Here’s the thing, I know I sound whiny. I don’t care. Maybe I’m whiny, but I’m confident in what I’m about to say. Why? Well, I’ve existed for fifty-two years and I have some experience at living and in what I’m about to write.
The title of this article, A Theory of Conspiracy, came to me as I was trying to go to sleep tonight with a strained muscle in my back. I was unable to get settled and every time I turned over, normally I do so about five times before I fall asleep, it would twinge in pain and in between the rolls I was thinking about what it meant and why I had that thought.
When I was in school I didn’t fit in. I was wild and rambunctious and drove my teachers to the point that my first-grade teacher tied me to my desk many times to keep me in place. So many people would have said, and did, that it was my mother’s fault for not raising me right. My doctor told my mom I was hyperactive when I was ten and years later I was medically diagnosed by two doctors eleven years apart as having ADHD. Asa child I wasn’t treated for the Hyperactivity, I was chastised for it, I remember in the fifth grade, be paddled pretty much every day of that school year for not staying in my seat and for speaking out of turn and saying things the teacher objected to. As I said, I didn’t fit in.
By the time I was in the seventh grade … … I was removed from classes and placed in a school for the mentally challenged. When they tested me they expected to see low IQ, however, what they found was the exact opposite. The school’s administrator suggested that my mother should move me to a large city school system and entered me into their gifted student program. Unfortunately, my mother was said she couldn’t afford the monthly fees from that larger school system, thirty miles away, and we weren’t going to move.
I spent the next two school years, in two different school systems, in special education classes being given remedial content because neither school system had access to or the willingness to educate me at the higher level recommended. The second school system put me in that class only because the previous school had done so. They did no testing or anything to determine if I was placed correctly. I lasted that entire year and then over the summer I made tragic mistakes and got in trouble with the law and then after four days in the ninth grade I walked away and quit.
I made that decision to quit on my own and to this day, while I know it was a mistake, I know I would have never finished high school.
The real reason I quit school is where the theory of conspiracy comes in.
I think it’s no secret that our school systems are designed to create a labor force for corporations and businesses to pull from. A farming system of human resources. Back when I was a child and before, there was a period just after World War II that America’s educational systems grew. All over America, larger (wealthier) school systems expanded their classes to included civics and other higher-minded endeavors that led to larger graduating numbers. Thos numbers led to more engineers, doctors, lawyers, MBA’s, scientists and college professors in a boon from the 1950’s through the 1980’s.
These higher numbers of graduates who joined the workforce created a great economy because they were changing things and creating new paths of production and distribution and technologies that increased the wealth and spread it out over a much larger swath of the American population. In fact, I’m sure I’ve read or heard somewhere, I think I know this is true, that there were at one time more wealthy people in the united states in the 1980’s than in the entire history of the world combined. If I’m mistaken about that it doesn’t change my premise.
My premise is that our system of education is about farming labor for companies to pick and choose from, rather than expanding knowledge to improve our lives. In this age, we live in today, that educational system seems broken to me, but not in a way that harms business. In fact, I believe that certain factions of our population are making sure our educational system breaks down even further and stays that way.
Why would anyone believe this? Why would they do it? I think this past year and a half or two years and longer even prove it out.
I’ll start with wages. Statistically, it’s known that hourly and non-executive wages have stagnated for almost two decades while corporate profits have gone up along with executive wages and the cost of living. I think it’s also well known that American education lags far behind much of the developed world. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/.
Taken with all of that, the exportation of higher paying jobs that require a technical, advanced mathematics, or scientific degree of some sort, and you have a lack of need for those types of laborers.
What’s left now are service workers. This includes doctors and lawyers and college professors and anything else you can think of that, yes requires intelligence and even some brilliance, but the jobs that have left the US are the jobs that create. Those jobs create infrastructure for everything we have and do but they’ve been shipped offshore en’mass leaving only a small fraction of the creators we had in the 1950’s through the 1990’s. Much is not most of that advancement that was made in the US has now been moved to Asia and India and elsewhere.
I believe that the US educational system is being dismantled. I think in a concerted effort by big business and politicians who see the US labor “market” as just that, a market to buy and sell people as cheaply as possible, people who will do for them what they want most of all, to serve them.
Most every job on the job search websites today is a service industry job. Fewer and fewer creator jobs. A Creator job is someone who creates something new that didn’t exist before, like carpenters, welders, electronics engineers, machinists, manufacturing machine operators and so forth. Jobs that used to make lots of money due to multiple factors from Unions that helped win and control wages and benefits to people being able to leverage their contributions to the companies successes.
That’s vanishing, quickly if not completely.
