Job Creators

     Some systems that developed over centuries are suddenly (Uranus) being questioned and discarded or radically changed (Pluto). I was reminded of this the other day while talking politics with my auto mechanic.  "Words," he said, "don't matter.  What matters are deeds." 

We're weary of being bombarded with the words of politicians.  Once elected, all they seem to do is raise money for their next election. They raise money from the wealthy in exchange for doing the bidding of the wealthy, which shortchanges the people who vote them into office. This breakdown is in process under the present long-lasting Uranus-Pluto square, due to be within a potently tight orb from 2012 through 2015.       

Of course words matter, for words enable us to figure out what's really going on and decide what needs to be changed.    

Take, for instance, two words that are currently very fashionable: "job creators," meaning the people who hire workers.  What most of those workers do is make stuff that the job creators sell for profit.  So the job doers are also wealth creators, and the job creators are also wealth confiscators—they pay the job doers as little as possible and sell the products made for as much as possible. 

Many job creators then send the profits they confiscate to offshore banks in order to evade paying taxes, another reflection of the Uranus-Pluto square.  They try to justify this by proclaiming that the "private sector" creates jobs, not the government.

Yet when you investigate the private sector, you discover that it needs the infrastructure built by government, and often derives profits from government—by making contracts with government to provide stuff the government wants, like information, weapons, cars, furniture, paper, the list goes on. 

It's the law that the job creators legally own what the job doers create. That's a law the present Uranus-Pluto square is addressing and is destined to redefine.  There is a difference between being paid for eight hours on the job, and being paid from the profits created by the work.    

 Example: In a unionized West Virginia coal mine, a typical miner works for pay ranging from $24.75 to $26.41 per hour. Using the higher rate, our miner receives $211.28 pay per eight-hour shift. (1)  The miner can extract 67.63 tons of coal per hour, 541 tons per day. The miner's job creator sells coal for $59.17 per ton.  What the miner is paid $211.28 for makes the job creator $32,020.97. (1)

When they retire, the miner scrapes by on Social Security, Medicare, and maybe a pension—if he hasn't invested his pension money in Wall Street and lost it in a stock market crash.  The retired owner winds up a millionaire, or maybe a billionaire from investing his profits in other job creators who confiscate the wealth created by their job doers, then hide their profits from the government in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands.   

In reality, job creators need wealth creators, and the private sector needs the government.  The wealth creators need the job creators and the government needs the private sector.  The Solar System needs all the bodies it has to be what it is. 

I need my auto mechanic to keep my old car humming—its odometer just turned 200,500 miles—and my mechanic needs to be adequately paid; if he's shortchanged, he'll turn to another way of generating income and I'll lose his service.  And the way we figure out and communicate what's fair is by words.    

But the deal your mechanic and you strike is very different from the deal you make with your corporate employer. The mechanic shows you what the auto parts cost and what he's charging for his labor. The corporation doesn't give you a metric for the wealth your labor creates, it merely pays you for your time on the job.

The modern economy thrives on willing and able consumers.  Yet the most profitable corporations are those that get away with paying the least for workers, who spend as consumers. Some workers are now paid so poorly, they depend on food stamps and homeless shelters to survive.  Unemployed workers can't buy anything.  This erodes the health of the overall economy.  Eventually, it causes the big corporations to fail.  Unemployment  compensation and other "safety net" programs save the whole economy from complete collapse.

If we use words skillfully to figure out what needs to change to revitalize the economy, the Uranus-Pluto square will benefit us.  If we try to preserve a system that needs to change—i.e., job creators who confiscate wealth and hide it from the tax man in offshore accounts, thus disabling government safety-net programs—the result becomes a form of plundering that makes the shade of Genghis Khan green with envy. 

Yet, job creators focused on their own immediate need to increase profits, want government  to "tighten its belt" by cutting the social programs that keep workers alive and thus prolong the viability of job creators.

It's like the Hindu myth of the blind men groping the elephant, each proclaiming the whole to be the part they can feel.  In this case, the elephant is the whole economy, and the gropers are all of us who depend upon it.  Money is the blood that sustains the whole-economy elephant. When all the gropers are trying to suck as much blood from the economy elephant as they can…

This metaphor applies to any number of activities considered economically necessary today. Take fracking, for instance. That's presently the most efficient method of extracting gas from the ground, and this gas can save us from going broke buying oil to power electricity, vehicles, etc, and poisoning our atmosphere with carbon monoxide.  But fracking is also poisoning our water and food, bleeding the whole economic elephant in this new way.   

Here's another way to look at our present economic conundrum:

Ancient astrologers believed the planets were the realm of the gods, and that the gods imposed their will on humans via such harsh aspects as this Uranus-Pluto square.  We moderns are educated to find such a notion laughable.  Maybe we should stop laughing and reconsider it.  

What if we "scientificate" the gods as aspects of the rainbow range of energy that is all at various rates of vibration.  That would bring us to about half a step away from returning soul to our perception of reality. If we perceive everything in our reality as possessed of ever-evolving and interdependent souls, we would have good reason to take care of our environment and each other. 

As it is, our perception of reality is shaped by our scientifically-oriented education, and educated people do not believe anything has soul.  If there is such a thing as soul, educated people believe, science would have discovered it. But science, until the discovery of subatomic particles, dealt only with what can be weighed and/or measured.

The good news, under this present Uranus-Pluto square, is that scientists are finding that subatomic particles behave in mysterious ways. Some of these miniscule mites act like they have minds of their own—or souls, destinies, karma. 

Seems this phenomenal turn of perception is heading us back to the beginning of a cycle that began two Neptune-Pluto conjunctions ago with what we now call the Reformation. Our reformatted concept of the reality we're all part of, did not include anything as non-physical as soul. This freed us from the restrains our mismanagement of religion had imposed, enabling us to discover many more dimensions of our physical reality. 

This focus on our material reality—to the exclusion of the invisible, immaterial world of soul—appears to be completing its cycle, and thus ready for a new end/beginning.  We have found that there is just too much going on to be fully explained by materially-oriented science and rational logic.  Or what we have come to think of as rational logic. 

Perhaps as we morph into this new cycle, we will re-establish the universally religious ideal, captured in the Biblical line, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," and in other traditions expressed as, "Do no harm."  This would enable us to stop trying to suck blood from our own little piece of the whole economic elephant.  For we would then realize the whole economic elephant needs blood/money to circulate, not clot into private fortunes, depriving other parts of itself.

If something bangs us over our collective head, say, changing our perception of this vast reality we are tiny units within, maybe we will again see our world as infused with soul, and this soul-dimension of our reality as shared by everyone of us and everything else too, and a new logical rationality will demand that we stop killing each other and other things, for we'll know that their death means they will reincarnate into entities bent on rebalancing, and rebalancing means pain and suffering for all. We'll realize we cannot go on playing economic Whac-A-Mole without losing everything.               

Endnote:

1.     "Romney Unaware Who Creates Wealth" by Gene Grabiner, Truthout web site, October 26, 2012.    

http://robert-gover.blogspot.com/