The 1% and the 99%

I am getting worried about the Occupy Wall Street movement using the 99% and 1% thing as a momentum building symbol. The 1% is a pretty large slice of the population, in the USA it would be approximately three million people and comprise about 1.4 million households. Every 100th person you pass on the street or encounter daily is a part of the 1%. Most of this 1% are small business owners, professionals, small time real estate investors and quite a lot of average income workers who were frugal, smart and had the luck of not getting sick in their lifetimes, many are middle level bureaucrats in government and business. I myself am close to being in the 1% by the time I retire if I don't get some bad cancer or illness or loose my job. It really is not the 1%, or the income level of the 1% that is the problem. The problem is the 1/100 of 1%, perhaps the 1/10 of 1%, and certainly the 1/1000 of 1%. The richest 400 persons in our nation have more wealth then the 150 million. That has nothing to do with the 1%. This is concentration of wealth and power over the monetary economic system akin to Roman Emporers and beyond the wildest dreams of aristocrats of the old world order prior to the American and French Revolutions. The danger here is that we are drawn into a critique of the order that we wish to change to a better system, but we are in the oppressive system and of it, we still believe the hegemonic ulterior subconscious doctrines and pedagoguery of the order that we are striving to break out of. We think in terms of money and wealth and power in the very ways those who control all the levers and controls of the regime have set out for us. But we are decieved because all the social structures and the systems of the markets and our so called democracy are not what they are represented to be. We are fighting for justice within a system that represents itself as one thing while being in fact the opposite. This is what hegemony is all about, absolute power, and cognitive dissonance. No matter how hard you try using the tools of the oppressor you end up oppressed. And this system has been in operation since the very start. There was no great society and no wonderful world of the USA after WW2 and no light of the world in America after the 1776 revolution. The revolutionaries of 1776 were not about changing the rules of the game they were about taking the power position from the King of England and the Church and consolidating that power in the freedom and the liberty of the new American Aristocracy. This Aristocracy discovered the magic of "democracy" and the "free market" and that if you can get the general public to believe in the myth of and the illusions that they are free and that they elect their leaders who then govern while the real power is held by the very few out of sight and out of mind then the problems that arise out of the troubles of the true rulers waging wars both physically and economically can be blamed on the peoples representatives and ultimately on the people themselves. This is a far superior mechanism of oppression then feudalism or outright slavery or Monarchy as the people historically rise up and make demands of or kill off the ruling class when it is clearly identified. So identifying the 1% as the problem sets up a perfect foil for the real ruling class. Not the least of is that you are stuck arguing about income disparities and statistics and how unfair it is that someone has a few million in assetts or earns 300-500,000 a year, rather than focusing on the fact that now in this "Book keeping" capitalism if you pay attention to the folks at the International Bussiness Daily or the Economist, now just to get by one needs to be a millionaire. Inflation and growth along with the decrease in the price of most things now mean that a million dollars is crumbs. Really the 1% are the middle class now. The 1/10 of 1% are the rich and the 1/100 to 1/1000 % are the ruling aristocrats. So we are running around bemoaning the fact that 1.4 million americans are actually having middle class lives while the other 99% don't . So, how could a system be devised so that the mechanisms of human transaction and services end up making us all the 1%? And why in hell would anyone believe that Warren Buffet or Bill Gates is really worth 50,000 millionaires??? I mean come on. Are we insane? Because they were really clever and new how to manipulate stocks and bonds and the numbers piled up on the books? They worked 50 thousand times harder and longer than the average millionaire? So we have to say to the capitalist and the free market libertarian. I do not believe you you are a liar. Back to the 1%. IN a ideal economy, perhaps a democratic economy, the average person would in fact be worth a few million dollars. Why not? You likely think this absurd because you are in the realm of the myth that there is a great shortage of everything. But there is no shortage of anything in this world only structures that destroy the abundance and cut off the efficient and sustainable production of the goods and services that are really needed for humans and the world to thrive and the substitution of addictive consumerism to useless junk and the societies resources directed to war and death and destruction of the environment. The war economy sucks up hundreds of millions of lifetimes of productive enterprise and turns it into waste and destruction around the globe destroying the capacities and freedom of other nations, the consumer culture of having larger houses and filling them with cheap knock off crap extracted from the environment at huge unaccounted for expense bankrupts the present and destroys the future, the huge manipulation of toxic chemicals and pharmaceuticals to cure the sickness induced by industrial exploitation of the world and its people is a gigantic waste of more human capacity, and finally the isane structures of debt and taxation reap most of what the poor hypnotized confused people have left over and force them into slavery in the system of oppression and destruction of the wealth of the world. We are working hard for our slave masters and producing a huge negative production and amassing a huge real debt of destruction of the world that could easily support us all in abundant sustainable wealth and happiness by not being consumers and not being at war with all the people of the world and by cooperating with natural processes and by following real integrated science towards perpetual changing evolving economics and interaction forever. We could be getting richer, healthier, happier, and have all that we need and more and have a shrinking economy in the terms of the current paradigms of free markets and growth. Because we do not have free markets and we do not have growth. We have a system that twists everything around to maximize the concentration of wealth in an numerical accounting system, fiendishly rationalized as just and scientific because after all we all know that mathematics is scientifically the truth, and then uses structures that devalue and avoid accounting for the majority of all real costs and denies the real value and compensation of the people who do all the work. The price is theoretically set by the free market but in reality the price is denied, the debt is a manufactured lie and the damages done are not recognized nor allowed to be accounted for. All accounting is regulated and ruled over by those who have accumulated masses of symbolic transaction rights through bizzare legal mechanisms and conventions of formality all invented and made up by the very segment of the population who benfit from this. All the while the entire over arching monetary and debt system is kept up and delivered as some given scientific fact of indisputable and concrete absolute fact of existence that only mad persons and lunatics would ever even bring up for discussion. Back that 1%. If one takes the position that the ruling class is in fact the most oppressed class one can open up to the possibility that they can be freed. Take the position of an alien cultural anthropologist looking at the human race on planet earth. Who is the most brainwashed? Who is the most comfortable person at this table? Who lives in the perfect utopian world right now. And why would this person want to change anything? Again likely the 1 million of that 1% are not in the utopian world, they can still fall, they can still get taken down. It is nice to be worth 10 million but really, one law suit, one bout with cancer, one bad business decision and things can get reversed. It's when your worth 100 million, now your pretty damn secure, loose 90 million and you can still shuck a million over to your lawyer lobbyists and get back up and going with some political favors or hire a secret service company to get even with whoever it was who cut you down. If your worth a billion or more your in what we are still thinking about millionaires as, rich, millionaires are not rich they are well off, Billionaires are rich, too rich. So if you are a billionaire why would you want to change anything? After all you don't get blamed for your poor choices and when you loose 50% you are still a billionaire. The congress gets blamed and the president gets blamed, and the 1% gets blamed, your are just a nice guy who made the American dream.