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For thousands of years, the inhabitants of North America were people who responsibly husbanded the land’s resources. They could have lived well for hundreds of thousands of generations more, until the sun burned out.
But they were displaced by less-adept people, who had largely stripped their homelands of trees, wildlife, soil fertility. These new-comers only became comfortable here after they cleared the land and built European-style cities that did nothing to feed the people, but which were designed for European-style exploitive economies.
It was the generous supply of exploitable resources here that allowed the new Americans to prosper. Where else in the world was iron ore so plentiful that we could leave incredible tonnages of steel lying around as railroad tracks, rusting and unguarded because steel was so cheap? Where else in the world could you find so many millions of acres of rich top soil, six feet thick, with only grass to clear to grow bumper crops? With all this wealth of resources, how could Americans ever not prosper?
Some argue that it was the ingenuity of Americans that let us expand so quickly. Or the hard work. Or the moral superiority of Americans. But which group of immigrants brought this ingenuity? The Dutch? Germans? English? Was the hard work that of the black slaves? The Chinese who were brought here to build the railroads? Was the moral superiority a mark of the Italian immigrants? The Irish? Or did all these virtues spring from the soil itself and imbue the new Americans with a special grace?
No, it was the wealth of resources that allowed our growth, as well as a carried-over lack of wisdom in using them. Even people without much can live like kings, for a short while, if they spend like there’s no tomorrow. The native Americans did not spend resources profligately, and the invaders used this as a rationale for taking the land from them! But we spent freely, so how could we not prosper?
Yet millions of Americans lived hand-to-mouth for the whole of the Great Depression. Even though we had, back then, vast industries, the Robber Barons had so extracted the money from the monetary system, through monopolies, suppression of workers’ wages, and stock market speculation, that the hollowed-out economy simply collapsed. Even the Robber Barons’ money-making factories couldn’t function. But that didn’t matter; the oligarchs were set for life. Tough that the cast-off peons had to eat cake.
The Depression would have resumed after WWII, had Keynesian economic reforms not been put into place. Labor unions were encouraged, to help build a secure middle class. This middle class then had the money to buy goods, which supported industrial vitality. Though the wealthy were taxed at 91%, the economic boom made lots of money for them.
But so many years of war in Vietnam drained the economy, as wars do. The best-off people were the arms dealers, and the uncertainty of war materials industries (occasionally we’re not at war) resulted in huge government subsidies to these industries. It was clear that the way to make money when the economy is drained is to be the ones doing the draining. So, during the 1970s, Keynesian economic reforms were thrown out through the influence of the new Robber Barons. Capital was freed to flee the country, factories and jobs went elsewhere, yet taxpayers here still subsidized these corporations, and every conceivable anti-public good/pro-greed piece of legislation found its way into law. Even though Nixon started this process, he actually proposed a negative income tax, in which people below a set income level received money from the IRS. Today, even the farthest left politician doesn’t talk about a guaranteed minimum household income. This shows how drastically Washington has shifted, in just thirty years, to a national economic and social policy of “I got mine; screw everybody else!”
Once again the oligarchs have stored up enough wealth to carry them comfortably through a new world-wide economic collapse. Once more the rest of us will be the wan and beaten casualties of the war of greed versus humanity. We can only hope that this time, this time at last, our suffering will stir an outrage that will sweep the land, revolutionize once and for all time what constitutes acceptable treatment of human beings, acceptable behavior for any corporation or government. It may be too late for us, but we can hope future generations will benefit from the tragedy of our near future.
“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” –Native American saying.
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