Message from Charles Aulds

Late stage capitalism is failing the USA

Most of my life was spent living a lie, and I lived my life for that lie. A lie that I bought into, lock, stock and barrel, during the 80's and 90's, when I was working 70+ hours a week (which I did for at least 20 years). 

I graduated from university in 1982, the Reagan years, and I was a true believer in "Reaganomics," and the "trickle-down" theory, in which wealth is diverted to the already wealthy who will use it to create new production facilities, creating new jobs. They would "invest" that windfall income, alright ... just not in the U.S. of A. That's supply-side economics and, in theory, I believe, it works well ... the notion that all of us, collectively, each of us acting solely in our own self-interest, create a "rising tide that lifts all boats." I was almost religious in that belief during the Eighties and Nineties. Greed is good. I, like so many other Americans during those years, abandoned the notion that "we are all in this together" and adopted the "every man for himself, and you are on your own" way of thinking: "You have not, because you strive not."

Like the corporations and their leaders and their servants in government; I had no empathy for others. 

I have changed; and I think the American economic system will change ... not because people discover empathy, but because "Reaganomics" has failed. It is a demonstrated failure.

And young people (not just in America) are beginning to get a sense of the reality: they are being ruthlessly exploited in an ever-increasingly socially stratified (feudalistic) society.

We're about to see what they do with that awareness. We fucked things up; now it's their turn.

Our financial system was taken hostage and looted by bankers, brokers, and speculators who told us that the old means of making capital by producing and manufacturing were outdated. They assured us money could be made out of money. They insisted that financial markets could be self-regulating. Like all financial markets throughout history that have thrown off oversight and regulation, ours has collapsed. Speculators in the seventeenth century were hanged. Today they receive billions in taxpayer dollars and huge bonuses.

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Excerpt from: Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion (Pub. 2010)

America's wealth is systematically being transferred from the lower and middle classes into the pockets of the rich. That is not by accident. And it is not a sustainable future for a nation.

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Charles