The United States has become a full-blown tyranny. This was built-in from the creation of the Constitution. When the battle for economic democracy was lost in the 1780s, the die was cast for a bourgeois oligarchy that has run the power structure ever since.
This bourgeois oligarchy (or, if you prefer, the merchant-banker class) existed before the American Revolution, as well, when their practices were known as the "Mercantile Code." Looting the public purse through various tax schemes that amounted to subsidies for imperial expansion (more looting elsewhere) was the heart of the bourgeois project. In this way, they could establish control over numerous wealth-producing projects. The Atlantic slave trade, for example -- both the trade in human livestock and the "staple crops" they produced were quite lucrative. Opulent neighborhoods were built up in many cities around the perimeter of the Atlantic Ocean by this trade. The wealth thus produced financed the Industrial Revolution, although imperial apologists remain largely in denial of this well-documented point.
Even after emancipation, bourgeois investments in Brazil, the legal slavery of prison labor in the U.S., and the wage slavery of textile mills, steel mills, railroad construction, and food processing -- all financed by the wealth originally produced by slaves -- meant a continuation of the ruling class's lock on power.
But back to the eighteenth century. Enter the young George Washington -- errand boy, surveyor, and land agent for the consortium known as the Ohio Land Company -- who saw an opportunity to fulfill his desires of becoming a Great Planter and Land Speculator Extraordinaire in the years after King George's War (one cannot resist mentioning the ironic twist in that name). When Washington hoofed it over the mountains in the employ of the Ohio Company with guide Christopher Gist, his path to "greatness" unfolded before him in the form of the Ohio Country -- the fertile land west of the Alleghenies that the French were in the process of claiming with their native trading partners in the "pays d'en haut," or "high country" above the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley. In short order, Washington was sent to the recently constructed Ft. LeBoeuf on the Allegheny River north of the forks of the Ohio River with a warning to the French to vacate that country being claimed by the Virginia consortium. The French laughed and sent him home with a counter warning. The end result was the outbreak of the French-Indian War, which was the culmination of a string of imperial wars dating to 1689 and the start of King William's War.
At this point, it is useful to recognize whose ends are served by war. One of the characteristics of the bourgeoisie is, of course, the accumulation of fluid wealth -- money and goods -- a process dating back to the twelfth century or so. This accumulation of money by this rising merchant-banker class allowed for the opportunity to sell loans and insurance to European aristocrats and monarchs who were perennially needed to finance their extravagant lifestyle. But the most pressing need, especially for monarchs, was financing for war. The bourgeoisie were happy to assist, and at low interest as well as the prospect of increased access to power. By the late seventeenth century in the English-speaking world, the bourgeoisie had grown frustrated at their lack of control over the London government. With the useful rationale provided by the unpopularity and religious preferences of King James II (a conservative Catholic king), a coup was fomented. The plan centered on bringing James's daughter Mary and her merchant-banker prince of a husband, William of Orange, to the throne. The new monarchs, however, would have to agree to sharing power with Parliament where the House of Commons was under the control of the bourgeoisie. Now, with control of the levers of power and access to the public purse, the military could be used to both run up the government's debt to the bourgeoisie, and to pursue their own ends: opening up new resources and markets. This was the essence of the "Glorious" Revolution of 1688, so named, and understandably so, by the bourgeoisie. The first in this series of imperial wars broke out the following year.
Meanwhile, back in Virginia some seventy years later, after several "wars of empire" involving primarily the English, French, and Spanish, the well-connected Ohio Company started a war with France and their Indian allies. Aided by messenger boy, agent, and emerging militia officer George Washington, this war would culminate in the French being ousted from North America in 1763.
How was this done? The answer is: war debt. Prime Minister William Pitt made the war so expensive for the French by opening up multiple fronts that the French government, still steeped in the ancien regime of absolute monarchy and not up to speed with bourgeois high finance, had to surrender its holdings in North America. The war was expensive for the British as well, and the bourgeois creditors demanded that the debt be "serviced." This would be done through taxes and tariffs that would fall heavily on the colonists who had fought much of this war. Basic American history tells us how that turned out. In an act that would lead to a protracted civil war, the thirteen colonies, led by now-General Washington and financed by the Master of the "Mercantile Code," Robert Morris of Philadelphia, started their own country.
