Most of my politically aware life has been consumed with concern over the size and scope of the state. The growing influence of the government in our lives, the expansion of the intrusion into every aspect of American life and the outright murder of Americans in places like Waco and Ruby Ridge combined to make me extremely distrustful of the government.
At the same time, I generally was a good Republican in the sense of supporting pro-business policies, thinking that what was good for business was good for America. More jobs, better wages, etc.
Over time, I began to realize that I was believing a fake narrative with a false dichotomy. It turns out that the people in Big Government were the same people in Big Business and that while the regular middle and working class Americans were voting Republican to benefit Big Business, Big Business was working at odds with our interests.
Today it is hard to distinguish between what far left political groups advocate for and what big business advocates for. We get inundated every year with corporate logos in rainbow colors to celebrate men sodomizing other men. We get endless corporate virtue signaling about “racism” and “black Lives Matter”, like Discover card giving black owned restaurants $5 million. Sure White owned restaurants are struggling too thanks to coronavirus but corporate America is deeply invested in replacing White Americans with easy to manipulate new consumers.
If you are paying attention, it is clear that Big Business and Big Government, along with Big Education, Big Religion, Big Media, Big Entertainment, etc. are all firmly opposed to the health and well-being of middle and working class heritage America.
Our political world is not a struggle so much between capitalism and socialism. We haven’t had a really capitalistic system in my lifetime. Our war is between the elites and the underclass they perpetuate versus average people. Marxism was never intended to create true equality between people, it was a way to remove the existing system and replace it with one where a different small group of oligarchs rule over the rest of humanity who would dwell in poverty and misery. In the places where Communism was tried, there was a clear distinction between the people at the top who have chauffeurs and vacation homes and lives of luxury and the remainder of the people who were crushed and abused.
What is unfolding now in America and across the west is more of a fusion between Communism and crony capitalism. In the place of “workers” the proletariat will be consumers. This is already on display in China.
China is home to a ton of billionaires, the 2nd most in the world, and much of the world’s consumer good production. It is also home to more than a billion people who work at near slavery conditions and live in constant terror of their own government. China brags that they have 300 million Chinese living in the “middle class” (10-60k per year) which sounds impressive until you remember that there are over 1.3 billion people in China so that means that around a billion Chinese live on well under $10,000 per year. These are the people who slave away to make consumer goods for Westerners that they could never afford to buy for themselves. I often wonder what the workers in Chinese factories think of Americans as they make us expensive electronic gadgets to replace the electronic gadgets they made for us last year. The per capita GDP of the massive Chinese economy is lower than Mexico’s.
Basically China has a small ruling oligarchy made up of corporate titans and Party apparatchiks, a sizable middle class and an enormous underclass ruled by fear and the threat of violence. There is incredible wealth being generated by Chinese industry but it is mostly concentrated in a small number of elites.
Now look at America.
The middle and working class have been squeezed for decades. As a kid, there were working class families mixed in with professional families in our neighborhood. My dad was the town doctor, putting us at the top of the economic pyramid. My next door neighbor was a corporate executive who made a very nice living (but spent most of his time in beat up bib overalls working in the yard). Two houses down was my best friend growing up, his dad worked in a factory on the night shift and repaired cars in his garage and his mom was a bank teller. Today on the road where I grew up, the houses are all priced way out of the reach of most working class families. Factory jobs have been shipped overseas for most of my life, replacing decent wages for American workers with slave labor wages in Asia. More and more people are working either in meaningless office jobs or in the service industry. These jobs don’t produce anything or add any value, they simply tack additional costs on other labor. What drives our economy is less producing and more consuming, people selling and people buying stuff made overseas. Massive companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon don’t produce anything, they buy cheap consumer goods from China, add a mark-up for profit and resell those goods.
