Amnesiac Explains the World and Teaches...Essentially Nothing
I'm not an economist, or political analyst or even a potential voter. That said, I do think I have a few clues as to where these concerns stem from.
The problem with problems is that they rarely have ONE SOURCE. All of the qualities of this "rant" have thousands of smaller cause-and-effect events behind them. Money is one, culture another, religion as well, etc., etc. ONE problem behind all this is that these issues are maintained by political philosophies and cultural beliefs...so when anybody talks about them, the discussions revert to ideological bludgeoning rather than investigation...for reasons I'll get to at the end.
"Money is the root of all evil" as the saying goes. Unfortunately, this saying has led to the assumption that MONEY = EVIL, rather than money LEADING to evil; since human interaction still depends on trade and material realization to function, money is fine...its the REACTION to money that can cause trouble. To attack money itself is to deflect attention from our own flaws as a species, not merely a society...even the Communists are finding that out, even if they won't admit it.
Remember the late 1940s? American coporations sold the first of their industries to Japan to gain cooperation with thei closed market, and found out just how much money they could earn by bookkeeping rather than production; and here's where the modern trend started. After a good 40 years, business leaders figured out that by owning and selling American industries, the Japanese gained global customers, and therefore, they pocketed unheard of amounts of global money; the unjust conditions of underdeveloped areas helps facilitate that process with the time it saves. Enron was probably just one of the more careless ones. EZssentially, the trend is to make as much money as possible for yourself and then leave to luxury in other regions...just like Agent Smith said in The Matrix.
Most people stop there and start looking for who's responsible. But beneath that is a pathology that goes little observed. Where did this interest in money come from? America by ideology doesn't endorse greed; rather I think something else unintentionally has: Protestant Work Ethic.
Whether Christian or Hebrew or Islamic, any monotheistic philosophy encourages individuals to focus their attention to the Divine; the purpose is to maximize contact with the Divine to ensure purity. Experience teaches that work is useful for fulfilling theological principles and distracting from natural impulses, both of which are useful to religious institutions. The Protestant Work Ethic is a more extreme version of the whole "Idle hands are the devil's playground" belief, and I surmise that centuries of this practice have created a culture where individual value and worth are based on accomplishment...which can only be measured by cataloguing of material and monetary worth. And since anyone in the business world can tell you that ego is greater than or equal to money, the most likely (but not exclusive) conclusion is that CEOS, executives, etc. are constantly pushing to one-up each other by increasing their wealth and power beyond practical means; this has led to the suppression of important scientific inventions to protect the market of perishable materials like oil; exercises that can have devastating results. Why else would they attempt to collect more money than is possible to spend or even print?
In fact, what can you buy with hundreds of billions of dollars? You can only live in one house at a time/drive one car at a time, etc. so the money loses any REAL value other than its perceived value. VANITY it seems, not GREED is the greater (but not the only) culprit. After all, what have you done in your life to be perceived as cool or hip or worthy by your peers? Now up the ante by a hundred-fold.
And this afflicts the people who write to the thread; highly-educated people legally require greater salaries, so they are not hired at all; industries are shipped overseas to save the cost of union fees and standard salaries, as well as cost on premium materials. Thus, the job market suffers.
Illegal immigrants are a hot topic because they take jobs we don't for substantially less money in order to stave off deportation, making them the new slave labor. But one MAJOR fact is that their countries are so poorly maintained that America is one of the few options for progress open to them; if they could make their successes in their homelands they would...and any of us would do the same if America were in that position. Cultural structure in these countries determine the ease or difficulty that comes from exploiting certain groups and building the institutions that thrive on them.
On a last note, another detrimental factor is population. In America, a family is a sacred institution (both secularly and theologically) regarded with great importance...so much so that our cultural values endorse people to interact with the purpose of starting one reflexively (a.k.a. "dating"). But while having a family may be religiously acceptable and culturally profitable, it does contribute to a population that may exceed the nation's ability to feed, house or employ them: EX: a single mother of one produces X amounts of waste, consumes X amount of resources, and requires X amount of space; the culturally ideal married mother of 5 produces 5X more of that...5 college funds, 5 cars, 5 mouths to feed, etc. and if thousands of families do the same all over the country, those exponential figures will ultimately breed themselves out of jobs and homes...and we already know what poverty does to people psychologically. Contraception is a useful countermeasure, but it is culturally opposed, which complicates matters.
So what does this mean? It means that there are no easy answers because there are no singular problems...they are all interconnected with other various motives and various cultural and social programs...all of which are at odds because of the bureaucratic ideology that provides the foundation for them. My reasoning is that the problems have grown to the proportions they have is because they build upon the flaws in our domestic architecture, which is based on rigid, inflexible, or contested ideologies that we are reluctant to change for fear that doing so will invalidate everything we believe.
And if that happens, we fear that we will descend into chaos because we have eliminated out "established" models and have no completed ones to replace them. It hits too close to home, you might say, and our racial vanity is at too great a risk for comfort.
This all started when money lenders started issuing notes of credit instead of actual gold and silver, back in the middle ages after ursury was made legal. Merchants and so on didn't want to lug the precious metal around with them all the time, because it was awkward and tempting to raiders. So they give the money to someone who deals in money (at the time the Knights Templar were the foremost gits for this) and they'd get a certificate of credit in return. Eventually these pieces of paper were exchanged between people as if they were actual currency. Being the clever bastards they are, these money people decided to lend money they didn't actually have, by giving people worthless notes and then they'd think they were rich. The buggers were issuing notes ten times more than they had actual money in their vaults, so the papers were bloody worthless, yet they were still valued as hard currency and people were beggared because of the interest they had to pay. And this is exactly the same that goes on today, except that it's done with figures on a screen, instead of ink on parchment! A country like Brazil has the third highest rate of international infant malnutrition, and yet 80% of it's exports are food!!! And we frigging stand for this!!! The whole damn financial system is artificial and the reason it exists is because it suits thieving bastards who don't care if your kid goes to college, if your house gets reposessed or if 100,000 Brazillian children die of starvation. Even more fictional is the lie that the economy has to grow every year to keep us stable, when it seems pretty obvious to me that ever rising consumption is the quickest way to hell. What would be much better, is finding a level of economic consumption that puts enough wealth in circulation so that everyone who can be bothered to get off their arse and work for it can have a good life, and keeping it stable. This obsession with continuous growth is yet another distraction to take us away from what we truly need.
