1. Employment Dynamics: In any capitalist system or free economy, the rich employ the poor. This has been the case since biblical times.
2. Exploitation of Labor: The wages of the poor are far less than the real worth of their labor. If you work eight hours every day for an employer, your first four hours cover your salary. The next four hours, called “surplus labor” by Karl Marx, generate the profit of the rich. The poor, therefore, are the muscles with which the rich make their wealth.
3. Economic Prison: The rich know that the poor have few alternatives and will even beg to work. So, there is an economic prison for the poor built by the elite class.
4. Government and Civil Servants: Governments in capitalist systems are no different. They call the poor “civil servants,” which is another term for civilized slavery. Your pay is determined by the government run by the elite. The tragedy is that the top 20% of the elite class in government gets 80% of the nation’s common wealth, generated by the poor or working class.
5. Obstacles to the Elite Class: The game is to prevent people from easily rising into the elite class. That’s why cutoff marks for courses like Medicine, Engineering, Law, Architecture, Petroleum Engineering, etc., are very high. They ensure there are enough obstacles to cross before joining the elite class. It’s called the “iron law of oligarchy.”
6. Lack of Alternatives: The prison of the poor is the lack of alternatives in every aspect of life.
Civil servants are not expected to do any business, so they work their lives away without thinking for themselves. They work until they are useless to themselves and then are discarded into retirement. Retirement benefits are deliberately delayed to further make them dependent and insecure.
7. Religious Restrictions: In some religious organizations, laws prevent you from doing any business outside the organization. They dangle offices and titles to build hope capital, but you are in a happy religious prison with no alternative until you are too old to be useful to yourself.
8. Sponsored Comfort: Any sponsored comfort the rich give to you is to prevent you from planning for yourself.
9. Consumerism: The rich create appetites for the poor by using a very small part of their wealth for conspicuous consumption. The poor then work very hard to look like cheap copies of the rich, using their hard-earned money to buy luxuries and pay for fantasies from the rich.
10. Political Manipulation: The poor stay under the sun and in the rain to vote the rich into power over them and their wealth. Politics, religion, regionalism, racism, and partnership are instrument the rich use to keep the poor divided. The end result is that the poor become enemies of each other, fighting the battles of the rich by fighting themselves.
I remain your friend, Dr. Charles Apoki. You are my responsibility.
