The War on Your Wages: An Architecture of Control
The economic anxiety felt by millions of American families is not a market failure or an unfortunate byproduct of globalization. It is the intended outcome of a meticulously constructed system. The analysis is clear: a self-reinforcing feedback loop exists where concentrated corporate wealth is used to capture the legislative process, which in turn creates rules that further concentrate that wealth. This is the core function of the Corporate State.
The evidence for this architecture of control is found in three key areas:
Legislative Capture: The first step is to control the rules. According to data compiled by OpenSecrets.org, federal lobbying spending has reached record highs, with corporate interests vastly outspending any other group. This overwhelming financial force is not deployed to promote the general welfare, but to secure specific outcomes. For example, a recent analysis published by National Bureau of Economic Research (NBE) demonstrates that lobbying is remarkably effective at shaping regulations to favor entrenched management, sometimes at the direct expense of shareholder interests and public good. This is how the game is rigged before it even begins.
Engineered Market Concentration: The second step is to eliminate competition. The favorable rules secured through lobbying allow for rampant corporate consolidation. The evidence, laid out in studies from institutions like The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), demonstrates a direct link between this consolidation and wage stagnation. When workers have fewer potential employers due to mergers, their bargaining power evaporates. This is not free market capitalism; it is the managed economy of an oligarchy.
The Division of the Spoils: The final step is the extraction of wealth. The result of a captured legislative process and engineered market concentration is a historic divergence between corporate profits and worker pay. Data from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) or Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a dramatic gap, where corporate profits have soared while inflation-adjusted wages for the average worker have remained largely flat for decades. Productivity gains are no longer shared; they are harvested by the executive class and the owners of capital.
This three-stage process—legislative capture, market concentration, and wealth extraction—is the central mechanism of the New East India Companies. It is a closed loop that enriches the elite at the expense of the producer class. The evidence is undeniable, and understanding this system is the first step toward dismantling it.
In an effort to understand the system, you need to understand the decision making process. What is the mission and vision of an organization and how does that translate into actions taken? East India's mission was to find a faster trade route to India. The "vision" was a world united under the British Crown. When they found more land, they saw additional resources. The system that is being manipulated is a delicate ecosystem and the division of its resources between each entity is the challenge. Each entity must be evaluated for the ways it processes information and resources, along with the means of how it obtained the information and resources. The standard is dependent on the population and the current rate (read this as currency) of labor by worker. The issue comes in when each worker is not equal or when a worker is viewed as a god.