In general, you aren’t going to make much money as an employee of places like Wal-Mart or Amazon and you really shouldn’t. You aren’t adding any value. Stocking a shelf or accepting payment from a consumer is just an expense. It adds nothing of value. A 17 year old kid opening a cartoon containing Fruit Loops and putting those boxes on the shelves hasn’t created anything. Now a carpenter? He takes raw materials, lumber and other building supplies, applies labor and expertise to turn plywood and 2x4s into a house. The 2x4s he uses were once raw timber that was cut into boards by a sawmill. The raw timber used to be a tree that someone scouted out, cut down, cut into manageable pieces and trucked to the sawmill. The process of turning a pine tree into a house is adding value.
Running consumer goods past a scanner and giving the consumer a total? That isn’t adding any value. It is mostly necessary, for now anyway, but it is just a drain on profitability. It is also the economic model that our overlords have decreed for the American economy. A few weeks back I wrote about the exploding wages of retail workers and what that means for the economy at large. When everyone works for Wal-Mazon as clerks, delivery drivers and stock boys, it is pretty hard to strike out on your own. Apart from people in professional jobs, the people who tend to be the wealthiest outside of the government/corporate structure are entrepreneurs. Contractors, business owners, that sort of thing. Hard work usually pays off, which explains why so many Amish I know with 8 years of pretty light schooling are also incredibly wealthy.
That has been the model of upward mobility in America. Work hard and pass on wealth to your kids, start a business your son takes over and a few decades ago, families scrimping and saving to send the children to college.
That model is mostly broken. Everyone goes to college now and obtains a meaningless four year degree before entering a workplace already saturated with young people with useless college degrees and no discernible job skills (a sense of entitlement is not a marketable skill in most industries). Small business owners have been losing ground for a long time. When you had to mail in a check to a “mail order” catalog and hope they had what you wanted, with a weeks long turnaround, local shops could compete. Now with Amazon who has better prices and selection and sends you anything you can imagine in two days, why would you shop in a store except in an emergency? Small hardware stores are dying out, slowly crushed by online shopping and monster big box stores. Sure the big home improvement stores are staffed by surly college grads with no people skills who know nothing about their products but at least it is cheap. Libertarians think this is great because it improves profitability and profit is the greatest public good but it sucks for sane people.
People sense things are jacked up. Older people are running out the clock, people my age are getting angry as we see the world we grew up in being destroyed and younger people are realizing that their future is working in a low wage, meaningless service job. Things like building wealth and a future for their own children seem to be out of reach.
The response has been different but also similar.
Older people voted for Trump and his promise to make America great again, and combined with talk of a wall we knew what that meant. It meant a return to a high trust, more homogeneous society. In retrospect I think most Trump voters understand now that it was all an illusion but it was a last gasp effort.
Younger people first openly embraced socialism via Bernie Sanders, a rich old Jewish guy who has never worked a day in his life. Now it seems like Bernie isn’t nearly radical enough. You can’t blame them entirely, they have been fed propaganda their whole lives where the entire 20th century was about American “racism” and the Holocaust and virtually nothing about the totalitarianism of the Soviets and the ChiComs. Stuff like this doesn’t help:
As the politicized coronavirus response has laid waste to many small businesses, the largest corporations and the wealthiest Americans are raking it in. Look at that chart. Bezos owns Amazon and coincidentally as the virus response kept people out of small stores, Amazon sales were great. Gates and Zukerberg, two tech oligarchs along with Ballmer, Ellison and Page.
Bottom line:
Corporate America is entirely on the side of Big Government on every significant issue: race, immigration, sexual degeneracy, everything but tax policy. There isn’t a free market in America, hasn’t been for a long time and overwhelmingly Big Business doesn’t want free markets. They want markets controlled by their symbiotic partners in government.
That rather overlong introduction brings us to Yelp. Last week the online review company declared that any businesses who were deemed to be possibly “racist” will be branded er made to wear a yellow star er labelled a naughty business on their review.
Here is how this apparently works. Some media hacks run a story about a business being “racist”. It won’t matter how accurate the story is or whether it is politically motivated or not. Just the accusation will be enough to justify being labelled a “Business Accused Of Racist Behavior”.
