Part 7 Avarice 51 to 53: The Meme

7) Avarice

[You shall not steal.]

{You shall not steal.}

51

Profit in society is achieved by feeding the Meme.  Reducing or mitigating the Meme equals penalty and poverty.  The Poor are most likely to rebel so religion is used as the major redress.  

The seventh commandment forbids theft.  As with killing and sex, there are exceptions.  Stealing ceases to be a violation of the commandment when the systematic civilities of corporations, financial institutions, governments or religions are extracting the assets.  

Tithing is not theft.  Taxation is not theft.  Price-gouging is not theft.  Profiteering from a pharmaceutical or a medical device or disparate health coverage is not theft.  Evicting a family from their home due to excessive finance charges in taxpayer-subsidized debt instruments which mitigate the free-market risk inside a bank’s profit-equation is not theft.  

Capitalism requires market controls to provide mutual assurance to encompass full costs into net profit.  The absence of these controls creates systematic disparities, which can appear as a merchant selling his goods in fair trade, but in reality is an unbalanced equation. 

We previously discussed environmental damage and healthcare, but let us speak in more basic terms.  Exploitation of the Poor that neuters the average-waged laborer from achieving self-sufficiency despite working full-time should be viewed as taking a portion of the expenses that should be inside a corporation or an industry’s income statement and placing it in the debt of the taxpayers.  Taxpayers are forced to pay increased housing, medical, food, and basic living subsidies to fill the gap when minimum-wage laws do not keep pace with inflation, employee benefits are treated like free market goods when they are not, and labor markets are kept increasingly desperate as the wealth of society becomes more and more consolidated in fewer humans.

The optimum system is a capitalist democracy with socialist controls over healthcare, renewable energy and utilities, transportation infrastructure, massive-level agriculture, public safety, education, courts, and public governance.  The reason these particular industries require socialist controls is because they are the easiest to exploit on a global or national stage because they are the most heavily subsidized by the public in any “free market” because they do not engage in what is often called free-trade.  This is a function of necessity and economy of scale for non-optional encumbrances of civilized society. 

Free trade is a microcosm pertaining primarily to retail goods with more easily determinable supply-demand price interactions where the free market succeeds.  When the price of corn and soy beans is so significantly influenced by tax subsidies and patents to serve corporate interests, the free market is broken.  When the National Institute of Health research capabilities and health insurance tax deductions serve corporate interests to dominate the price of a pill or a hospital bed, the free market is broken.  

When colleges create false demand for massive administrative costs that provide little education and garner trillions of dollars in profit to finance-companies and enlarge governments and schools, the free market is broken.  When the price of a barrel of oil is squeaked out by cartels and surrogate cartels in the form of multi-national energy corporations and those parties dominate the political process to repress renewable energy, the free-market is broken.  When we have no idea if our supply of weapons and safety is ever sufficient and corporations which sell us bombs own our senators, the free market is broken.  

To say the free market is broken is to say, the free market is ineffective at mitigating exploitable behavior by firms both private and governmental in the market without defined, enforceable, comprehensive rules.  These rules can either be global, national, or local.  One can see that the larger the firm, (i.e. Wal-Mart, BP, or the U.S. government) the more likely international rules will be vetoed, blocked, lobbied against successfully, or ignored.  The U.S. relationship with Israel can be seen in such ways, as Israel is a more like an elbow of America in terms of picking and choosing which rules to follow.  Smaller countries are generally not afforded such dexterity.  

