Riders On The Storm ... Of Plunder - 2

Bush II Still Doesn't Get It

In the first post of this series, we marveled at how quickly just one presidency can bring down our economy.

If it is bad enough, it can take two presidencies to recover, if at all.

In other posts we reflected on the damage war does to an economy (e.g., see The Graphs Of The Age Of Plunder, and the more recent series, The Homeland: Big Brother Plutocracy).

In this post we will focus on the propaganda method Bernays fashioned for the American powers that be:

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.

The hoi polloi

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.

(Preying On The Poor). Essentially the 1% elite convince the 99% that they have their best interests at heart, even as they devise a system to devastate the 99% by plundering them.

It is a form of social kuru caused by the cannibalism of society, and is one of the signs of a dying empire.

The previous post in this series is here.

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The lyrics to the following song are here.

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