Pensions used to be a big thing, now it’s about private investing in the most lucrative service industry of all, Wall Street, with your 401K. The Company my wife works for, sold their employees to a Human Resources Company to manage them, rather than have to do it themselves. Now, my wife get’s paid by a different company, but works for the same people and does the same job and they treat her like she’s one of the family, but she doesn’t actually work for that company or the owners of that company she was hired by anymore. She wasn’t given a choice about the change. It was just done and that’s that.
The Company my wife works for, sold their employees to a Human Resources Company to manage them, rather than have to do it themselves. Now, my wife get’s paid by a different company, but works for the same people and does the same job and they treat her like she’s one of the family, but she doesn’t actually work for that company or the owners of that company she was hired by anymore. She wasn’t given a choice about the change. It was just done and that’s that.
I see a pattern.
The pattern started when I was in middle school. Back then, around 1978, the “funders” of education in government began tinkering with it. When Ronald Regan became President and joined forces with the religious right and instituted “Trickle Down Economics” the pattern emerged. The dumbing down of America became a political party platform in fact, if not stated by name.
One group, the evangelicals, got their foot in the political door in Washington and thus began the willful ignorance campaign that has ravaged the American intellect and America’s leadership in the world to being a middle-of-the-pack nation of mediocrity. Statistics prove it out. We’re not the best anymore and we’re not getting any better. This is at the heart of my premise. I don’t think the national or global corporate system that exists today, wants the US to be number one or even number ten.
The USA has a past that proves we can achieve as much as we want. Yes, many other countries have joined the US in achieving greatness in technology, economics, and democratic principles, but our “middle-of-the-pack” status is not very competitive nor is it progressive. Without progress, we’re doomed to decline and wither rather than expand and flourish. I think that is the plan.
If someone wanted a cheap labor force, what better way to get it than to dismantle the education system over a short time, say two decades, and export the jobs that require higher education and skills. Either we move away to another country or we end up selecting careers that don’t really suit us, our paths in life, and we conform to the needs of the corporations.
Moreover, if you’re a creator, a person who is creative and likes to bring new things into the world that never existed before, you’re pretty well diminished by that system, unless you create something that can make them loads of money, thus showing you have a load of value to them.
What I’ve seen is the dumbing down of Americans and the reduction in production jobs leaving few of them to fight over and that means lower wages, fewer opportunities to rise from poverty or the middle class. Service is where it is now.
Service jobs are what’s left. Lawyers, Doctors, and nurses, support personnel across multitudes of industries and business models, mostly in high volume call centers. Yes, there are other jobs in the trades that can’t be outsourced, yet, but they aren’t the majority of jobs. I’d bet Wal-Mart and MacDonalds employee far more people and pay far less for working the same or more hours and in many small towns, Wal-Mart is the only steady employer. Little to no skill is required to work at Wal-Mart, yet the stores make loads of money that doesn’t trickle down to its employees.
I’m convinced that there is a plan by a group of people, a large group in this country and around the world, to turn the USA into a semi-slave-labor nation but with our consent.
I’m not a true protectionist. We need global trade and if we could find a way to get all nations to agree on democracy and how to run it, I’d be in favor of a one world government, but it’s not practical. It’s not safe for us to continue to allow politicians and corporations to export the higher paying jobs and influence our educational system.
American workers built a great economy at one point and began earning so much money that the Executives got jealous, not of their earnings but that it was infringing on their earnings. I think those CEO’s and others began lobbying Congress and the like and started changing things to benefit them over the skilled and highly educated creators, gearing the nation toward a downturn that started right after Septemeber eleventh 2001.
Once the US Treasury’s Trillion dollar surplus was drained, things began to change drastically. More and more CEO’s began to pay themselves more and their boards went right along with it. They began outsourcing more and moving factories overseas to reduce costs. The only costs they reduced really would be wages and benefits, and pensions if they still had them.
I’m not saying they had anything to do with 9/11, I’m not there, yet. But I am saying a national and global group or cabal is controlling our educational system in order to reduce our national IQ, and our ability to demand higher wages and rights.
If you ask why then I’ll assume you’ve not been paying attention to the world we live in. But to make it easy, it’s of course about power and influence – which is power – and money. However, I think it’s really about the laziness of wealthy people who want to be waited on hand and foot and live a life of luxury and whimsy. They get off on having us work for them and not having to work for anyone.
I can’t prove it’s true, I just know it is.
That’s my ramble for this night. It’s 4 am and I need to get up in less than 2 hours to tile my walk-in shower I’ve been working on for a month and a half. But first, I’ll spend a few hours on a writing course I’m taking and then on an HTML/CSS/Javascript/SQL/PHP coding course, after setting tile.
Have a great day.