Political Action Committees of industries and Super P.A.C.’s for candidates after overturning Citizen’s United bully democracy.  Lax campaign finance laws with the same cronies play puppeteer with P.A.C.’s like Move On.org and The Chamber.  The NRA, the Sierra Club, ExxonMobil PAC, Dominion Resources PAC, Goldman Sachs PAC, Citigroup, Inc. PAC, Tito PAC, Pfizer Inc. PAC, the AMA PAC, Ernst and Young, PAC, Tyson Foods PAC, Comcast Corporation PAC, McDonald’s Corporation PAC, K&L Gates PAC, Wal-Mart Stores PAC for Responsible Government, RJ Reynolds PAC, IBEW PAC, and you name it there is a political action committee for it.  This is the true U.S. legislative body of representatives with less than half a percent of the people driving ninety-nine percent of Congress.  Legislators spend half their time focused on this slice that funds their campaigns.  Play-ball fundraising equals access.  The root of the Meme’s influence is money.

52

The outlawing of property ownership of a communist manifesto is impractical and faulty.  Humans need to be rewarded for the incentive to labor.  However systematic inequities due to market costs which should be internalized to an industry rather than externalized to the public heavily distort the excess rewards provided to the owners of industry, while simultaneously decreasing labor’s self-sufficiency.  The Meme distorts any dosage of socialism into a malignancy often to its benefit.  Communism as an overdose of socialism is particularly maligned as it is convenient for the Meme to deal in absolutes.

Let us evaluate why the U.S. protests communism and nationalist uprising.  Here is a simplified, insufficient, and quick playbook to highlight the major points for the United States domination of the global economy post WWII.  The rest of America’s industrialized rivals in the First World were crippled physically and fiscally.  The United States homeland was never damaged outside of Pearl Harbor and domestic capacity more than tripled.  America had the world at its mercy to set the stage for an empire. 

America had a disproportionately high level of wealth for a small percentage of global population.  The key issue of the empire was how to maintain, if not, expand this disparity.  The Meme flourishes in such petri dishes of control.  (We will focus on America, as the United States represents the greatest modern-protagonist of the Meme.)  The level of social order, patriotism, and systematic control in America’s post WWII action-plan is the most significant example of the Meme and rationalized exceptions to commandment seven in modern history. 

America deemphasized discussions of human rights, living standards and empowerment within any Third-World country or within its domestic Poor.  These groups represented America’s labor encampments.  Access to cheap labor and raw materials was and is paramount to maintaining the empire.  One can look at the expanse of Central and South America, Africa, and East and Central Asia as America’s foreign plantations to go along with its Alaska, Nebraska heartland and red-state South. 

America’s corporations would produce goods in these foreign farms and then sell them to an engineered consumerist culture in the first worlds of the United States, Western Europe, Australia, and Canada.  China and Russia remained relatively closed for much of the post-WWII timeframe because these countries were playing their own version of America’s playbook inside their regions. 

Post-cold-war China and Russia’s position has primarily changed only in the post-9/11/01 weakness in the United States and Western European economies.  This is due to the global residency of the major corporations profiting from the design of the empire abandoning the domestic superpowers in terms of taxes that have gone unpaid from offshore profits and the economies of intellectual property rights like computer systems, patents, and financing which do not need substantial brick and mortar footprints to harvest massive amounts of wealth.  The consumers of China and Russia, and to a degree Brazil and India, are now shifting inside the Meme to a quasi-citizenship status inside the consumer bin rather than the rival or labor bins. 

Germany and Japan became subordinate factories for the United States.  One would think the two major enemies who “lost” WWII would be left at the bottom of the economic pile, but the opposite is true. 

Since America was and is the default military for these countries deemed unworthy of holding a military by the Meme, Germany and Japan were allowed to become middle-men for the United States Empire as long as America could have military bases in their countries and each posed little military threat.  The Third World would supply the resources to rebuild Europe and Japan with the United States corporations harvesting profit.  This dynamic is a major reason why each country is a step above its region’s peers economically today. 

America in the post-WWII landscape became obsessed with access to these cheap bastions of labor and raw materials.  This is why the Vietnam War happened.  The Meme, to maintain the empire’s control, had to thwart the idea that a government has a responsibility to its citizens’ direct welfare, which if initiated increases the cost of labor and reduces the profit equation of those exploiting labor and the empire’s crucial disparity ratio.  Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were to oust the French oligarchy for nationalism.  The dominoes would fall, pushing out foreign access to profitable resources.