After this successful revolution, a struggle for power ensued that goes on to this day: who will rule -- the people or the bourgeoisie? Until the Constitution emerged in 1787 and ratified the following year, this was a genuine question that remained undecided. But the Constitution was a cake baked by the bourgeoisie. Leave economic decisions beyond the reach of voters. Let the property-owning white males have the franchise, and don't disrupt the gravy train of slavery and the Mercantile Code -- the maintenance of permanent government debt, control of a standing army to be used for pursuing resources and markets funded by the "power of the purse," i.e., taxpayers. Tell them it's all on the side of the angels -- whisper sweet nothings about freedom and democracy into their ears -- they'll eat it up. And they did. Washington's project was so successful that upon his death he rose to his seat next to the Divine Throne itself, opposite his predecessor, Jesus. The bourgeois project in the New World was now beyond serious question, and so it more or less remains 230 years later. And yet, there are those who question the divinity of this project . . . it's almost as if they don't believe it. Their predecessors -- the true democrats (small "d") who envisioned a people's republic, weren't in the kitchen when the cake was baked -- they weren't invited.
Showing posts with label empire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label empire. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Back to the Basics: Agrarian History 101
Among the legion of items glaringly absent from the mainstream political discourse in the United States is agrarianism. This was one of the bedrock principles of the founding era, but it's demise -- in hindsight -- was predictable. Its return is vital.
Human access to fertile land and clean water, for eons, was an assumption. But as populations coalesced and divisions of labor in urban centers increased, not everyone was a farmer or hunter-gatherer (or both), anymore. By the time of the early Industrial Revolution, it became quite apparent to the Lovers of Control that depriving people of these basic resources was a method of social control. Once people are thus "proletarianized," (no land, nothing to sell but their labor), Power -- in all it's various forms -- can set the conditions whereby individuals might survive. The "proles" will then have to seek gainful employment on Power's terms.
In the English-speaking world, most people had a vital connection to the land until the rise of the Tudor monarchs. This coincided with the expansion of capitalism out of the Mediterranean, into the eastern Atlantic and beyond, creating a proto-global economic system. Where rural communalism had been the basic social structure up to that point, "landlords" -- those given special privilege in the hierarchy of feudalism -- began to realize that agriculture could be made more efficient by growing New World crops like corn and minimizing labor expenses. Rather than growing "food for the realm," landlords retained a small number of farmers to grow profits. This made food production more efficient, and those who were allowed to remain on the land largely profited, as well. But the vast majority of those rural communities went up in smoke (sometimes literally) when farmers who were seen as superfluous to the purposes of wealth accumulation were sent packing. If they refused to leave, their homes would simply be burned down as they looked on. This majority became homeless, landless, and were at the mercy of the elite-controlled market forces -- i.e., proletarianized. They had nothing left to sell but their labor.
The old feudal system had at least a facade of mutual obligations up and down the social hierarchy, but as the capitalist revolution continued to gain ground, ownership of the land became nearly absolute, and these landowners could and did restrict access to those resources. The rural folk who did not "make the cut" found themselves roaming the highways and byways searching for seasonal labor, often begging, or they headed for London, Edinborough, or other urban centers to try and sell their labor.
With the expansion of Britain into the global economic game of Empire, a new class seized the center of power. Known as the "Glorious Revolution," in 1688 the merchant-banker-landowning class, (AKA the "bourgeoisie"), gained control of the British government creating an entity generally known as "King-in-Parliament," where the monarch would now have to share power with them. Obligations to the peasant-artisan (AKA"working class") were minimized.
The empire uprooted indigenous villagers in a the New World, as well. These villagers fought back and found themselves out-numbered and out-gunned. Deracinated individuals from the Old Country (or their descendants), jumped at the chance to obtain some fertile land and fresh water to realize their dream of independence from dire poverty, obligation, and a brutal work-cycle forced on them when they (or their descendants) had lost their access to such resources. A desperate struggle between these Euro-Americans and Native Americans defending their own access to land and water ensued which continues to this day. The open violence of this struggle continues in Latin America, but it has largely moved into the courtroom in the U.S.
Often, these Anglo-Celts began their New World experience by working as slaves (indentured servitude) for several years as the price for their passage to America. Because the British expansionist power structure needed inexpensive "shock troops" to continue the process of appropriating land from the Indians, this nascent class of agrarian producers was given some measure of self-determination and, because of the distances involved, they were able to take for themselves still more independence.
