Reaganomics & The Free Market End Game
As Reaganomics begins to take
effect, it becomes the straw the breaks the back of the U.S economy.
Beginning with
the depression and Word War II the U.S. economy had become essentially a war economy. The means of production
gravitated away from products and services oriented toward human use and needs
to the production of war materials. Incidentally, this also includes the
migration of wealth away from cultural arenas such as the arts, and human need
arenas such as health and education. The reason was obvious: the bureaucratic
environment of graft guaranteed that profits went far beyond even unreasonable
expectations. Inferior military products became the norm, manufactured only because
they occasionally needed to be proven effective, and since the military product
was susceptible to the constant changes in technology, the products could safely
be scrapped and reinvented on a constant basis.
American
resources, R & D, education and production were all oriented to this end.
When the economy flagged it became necessary to stimulate enemies, wars and
conflicts in order to manufacture the public consent necessary for more money
to be funneled into the military industrial complex.
By the 60's and the Vietnam war, America was just on the edge of losing its competitive edge in relation to the rest of the industrialized nations, who had recovered from the destruction that World War II had inflicted on their means of production. The Vietnam war was the longest in U.S. history and it broke the bank simply because America had failed to recognize its need to once again become competitive instead of complacent; it needed products and services that answered human needs not corporate profits, and because the actual fighting of war was no longer profitable. Ideally only the manufacturing of war machines is profitable. The actual fighting is expensive indeed, when it can no longer be fought in an informational vacuum. The technology and industry of war had become far more costly than the return in profits on the manufacturing of unused and unnecessary war materials.
War is not profitable. The threat of war, like the marketing of religious pipe dreams, is pure profit. Pure profit is holy grail of something-for-nothing economics, the basis of free market fundamentalism.
And so, the second major arena of Reaganomics became the pursuit of something-for-nothing economics in the form of the most effective organized theft institution yet to appears in the long saga of human folly: the wealth market. The stock market, money markets and all other instruments and means of brokering the manipulation of wealth do not produce wealth; they transfer wealth from the populace, primarily the middle class, into the coffers of an economic elite. This is neither productivity nor wealth; it is theft.
To this end the idea of trickle-down economics is periodically introduced. The propaganda claims that by transferring huge chunks of public and private wealth into the coffers of the wealthy elite, that R&D will occur, new jobs will be created and wealth will flow down to the industrious lower and middle classes. In reality the wealthy elite simply pocketed the money and shut down production.
When it became apparent the debt created by useless wars, the threat of war and economic theft systems was becoming too noticeable, the debt was cleared by means of burdening the public with credit card like debt to be passed on to future generations.
The debt was
passed on, but the means of producing wealth, jobs and education were
curtailed.
Already, by the
end of the Vietnam war the American economy was broke
and the means of producing wealth by producing useful human products had
seriously deteriorated. We had forgotten how to make a better automobile, how
to educate the people and how to maintain the economic infrastructure.
In the meantime
the global economy had become integrated. National economies no longer operated
within vacuums.
The last half of the 70s were spent trying to tax and spend our way
into economic recovery. It failed.
With Reagan and
Company, the economy took yet another radical turn into dementia. The economic
theory of "Free Market" was put forth. It was neither free nor a
market.
It was not free
in that it was a tightly controlled corporate monopoly of the market. What used
to be a market became a ranch of economic cattle. The entire philosophy of free
market fundamentalism was based on a pyramid scheme. The idea was to produce as
little as possible for as small a cost as feasible, and sell to a monopolized
market thoroughly insulated from all competition. The idea was to absorb wealth
at the top of the pyramid by plundering the base. The base in turn is to pass
it on to an ever increasing population, to a new and wider base. But the
possible number of bases are finite. Hence increasing
population is critical to free market schemes in order to have a new base of
poverty to pass the debt on to. When resources become finite and the base
becomes economically incapable of paying the debt, the next option is to pass
the debt on to future, unborn generations. The irony is that anti-abortion
fanatics who espouse the rights of the unborn are more than willing to not only
ignore the rights of the children of other nations, but are perfectly happy to
remove the economic rights of the future generations of their own unborn.
When passing the
buck to the top and the debt to the bottom reaches it limit, the solution is to
wipe out the debt by wiping our the base of the
pyramid, usually through war and or depressions.
By the early 80s
the resources were limited indeed relative to the consumption of the increased
population. The base was broke. Mere manufacture of military hardware no longer
sufficed to keep the economic fantasy afloat. Actual war was too costly so it
became necessary to replace war with the threat of war. To have implacable enemies
without the expense of war was what was needed. This dovetailed well with the
underlying principle of the service economy. This was an enhancement of the
root philosophy dating back to the 20's: that profit is greater when money is treated
as a commodity and manipulated in lieu of manufactured goods. We became a nations of brokers, real estate salesmen, snake oil
hustlers, insurance brokers, lawyers and government bureaucracies. The primary
definition of these industries is that they produce nothing,
they merely manipulate wealth as a commodity in and of itself.
