordinary.
Whilst the objection itself is levelled against a pretended oligarchy, the principle of it strikes at the very root of republican government.
end quotes
Now, when the author of this Federalist Paper speaks of “republican government” in that sentence, he is not talking about government controlled by the political faction known as the Republican party; to the contrary, he is talking about government on Republican principles, or Republicanism, which is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic with an emphasis on liberty and the civic virtue practiced by citizens and more broadly, it refers to a political system that protects liberty, especially by incorporating a rule of law that cannot be arbitrarily ignored by the government.
Suffice to say, as this thread makes clear, in the United States of America today, we DO NOT have republican government, which brings us back to Federalist No. 57, as follows:
The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.
end quotes
Sounds real good in principle, it does, but in practice?
Just a pipe dream for where in our two-party system is there any attempt made to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society?
Those people are rejected by both the Democrats and the Republicans – with them, it is about the good of the party, not society.
And what effectual precautions exist today for We, the American People to keep members of congress “virtuous” whilst they continue to hold their public trust, where “virtuous” means having or showing high moral standards?
The idea that we have any kind of means to keep members of congress virtuous today is ludicrous!
Ask yourself this one question – who among us can keep Nancy Pelosi virtuous?
The answer is not a one of us.
That is why we read in the Charlotte Observer story “Embattled Pelosi’s big survival weapon: Money” by Anshu Siripurapu on June 23, 2017, as follows:
Here’s a huge reason Nancy Pelosi maintains her iron grip on House Democrats, even after another bruising – and in many party circles embarrassing – election loss: Her ability to raise lots and lots of money.
The House Democratic Leader has few current peers when it comes to pumping money into colleagues’ campaigns.
No other potential up-and-coming Democratic challenger to her leadership comes close.
Since 1990, she’s raised more than $9.2 million for party candidates, including $739,000 in the 2016 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks contributions from candidate committees and affiliated PACs.
Pelosi’s office claims even loftier triumphs, saying she’s raised more than $500 million for Democrats since entering the party leadership in the early 2000s, including $141.5 million in the 2015-2016 cycle.
They explain their totals includes money raised for the party not directly controlled by her committees.
Big donors to the party’s congressional campaign committee were also available to Pelosi through her “Speaker’s Cabinet” program, which gave them special access to the Democratic leader.
end quotes
Yes, people you too can buy some special access to the speaker of the house of representatives Nancy Pelosi IF you have the big buck$ to do so with, which takes us back to Federalist No. 57 as follows:!
The elective mode of obtaining rulers is the characteristic policy of republican government.
The means relied on in this form of government for preventing their degeneracy are numerous and various.
The most effectual one, is such a limitation of the term of appointments as will maintain a proper responsibility to the people.
end quotes
In the light of reality as we know it today, that is a totally ludicrous statement, that somehow, we can force Nancy Pelosi to maintain a proper responsibility to “the people.”
How droll the concept which again takes us back to Federalist No. 57, to wit:!
Let me now ask what circumstance there is in the constitution of the House of Representatives that violates the principles of republican government, or favors the elevation of the few on the ruins of the many?
Let me ask whether every circumstance is not, on the contrary, strictly conformable to these principles, and scrupulously impartial to the rights and pretensions of every class and description of citizens?
Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives?
Not the rich, more than the poor; not the learned, more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names, more than the humble sons of obscurity and unpropitious fortune.
The electors are to be the great body of the people of the United States.
end quotes
And that is not true.
The great body of the people of the United States, some 331 million people, did not put Nancy Pelosi, who sells out access to what is supposed to be OUR government to the highest bidders, into power.
Nancy Pelosi was elected to the house by just 275,292 votes in the 2018 election for California’s 12th Congressional District, which for all practical purposes is the City of San Francisco.
Getting back to Federalist No. 57, it continues as follows:
If we consider the situation of the men on whom the free suffrages of their fellow-citizens may confer the representative trust, we shall find it involving every security which can be devised or desired for their fidelity to their constituents.
In the first place, as they will have been distinguished by the preference of their fellow-citizens, we are to presume that in general they will be somewhat distinguished also by those qualities which entitle them to it, and which promise a sincere and scrupulous regard to the nature of their engagements.
In the second place, they will enter into the public service under circumstances which cannot fail to produce a temporary affection at least to their constituents.
There is in every breast a sensibility to marks of honor, of favor, of esteem, and of confidence, which, apart from all considerations of interest, is some pledge for grateful and benevolent returns.
Ingratitude is a common topic of declamation against human nature; and it must be confessed that instances of it are but too frequent and flagrant, both in public and in private life.
But the universal and extreme indignation which it inspires is itself a proof of the energy and prevalence of the contrary sentiment.
In the third place, those ties which bind the representative to his constituents are strengthened by motives of a more selfish nature.
His pride and vanity attach him to a form of government which favors his pretensions and gives him a share in its honors and distinctions.
Whatever hopes or projects might be entertained by a few aspiring characters, it must generally happen that a great proportion of the men deriving their advancement from their influence with the people, would have more to hope from a preservation of the favor, than from innovations in the government subversive of the authority of the people.
All these securities, however, would be found very insufficient without the restraint of frequent elections.
Hence, in the fourth place, the House of Representatives is so constituted as to support in the members an habitual recollection of their dependence on the people.
Before the sentiments impressed on their minds by the mode of their elevation can be effaced by the exercise of power, they will be compelled to anticipate the moment when their power is to cease, when their exercise of it is to be reviewed, and when they must descend to the level from which they were raised; there forever to remain unless a faithful discharge of their trust shall have established their title to a renewal of it.
I will add, as a fifth circumstance in the situation of the House of Representatives, restraining them from oppressive measures, that they can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.
This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together.
It creates between them that communion of interests and sympathy of sentiments, of which few governments have furnished examples; but without which every government degenerates into tyranny.
If it be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society?
I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America, a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.
If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate any thing but liberty.
Such will be the relation between the House of Representatives and their constituents.
Duty, gratitude, interest, ambition itself, are the chords by which they will be bound to fidelity and sympathy with the great mass of the people.
It is possible that these may all be insufficient to control the caprice and wickedness of man.
end quotes
Two hundred thirty-three years later in 2021, we can definitely say that yes, that was all insufficient to control the caprice and wickedness of Nancy Pelosi.
Welcome to the oligarchy!