Automated and Amalgamated

"And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

-Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, May 28, 1816

“The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.”

-Albert Einstein

“It is the tendency of the social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme.”

-William Graham Sumner


We are witnessing the simultaneous amalgamation of capital across the globe and the automation of daily life of each person.  It is an evolution speeding its way into a revolution.  In the U.S., the politics have become wholly devoted to masking the amalgamation of wealth and power in a tiny elite.  The massive wealth disparity between the ultra rich and regular individuals has grown into a chasm.  This has been sustained up until now by the widely disseminated myth that one could reach the pinnacle of wealth; in essence, the two were interchangeable.  One could become the other.


But as the avenues upward have been detoured time and time again, reality begins to set in.  The opportunity to set up shop in the town square is gone, displaced by the big boxes, who cannot even pay its local workers enough to get by and leaving them seeking public assistance for health care, once again, on the backs of the taxpayer.  In effect, the government and taxpayers subsidize the big box stores.  But that's not all.  They also buy their goods from China and India, adding insult to injury in hiring non-Americans and supporting their economies, and sheltering profits offshore, out of the reach of American taxes.  The opportunity promised to immigrants for generations died in the shadow of Wal-Mart.  


Everything has become automated.  Want to open up a bank like George Bailey, American hero?  That is gone too.  It takes too much, and only the amalgamated capital can meet the regulatory burden.  There is no such thing as a bank startup.  It has been gone for decades.  Your only bet is to go to work as an automaton, a robot serving the little people that come to bank at their automated banking branch.


Amalgamated capital demands its corporate welfare.  The subsidy provided goes beyond even their failure to pay sufficient wages.  Even though they refuse to pay enough wages or benefits to keep their American employees off the public dole, they escape even having to pay their share of taxes to the public dole.  Regular Americans have to support their workers, and they support non-American workers.  All in all, amalgamated capital lives on the backs of Americans while enriching foreign workers and a very small tiny, tax-evading elite.


Welcome to the Monkey House.