We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, September 6, 2014

How To Reduce Living Standards Without A Revolution: Slowly & Lie About It

Click here to access article by Roger Boyd from his blog Humanity's Test.

The author provides us with an explanation of the various methods the One Percent ruling classes use to reduce payments to Social Security recipients and to disguise the falling living standards faced by all Americans--except, of course, the One Percent. 
The rich, together with their bought-and-paid-for politicians, saw that it was impossible to explicitly reduce well-regarded programs such as Social Security (government-provided pensions) that benefitted the mass of the population rather than just themselves. So instead, they decided to reduce them a little bit each year by falsifying the CPI, upon which the yearly “cost of living” increases were based, in a way that made it underestimate the actual rate of inflation.