Death by Oligarchy
Death by Oligarchy
/Truthdig
Oligarchs are blinded by hubris, wealth and power. Their cloying sense of
entitlement sees them outraged by even the most tepid reforms or mildest of
criticisms. They lack empathy and compassion, along with remorse or guilt,
for what is done to those outside of their tiny, elitist circles. Privilege
does strange and unpleasant things to human beings. I saw these distortions
among my rich classmates as a scholarship student at prep school and at
Harvard University, an institution designed, like all elite schools, to
perpetuate the plutocracy. Living in privilege spawns callousness, even
cruelty, to those less fortunate and feeds a bottomless greed.
The repugnant characteristics of the rich are skillfully masked by armies of
lawyers and publicists, a servile and intimidated press, good manners and
the fig leaf of philanthropy. Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates, Jimmy
Wales, Peter Thiel, John Mackey and the late Steve Jobs and David
Koch-whatever their carefully packaged public image-champion or championed
economic and social models that are designed to create a new form of serfdom
for the working class and further consolidate the concentration of wealth
and power into the hands of the oligarchs. When a society falls into the
death grip of an oligarchic class, the result is always catastrophic.
Oligarchs, because they live insulated lives surrounded by obsequious
courtiers that cater to their bottomless narcissism and hedonism, wield
power based on fantasy. They propagate ruling ideologies, such as
neoliberalism and the intellectually and morally bankrupt writings of Ayn
Rand, which are not economically rational but justify their privilege. Their
mantra, first uttered by a notorious serial killer and enthusiastically
embraced by Rand, is: "What Is Good for Me Is Right." All our
institutions-the press, the courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch
and academia-have been perverted to serve the oligarch's narrow, selfish
interests while an oppressed citizenry, struggling to survive, is seething
with mounting rage and frustration. The corporate coup orchestrated by the
ruling oligarchs over the past few decades gave us Donald Trump. If this
coup is not reversed, far worse will follow.
The oligarchs are the last to understand the consequences of their moral
depravity. The political reformers, such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth
Warren, who could save the system from self-destruction are demonized in the
same way the Russian oligarchs demonized Alexander Kerensky, the socialist
revolutionaries and Mensheviks, paving the way for the tyrannical Bolsheviks
under Vladimir Lenin. When the end comes, and the end will come, most
probably in our case with a tyranny imposed by Christian fascists, the
oligarchs will be blissfully unaware, gorging themselves at their palatial
estates or on their mega yachts like the clueless French or Russian
aristocrats on the eve of their revolutions.
"We are in the midst of a major global, political, economic, social and
cultural transition-but we don't know which way we're headed," writes Lisa
Duggan in "Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed." "The incoherence
of the Trump administration is symptomatic of the confusion as politicians
and business elites jockey with the Breitbart alt-right forces while
conservative evangelicals pull the strings. The unifying threads are
meanness and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand."
This spirit of meanness corrupts the far right and the far left. It defines
the Christian fascists and the alt-right as it defines many in antifa and
the black bloc, although unlike their fascist opponents the far left in the
United States is a marginal, poorly organized, ideologically bankrupt and
ineffectual political force. As societies polarize, the attempts by
reformers and moderates such as Sanders and Warren to halt the disorder,
defuse the mounting hatreds and antagonisms that are increasingly expressed
through violence and salvage democratic norms prove fruitless. The oligarchs
do not respond to their appeals and eventually the disenfranchised lose
patience with the impotence of the moderates.
Lenin's ruthlessness and rule by decree and terror, enforced by death squads
run by the Cheka, reflected the ruthlessness and terror employed by the
Russian aristocracy and the Okhrana. The Committee for Public Safety, which
assumed dictatorial power from September 1793 to July 1794 during the French
Revolution, reflected the ruthlessness and terror employed by the French
nobility. Extremists, no matter what their political platform, are
remarkably similar once in power. And it is almost always extremists who
inherit power in failed democracies.