The idea of an
actual free market will only work in the case of an economy consisting of
actual producers of humanly usable goods. However, most producers are not honest, they are oriented toward profit and not product. An
honest producer is concerned with his market, the best product at the lowest
price, and the welfare of its employees. Most corporate producers have morphed
into mere money manipulators; that is why automobile manufactures have recently
become credit card hustlers, and retailers have become banks.
Corporate piracy
is based on primitive concepts of cattle theft, power, profit, exclusion,
class, monopoly and wage slavery.
The underlying
agenda was simple: plunder the public wealth and bury it in the private
treasuries of an elite class. Such treasuries are defined by the inability of
governments or the public classes to retrieve the wealth. In fact government
was converted by Reagan from being for the people, by the people and of the
people, to for the wealthy by governmental police and of the international
corporate super-state.
"Trickle Down Economics" was the public relations program of
lies and disinformation that sold such ideas to the public. There was never any
intention of letting wealth trickle down to the lower classes of the pyramid
once it was safely squirreled away in the elite treasuries.
Deregulation was the critical legal necessity that allowed the corporate subculture to plunder the body politic. It was a license to steal. The Savings & Loan debacle cost the American economy well in excess of a trillion dollars. This wealth is irretrievably lost to netherworld of elite treasuries.
Deregulation was essentially a license for monopoly. This was termed “free” simply because is encouraged big fish to eat little fish. Competition no longer meant equal footing on a level playing field; competition became a feeding frenzy for corporate monopolies. Such monopolies and international corporate super-states did not restrain their predation to other businesses. The ultimate target was an overpriced labor force of lower and middle classes. Not satisfied with merely denying employment, the monopolies and corporate super-states determined to bleed the American population of all the wealth it possessed. This program also contained the attractive benefit of positive feedback; the rich got richer and as the poor got poorer they lost all political power to effect change.
For, hand in
glove with the programs of free market monopolization and theft,
went the political program of buying the government. From this point forward
American political power responds only to wealth.
Privatization is the idea that government should not provide services of any meaningful use to living human beings to its constituents. Apparently government should only collect massive taxes and spend them to the benefit of the ruling oligarchy. While the decline of the airline industry is an example of the destructive nature of deregulation, the privatization of the Post Office is an example of the fundamentally erroneous idea that government itself is some sort of business which, of necessity, must turn a profit. By privatizing the Post Office the Federal government was relieved of an expense and the Post Office, in turn, passed the cost on to the customer. Increased postal rates are another form of a tax hike. Also, they became another form of media control, meaning control over what information was allowed to flow to what consumers of information. The problem with the Post Office is that is too democratic, and that by dampening it’s effectiveness, it forces information to flow in more controllable and more profitable media such as television.
The third pillar
in the program of Reaganomics was the purchase, control and censorship of all
meaningful media in the
Government became the enforcement
and collection agency of corporate monopolies and the wealthy elite. Given a
license to steal, the insurance industries looted at will and their theft was
enforced by the government. Laws exist which state
that every citizen, under certain conditions such driving an automobile, must
purchase some product from a private provider or suffer punishment. That is
banditry pure and simple; a governmental extortion racket. If the state
mandates that citizens must, by law, purchase some product, then it is only
reasonable that the state becomes the provider of that product, and to provide
it at no profit. While enforced expense may be considered a tax, the enforced
appropriation of a citizen's wealth for the benefit of a private corporation
which does not have to account for its rate of profit and which is a completely
unregulated monopoly can only be considered to be extortion. At the very best,
it is taxation without representation. California Proposition 103 clearly announced
the end of democracy when that law was voted in by an irate citizenry and then
ignored by the insurance industry and the government alike.
Government in
general and the Congress in particular had already been purchased lock, stock
and barrel by the corporate world. We now had government by PACS, lobbies,
special interests and corporate interests. The body politic was in control of
nothing. Congressional members were out of control and for sale to the highest
bidder, which was the corporate super state.
In addition
Reagan personally and criminally enhanced the degradation of government by
creating non-traceable wealth with the illegal drug trade, then by selling
American arms to its ostensible enemy,
When Mr. Reagan
was in flagrant disregard of democracy and committing illegal and immoral acts,
the shameful fact is that he was not considered to be in conflict with the
"
The general goal
was to emasculate government by converting its function from that of protecting
the citizens and regulating the corporate world to protecting the corporate
world and regulating the citizens.
One means of
accomplishing this goal, besides the ownership of Congress and deregulation,
was to maintain the illegal status of the drug trade.
The "War on
Drugs" is the biggest snake oil hustle of this century. The primary reason
for the continued illegalization of cocaine is to employ two major industries
that produce nothing, do not feed, cloth, house or heal a single human being
and are, at best, dangerous parasites on the culture.