By the mid-eighteenth century, this agrarian class, many of whom were fairly well-educated -- they had read of the Demos of the Greek city-states, of the Roman Republic's representative government, of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance -- and they understood the importance of access to resources in the struggle for self-determination (AKA "independence"). If one can produce one's own food supply, one's life will be much more stable and much less threatened than if one has nothing to sell but your labor to obtain needed sustenance. The subjugation of African slave labor -- among the most brutal of labor systems ever devised by humankind -- helped seal the deal. There was now a permanent underclass that could be forced to produce wealth almost unconditionally, allowing more self-determination for the Euro-American Anglo-Celts as they were not needed for that purpose. The socio-economic creation of "race" allowed for social control, dividing the producing class by skin color and ethnic origin, not unlike the way livestock is divided by breed and provenance.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the new republic of the United States had grown into a major producer of food as well as staple crops through the plantation complex. But the Industrial Revolution, fed by machinery, immigrant labor, banker finance, and the U.S. Civil War, boomed.
Immigrants -- usually deprived of their access to fertile land and fresh water in Europe and China -- came by the millions. Cities expanded at unprecedented rates. The rise of Industrial Capital gave new impetus to appropriating lands already appropriated from the natives by the agrarian class.
By 1920, the majority of people in the U.S. lived in cities. To resist virtual enslavement, urban artisans had joined together to form labor unions utilizing the only resource they had other than their labor: each other. The war over control and ownership of the means of production was full-throttle at this point, although the First World War had given the power structure an excuse to purge and/or outlaw those who refused to accept the appropriation of the wealth they produced with their labor. The economic crash of 1929 was particularly devastating because so many people were city-dwellers and access to fertile land and fresh water had not been part of the urban planning, much less an urban social contract.
By the time the Great Depression was at its nadir in the mid-1930s, dire want sparked the realization that access to fertile soil and clean water could alleviate much suffering. This neo-agrarian "back-to-the-land" movement remained in the shadows, however, as government used its access to credit (another, parallel story), to create infrastructure jobs for the society.
All went by the boards, however, with American involvement in the Second World War. In the aftermath of that sublime conflagration, a superficial consensus of conformity to a bourgeois-dominated social order emerged in the U.S. Power declared as its enemy any regime on the planet that might question this bourgeois domination -- a phenomenon reminiscent of the appropriation of lands from Native American peoples. At this point, agriculture began to embrace the industrialization that had spawned other industries in the previous century. By the 1980s, the slogan "Get big or get out" could be seen on t-shirts and billboards throughout the American Midwest. The American Agriculture Movement, a last gasp of the old independent agrarian class, breathed its last with the "Tractorcade" to the Washington, D.C. mall in 1978.
Access to essential resources for the "rank-and-file" was nevertheless nurtured by members of the '60s' and '70s' counterculture, giving rise to a new "back-to-the-land" movement. Urban gardens and farmers' markets have expanded on this vision in recent years, and such spaces are beginning to be incorporated into American cities from coast to coast.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of the agrarian movement -- access to arable land and fresh water -- for people traditionally categorized as the "working class." The whole concept of the "working class" is flawed in that it implies that all most people are good for is producing wealth for landowners or factory owners. People, on the whole, are "good" for much more than that, but most have never really been given the chance to find out for themselves in the modern world; indeed, most do not even consider pursuing such a goal realistic. This is a travesty and a tragedy, and it is completely unnecessary.
Just as liberating enslaved people of African descent in the nineteenth century gave rise to sophisticated art and literature as well as advances in science and medicine -- phenomena such as the Harlem Renaissance, the work of people like George Washington Carver or Booker T. Washington, blues, jazz, rock and roll, and on and on -- liberating the so-called "working class" from forty-plus hours of drudgery every week would produce a cultural flowering the likes of which we can scarcely imagine. The return of agrarianism and true independence points in this direction. I think it essential to take this journey. The legacy of agrarianism holds great potential for realizing our true human potential and independence from power systems that squelch such things, but it is also necessary for the survival of our species, and possibly our planet, as well.
Human access to fertile land and clean water, for eons, was an assumption. But as populations coalesced and divisions of labor in urban centers increased, not everyone was a farmer or hunter-gatherer (or both), anymore. By the time of the early Industrial Revolution, it became quite apparent to the Lovers of Control that depriving people of these basic resources was a method of social control. Once people are thus "proletarianized," (no land, nothing to sell but their labor), Power -- in all it's various forms -- can set the conditions whereby individuals might survive. The "proles" will then have to seek gainful employment on Power's terms.
