Tag: serfs

The Rebellion of America’s New Underclass

Guest Post by Joel Kotkin

Serf’s up.

Like so many before them, our recent disorders have been rooted in issues of race. But in the longer run, the underlying causes of our growing civic breakdown go beyond the brutal police killing of George Floyd. Particularly in our core cities, our dysfunction is a result of our increasingly large, and increasingly multi-racial, class of neo-serfs.

Like its Medieval counterpart, today’s serf class consists of the permanently marginalized—like the peasants of feudal times, these people are unlikely to move to a higher station. This does not only apply to the residents of our ghettos and barrios. Many of our young people, white and otherwise, appear to have little or no hope of attaining the usual milestones of entry into the middle class—gaining a useful and marketable skill, starting a small business, or buying a home or other property.

Throughout much of the 20th century, this aspiration was very much alive as more and more people, including racial minorities and immigrants, entered the middle ranks. Now, in contrast, the doors are slamming shut for millions of Americans.

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The Status Quo Plan – Convince The American Public To Accept Serfdom

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Earlier today we came across a fantastic article published at Naked Capitalism by a writer known as Gaius Publius.

Yves Smith introduces the piece with the following poignant passage:

Let us not forget that the “things are going to get worse for you” story also conveniently diverts attention from the degree of rent extraction and looting that is taking place. US corporate profit share of GDP has been at record levels, depending on how you compute if, of 10% of 12% of GDP, when no less than Warren Buffett deemed a profit share of over 6% of GDP as unsustainably high as of the early 2000s. That higher profit share is the direct result of workers getting a far lower share of GDP growth than in any post-war expansion. So the increased hardships that ordinary people face is not inevitable, but is to a significant degree due to the ruling classes taking vastly more than their historical share out of greed and short-sightedness.

Now here are some excerpts from the Gaius Publicis piece:

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The Re-enserfment of Western Peoples

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

The re-enserfment of Western peoples is taking place on several levels. One about which I have been writing for more than a decade comes from the offshoring of jobs. Americans, for example, have a shrinking participation in the production of the goods and services that are marketed to them.

On another level we are experiencing the financialization of the Western economy about which Michael Hudson is the leading expert (Killing The Host). Financialization is the process of removing any public presence in the economy and converting the economic surplus into interest payments to the financial sector.

These two developments deprive people of economic prospects. A third development deprives them of political rights. The Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic Partnerships eliminate political sovereignty and turn governance over to global corporations.

These so called “trade partnerships” have nothing to do with trade. These agreements negotiated in secrecy grant immunity to corporations from the laws of the countries in which they do business. This is achieved by declaring any interference by existing and prospective laws and regulations on corporate profits as restraints on trade for which corporations can sue and fine “sovereign” governments. For example, the ban in France and other counries on GMO products would be negated by the Trans-Atlantic Partnership. Democracy is simply replaced by corporate rule.

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