The Meme could not tolerate insubordination to submit to the Western master’s whip.  If Vietnam went communist and carried out the true threat, which was the equivalent of a labor strike at a factory, then the notion of uprising could spread to the region and then create a Red globe.  The Meme and the empire are very much concerned with such chaos; the death of humans in a war, not so much. 

53

This correlates with the American Civil War.  The Meme understands that its power is tied to access to exploitable cheap labor.  The American Civil War was not about the morals of racism; it was about the centrality of economic power under the Meme being located in Washington D.C. versus Atlanta, New Orleans, or Charleston and how dangerous the South’s asset of Poor-labor was to the North.  

The Meme uses slogans, compulsory military service, marketing campaigns, and all manners of patriotism from the glorification of soldiers with medals who are later left to interstate underpasses, wheelchairs, body-bags, or suicide notes to the unending economy of funding safe is never safe-enough inside the behemoth military-industrial complex and the U.S. defense budget.  Enemies are labeled terrorists and evil.  Internet posts with a picture and story about a six-year old girl holding a flag retelling how her soldier-father could not make it to daddy-comes-to-school day because he is in heaven mirror the rationalization of every country believing god (righteousness) is on their side in war. 

A byproduct of the Poor being systematically funneled to remain isolated in poverty, infighting, and ignorance is the cultivation of soldiers.  The Meme needs bodies to fuel war.  This is even more paramount with the elimination of the U.S. public-draft after Vietnam.  Economic desperation and Southern culture have served as replacements for mandated service.

The red-state American South can be seen as a breeding ground for the Meme’s purposes in this regard.  Fundamentalist Christianity, red-white-and-blue flag appeal, good-ole-boys like my daddy, pick-up trucks, hunting-culture, battle-reenactments, mud-riding, and the racism fueling the economic cascade of the Civil War aid the Meme’s recruiting.  This is paired with the historical anti-big government Confederacy-rebel culture. 

One would think the South would be less supportive of the National military.  Instead the never-achieved Confederate-victory is tied to Southern culture’s higher per capita military participation inside the Meme.  “I am a Southern boy.  I’m tougher than a Yankee.  Look how great we are.  We’re real Americans!  Look at how many flags I have on my house, my truck, my t-shirt.  I have both.” 

This comes from an inferiority complex in the South to the North.  In part this is the result of Caucasian-guilt over slavery, which cannot be explicitly expressed inside the Meme.  To vent this sentiment it comes out in a distorted mirror.  It appears as a pride compensating mechanism in the superego of compartments of the culture to be able to articulate the segmentation between slavery as an economic tool of the Nation and not just the South compared to the collective participation of the North in the reprehensible moral volition of the Nation in choosing to use slavery for the Meme.  The Meme understands this and manipulates the decision trees of the South accordingly. 

The North and West are in return more “liberal” in general related to the commensurate Caucasian guilt.  Both sides understand that the Civil War was about economics and not morality.  The Meme however would prefer we speak in rhetoric rather than the empirical ration for our volition.  Our inability to label racism as secondary to economic exploitation, led to the second-class citizen status of racial minorities after Plessey versus Ferguson and the seventy or so years of disparately-funded segregated systems that followed to the Civil Rights Act of the 1964 and the slow progress still trickling today. 

The Meme represses human ability to understand, eliminate, and acknowledge racism and racism’s role in economics.  This correlates with how Western corporations treat the Third-World and how “illegal” immigrants are treated in California farms and working in the industries like construction, hotel house cleaning, and restaurant kitchens.  These modern iterations of economic-exploitation in the Meme are the same as the Civil War, only the exploitation is done collectively by the Nation.  Therefore there is less domestic fighting as the profits go to corporations who battle on Wall Street rather than at Gettysburg.