All through history, there have always been two types of people: rulers and peasants.
The ruling class is much, much smaller than the peasant class.
Almost all people on Earth are poor peasants, like you and me. We are the worker bees. The little pawns on the chess board of life. The expendables.
Only a select few belong to the ultra rich ruling class. That’s why they’re called the one percent. The elite. They’re a small little club.
They all know each other and hang out together at exclusive galas, luxury resorts on private islands, golf tournaments at country clubs, or yacht parties in Saint-Tropez.
You’re not part of that elite club of the ultra rich, and you never will be.
You’re working class. You work for a living. They don’t. That’s why they’re not working class. In their eyes, you’re nothing more than a worker bee. An ant. A servant.
Chances are, you’re literally working in the service industry. Which is, let’s face it, a polite way of saying you’re a servant.
The ultra rich are not servers. They spend their entire lives being served by peasants like you. To them, your only reason to exist is to serve their needs. Your life only has meaning as long as your existence benefits them.
They don’t care if you’re overworked or underpaid. They don’t care if pollution gives you cancer and you have no health insurance. They don’t care that you can’t afford to pay your bills and your meds. They don’t care that you’re a homeless vet with PTSD.
Your quality of life is meaningless. Because your life is meaningless, once you’re no longer useful to them.
Once they have sucked the life out of you, they throw your burned-out leftovers in the trash. You get fired and replaced by the next poor schmuck who will do your shitty job for even less money.
That’s what they call “raising productivity.” That’s when fewer and fewer people are employed and work harder and harder for less and less money.
Cheap slave labor means higher profits for the ruling class. That’s why your life is shit, while they get richer and richer. The gap between the small ruling class and the rest of us is now greater than it has been in a hundred years.
You know those old-timey Charles Dickens novels about poor peasant children begging for food? We’re headed right back to those days.
Income gap between rich and poor is biggest in a century
If you feel you’re falling behind in the income race, it’s not just your imagination. The wealth gap between the top 1% and the bottom 99% in the U.S. is as wide as it’s been in nearly 100 years, a new study finds.
This wealth gap that we see today is something that has really skyrocketed since about the 1980s and certainly in the past decade, decade and a half.
You know what happened in the 1980s? Reagan happened.
His policies, particularly “trickle down economics,” were all about making the rich richer, and the poor poorer, by taking money away from the poor masses and giving it to the one percent on top. And that’s exactly what happened.
“The tsunami of wealth didn’t trickle down. It surged upward”
The Rise of Homelessness in the 1980s
Why, in the early 1980s, did so many Americans find themselves homeless? Why did the accumulation of personal tragedies reach epidemic proportions at the same time across the nation?
Over three-quarters of the new jobs created during the 1980s were at minimum-wage levels. By 1983, over 15 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line, even though half of them lived in households where at least one person worked.
Nationwide, between 1982 and 1985, federal programs targeted to the poor were reduced by $57 billion. Because of adjustments to the eligibility requirements, over half the working families on the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC) were removed from the rolls.
Where did all that money go that the government saved by not helping poor people?
Straight into the pockets of a couple of very rich people.
There are countless government programs where rich people get free money. Free money for rich people is called subsidies, or corporate welfare.
Where Is The Outrage Over Corporate Welfare?
Three-quarters of all state economic development subsidies went to just 965 corporations since the beginning of the study in 1976. The Fortune 500 corporations alone accounted for more than 16,000 subsidy awards, worth $63 billion – mostly in the form of tax breaks.
Think about that. The largest, wealthiest, most powerful organizations in the world are on the public dole. Where is the outrage? Back when I was young, people went into a frenzy at the thought of some unemployed person using food stamps to buy liquor or cigarettes. Ronald Reagan famously campaigned against welfare queens. The right has always been obsessed with moochers. But Boeing receives $13 billion in government handouts and everyone yawns, when conservatives should be grabbing their pitchforks.
Fortune 100 companies received $399 billion in federal funding between the 2014 and 2017 fiscal years, according to a report from transparency organization OpenTheBooks.
The report found that in the four years measured, the top 10 companies on the Fortune 100 list received $338 billion from the federal government. Almost all of the money—$393 billion—was provided in contracts, but $3.2 billion in government grants was also given out. The report noted that the recipients of the federal funds spent significant amounts of money lobbying for their own interests.
Several recipients of the highest amounts of federal funding were in the defense or pharmaceutical industries. Lockheed Martin received almost $138 billion, and Boeing received over $82 billion. McKesson, a pharmaceutical company, received over $30.1 billion, and insurance company Humana received close to $13.8 billion.
The rich ruling class doesn’t like it when you mention that there is a rich ruling class that rules over us.
When you even just mention that fact, they immediately accuse you of class warfare, to shut you up and ridicule you.
They don’t want the truth to get out, so they want to make sure the other peasants won’t listen to what you have to say.
The funny thing is, there always has been a class war. It’s a war the rich have waged against the poor since the beginning of time. And not knowing anything about this war puts you at a serious disadvantage.
“In a sense, you could say we’re involved in the class struggle.”
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
“The history of society is the history of class struggles.”
“The class-struggle is the main source of progress, and therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a necessary part”
Knowledge is power. When you don’t know what the hell is going on around you, or how all the puzzle pieces fit together, it puts you in a very weak position.
That’s why they like to keep you nice and stupid. The less you know, the better for them.
And that’s why the rich ruling class always wins the war they wage against the rest of us. That’s why they’re our rulers. That’s why they have all the money and power.
Ever since peasants worked themselves to death to build a pyramid for the Pharaoh, the rich ruling class has sucked the life out of the poor.
How has a tiny group of ultra rich assholes managed to control the unwashed masses all through history?
With violence and lies.
This article is part 1 of a 5 part series. I’ll post the second part soon.
The problem has become even worse under Trump and the Republicans. The lack of historical knowledge in the American population combined with the mass misinformation campaign by the right wing media is convincing the “working people” that if they “behave”, everything will be fine - it’s just a bunch of disgruntled liberals that are fighting the system. Pretty much going back to feudalism.
It’s us versus them
Always has been….
When do we break the chain?