In 92 when Clinton was elected President, people think of it as the beginning of the end.
No my friends, it goes much further back than that. In 1980, the year before I graduated, my father was still making 20,000 dollars a year, enough to put us soundly in the middle class, although his decision to spend much of that putting his 5 children through Catholic Indoctrination ate much of that.
He deeply resented that my fresh out of High School eldest brother, living at home, was working for Detroit Diesel and out-earning him by far. He had started as a “chipper,” a sweeper, and within a couple years was on the line. He would make “production” in a few hours, then spend the rest of the time reading. 8 years older than me, he was my “book dealer” since I was 10. (We were all voracious readers) I was reading Heinlien’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” and “Future Shock” at 10.
By High School, he had made Electrician, and I was scoring his pot for him. By the time he moved out, his car cost more than my Dad’s house, and he and his girlfriend working also as an electrician at Wixom Ford, could barely scrape to buy an average house.
Suddenly my Father realized that their combined 80,000 dollars now bought less than his 20,000 did, then his lower one income ever could. These two could not POSSIBLY raise one child, let alone two on one income.
The slow boil of the frog had started.
My Shock Doctrine, my Future Shock starts then…. he only missed what Naomi filled in, the INTENT.
Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation” – future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also coined the term information overload.
By the time I entered the workforce, lying about my age to get a job waitressing, I was merely 14. Babysitting was no longer supporting the horse I had purchased with my own money, rent went up on his field, hay went up, sweet feed was astronomical.
Waitressing paid minimum wage then. Within a year, someone had sued, saying they paid all these taxes against our minimum wage, while the businessmen got all those lunches and dinners tax free. The result? We got paid 1/4 minimum wage, since that proved our tips brought us up to minimum wage. We paid taxes on FULL minimum wage, making $1.82 at the time, and had to “claim all our tips” and pay full taxes on them as well. DOUBLE taxation. They kept their tax free lunches, only now, we had to sing their receipts.
The slow boil of the frog was already on.
Unions had already been pegged as getting ahead of themselves, and in all truth the UAW did. Hell, Hoffa was already missing, and there was backlash about people being paid for lay-offs, getting almost full wages for being off. What they never mentioned in THAT info-campaign, is that they paid over a $100 weekly into subpay (IIRC) that was an “investment” account OWNED by the factory, from which they supplemented unemployment. Michigan unemployment had a cap that nowher near reached the mortgage payers, and they foresaw the collapse, and negotiated for another way to supplement it. They PAID for it.
By the time I entered the Corporate World, benefits were almost as important as the pay. Health insurance had skyrocketed.
They had already incorporated, even in my college, bar-bistro-chain days it being mandatory to be drug tested and lie-detected. I passed both easily, I’m not a liar, and just refrained while job searching. I never even had to use the “Golden Seal” and other things they test for now. The TV was rampant with stories of that one bus driver who crashed a bus high, and they were pushing HARD on the war on drugs… “Just say NO!!”
Iran/Contra was in full force, or over, and the damned paraquat got us all trying coke.
They had only just begun. There had to be a way to slowly turn the heat up, for Americans held huge amounts of assets in the Middle Class, and were well armed and far too Cowboyish in nature to be suddenly thrust into poverty, as worked in Chile in the 50’s.
Enter 401k’s. Yeah, they convinced many they were BETTER than retirements, had higher returns, and flooded the already bubbling dot com market with more instant cash. Greed is Good became mantra. So many thought it was their ticket to forever, but a few of us wary said NO. The stock market is not a real thing, and gambling is as easily gained as lost. But they pressed. We could not compete on a global level with all of the money spent on benefits… retirements and soon Health Care had to be privatized.
The boil just got hotter, and the propaganda fiercer.
Clinton was an aberration they didn’t expect, but they co-opted him easily enough. We were living in the falsely propped high market flooded by 401k dollars and internet sales. They sold him and us globalization without a shudder.
The easiest time to sell people anything is when they have a false sense of security, and boy howdy, that get rich quick dream had everyone clawing into the market with fervor.
It could not sustain.
Of course, it was time to take it out of all those private hands that so willingly put it at the mercy of the market, to take it back.
Enter GWB and 9/11.
You cannot jump out of the pot on boil when you’re under attack can you?
The long range plan was under way… Now, a war, an enemy to unite us. Gross expenditures with no oversight to move the assets into the hands of the designers.
Finally, after luring the populace into a false high market, to bring earnings back to where it was in my father’s times…. but!!! At todays prices.
The market collapse was not by accident. This is the long pork pull of planning, the ultimate design.
We WILL be impoverished, but we will think it by accident, exactly as planned, we will think it the fault of enemies and inevitable economic weirdness, and the fault of those we are at war with, and our own idiocy of overspending. Just as planned.
But it gets scarier, if you will bear with me a moment longer.
This attack, this war has lead many to believe that not only is it the fault of others that our monetary system failed, it has inured them into the very shredding of their rights… rights they think they are PROTECTING by GIVING UP to keep themselves from further monetary and physical harm.
The genius in that is supreme.
This media? The electronic age, the one that allows me to speak of this? It has been compromised. Not only by our enemies, by ourselves. They know that this media has over written theirs, the MSM, so there are now legions of paid bloggers, or formerly independent bloggers now on the payroll.
We all know that.
They let us know that.
But we ourselves, me included, add to that noise to signal ratio, each of us sure we have the message, that nothing gets truly through. I can think of at least three worth campaigns I have started that went nowhere.
The internet is not the “only place people have community anymore,” it can and may become exactly what divides us. Now, instead of opining about one writers words we opine about millions words…. and as such FIND division.
And here I am asking you to read me, and I am part of the problem. We are all more interested in what we write, and the reactions to it than the solutions, me included. We are at fault too.
Trippy.
This, watching Iran, and what has happened with Obama’s electronic victory (not unlike Kennedy’s TV victory… without comparing the men, just the media) has me convinceed we are doing it wrong.
This is a long plan. Theirs has been along plan and we are playing into it every day, even I, with these words which will do nothing.
We need to relook at ourselves.
We need to find a way to unite.
I am totally lost on how.
But I am wide awake and aware of what I am up against, I have been since I was 10.
/ Part One
