How Did Americans Become Poor?
Column by Glen Allport. Exclusive to STR
"If you can understand why a bathtub empties when the drain is
opened, you can understand why Americans are now as poor as church
mice."
Not long ago, we Americans were rich;
now we are poor. How did that happen?
Actually, Americans are worse than "poor" – Americans are
staggeringly indebted, in debt beyond anything that can ever be
repaid (other than with worthless, hyperinflated dollars) and thus
with a negative per-capita real net worth. Yet we are still
borrowing trillions of dollars every year; by itself, the
projected federal deficit for next year is over $1 trillion,
for the fifth year in a row (Bush's last year and all four of
Obama's). And the federal government's off-the-books debt
(mostly, unfunded liabilities for Medicare and other programs) is
$60 trillion to
$202 trillion, depending on how you
count and whose numbers you believe.
Really: How did the linked disasters of mass poverty,
staggering and rapidly growing debt, and imposition of a police
state befall the wealthy, can-do population of the strongest,
wealthiest, and most visibly free nation the world has ever known?
The answers – as explained in the short document below, provided by
an anonymous source – are simple. Indeed, if those in the
corporatist media were talking honestly about the reasons for our
downfall, nearly everyone would understand the situation. This isn't
brain surgery: If you can understand why a bathtub empties
when the drain is opened, you can understand why Americans are now
as poor as church mice and why tyranny has replaced freedom in this
country.
Of course, our wealth hasn't entirely disappeared; most has simply
been transferred from the people who created the wealth to a
smaller group that benefits financially, in one way or another, from
the use of government coercion against the rest of us. Below, a
short Lesson Plan Summary in how to do exactly that, leaked, as
mentioned, by an anonymous source.
– 1 –
Transferring the People's Wealth to the Elite
[Author of this excerpt is unknown]
First, arrange to take trillions of dollars away from those
who create the nation's wealth, and to do so year after
year. Only a government can do this, so that's the tool you have
to work with. In our example for this lesson – the United States –
the federal government was used to create the two major elements of
the plan; both were put in place, ready to drain the wealth from an
unsuspecting public, in 1913.
The first item was a nationwide income tax. The U.S.
Constitution forbade such a thing, so a constitutional amendment was
called for. The
Sixteenth Amendment was ratified
February 3, 1913. You'll want an income tax at a minimum, so plan
accordingly.
Next, add a central bank and fiat currency, because to
take ALL the wealth from a productive society, you need more
than just an income tax and a raft of other taxes: You need to
counterfeit that society's money on a massive scale, printing up
trillions of (in our case) dollars to fund those Important Plans
that citizens would otherwise be too cheap and too selfish to pay
for. Eventually the nation's currency will become worthless (ditto
the incomes and savings of the people), but that's a small price to
pay for transferring the nation's wealth to the Elite, who clearly
deserve and know best how to use this wealth. In our example, the
U.S. constitution (still!) requires each state to use
only gold or silver as legal tender –
can't very well counterfeit that! – but an end-run around
this requirement needed only to have the Federal Reserve begin
operation while gold and silver were still circulating as legal
money in the United States. When monetary inflation finally made the
situation untenable, our man Franklin "Internment Camp" Roosevelt
made possession of more than $100 in gold coin illegal, confiscated
the rest, and devalued the dollar from $20 per ounce of gold to
$35/oz, overnight. The rubes never knew what hit them! Later, the
silver was removed from lesser coinage. Somehow, the American people
forgot to protest all this.
Next, spend the stolen loot primarily on war and on hunting
down, prosecuting, and imprisoning peaceful people for drug use (or
sale) and for other non-crimes that have been criminalized by
Congress or by the stroke of a regulator's pen. This brings both a
standing army (and the trillions of dollars it spends equipping and
running itself; an excellent way for the Elite to pad their
coffers) and an expanding, ever-tightening web of regulations, laws,
secret policemen, prisons, and related actions and institutions ripe
for corruption – still more opportunity for those with
capital and political connections.
Don't forget to spend trillions of the people's dollars on a
coercive Ponzi-scheme retirement plan that is itself then looted
by Congress to pad the General Fund (until the incoming Social
Security taxes fall below the outgo, as happened recently; then the
Ponzi scheme becomes a drain on the General Fund – not a good
omen for Baby Boomers and those who follow). You'll need clever
schemes like this if you want to get every last scrap of wealth out
of a country.