Just get a load of that mealy mouth crap. A business “accused” of “racist behavior”? That is Soviet level discourse. A mere accusation apparently is adequate to get your blacklisted (pun intended) by Yelp and since most normie Whites are terrified that anyone think them racist, you can bet that Whites will be checking Yelp
If you don’t think this will be abused by race hustlers, you are an idiot. The Left is already putting together a hit list:
The list is being prepared by the same ANTIFA group is that “responsible for organizing the violent Portland riots,” according to the Post Millennial. In fact, Tweets from the group compiling the data suggests that ANTIFA members submit “non-friendly” businesses, “AKA any company that’s hanging blue lives garbage in their store or anything else that’s anti the BLM movement”.
So, in essence, Black Lives Matter is now being granted the power to shut down whatever businesses it doesn’t like. And remember, this is supposed to be the anti-fascist group.
You can be sure that race hustlers like Benjamin Crump and Shaun King, along with the OG race grifters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, will be hitting up businesses for “donations” to avoid getting reported as being “racist”.
This is dangerous stuff. According to Wikipedia:
As of the second quarter of 2019, Yelp reported having a monthly average of 61.8 million unique visitors via desktop computer and 76.7 million unique visitors via its mobile website. As of June 30, 2019, Yelp stated on their Investor Relations page that it had 192 million reviews on its site.
That is a monthly average of over 138 million unique visitors. Whether that is accurate or not, there are millions of people who make buying decisions based at least in part on Yelp reviews.
Since anything and everything is racist, that means that any company that doesn’t toe the line on what is allowed on a given day can be reported and blacklisted, costing them business and if there is anything true about American businesses it is that they are cowardly and terrified of any bad press. There will be pressure to hire internal “monitors” who will make sure none of their employees are engaged in “racist” behavior, which will extend to employees personal social media accounts. Since being a Republican automatically makes you “racist”…..well, you know what that means. Shut up about your politics, even in your personal life, or lose your job.
The government won’t even have to suppress free speech that runs counter to the prevailing narrative, they simply will subsidize Big Business to do their dirty work for them.
Big Business has picked a side and it isn’t our side. The conservative movement needs to figure this out.
"Small hardware stores are dying out, slowly crushed by online shopping and monster big box stores."
Oh, my heart. There was an ancient hardware store in old Northport Village here on Long Island that had been around, in one form or another, since Coolidge was president. Before Ace Hardware franchised it, it was owned by generations of old native Long Islanders. It served a vital purpose in a famous old settled town here for decades before I was even born. Even after slapping the 'Ace' label on the place, it remained a magical portal to a far earlier time when small businesses WERE America's 'business'.
My family members and I would frequent the place from time to time through the past 20 years, picking up the odd hacksaw blade, small handtool or quart of Cabot stain, not because we were in need but because we could not bear the thought of the old hardware store folding for lack of patronage as Amazon and HomeDepot.com sucked the very life out of that wonderful old store. It was always an adventure, walking in on a weekend to experience its creaking floorboards and ancient funky smell of fertilizer, paint and just plain old age. It was a walk back in time that simply will never be replaced by parking in the mammoth Home Depot lot and rascal-scootering through two acres of chinesium cheap-chit.
It folded just this year, after 90+ years of continuous operation, and my heart is broken. I am as guilty as anyone else, having opted for online shopping, two-day delivery and far cheaper prices, rather than driving downtown to pick up that 4" galvanized lag bolt or bag of black oil sunflower seed from the auld place. I have no idea what has become of Hank, who worked the counter for all of my lifetime and then some. He cut more keys for me than I can possibly count, since the days when I was a new teenaged driver, and then a young, nervous homeowner a whole lifetime ago. He, too, has been swallowed up by AmazonWalmartBezosGatesZuckerberg, our "betters" who spit his kind out like watermelon seeds without so much as a care, for the sake of economies of scale.
Dunno why this post of yours suddenly struck such a raw nerve today, Arthur. Maybe it was our Sunday trip to the Big Box and Lowes, and dealing with impersonal, masked "associates" who could not possibly care any less if we lived or died.
TBC
The memories of the world stolen from us are often incredibly painful, but now are more often infuriating.
Great post, Arthur.
It has (more or less) always been this way, though. But at least at one point, the Left and Right in America both liked Americans.
Now? Not so much.