the rich should fear their servants

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article that said the greatest fear of the wealthy is political violence in the streets.

But it’s not the people outside the gates they should fear--it’s all the ”little” people they need to fear run their lives, the butlers, nannies, drivers, gardeners, accountants, ass-wipers, and probably even the private security.

Even if these servants are well-compensated, they have eyes and ears and could realize that their bosses are screwing their friends and family and even endangering their lives.

Those inside the walls might take action or even leak some useful information to the rest of us.

Jack London wrote about this happening in a revolution in the US in THE IRON HEEL. It was incredibly accurate about the methods of the wealthy today even though it was written over a hundred years ago.

You can see a real life example of this in THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED when the wealthy of Venezuela are fretting on camera that their servants may be spying on them, then the camera turns for just a second to a Native maid dusting whose eyes flash up making you wonder if they were right.

So it will be here.

We have already seen this with low and mid-level people who execute the orders of the rich in the defense and foreign policy establishment, from functionaries who refuse to lie like the Iraq Survey Group and the pre-Iraq War intel analysts, to those in the military who leaked specifics of war plans against Iran and the suspicious movement of nuclear weapons in the US, to the wholesale leaking of Bradley Manning.

You can’t be an idiot and do those kind of government jobs, and when they see the real agenda, not of protecting our security or even enriching average Americans, but of killing people and crushing democracies to enrich a very few, they can’t do their job blindly forever. As Frederick Douglass said, when someone realizes they are doing an injustice, either they will be eaten by guilt until they end the injustice or they will figure out a way to justify it in their mind.

In the Internet Age, when it is so easy to find other opinions and facts about what’s going on, a literate person would have a hard time keeping up the walls of rationalization for long.

When enough of their servants say “ENOUGH,” their day will be over. Then we can get on with solving our pressing problems without worrying about whether the solutions offend or cut into the profit margins of  pampered, morally degenerate trust fund babies.

Japan's nuclear meltdown shows threat of gov't of, by, and for the rich

As if we hadn't seen enough of it in recent years with unnecessary wars that drained our treasury and killed our patriotic youth, massive oil spills that contaminate major supplies of seafood, trade deals that exported our jobs, demands for deregulation of the financial industry, then bailouts when they destroy what they just had deregulated, taking our homes with mortgage scams, put tax avoidance of the rich as the absolute top priority ahead of schools, heat for the poor and old, health care, and honoring the contracts of public employees.

Now with the meltdown in Japan, what most people see as a no-rush, second or third tier issue, the rich's demand that we stick with dirty energy sources like oil, coal, and nuclear power, which they have figured out how to monopolize and manipulate the price of, instead of allowing us to switch to limitless sources of clean energy is going to cost us thousands, maybe millions of lives. Not slowly from a cancer here, or a mine collapse there, but all at once.

Japan's earthquake has led to an accidental Hiroshima that could affect the whole world, and it was entirely avoidable. But our politicians, both here, in Japan, and around the world, have been bought by a financial elite that would rather risk millions of lives than pass up a chance to increase their profit margins.

That cloud of radiation that might drift over to us through the jetstream could just as easily be coming from nuclear plants built on or near faults here in California.

We can no longer afford a political system that allows such a malignant financial elite to call the shots.

We must put our people ahead of their profits.

It's a matter of survival.

Why Wikileaks gives me hope

Over the last decade, it has become obvious to anyone paying attention that the very wealthy few were calling the shots and Washington does exactly what they are told, even when destroyed our middle class and our real national security to pursue goals that benefited that very few financially. Even the base of the right wing saw this clearly with the Wall Street bailout. Wall Street threatened to destroy our economy if we didn't bail them out (as if they hadn't already ) and our elected representatives voted to give them the money in spite of overwhelming public opposition.

A couple of things allowed them to do all this: 1) lame propaganda reasons fed to the public that just enough believed to vote for and give a democratic seal of approval to those action, 2) middle and upper middle class people in government and the corporate media who repeat and reinforce the propaganda and enact and enforce the real policy, and most importantly, 3) those functionaries either looking the other way or keeping their mouths shut about what is really going on.

Over the past few decades, we have seen tiny cracks in that wall of silence as individuals realized that by quietly serving the financial elite, they may be enriching their own family, but they were betraying other families like theirs, their country, and the human race. Daniel Ellsberg, the Church Committee, the Iran Contra hearings, journalists like Gary Webb, insiders who spoke out about the fabrication of intelligence before the Iraq War even started, Ambassador Joe Wilson, each seemed like a rock thrown in a pond that made ripples for a moment before the flat calm returned as if nothing ever happened.

Wikileaks could be different. The sheer volume of material makes you wonder if there aren't a LOT of people contributing material, and the recent State Department document dump shows that it can do real damage both to the propaganda facade and hopefully even the real policy.

Even if Wikileaks itself is shut down, and everyone who ever funneled documents to them is thrown in prison, whistleblowing has reached a critical mass and the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. It is also likely that those who have access to even more damaging information will be emboldened the more other people put out there.

This must scare the shit out the rich more than Nat Turner scared white plantation owners in the 19th century, and it should.

