Actually I don't think that's entirely true. There are people like Obama, who
did not come out of the old elite. He got where he is through education and the
contacts he made while being educated. That's also true of his wife. She came
from a working family, but attended an elite college. They are now members of
an educated, wealthy elite. Their daughters attended elite private schools and
will benefit from that. There are many other examples. I just can't remember
them all right now. But these people started out in working class or middle
class families and because of their intellectual abilities or contacts or both,
they ended up in elite colleges where they connected with the powerful. What
the article is saying, partly, is that this is no longer possible. It's also
saying that the nature of the education that is provided to people who are not
wealthy, no longer prepares them to compete in the kind of society we have now.
When I attended college, or when Bernie Sanders attended college, that wasn't
the case. One could attend a city college or a state college or university and
receive a fine education. That's no longer true. Some of the girls in my public
school class were bright enough to attend a high school for intellectually
gifted girls at Hunter College, which was a city college for girls at the time.
Probably, if I hadn't been visually impaired, I, too, would have qualified. We
were all working class kids. None of that exists anymore, at least not in the
way it once did.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2020 2:33 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The New Elite: Dark Nights Rising
An interesting article, but I got bored and began skimming about a third of the
way through it.
I did agree with the following: "Louis Brandeis once noted, we can have a
democratic society or we can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few.
We cannot have both."
And as far as I'm concerned, that sums up the point of the article.
Not to take away from all the threads the authors wove, but I simply believe
that the "New Elite" are nothing more than the children of the "old elite"
The old monied folks worked just as hard to maintain their control, as do the
new elite. And the old elite had come out of an even older elite, one grounded
in Land, and moved into manufacturing and factories and sales of product. But
always the new elite build their fortunes on the wealth passed on to them by
their old elite parents.
Louis Brandeis was dead right. As much of an improvement as Capitalism is
over earlier systems, it still depends upon a portion of a population holding
captive the lives of others.
And by now we should be able to point out the weaknesses of the Capitalist
system for the majority of the people.
Wealth breeds contempt for the unwealthy.
Contempt drives people apart.
And once the process has begun, it becomes its own force.
While the solution is clear, redistribution of wealth, it is a solution that
will not work. The reason it will not work, is us.
Our thinking has been conditioned to view capitalism as a good method of
directing our social and economic system. Once we did manage to redistribute
our wealth, we would simply begin the process over again.
Until we bring into existence a person, or persons who are able to create a
system that allows us to share our collective wealth without some of us taking
more than our fair share, we are doomed. Our species is doomed, and very
likely the very planet we depend on will no longer support us.
Carl Jarvis, the optimistic pessimist
On 11/22/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But when I was young, there was quality free college education in New
York City and also, high quality specialized high schools for talented
and intellectually superior students in the city as well. And my
friend, 22 years older than I, who was raised in St. Paul Minnesota
and attended a regular, run of the mill high school in the 1930's and
never attended college, had an excellent liberal arts education.
Miriam
The New Elite: Dark Nights Rising
from Scheerpost
EDUCATION KLICKAUER & CAMPBELL
The New Elite: Dark Nights Rising
November 17, 2020
14 Commentson The New Elite: Dark Nights Rising America's new
self-replicating economic elite is conditioned from childhood to
accept heirarchy, domination and authority.
By Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell / Reposted from CounterPunch
There is a new elite on the rise. Unlike the old traditional elite,
America’s new elite lives no longer from inheritance and breeding but
on achievement. The old elite was based on land, property, and
factories. The new elite is very different. This elite has gone
through a rigorous training regime – all the way up to elite
universities in the Ivy League – to arrive at highly selective elite
jobs.
The old elite was defined by what Thorstein Veblen called leisure and
conspicuous consumption (1899). The new elite is a working elite. It
has to work – mostly in elite professions – to earn money. The new
elite’s employment is located in a relatively narrow spectrum of
occupations separating the new elite from non-elite, i.e. white-collar
workers in middle-class employment. The new elite finds employment
mainly in three main
categories: in management – CEOs (cf. JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon got
$31.5 million in 2020), CFOs, top-management, etc.; in finance (hedge
fund managers such as Jim Simons with a net worth of $23.5 billion –
not million – billion!); and in elite law firms like Wachtell, for example.
Having gone to elite day-care centres, elite kindergartens, elite
pre-schools, elite primary schools and elite high-schools, the new
elite arrives at elite colleges as a jumping-board to elite
postgraduate universities. For example, at Harvard and Yale, more
students come from households in the top 1% of the income distribution
than from the entire bottom half, writes Daniel Markovits in The
Meritocracy Trap. Markovits also sees the new elite as being trapped
because of its constant exposure to elite training, prep-schools,
private tutors, etc.; the relentlessness of examinations and
assessments; and eventually, the harshness of stressful burn-out jobs
at the top of the income pyramid.
Students at the prestigious Harker School in San Jose, where many
Silicon Valley elites send their children.
In sharp contrast to 18th and 19th century Satanic Mills run by the
old elite, the new elite works in what might be called elite
white-collar salt mines creating unbearable levels of workplace
stress, anxiety, cocaine use, alcoholism, and rafts of other
work-related stressors. These are symptoms and illnesses of
high-pressure jobs. In other words, from birth to death, the new elite is
trapped in a gold cage.