The oligarchs, who spent $1 billion in 2016 to deny Sanders the Democratic
Party nomination and try to put Hillary Clinton in the White House, learned
nothing from the debacle. If they can't shove Joe Biden down our throats,
how about Pete Buttigieg or Michael Bloomberg? And should Warren or Sanders
miraculously become the Democratic candidate, which the oligarchs are
working hard to prevent, they will reluctantly back Trump. Trump may be
vulgar, corrupt and inept, he may have turned the United States into an
international pariah, but he slavishly serves the financial interests of the
oligarchs.
No battle to accrue profit is too small for oligarchs. The election for City
Council in Seattle saw Bezos, the world's richest man, spend $1.5 million to
flip the council to serve his business interests. Bezos was incensed by a
council decision last year to tax Amazon, which in 2018 paid no federal
income tax, and other businesses to help provide housing for the city's
11,000 homeless. Amazon got the city's tax repealed within a month. Bezos in
this election targeted his nemesis, the socialist City Councilwoman Kshama
Sawant, who thankfully was re-elected, and pushed a slate of pro-business
candidates for the council. Bezos failed, this time, to seize control of the
council. No doubt, the next round of elections will see him triple or
quadruple his investment. The 2016 elections had a price tag of $6.5
billion, but as Hamilton Nolan points out in the Guardian, "for a group that
exercises total control over a federal budget of more than $4 trillion,
that's a real bargain."
Oligarchs, freed from outside oversight and regulation, wantonly pillage the
political and economic institutions that sustain them. They run up huge
government deficits by slashing taxes on the rich. This forces an
underfunded government to borrow from the banks, further enriching the
oligarchs, and impose punishing austerity programs on the public. They
privatize traditional government services, including utilities, intelligence
gathering, large parts of the military, the police, the prison system and
schools to make billions in profits. They create complex financial
mechanisms that ensure usurious interest rates on mortgages, personal and
student loans. They legalize accounting fraud and suppress wages to keep the
public trapped in a crippling debt peonage. They loot trillions in taxpayer
money when their speculative bubbles burst.
They are no longer capitalists, if we define capitalists as those who make
money from the means of production. They are a criminal class of financial
speculators that rewrite the laws to steal from everyone, including their
own shareholders. They are parasites that feed off the carcass of industrial
capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They manipulate money.
And this gaming of the system and seizure of political power by finance
capital is why the wealthiest 1% of America's families control 40% of the
nation's wealth.
Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase with an estimated worth of $1.4
billion, is the poster child for corporate greed and criminality. He
directed JPMorgan Chase to underwrite fraudulent securities in the years
leading up to the 2008 financial crash. He overcharged members of the
military on mortgages and mortgage refinancing transactions. He overcharged
customers for overdraft fees. He manipulated bidding on California and
Midwest electricity markets. He overcharged homeowners for flood insurance.
He billed customers for nonexistent credit card monitoring services. He
charged minorities higher rates and fees on mortgages than those paid by
white borrowers. He failed to pay overtime to company workers. Yes,
JPMorgan Chase had to pay more fines than any other financial institution in
the country, but the profits more than offset its fraudulent and criminal
activity.
It is Dimon, along with fellow oligarchs Gates and the billionaire investor
Leon Cooperman, who has recently led the attack on Warren. Dimon chastised
her for her "wealth tax" plan and for allegedly vilifying "successful
people." Cooperman accused Warren of seeking to wreck the American dream.
Gates also denounced her wealth tax plan, although if he did have to pay the
tax, he would still be worth $6 billion. When questioned, Gates refused to
say whether, if Warren becomes the Democratic nominee, he would support
Trump.
Greed is bottomless. It is the disease of the rich. The more the oligarchs
accumulate the more they want. This is the dark side of human nature. It has
always been with us. All societies are plagued by social inequality, but
when those on the bottom and in the middle of the social pyramid lose their
voice and agency, when the society exists only to serve the greed of the
rich, when income inequality reaches the levels it has reached in the United
States, the social fabric is torn apart and the society destroys itself.
Aristotle warned about the danger of oligarchies nearly 2,500 years ago. We
stand on the cusp of social and political disintegration, bequeathed to us
by oligarchs who have seized total power. The ruling oligarchs will stymie
all attempts at reform. This makes a crisis inevitable. Once we enter this
crisis, the oligarchs will become the most potent enablers of despotism.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
