The Freeloaders Are at the Top

One of the false narratives in our politics is the one about free stuff, often also referred to as “entitlements.” Let’s correct the propagated myth right here and now:

It’s the billionaires who get the free stuff! Most of it! Loads of it! That’s the very definition of being rich. The rest of us have to work for our money while the billionaires get their money for free, milking us for it in a whole bunch of ways. 

They start by skimming money off our earned incomes by taking it out of our paychecks and job benefits when they don’t pay us the full amount our work is worth. That’s the traditional capitalist way of the rich to line their pockets: the difference between what we workers produce and what management takes from it for itself and the billionaire “owners” of our places of work (which we built for them).

The New Deal reduced this theft to a much more tolerable level in the U.S., thus giving us the American Golden Age. But, as time went by, the rich sitting in command over our economy cut or completely eliminated pensions and other things like healthcare benefits and overpay, in order to line their pockets even more. And they are still doing this year after year, making our situation worse as the years go by. Additionally, they have been displacing us from our jobs with machines or cheaper workers in poor countries overseas, so they no longer have to share any company incomes whatsoever with us in the form of wages or benefits, even though it was our work which gave them the money with which to move factories or buy industrial machinery and robots in the first place. They then bribe politicians to get sweetheart deals, corporate subsidies, and bail-outs from the government reassigning our tax dollars to themselves.

They furthermore buy publicly built infrastructure for pennies on the dollar to then charge us tolls and fees. Then they further re-arrange things in government for raiding, cutting, or privatizing our Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, and what not, thereby to transfer ever more wealth to themselves (by redirecting government spending into their pockets either in the form of tax breaks for the rich and their corporations or by outsourcing and privatization of formerly public services). Additionally, they make our government borrow money from them (in substitution of the taxes they are no longer paying) at interests we working people must pay for with our taxes, even though our government is the issuer of the money it borrows from these banks and then gives them for free.

When the robber billionaires are done making us penniless by cutting our wages and job benefits and diverting our taxes and government spending into their pockets, they then come for us with mortgages, student loans, car loans, and other loans and rents, banking fees, penalties, and insurance premiums; and they make sure we cannot ever get out from under their yoke, not even through the process of bankruptcy which was historically invented to save people from such debt slavery and keep the money lenders in check. Thus they now keep us in bondage until we die. Their greed knows no end — but sadly our livelihoods do! If these schemes continue, they will “own” absolutely EVERYTHING in the end, E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G, leaving us with nothing to live on.

When America’s ancestral settlers fled the feudal system of Europe at a time when almost the entire human economy revolved around agriculture and the European aristocrats “owned” all the arable lands using them as the means by which to hold our European ancestors in bondage as their serfs – not much different from slaves – they did so to own their own lands and be their own bosses, thus achieving a life in liberty. How many of us still have those lands? The new American aristocrats gradually drove our ancestors off their lands using market bullying techniques and especially the agricultural revolution. As the dispossessed took refuge in the cities, they became industrial workers, now living in bondage as serfs to the new industrial aristocrats who “owned” all the factories. The system has continued to evolve, all to the benefit of the moneycrats and the dispossession and enslavement of the rest of us.

And after doing all this to us, the rich have the gall to make us feel feel guilty of our plight by calling themselves “makers” and us “takers,” even though it is us, through our work, who make everything and they, through their parasitism, who take, take, take. Many of them today are not even involved in production anymore but merely gamble with stocks, these being so-called assets that include our lands, apartments, workplaces, pensions, and mortgages.

They merrily blame us for the poverty they forced us into. And they use the terms “free stuff” and “entitlements” to shame us into never asking for a fairer wealth distribution, because that would be asking for unearned “entitlements” also known as “free stuff” — according to them and all those gullible folks who lap up this propaganda from the corporate media. Our parents or grandparents living in the Golden Age still understood the concept of shared prosperity and were proud of their country because of it. But now, after decades of corporate-controlled media propaganda and lying by corrupt politicians, the perception of reality that many of us have is standing on its head.

Anybody besides me smell a rat? Or a nest of rats at the top, that is? It’s the billionaires who get all the free stuff! They never work, and yet they are rich! When we working folks need help, or a fairer share of what we and our ancestors create and created, don’t accuse us of asking for “free stuff.”

For an obnoxious example of this attitude of our moneycrats, see also: Entitlement Happens Not at the Bottom but at the Top

Or, for an alternative future, revisit my Thanksgiving articles, such as this.

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