In the English-speaking world, most people had a vital connection to the land until the rise of the Tudor monarchs. This coincided with the expansion of capitalism out of the Mediterranean, into the eastern Atlantic and beyond, creating a proto-global economic system. Where rural communalism had been the basic social structure up to that point, "landlords" -- those given special privilege in the hierarchy of feudalism -- began to realize that agriculture could be made more efficient by growing New World crops like corn and minimizing labor expenses. Rather than growing "food for the realm," landlords retained a small number of farmers to grow profits. This made food production more efficient, and those who were allowed to remain on the land largely profited, as well. But the vast majority of those rural communities went up in smoke (sometimes literally) when farmers who were seen as superfluous to the purposes of wealth accumulation were sent packing. If they refused to leave, their homes would simply be burned down as they looked on. This majority became homeless, landless, and were at the mercy of the elite-controlled market forces -- i.e., proletarianized. They had nothing left to sell but their labor.
The old feudal system had at least a facade of mutual obligations up and down the social hierarchy, but as the capitalist revolution continued to gain ground, ownership of the land became nearly absolute, and these landowners could and did restrict access to those resources. The rural folk who did not "make the cut" found themselves roaming the highways and byways searching for seasonal labor, often begging, or they headed for London, Edinborough, or other urban centers to try and sell their labor.
With the expansion of Britain into the global economic game of Empire, a new class seized the center of power. Known as the "Glorious Revolution," in 1688 the merchant-banker-landowning class, (AKA the "bourgeoisie"), gained control of the British government creating an entity generally known as "King-in-Parliament," where the monarch would now have to share power with them. Obligations to the peasant-artisan (AKA"working class") were minimized.
The empire uprooted indigenous villagers in a the New World, as well. These villagers fought back and found themselves out-numbered and out-gunned. Deracinated individuals from the Old Country (or their descendants), jumped at the chance to obtain some fertile land and fresh water to realize their dream of independence from dire poverty, obligation, and a brutal work-cycle forced on them when they (or their descendants) had lost their access to such resources. A desperate struggle between these Euro-Americans and Native Americans defending their own access to land and water ensued which continues to this day. The open violence of this struggle continues in Latin America, but it has largely moved into the courtroom in the U.S.
Often, these Anglo-Celts began their New World experience by working as slaves (indentured servitude) for several years as the price for their passage to America. Because the British expansionist power structure needed inexpensive "shock troops" to continue the process of appropriating land from the Indians, this nascent class of agrarian producers was given some measure of self-determination and, because of the distances involved, they were able to take for themselves still more independence.
By the mid-eighteenth century, this agrarian class, many of whom were fairly well-educated -- they had read of the Demos of the Greek city-states, of the Roman Republic's representative government, of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance -- and they understood the importance of access to resources in the struggle for self-determination (AKA "independence"). If one can produce one's own food supply, one's life will be much more stable and much less threatened than if one has nothing to sell but your labor to obtain needed sustenance. The subjugation of African slave labor -- among the most brutal of labor systems ever devised by humankind -- helped seal the deal. There was now a permanent underclass that could be forced to produce wealth almost unconditionally, allowing more self-determination for the Euro-American Anglo-Celts as they were not needed for that purpose. The socio-economic creation of "race" allowed for social control, dividing the producing class by skin color and ethnic origin, not unlike the way livestock is divided by breed and provenance.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the new republic of the United States had grown into a major producer of food as well as staple crops through the plantation complex. But the Industrial Revolution, fed by machinery, immigrant labor, banker finance, and the U.S. Civil War, boomed.
Immigrants -- usually deprived of their access to fertile land and fresh water in Europe and China -- came by the millions. Cities expanded at unprecedented rates. The rise of Industrial Capital gave new impetus to appropriating lands already appropriated from the natives by the agrarian class.
By 1920, the majority of people in the U.S. lived in cities. To resist virtual enslavement, urban artisans had joined together to form labor unions utilizing the only resource they had other than their labor: each other. The war over control and ownership of the means of production was full-throttle at this point, although the First World War had given the power structure an excuse to purge and/or outlaw those who refused to accept the appropriation of the wealth they produced with their labor. The economic crash of 1929 was particularly devastating because so many people were city-dwellers and access to fertile land and fresh water had not been part of the urban planning, much less an urban social contract.
By the time the Great Depression was at its nadir in the mid-1930s, dire want sparked the realization that access to fertile soil and clean water could alleviate much suffering. This neo-agrarian "back-to-the-land" movement remained in the shadows, however, as government used its access to credit (another, parallel story), to create infrastructure jobs for the society.