The two major
industries are the illegal drug trade and the opposing law industry comprised
of various types of police, lawyers, judges, prisons and other related systems
to fight the war on drugs. There is somewhere between 20 and 50 billion dollars
a year lost to the illegal consumption of drugs. There is another 20 to 50
billion a year lost fighting illegal drugs. In addition there is an indefinite
amount lost each year in the medical and economic costs of drug usage.
Conservatively, it costs the U.S. 50 billion dollars every year to keep cocaine
illegal. All for nothing, for a drug worth less than aspirin.
There are two
hidden agendas: the first is to keep clandestine operations such as the CIA
rolling in non-accountable dollars. The profits from the drug trade need never
darken CIA bank accounts or touch CIA fingers. It need merely be transferred
from CIA associated drug lords to CIA associated sub-contractors. Wherever
illegal clandestine operations need funding, or operations need execution,
money is made available by the drug industry. Like all American foreign policy,
all decisions, actions and spending are made in favor of corporate interests.
The second hidden agenda is to maintain a police state at the taxpayers expense and with the enthusiastic support of the taxpayer. The purpose of this police industry is not to control drug lords, but to control our own citizens.
The two separate
systems comprising the drug industry, the illegal providers and the legal
interdictions, are a perfect example of how conspiracies function in the modern
world. Effective conspiracies are never formalized, never negotiated nor agreed
upon; they are tacit; they are inferred. Each group or member party to the tacit
conspiracy simply assume that that their participation
in the tacit conspiracy are dependant on the existence of the other. As such, there
are well know rules and behaviors that each party
knows and expects about every other party. The Kremlin and the Pentagon
together make such a tacit conspiracy.
Reagan and company further
plundered the body politic by more sophisticated military swindles. SDI
elevated military theft to an art form. It could not possibly work. It could
never be used or tested, and if it was, no customer would be left to accost the
complaint department. It costs billions just to consider how to waste further trillions
on an entirely worthless product for an enemy that never existed in fact.
Another act of
piracy was the wholesale raiding of social spending: all forms of human needs
were plundered; education, health, art, roads, bridges and highways, welfare,
infant care, day care, and etc..
The gimmick was
to lower taxes. Mr. Reagan promised to lower taxes,
and federal "income" taxes he did. The Federal government then simply
ceased to fund local city and state programs. Every other form of local tax
increased dramatically. Social Security increased, but the primary strategy was
to cut funding from local expenditures such as education and health. The left the Social Security available as a slush fund for
unauthorized, clandestine, un-reportable or unpopular raiding. Consequently
local taxing institutions had no choice but to institute and raise local taxes
of all sorts; property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, city income taxes,
parking and traffic citations, garbage collection, museums, school lunches,
utilities and power, etc.. The other form of local taxation that was sharply
escalated was something called fees: legal documents, licenses of all sorts,
parking permits, smog checking and licensing, school expenses and etc.. Nearly all local services previously performed by the
government were now subject to fees or taxes. The net result was that Reagan
and Company could righteously claim to have lowered Federal income taxes, to
have ceased spending money on human needs, to have plundered billions into the
elite treasuries and to have drastically raised the net, sum total of taxes in
general. It was a master stroke of misdirection and piracy.
In conjunction
with such massive means of public theft was the ever increasing cost of living,
which merely reflected the rapid rise of corporate piracy that was permitted by
deregulation and the neutering of the watch-dog laws. The massive profit taking
for worthless products had to be paid for by someone and that someone was the
American citizen in terms of cost-of-living, taxation and outright theft, such
as in the S&Ls. There was also a constant need to prevent inflation of the
money supply in order to protect the global corporate interests. In order to
reduce the risk of inflation, the money supply was constantly withheld from the
public and given to the corporate world at the most favorable rates of
interest. This aided the corporate strangleholds over monopolies by preventing entrepreneurial
competition from the "little people."
The
Reagan and Company conspired to
achieve three main goals:
1: To plunder
the public wealth into an elite treasury.
2: To destroy
government as an effective democratic watch-dog mechanism to regulate corporate
buccaneering.
3: To create a
Reagan is the consummate Flim
Flam artist of the 20th Century. He was elected on the public need for change
on the basis of tax-lowering disinformation and a "Trust me"
charisma. In his second term in particular, he was not voted in for his
economic policies, but rather for his perceived foreign policy. He had no
particular mandate to steal the wealth of the
In regard to
foreign policy, Reagan only had one. He used credit-card economics to steal
wealth in the form of debt passed on to the American public and to the future
generations in order to fund ridiculous military programs such as SDI. He
simply outspent the
Mr. Bush was
merely Mrs. Reagan's cloned appendix and continued the policies and agendas of
the wealthy elite class without serious revision.
Mr. Clinton is
Mr. Reagan's partner. As another loyal employee of the
Michael Andrews
07 June 1995