Wrongfully Convicted
By Tim Pheotist
Do you feel like you’re living life on parole these days?

Expecting a fair living wage for services rendered. You expected to be paid for your labour – Guilty as charged!!

 

 

 

 

Happily, Tim has no direct experience of the parole system despite his, possibly, well disguised economist credentials. But let’s look at the link between the wrongfully accused and our current economic picture.

 

The link is found in the ‘blame game’ nature of economic reporting. Nevertheless we must be certain that we’re joining the dots to make an accurate picture. Otherwise, just like too many judges and juries, we end up convicting the wrong people – and the guilty go free!!

Scapegoats are the stuff of any crisis, of course, and this time a few miserable captains of industry have found themselves in the stocks – and rightly so.

But now that the axe has dropped on a few princely necks we’re told not to expect to live happily ever after. Decades of misery await – and it’s all our fault after all. We were greedy!! We were paid too much!!

 

Yes – the cause of our misery is our personal greed in seeking to be paid a living wage. Yes, it’s true – the love of money is the root of all evil.

Now that the straw has almost soaked up the blood under the block we’re hearing, daily, the message that because this must never happen again we’ve got to change our ways.

What is the new way forward? Lowered expectations and that means -  don’t expect to be paid for your labour any more. No more wages. No more salaries. No more benefits – for the rest of your working life. And the lives of your children.

 

I kid you not. Look again at how things work in a perfect capitalist system. The perfect model is to extract maximum profit from the control of land and labour. Perfectly, if land and labour is available at no cost, a perfect capital grouping is formed.

 

Often we call these groupings, ‘Nation States’.

 

But the groupings are never large enough so, of course, the next move is to obtain the next guy’s grouping. It’s war – again!!
What’s modern about today’s problem is that there are fewer groupings to attack and obtain – it’s all gone global.

 

Capital groupings are interdependent as never before. Your land is my land.

 

All that’s left to exploit is labour.

 

The exploitation of labour requires a PR message of proctological execution. We all have to be persuaded that we deserve nothing for our work and effort. Our time on this planet is of no value.
A difficult message to sell? Not if you’re probation-officer-in-chief delivering the same message, daily.

 

The message? – Greed and wages have reduced the profits that built the capital grouping upon which we all lived. If you want to live on, stop being greedy and stop expecting to be paid. That’s the simple message.

 

Don’t worry – the payroll lives on. But the $$s are just being loaned to you. You’ve got to pay it all back, with interest.

 

After the obligatory parliamentary/congressional drubbing of unlucky sacrificial lambs, our wise leaders, having wiped the blood from the axe that they’ve wielded on our behalf, tell us we must now look to improve things in the future.

 

Improve what for whom? What is meant is that the fruits of at least a generation of labour must be returned to the capital grouping from whence it came.

 

The capital grouping never liked paying wages in the first place. Every dollar was resented and clawed back in unreasonable profit.
Now, whatever was left is to be devalued and disappeared!! – Poof – just like magic!! Now you see your house – now you don’t!!
Of course this trick can only be played once in every generation. The smoke and mirrors reflect the trick for all to see but not until it’s too late.

 

The banking and finance ‘products’ were today’s ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’

 

So, what to do? How to fight? Try these tactics if you want to avoid 21st century slavery.

 

Don’t volunteer when the value of your labour will add dollars to the bank account of a ‘for profit’ individual or corporation.

 

Don’t support unpaid interns providing services for ‘resume experience’. This reduces the value of your labour to zero.

 

Don’t provide labour to entities that use discriminatory pay scales based on gender.

 

Don’t utilize financial institutions that call chequing accounts ‘products’. You can see and touch a ‘product’. Retirement and investment accounts are not ‘products’ – can you see and touch them? Most of these banking ‘products’ were illusory – they were never there. Don’t make the same mistakes again.

 

Join a union. Support your union.

 

Be ready to withdraw your labour, however painful in the short term.

 

Understand labour solidarity is labour’s only answer to capital groupings.

 

The common man is again at war with ideas that will return us to times of slavery.

 

Too dramatic? Look at the streets of any major city lined with human beings who never received a fair share.

 

These people represent the product of a generation of capitalist greed.

 

To those who think the homeless and destitute were overpaid – let’s see you try to cheat the next generation!! We’ll recognize you this time round.