Businesses do not exist to take care of people, they exist to extract money and provide something that the customer wants. The businesses that tell you that they are taking care of you are often the worst of the lot. Take the cuddly advertisements for chemical companies, which often use childlike graphics to persuade you that they are doing something good for you, your family and your immediate environment whilst doing the exact opposite.
Until this point in global history, governments have been, with the exception of very unusual circumstances, bigger and in possession of better credit than businesses, and people have trusted them to take care of their welfare. TTIP and TIPP seek to reverse that. I forsee several developing nations collapsing entirely, jobs going to the ASEAN nations whilst America and Europe become rather backward regions where most of the population exist at the mercy of the very few. This will be enhanced by modifying education and the media to enable people to genuinely believe that money means merit. A scanty look at the people you know will tell you that the smart ones are not the same as the rich ones. It is a matter of priorities as well as your ability to look convincing when you say yes to anything said to you.
As I have mentioned in several previous articles, it is in your hands. You as the consumer, could reverse this progress tomorrow if you stopped feeding the companies large enough to control governments. You probably won’t do it. Why? Because you have a busy life, scraping your living from your employer, who requires you to say yes in order to pay for the roof over your head etc etc. This makes, for example, going to the supermarket more convenient, which in itself precludes you from starting a grocer’s, deli, goods store etc because everyone else is, like you, going to the supermarket to hand over their money to the same people. It is as much a question of convenience as it is belief.
It is not complicated to think that if you do enrich smaller businesses, it puts them in a position where the barriers to entry to compete with larger businesses in a hugely monopolistic situation are more manageable. I would like to know what happened to Anti-trust laws, now only non-cronies appear to be prosecuted for creating situations in which small versions of large supermarkets, for example, put successful corner shops out of business. Another example was Remax, who had the employees pay for over-expansion to reduce their competition. We all live in an inherently corrupt society, where we are told that we have no power because we have little money and we sit back and believe it whilst sustaining a system that cannot work well for us.
In the event that you have a problem, the simple answer is to pick up your wallet and go elsewhere. That is the nature of capitalism. There is now no other way of rebelling against a system that does not suit us, because we allowed businesses to become bigger than government, and the trade agreements that America is conning our middle management politicians into signing will nail this to the wall. Never trust a corporatist. America is a corporatist country. Mussolini had very interesting things to say about corporatism, feel free to look it up yourself.
In contrast, I wake up with a list of things I would like to do to help people every morning. Many of those things make no sense to anyone but me. I do not think that it is odd to do this, it would take more effort not to. I explained this to many of my friends before I removed them from my life. Why did I remove them? I was told that this was a crazy way to live, that you should always consider yourself first. When it comes to parting with my money I understand this, but not when it comes to giving people what they actually want.
What everyone, no matter how scatty, longs for is a sense of becoming what they dream of being. There is no shame in asking for what you want, however oddly this is presented. There is shame in rejecting what you want when it is offered to you.
My personal system of responsibility is entirely different from someone who has other wishes, for their children’s future, or a new car, or their parents to be neatly tidied away rather than free to make a mess, keep them awake and generally tell them they are awful. My responsibility is to the soul. I think there should be more people like me, and less corporations who exist to take your money, your future opportunities and those of your children for their own growth, in order to dictate the future of a declining planet. I am goddess of my own personal religion. I do not ask anyone to join it, but I do care to point out that my crazy, kind little niche is a lot more pleasant than the current future of the Western world. I do not play by the rules, because the rules are wrong in the first place. Dreams are real. Reality is transient. I plan to remain defiantly kind, even if it means my inability to tug my forelock or respect the cash means that I will be financially poor.