All went by the boards, however, with American involvement in the Second World War. In the aftermath of that sublime conflagration, a superficial consensus of conformity to a bourgeois-dominated social order emerged in the U.S. Power declared as its enemy any regime on the planet that might question this bourgeois domination -- a phenomenon reminiscent of the appropriation of lands from Native American peoples. At this point, agriculture began to embrace the industrialization that had spawned other industries in the previous century. By the 1980s, the slogan "Get big or get out" could be seen on t-shirts and billboards throughout the American Midwest. The American Agriculture Movement, a last gasp of the old independent agrarian class, breathed its last with the "Tractorcade" to the Washington, D.C. mall in 1978.
Access to essential resources for the "rank-and-file" was nevertheless nurtured by members of the '60s' and '70s' counterculture, giving rise to a new "back-to-the-land" movement. Urban gardens and farmers' markets have expanded on this vision in recent years, and such spaces are beginning to be incorporated into American cities from coast to coast.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of the agrarian movement -- access to arable land and fresh water -- for people traditionally categorized as the "working class." The whole concept of the "working class" is flawed in that it implies that all most people are good for is producing wealth for landowners or factory owners. People, on the whole, are "good" for much more than that, but most have never really been given the chance to find out for themselves in the modern world; indeed, most do not even consider pursuing such a goal realistic. This is a travesty and a tragedy, and it is completely unnecessary.
Just as liberating enslaved people of African descent in the nineteenth century gave rise to sophisticated art and literature as well as advances in science and medicine -- phenomena such as the Harlem Renaissance, the work of people like George Washington Carver or Booker T. Washington, blues, jazz, rock and roll, and on and on -- liberating the so-called "working class" from forty-plus hours of drudgery every week would produce a cultural flowering the likes of which we can scarcely imagine. The return of agrarianism and true independence points in this direction. I think it essential to take this journey. The legacy of agrarianism holds great potential for realizing our true human potential and independence from power systems that squelch such things, but it is also necessary for the survival of our species, and possibly our planet, as well.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
The Institutionalization of the Criminal Mind
The Institutionalization of the Criminal Mind
©Douglas S. Harvey 2012
It is interesting that Adam Smith, the oft-cited codifier of “classical economics,” whose 1776 book The Wealth of Nations continues to be mentioned with great frequency, did not advocate cold, amoral rationalism in all one’s economic affairs. Smith maintained a moral center in which concepts of justice took precedence over “enlightened self-interest.” Indeed, Smith even referred to the “beneficent” society which served as an embellishment to a “just” society. Yet, the concept of “enlightened self-interest" has become a phrase conflated with cold, calculating – even cunning – behavior. The expansion of economic empire has made this behavior an assumption in capitalist market societies like the U.S. and Britain. This assumption whispers to us that profit is our proper priority, greed is good, “self-interest” equals capital and material accumulation, and this “self-interest,” when pursued by all, creates an ideal population of virtuous individuals.
In the so-called “developed” world, this assumption seeps into our pores as we mature into adulthood. Indeed, we are led to believe that this is the only way to motivate people – without the profit incentive, no one would ever do anything. This brings to mind the mythos prevalent in western religions that without the threat of eternal damnation, people would succumb to their “base instincts” and the world would deteriorate into pagan barbarism. Indeed, as many on the political “right” would argue, profit motive is the only legitimate motivation. Some have gone to great lengths to associate capital accumulation with virtue, and with Christian virtue, at that. In this mythos, “self-realization” is measured by accumulation – money, houses, cars, clothes, jewels, etc. Wealth accumulation became the measure of virtue. As for barbarism, a cleared-eyed body count of the victims of economic expansion might cause us to redefine the concept.
This is not a process that began with the Industrial Revolution, or even Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The search for resources and markets to facilitate the continued accumulation of capital can be traced at least to the thirteenth-century Mediterranean world. There, for a brief time, connections were established between the Silk Road and the relative backwaters of northwestern Europe that spelled profit for the merchant middle-men. When the search for resources and markets expanded into the New World after Columbus, unprecedented engines of commerce and accumulation were kick-started that continue to ebb, flow, and expand to this day. Wealth once enjoyed only by “divine-right” monarchs was now realized by a growing number of individuals who, often, had not even a title before their name. The liberal economic revolution was in full swing.
