Quote:
Originally Posted by rice_classic
All of our core expenditures (housing/education/health/childcare) over the last 60 years have increased exponentially while wages have remained flat even as productivity has increased several fold. If wages increased to match productivity over that time period the economic story of today would be vastly different for most folks.
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This is totally the crux of the issue.
During this same period corporate profits and executive salaries have absolutely soared. All the while, the average worker, their per capita debt load skyrocketed. We're also offered increasingly lower quality goods. Easy to see where all the money has gone and the debt it has been replaced with. Just so long as we all had the ability to buy (consume) even cheaply made stuff with debt (credit, mortgages, auto loans) nobody cared that all the wealth was being concentrated amongst a handful of people.
We were lulled to sleep as the term "citizen" was being replaced by the term "consumer". We allowed ourselves to be divided on cultural, dogmatic, and ethnic lines while the issue that mattered most (economics) were usurped & entangled. Corporations that think they have an iron grip now that they wield the hammer of Citizens United, media consolidation, mass surveillance, and "the new Jim Crow" are their tools. We still have the weight of the masses. We only must act. So many speak like "the government" is it's own entity comprised of tiny dictators. Truth is, the government is whatever we allow it to be. It is us, and if it gets to the point where it represents only a small percentage of us (say 1%), we have to step up, with the power of will, conviction and law and force it back into representing us. We can fix this mess.