If Washington fails to do their job of making Wall Street, bankers, and the old money, spoiled trust fund babies subject to the rule of law instead of allowing them to make the law, some regulator told to look the other way, a soldier or diplomat asked to carry corporate water when it violates human rights or democracy, or a reporter who actually uses their skills to afflict the comfortable will air their dirty laundry in front of the whole world.

Once Washington realizes that nobody is listening when they say these leaks are treason and a danger to our national security, they will be forced to do one of two things:

1. their jobs. Start legislating in the public interest not the interest of the wealthiest few, and bring the few to justice when they harm the rest of us and the rest of the world
   
   or
   
   
2. Give up the pretense of democracy and execute the Pinochet Option.

The problem with the latter is it would depend on the same people to execute it who are now leaking like sieves, and in the long run, Americans will have no stomach for persecuting their relatives and neighbors.

The Libertarian wing of the Republican Party likes to entertain the Ayn Rand fantasy of the elite John Galts of the world withdrawing the contribution of their works and talents from the rest of us and the world falling apart, but they have it exactly backwards. First, that financial elite has no talent other than a lack of conscience and a mistaken belief that they are better than those born to the middle and working class, and second, without the willing cooperation of hundreds, even thousands of the working and middle class, they could not manipulate world events, access their fortunes, eat, and in many cases, they could not even wipe their asses since they have always had someone to do it for them.

Wikileaks isn't a crack in the dam of silence of all those people who carry water for the rich, it is the dam breaking, and the wall of water is fast approaching the mansions of those who have treated the rest of us like sheep for the slaughter for too long.

WaPo publisher's apology shows why newspapers are dying

Recently, the publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth, advertised a dinner at her home where, for the low price of $250,ooo, you could talk off the record with Post reporters and top Obama administration officials. The first was to be on health care reform (paid for by Kaiser Permanente). Weymouth later ran an unconvincing apology claiming she knew little about the details of the event that was supposed to take place in her own home.

While this story by itself has little direct consequence, it is further evidence of what we all should have learned about the financial elite in the last decade, as I explain in my letter to the Post:

Weymouth's hard-to-believe apology as well as the original idea for the event itself shows why newspapers and our democratic process are dying: the public is fed platitudes and PR spin to herd them toward pre-approved opinions while the real debate is going on behind closed doors between those who have the money to buy the outcome they want.

The original article shows one part of the problem is nepotism. Weymouth got her job not because she is the crème de la crème of journalists but because she is the grand-daughter of famed owner Katherine Graham. Owning the press no more makes you a competent publisher than being the first president Bush's son makes you a competent president.

When the press is a for-profit business, it is the toy or tool of the wealthy. They can take a good paper and turn it into a worthless rag as has happened at the Los Angeles Times, or they can simply shut it down as is happening at newspapers across the county because though profitable, they don't make enough of a profit margin to please their owners.

We need a new model of press, perhaps like the Guardian in the UK that is run like PBS & NPR here (but the Guardian doesn't have to beg for corporate donations). We should also fully fund PBS & NPR, so they aren't beholden to corporations and the foundations of the wealthy to stay in business.

We need a new model for business and especially news that doesn't depend on the whims of the Katherine Weymouths of the world.

Even better would be if she simply gave the paper to its employees to run as a non-profit.

We need a new model for journalism, business, and government that limits the power of those who only bring money not talent to the table (and NO, bookkeeping scams you learned in your MBA program are no more talents than stealing money from your mother's purse was when you were a kid).

Since the wealthy love charity and their foundations so much, Weymouth could do a great public service by removing herself entirely from the operation of the paper, and letting the reporters choose their own editors from their midst rather than letting the idle rich pick those who are corporate compliant. Then Weymouth should never speak to the reporters or editors again except for a congratulatory phone call when they get their Pulitzers.

If the presidency of George W. Bush, the Enron collapse, the theft of countless pensions, the attempted theft through privatization of Social Security, the banking crisis, our health insurance system that puts profits ahead of saving lives, and our on-going wars for oil and pipeline routes in the Middle East were not evidence enough, Katherine Weymouth provides further proof that the financial elite in this country is as morally and intellectually crippled as George W. Bush--and just as dangerous when their hands are on the levers of power.

Sincerely,

More on the inevitable extinction of the financial elite

Jack London accurately detailed utter failure of our financial elite

Just about a hundred years ago, Jack London wrote The Iron Heel about the oligarchy in America taking open control of the government to crush the rising political power of the working and middle class:

The Iron Heel

by Jack London

chapter 5 excerpt

He sketched the economic condition of the cave-man and of the savage peoples of to-day, pointing out that they possessed neither tools nor machines, and possessed only a natural efficiency of one in producing power. Then he traced the development of machinery and social organization so that to-day the producing power of civilized man was a thousand times greater than that of the savage.

`Five men,' he said, `can produce bread for a thousand. One man can produce cotton cloth for two hundred and fifty people, woollens for three hundred, and boots and shoes for a thousand. One would conclude from this that under a capable management of society modern civilized man would be a great deal better off than the cave-man. But is he? Let us see. In the United States to-day there are fifteen million8 people living in poverty; and by poverty is meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and adequate shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained...

