August 30, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
The Price of Wealth
The most shocking part of this economically
booming United States with unprecedented GDP and wage growth was that the
bottom 40% of the population which included perhaps all the African Americans
and former slaves had no wealth at all.
In terms of land or property holdings the
scenario was even more heart wrenching.
Nearly 51% of the real estate and farms
were owned by the elite 1% and in contrast to them the bottom 44% held a paltry
1.1% of land.
Even worse and a fact which is almost never
reported, this economic prosperity of the Gilded Era came at a terrible human
cost (most Empires are built upon some kind of exploitation of other humans
besides nature – that is a basic law).
While colonial exploitation was very
obvious and visible in cases of European Empires of the seventeenth, eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries in today’s Empires that go by the name of super powers
exploitation is garbed under various clothing which are not too hard to uncover
if one takes pain to look for them.
The accidents in the American industry were
the highest in the world with the workers having little support or aid of any
kind.
In fact, the United States of the Gilded
Age, the Victorian Era and the Belle Epoque was the only industrial power house
that flourished with no workman’s compensation law being enacted that would make
it compulsory for the industries to aid their injured workers.
With such conditions of disparity at its
vulgar display both in the emerging United States and the British Empire it is
not surprising then Russian socialism, Anarcho-communist movements, American
Labor Movements and the left-wing People’s populist parties began to find great
appeal to the wretched impoverished masses almost everywhere in the world.
It is not by accident that the age of
thinkers and philosophers like Karl Marx coincided with the times of
mind-boggling plutocrats that United States and Europe was spitting out.
It would not be fare to blame just the
American millionaires for the rise of communism; The Russian Empire itself was
to a large extent contributed to the rise of socialist and Marxist views.
If the United States was a democracy
controlled by plutocrats underhandedly the Russian Empire was an openly declared
autocracy where the tsars openly wielded unrestrained power and shamelessly
displayed ostentatious wealth to their millions of country’s largely agrarian
populace living in abject poverty.
It was this deadly mixture of poverty,
oppression and exploitation that proved to be the fertile soil for Marxism to
grow in.
Same is the situation today in the central
Hindu heartland that involves 60 districts of eight states with the epicenter
being the poverty-stricken state of Chhattisgarh.
It is a breeding ground for various Maoists/Communists
outfits that are known as Naxals.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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