It is worth asking, as many have done: where did the wealth actually come from? Who took the stuff of the earth and transformed it into something of greater value AND did they enjoy the “surplus value” they created? The answers to the first question is: well, it wasn’t the capitalists. The correct response to the second question is, no they did not. Those who hoarded the surplus value were those who were in a position to steer some of that added value their way. They were in such a position because of influence or access to existing wealth that had been accumulated through, for example, policies deracinating entire communities, redistributing land (resources) to the wealthy, enslaving thousands of people, and creating a large number of itinerant, landless laborers. This can be seen in Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the early modern period, and it can be seen in Mexico, India, Brazil, China, and elsewhere today.
Those accumulating this wealth had a deeply-rooted interest in creating the assumption that “wealth = virtue.” This accumulation of “capital,” the value added to the fruits of the earth by the work of artisans, became the standard rate of measure for “success.” This was accomplished through books instructing one in the arts of polite society, through various theater plays that depicted accumulation as virtue, and by demonizing or dismissing alternative viewpoints in the public sphere. For example, the notion of “commonwealth” – that certain aspects of the earth are owned by all as fellow creatures – was downplayed or forgotten. Holding resources in common was said to be “savage”; simply not the way civilized people behave. In the 1980s, champion of laissez-faire capitalism Margaret Thatcher announced that “there is no such thing as society.”
One may study the historical record and a pattern emerges: people must be displaced and alienated from the land so that Big Capital, (those who have accumulated the surplus value they themselves did not produce), can control the extraction and production of resources. “Peace Treaty” meetings held with native peoples in North America were conducted with a veneer of sincerity, but behind the scenes there was a calculation that the indigenous peoples would ultimately be alienated from their land. One basic way that this can be illustrated is by observing that these “treaties,” which invariably meant more land for whites, less land for Indians, had to be ratified by the colonial authorities be they British or Anglo-American. Indigenous people, while they often held treaty ratification votes of their own back home, considered all that was said at the treaty meeting to BE the treaty. For the colonial interests, it was only the markings on the paper that constituted the treaty, regardless of what had been said. Since the indigenous peoples often could not read English and were in any case an oral culture, this paper was secondary to the words spoken at the meeting. Here is what an English official told Tanighrisson, the Seneca leader who met with them at Logstown, Pennsylvania colony in 1752 to discuss their presence in the Ohio Valley:
Brethren, be assur’d that the King [George II], our Father, by purchasing your Lands, had never any Intention of taking them from you, but that we might live together as one People . . .
The deceit plainly visible in hindsight is the rule, not the exception. From the Canary Islanders of the fifteenth century to the Taino peoples of the sixteenth, the Lakotas of the nineteenth, and the farming folk of Mexico, India, China and beyond in the twentieth, the deracination of people from their land by hook, crook, bullet, and bomb has been a feature of this economic empire. Native “leaders” willing to sign-off on this resource usurpation are bought off, created or, failing those methods, native resistance to economic empire is crushed by a publicly-funded military.
The same pattern continues through to Latin America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and other regions where there are resources and markets coveted by Big Capital. The death of innocents who just happen to be in the coveted region can be numbered in the millions. Yet, those who champion this behavior, from the Donald Trumps to the Dick Cheneys to the Koch Brothers are put forward as exemplars of virtue – “hard workers” who have been “successful.” In most cases, their “success” is built on deceit and cunning. They have institutionalized the criminal mind.
There was a brief time – about two generations' worth of time – labor unions mitigated the leak of surplus value flowing into the coffers of the rich. This is the American "middle" class of the mid-twentieth century – probably the largest affluent working class in the modern period. (Note: the "middle" class works, hence they are "working" class. It doesn't really matter what color your collar is. If you want to know what "class" you're in, stop making your house payments or paying your rent; this will clarify the issue for you.) Yet, we are told that the rich are the "job creators" and that they need regulators and government in general "off their backs." Here's a secret they either don't know themselves or they certainly don't want the rest of us to know: they don't create the jobs. People with ideas, people with skills, and a large, well-paid working class with money to spend create jobs. Ultimately, the capital accumulators are superfluous - if they don't know it they may suspect it – hence the burning need to control the discourse and equate wealth with virtue.
The cultural echo chamber that measures success in private wealth accumulation needs to be called out in its deceit again and again and again until the values and mores of the mainstream begin to be called into question not daily but hourly. A value system that champions values of health – for humans AND their environment – a good quality of life for ALL, and allowing food producers, artisans, craftsmen, and laborers to enjoy the fruits of the wealth they produce needs to replace the institutionalized criminal mind of deceit and cunning. Truly “enlightened” self-interest includes the welfare of our home and all who are in it. This home is Planet Earth.
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