The Political Rebellion Gathers Momentum
by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
ZeroHedge.com
Sun, 11/18/2018
When was the last time a monopoly or quasi-monopoly was broken up? A generation ago, or was it two generations ago?
The Ruling Class that wants us to love our servitude incites us to seek divisions: between red and blue, left and right, progressive and conservative, and so on. The Ruling Class in the mainstream media, in Washington D.C. and in Silicon Valley are experts at manipulating language and terminology to divide and conquer.
But beneath the superficial red-blue divide they are hawking, a broad-based political rebellion against the Oligarchy and their Ruling Class nomenklatura is gathering momentum. People left, right and center are awakening to two painfully obvious realities:
1. the political-social-economic system no longer works for the bottom 95%
2. the system is intrinsically unfair–rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
The bottom 95% lack the political influence of the Oligarchy, and so their only means of expressing their disapproval is at the ballot box, by rejecting the approved mainstream candidates in favor of candidates who might move the needle in a rigged system.
What are the core economic issues that people are trying to solve at the ballot box?
1. The systemic lack of fairness: the growing sense that opportunities are not being distributed as widely or fairly as they once were; ruling elites now have advantages the “rest of us” don’t.
This advantage is very basic: capital has accrued most of the gains of the past decade’s growth and asset appreciation, labor’s share of the GDP continues to slide.
Much of the wealth is controlled by corporate-state cartels operating rentier skims: prices rise while quality and quantity of goods and services remains the same or decline. This is more akin to extortion than a free-market competitive market.
The pathway to middle-class security that was viewed as a birthright no longer works: go to college, get a secure job, buy a house, etc. A university diploma now saddles students with the equivalent of a mortgage in many cases, while housing in strong job markets has soared out of reach of all but the top 5%.
The Rest…HERE
