The Illusionary and Repressive Economic Status-Quo

Over the past 100 years, numerous people claiming to have the academic credentials to speak with convincing authority, mostly American citizens, have written literature advancing the notion that democratic socialism does not, cannot, and will not practically work in human society. Most of these people, pundits educated in the United States, were weaned on the abundant fruit of corporate capitalism and the doctrine of pragmatism advanced primarily through the philosophic efforts of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Chauncy Wright, Nicholas St. John Green, and Oliver Wendell Holmes in the latter-part of the 19th Century and the early part of the 20th Century. These individuals, all aloof academic thinkers, affluent, and extremely wealthy, inculcated through private discreet dialogues the contrived philosophic predicates for much of the public policy (federal and state legislation) which directly advanced the practices of corporate capitalism to the level at which they presently exist and flourish around the globe, especially within the United States. These primarily federal public polices, which have made a very few American entrepreneurs and as many foreign investors extremely wealthy over the decades, have been blindly accepted by most of the generational American electorate as necessary for the United States to have maintained a global economic prowess. Nonetheless, most present-day Americans, the great majority of whom work for wages and salaries paid by corporations and incorporated companies in the 58 U.S. states, territories, and possessions, have no real knowledge and understanding of the practical philosophy of pragmatism, or of the history of economic capitalist development in the United States, and this is most unfortunate. Check Illusionary London here.

While a majority of U.S. citizens are currently high school graduates (approximately 80 percent), much less than a majority are college graduates (around 28 percent in 2006); and the information an adolescent learns in high school about comparative economics and U.S. political and economic history, which is used and carried into adulthood, is deliberately minuscule and a very small component of what should be a complete and comprehensive adult public education. Yet, those citizens over twenty-five years of age, who are without the benefits of a liberal college education, are the many millions of hard-working, law-abiding men and women comprising the national workforce, who spend 40-or-more hours-per-week earning money to provide the essentials of life for themselves and the wives, husbands, and children they might be supporting. Once most of these Americans enter the workforce to earn their subsistence, they use what education they have to be as productive as humanly possible within their own spheres of influence. Essentially, most of these people are not that concerned with what is happening in Washington, DC, in their state capitals, and in their local counties and towns, as long as they are able to maintain the jobs with which they earn the money needed to pay the required bills, such as mortgages or rent, utilities, a car payment, gasoline, healthcare, and the many other debts which are incurred through the use of credit. Even an unnecessary foreign war, instigated through illegal presidential and congressional duplicity, is frequently not enough to engage a majority of U.S. citizens into active opposition when an economic status quo apparently exists. As long as such a status quo, as a modicum of stability, is maintained, whereby individuals and families have the income and the apparent liberty to afford the basic necessities of life, the media, daily newspapers, news magazines, and network television programming are merely instruments for dispensing public entertainment, not for the dissemination of pertinent factual information necessary for the promulgation of the deliberative democratic process.

The face of American capitalism has, for many generations, been adeptly painted by pragmatic economists and apologetic historians as the best working financial system in the modern world. Even when an ongoing 85 percent of working-class citizens (the ones who have succeeded in making less-than-10 percent of the American population very wealthy) haven't possessed over time the basic necessities of life, the impoverished many will continue to, strangely, stand up and cheer for the existing status quo. It's hard to believe, but, presently, one out of four people in New York City don't know from where their next meal is coming. That's about 25 percent of over eight million residents in America's largest city; and if they can't afford proper food, I seriously doubt whether they can afford proper healthcare. This statistic is proportionately the same for most U.S. cities with over 2 million in population. Presently, 98 percent of the wealth in the United States is controlled by only 2 percent of the population. And that's a hard cold fact. That's basically, and shockingly, around 4 million in number, the number of people who would fit into three cities the size of Seattle. With over 16 million American citizens around the nation who cannot presently afford any type of medicine and medical care to relieve their sickness and pain, I think that a proper explanation of American economic pragmatism, and the way it fits into corporate capitalism in a convoluted military-industrial complex, is well overdue. If studied and examined in the light of correct history and facts, the evolution and expansion of American capitalism is enough to make a reasonable person retch.