`But to return to my indictment. If modern man's producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, why then, in the United States to-day, are there fifteen million people who are not properly sheltered and properly fed? Why then, in the United States to-day, are there three million child laborers? It is a true indictment. The capitalist class has mismanaged. In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged....

`You have failed in your management. You have made a shambles of civilization. You have been blind and greedy. You have risen up (as you to-day rise up), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the toil of children and babes. Don't take my word for it. It is all in the records against you. You have lulled your conscience to sleep with prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities. You are fat with power and possession, drunken with success; and you have no more hope against us than have the drones, clustered about the honey-vats, when the worker-bees spring upon them to end their rotund existence. You have failed in your management of society, and your management is to be taken away from you.

FULL TEXT

The words Jack London put in his characters mouth in The Iron Heel still ring true, though it needs some additions:

When you are no longer allowed in one country to work women and children around the clock for starvation wages, you simply move your factory to another country that will let you abuse your workers.

And you figured out the way to keep moving the factories forever: break the economies of the countries that are strong, so when you have finally worked your way down to the poorest of poor here, the formerly rich countries will be grateful for your starvation wages jobs. Isn't that what is happening to America today?

When one of your country club brethren charges you too much for health insurance for your employees, rather than drive a hard bargain with your fraternity brother, you simply stop giving health insurance to your employees and let them fend for themselves.

If anything in America tends to produce a more vigorous democracy like decent education in K-12 or college, you tell your bought off politicians in state capitals and Washington to starve it of funds or kill it outright.

You publicly claim to believe in competition, but use your pawns in Washington to tax your small competitors and subsidize you. And when someone comes along with a better product that would bury something like say, GASOLINE, you buy up the patents and if it isn't a patentable technology, you launch a massive PR campaign to crush it.

One person in America can do the work that a thousand did a hundred years ago, and yet they can only survive by incurring debt and more debt, and working two jobs and then three.

All so you can put more and more money in the bank than you can ever spend in your lifetime. Do you think your descendant four generations out will thank you for your hard work (if you did any) to accumulate your fortune, or will they be a moral and intellectual cripple like Paris Hilton and so many of the idle rich?

And those who inherited great wealth, don't you secretly know that you are incompetent and even helpless to defend yourselves without your army of middle and working class drones who manage your money, cut the crust off your toast and wipe your ass?

George Orwell said essentially the same thing as London in 1984:

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations...

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared...

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
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I like capitalism, and I'd like to be rich, but no one person, small group of people, or business should be so powerful that they can buy our government and have the power of life and death over the rest of us.

And if you don't think they have the power of life and death, think about someone whose health insurance denied a life saving procedure to fatten their profit margin, or a Gold Star Mom, mourning her child killed in Iraq, the country with the world's third largest oil reserves, in a war that our politicians tell us over and over had nothing to do with fattening the profit margins of oil companies.

The question is not if but when their depraved, withered hands will be pried from the levers of power. What they probably fail to realize is that the more radical action Obama takes, the longer their reprieve from forced retirement as Masters of theUniverse.

MORE IRAQ OIL THEFT LINKS

VIDEO: stick figure explain why banks screw you & credit unions don't

Click pic to see flick

The best way to get even with banks is to stop doing business with them. This is explains why credit unions are a better alternative in under two minutes.

Bankerspank.com has some good links on this including how to find a credit union:

creditunion.coop (look for LOCATE A CREDIT UNION in the left sidebar)

international woccu.org

We could probably eliminate a lot of our problems with corporate crime if we fed this model and starved the corporate one.

Previous post on credit unions.

Wall St. Bailout proves Orwell right: financial elite, you are OBSOLETE!

Or a vestigial limb that evolution will eventually remove.

As we have seen in the myriad scams and schemes that led to the bailout, they do nothing productive but instead, drain wealth from those who know how to make things and provide services, and even from taxpayers with wars to seize assets for them and subsidies to prop up their poorly run businesses.

Orwell goes even farther and says that modern technology has the means to produce enough wealth to give a comfortable lifestyle to everyone on earth with fairly minimal work. But that would endanger the elite, who would begin to look superfluous, so the excess wealth must be destroyed--spent on weapons that make no one's life easier and used to destroy other weapons, people, and things, which in turn absorbs more wealth to repair.

We see this most clearly in the United States. We can't afford to pay decent salaries to workers because the money must all go to execs and dividends. We can't afford to have decent government run schools or health care because the rich must not be taxed more than they want to be and more must be spent on our military than all other countries combined--never mind that all the yahoos with hunting rifles and shotguns would be more than enough to give anyone stupid enough to invade us a serious headache.

America and the world are at a cross-roads: do we continue to run our world into the ground and kill each other so that a handful of people can control more money than their family could spend in twenty generations or do we tell those people ENOUGH? Would it really hurt them to only have enough excess wealth for three or four generations?

Would it hurt them to make them treat the rest of us like members of the human family instead of like cattle they can milk, slaughter, or sell for their own enrichment?

This is what Orwell said about the wealthy in the modern world in 1984:

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.

1984

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