It's About Time...

What's fair? If you're working one or more jobs, just to be able to pay your monthly bills, I'd like you to ask yourself: is it fair to sell the best parts of the day and the best years of your life for a price, a wage that's many times less than the amount of profits you produce? If you do think that's fair, this little rant is for you.

This is for you because it's not fair. Far from it. If there's any lesson to be learnt from the whole Gamestop affair, it's that "fairness" isn't part of the system that literally rules our every day life. As soon as everyday people used the same tools and tactics, trading on stock markets as have been used by billionaires since their conception, and for once managed to make significant profits, said billionaires didn't wait one second to use their leverage and power to make it stop. The affair was a micro-version of the crash of 2007 / 2008. Back then the economy was trashed by the eternal and mega-sized greed of those billionaires. We all suffered, millions lost their jobs and houses. But did any of those responsible get arrested? Did any of them do any time in jail? Of course not. Instead they got bailed out with our tax dollars and tax euros. It was exactly what capitalists always do; privatize the profits and socialize the losses. And after millions lost their houses the rich doubled down by buying the empty homes for pennies on the dollar. And as soon as the table was turned, just once, when profits were socialized and losses privatized through public "manipulation" of GameStop's stock price, the billionaires cried foul.

In capitalism, and yes, this is capitalism, the flow of wealth is in one direction only: from the poor to the rich. And this flow starts with your job or jobs. Capitalism is a system of production in which the means of production are in private hands. You, as a worker, are paid a wage that's far less than the amount you produce for your boss or the owners of the stock of the corporation you work for. The profit motive and the system's need for eternal growth dictate that these owners pay you a wage that's as low as they can get away with. They pay 10 dollars in wages, 5 dollars to maintain the workplace, you produce 30 dollars and they pocket the 15 dollars difference. That's how millions and billions of dollars are made by just one person: by exploiting the time, the labor of workers like you and me. A single person can't produce millions of dollars worth of tangible goods or services; that's why a Maximum Wage isn't a bad idea at all if we want to hang on to this fundamentally unfair system.

What happens next is that these billionaires, who already own every house, car, boat and private jet they can wish for, give their spare millions to a hedge fund or capital manager to let that money "work" for them. They already didn't produce anything, that's our job, and now they let professional stock traders multiply their millions into even more millions and billions without anything of worth being produced. It's insane that politicians, who they also own, keep bailing out and subsidizing those who already have everything, but need hearing after hearing before deciding to pay crumbs to "help" those who have nothing left. In spite of what you've heard from free market fundamentalists, capitalism can not exist without a government, even Adam Smith knew that. And capitalists can not be prevented from buying the government. Capitalism, its very nature, guarantees the downward spiral toward the oligarchy, the "crony capitalism" those free market fundamentalists hate so much; I wish they'd wake up to that simple truth because it's their belief system, their ill advised ideology that keeps this current mess alive. "If only the markets we truly free, we'd all have a fair shot," is what they believe. Only problem is; markets can't be free, unless you believe that humans can be traded and children can be put to work, and capitalism isn't the markets, it's the private ownership of the means of production and the consequent exploitation of labor.

This is the process by which the fruits of billions of man-hours of labor get concentrated in the hands of a few insatiable individuals. After the 2008 credit crisis, the pandemic, the GameStop affair it's about time we face the truth that capitalism is broken. It's just another iteration of all other socioeconomic system we've ever had. Democracy is just a ruse to make us believe we've got a say in who makes the rules, when in fact the rules are made by the ones who've always made the rules, only now they're not called Kings, Queens, Emperors, Dukes or Lords, but CEO's, CFO's, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and other billionaires. It's a small club, and we're not in it. And like it's said in the below linked video; these people are not your friends, they don't care about you at all, they live by their own rules, one of which is to never waste a good crisis, they capitalize on anything and everything. It's about time we stopped treating them like heroes or role models; it's about time we change this rotten system.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep safe, keep healthy!