When Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” was being filmed in 1945, just as the Second World War was closing and a few years before the Cold War was heating up, the FBI investigated it for its supposed anti-capitalist themes. A memo said:
“With regard to the picture It’s a Wonderful Life, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/t ... =ZeroHedge
"this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters."Upper class? Well of course, they exist. Despicable? Well naturally, just look at the likes of Bill Gates and Zuckerberg, they are willing to step on anyone to get what they want. And they are the "good cop" public faces of the upper-class, behind them is the likes of the The Cargill-MacMillan family that owns Cargill, America's largest private company with revenues of $177 billion. They are the ones that dine on sumptuous fresh food every day while they feed you toxic processed muck in tins and cardboard boxes. And then there are the Big Pharma families that were exposed in "Dope Sick". And on and on it goes, tens of thousands of super-wealthy upper-class families with their fingers in every pie, running all the banks, and pension funds of course.
And this is at the root of the pension problem. When people look at their pension plan they don't consider the upper class types who control it, they think only of their
"Money" and have an innate trust that whoever is running the show has their best interests at heart. After all isn't that what the TV set told them? There was no mention on TV of their money being directed in companies and real estate of the upper-class so that the upper-class, not them, would be enriched.
I remember 20 odd years ago when the big banks in Australia all sold their commercial real estate to our private pension funds. It was near the top of the commercial RE boom and they got fantastic prices for their old concrete buildings. The deal was they would lease them back, and they did, for a while... But so many branches and city centers have closed up shop now it's not funny and many of those "Investments" now sit empty. Also the big inner city ones are reaching the end of their design lives, as well as being full of vacancies due to the GFC and covid. It was a bad deal, but not for the upper-classes who owned them.
But the average person in the street seems resigned to getting ripped off these days, they are choked in debt and their homes are monuments to TV renovation shows. They buy new cars that are worse than the 8 year old ones they trade in as far as reliability goes and neither will they complain too much when 50% or more of their old age pension gets stolen. It's the Slave mindset, the whipped dog mindset. And there is nothing to be done for it either quite frankly, because there isn't enough wealth left on the planet to drag them back up into another episode of the affluent middle class. Instead they are given Potemkin wealth, digital stock entries on screens, digital coins in a digital wallet. These cost nothing but a few electrons zooming across the internet and they give the masses the day to day feeling that they are sharing in the wealth too. But it isn't the vast estates, the private jets and yachts of the upper-class. it isn't producing farmland or vast mineral deposits either. It's just a placebo, that's all that's left to go around.
The last one to leave this forum please remember to put Adam_B out and turn off the lights.