Spend more trillions of the people's money on "poverty programs"
that have by now, in our example, kept several generations
poverty-stricken and dependent upon hand-outs from the State,
while as a side-effect reducing the level of honest charity due to
heavier tax-loads and to the perception that "government is taking
care of the problem." Of the several benefits this provides to the
Elite, the most important may be that – as Roman emperors knew so
well – providing bread and circuses to the masses means you can
count on the support of those receiving the bread and enjoying the
circuses. The popular libertarian (i.e.,
terrorist) adage on the subject is "He
who steals from Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support
of Paul."
But don't stop there! Get the government involved in
controlling everything from major industries to personal
behavior (of course, "controlling" would be bad PR, so be sure to
call it "regulating").
How does this work for the all-important Elite? Just ask those of us
in Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Big Medicine, Big Oil, Big Banking,
or any other regulated industry where prices keep going up, quality
and safety keep going down, and no matter how horrifying or illegal
the behavior of those involved, the money keeps pouring in – while
the rubes keep getting poorer. Bonus: You get to watch the rubes
clamoring for "more regulation" to solve the problem! (Try
not to laugh at this – at least not in public).
What about after you've looted the entire nation and taken
all its actual wealth? Even at this point, there are still
trillions of dollars to be taken from the rubes; don't leave
this money on the table! Simply have the bankrupt government
borrow trillions of dollars year after year (YOU won't be paying
it back, of course!) to keep the main scams going, and get the
central bank to print up so many trillions of new dollars (much of
this can be handed directly to bankers and other members of
the Elite) that people lose count, go numb, and turn back to their
televisions rather than think about what's actually happening. A
perfect example: The Federal Reserve recently created and loaned
about
$16 trillion in near-zero-interest,
"probably won't ever get repaid" money to its pals at big banks and
corporations worldwide – more than the annual GDP for the entire
United States! The citizen-rubes of the U.S. didn't HAVE that money
(to loan or to do anything else with), and they sure won't be
benefitting from the loans, but guess whose retirement funds and
savings accounts and paychecks are worth less and less every day
because the Elite keep printing up those trillions of shiny new
dollars (OK, mostly electronic account dollar-entries)?
– 2 –
But . . . Won't the People be Angry?
Of course they will! Who wants to lose their nice suburban
split-level home and have to spend the rest of their lives in a tent
city or living out of their car? Who wants to trade a high-paying
career (with benefits!) for panhandling on a corner near the local
Wal-Mart?
No one, that's who. So when you're planning to siphon off ALL
the wealth from a nation, you'd better also plan to protect yourself
from prosecution and from retribution from your victims.
Fortunately, with a little planning and finesse, you can get your
victims to pay for THIS along with everything else.
How? One word: "Terrorism."
Before we get to that, note that you'll already have the courts on
your side, and of course you'll literally OWN the major media so
THEY'LL be working for you. And you naturally would have long ago
arranged to control the major universities as well as the "public"
schools, so the rubes (and even their parents) will have been
getting a steady dose of pro-Elite propaganda from childhood on. But
all the propaganda in the world won't completely insulate you from
the angry Mob (and don't kid yourself: At bottom, that's what those
"citizens" are) when the Big Wealth Transfer is nearly complete and
it's time to move on to the next stage.
You could simply hire more private security, but then YOU
would be the one paying for it and besides: Private security might
not be enough. Given what you've done to an entire nation by this
point, in fact, private security would almost certainly be
inadequate.
The answer lies in that Standing Army created earlier and in those
bloated internal police forces, domestic spy agencies, and other
arms of government surveillance and control. Insist that
terrorists are everywhere (with a little
help from the FBI, your media should be
able to sell this to the entire country), trying to kill the
helpless citizens that you (or your proxy the government) claim to
be protecting and In Charge Of.
Presto! You've got both justification and, with a little work
by Congress, a legal framework for whatever you want to do to the
Mob in order to protect yourself from them. Strip-search little old
ladies at the airport? Sure! Have the NSA and hundreds of other
federal agencies, and organizations, not to mention
almost 2,000 private companies, spy on
every phone call and email? Go ahead: Who's going to stop you? And
don't forget to build and staff dozens of
internment camps to put troublemakers into when the crap really
hits the fan. Not that the government has the resources to house,
feed, and care for millions of detained Americans in such camps for
long, but . . . you'll think of SOMETHING to do about the problem.
After which, you won't need so many "security" goons. And for that,
again, you'll think of something.
That's it: You're done! When you've reached this point, you
are finished with the Big Wealth Transfer part of the program. To
continue this lesson plan, please purchase our Moving Control to
the Global Level package.
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