Semantically, it creates an elite language that denies ordinary
workers a language through which they can understand and articulate
the pathologies of contemporary capitalism. Linguistically, it cements
the increasing exclusion of middle-class and the working class.
Perhaps more importantly, workers have become victims without a
language of victimhood. This is a significant achievement of corporate
capitalism.
Simultaneously, media capitalism adds more gloss on glossy jobs for
the new elite while simultaneously justifying joblessness, wage
stagnation, and precarious employment in gloomy jobs. Increasingly, it
also creates mass unemployment for workers and the middle-class. The
increased alienation and exclusion of workers and the middle-class
paralleled by the concentration of power in the hands of the new elite
means precisely what Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis once noted,
we can have a democratic society or
we can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few.
We cannot have both
The new elite is about concentrating wealth and power in the hands of
a few.
And those few – the new elite – justify the system for which they have
been trained and worked so hard for many long hours. What was once
known as standard office hours – 9am-5pm – has muted for the new elite
into a work regime that begins at 9am or earlier on one day and runs
through to 5am on the next day with email checking during breakfast
and late-night conference calls.
Exemplifying such work regimes is Amazon’s turbocharged corporate
Darwinism with unreasonably high expectations on its elite staff as
well as its underpaid and harshly exploited warehouse workers. It is
as Amazon boss Bezos once said, you can work long, hard or smart, but
at Amazon.com you can’t choose just two out of three. Implementing his
relentless work regime, Amazon runs a continual performance
improvement algorithm on its own staff.
It is a remote-control super-surveillance panopticon relentlessly
scrutinising and always ready to get rid of workers deemed unproductive.
In many areas, the rise of the new elite is a zero-sum game – I win
you lose. It clearly identifies the so-called “losers”. Overall, the
share of national income of workers has fallen. It came as predicted
by those who understand neoliberalism. Shifting wealth away from
workers and towards capital during the last decades was paralleled by
the rise of neoliberalism, around the middle of the last century.
Simultaneously, stock prices which can be roughly seen as capturing
the income made by capital have far outstripped the wages of ordinary
workers. In other words, neoliberalism and the rise of the new elite
have vacuumed wealth upwards. To camouflage this neoliberal
propaganda, corporate media invented the infamous trickle-down
economics. In short, the rich are made richer, while the poor are made
poorer.
Not surprisingly, somewhere in the range of 40 to 50 million Americans
suffer from material deprivation. Of course, this has been
purposefully engineered through a neoliberal tax policy, for example.
In the USA, the top tax rate has fallen by more than half. It has cut
taxes for the rich that was over 90% throughout the 1950s and early
1960s. Neoliberal politicians reduced top tax rates to 70% starting
when Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981. Today it is below
40%, and in some cases, it is way below that.
The new elite can hire creative tax lawyers and accountants who know
the deliberately installed loopholes so that the new elite can reduce
their taxes further. As a consequence, someone like Donald Trump, who
Forbes estimates to have $2.5bn – $2,500,000,000 – paid a meagre $750 – in
taxes.
Trump pays less taxes than those voting for him! As the new elite is
made richer and richer, the government takes a smaller and smaller
share of their wealth.
Worse, the annual probability that a middle-class family who has
suffered a significant financial reversal, defined as a decline in
income, drop by more than 50% doubled between 1970 and 2000. For those
children born into such families, it does not get better when they
enter underprivileged schools. A poor child, in a poor school
district, in a poor state, receives about
$8,000 worth of schooling annually.
The very affluent children attending an elite private school receive
$75,000
worth of schooling per year. The poor kid has lost before the race begins.
There is no level playing field. Such stark disadvantages are cloaked
through rafts of ideologies pretending that everyone has the same
opportunities and the same chance in life.
Compared to a middle-class child, in a middle-income school district
receives about $12,000. At the same time, a middle-class child in a
wealthy school district receives $18,000. A rich child in a wealthy
school district receives $27,000. And now to the new elite. The very
affluent children attending an elite private school receive $75,000
worth of schooling per year. The poor kid has lost before the race
begins. There is no level playing field. Such stark disadvantages are
cloaked through rafts of ideologies pretending that everyone has the
same opportunities and the same chance in life.
Of course, the inequality in schooling is further exacerbated through
private tutoring needed to pass entry exams into elite schools and
elite universities. One test preparation tutoring company, for
example, catering to elite students in New York City charges $1,500
for a ninety-minute Skype tutoring session. With a father on $15/hr –
minimum wage, for example, it takes him 100 hours of work to pay for
the 90 minutes training. The poor simply have no chance. The
“$1,500-for-90-minute-tutoring” elite child in New York is not alone.
Globally the private tutoring market has exceeded
$100 billion. This is what the new elite spends to get their children
into elite schools, elite universities, and eventually into elite professions.
These are very serious numbers – $100 billion. The new elite wants,
pays for, and gets real education rather than gimmicks, ploys, exam
tactics, and cheap trickery. Instead of teaching elite students how to
simply take entry exams, they are tutored to become better at what the
test measures. They develop superior abilities to read
comprehensively, think coherently, process numbers, and use their
brains most effectively under exam conditions.
Elite tutoring delivers results. Elite children who are consistently
involved in extracurricular tutoring are 70% more likely to go to
high-quality colleges compared to children who are only occasionally
involved in tutoring. Even more critical is the staggering 400% higher
likelihood of getting into elite colleges/universities compared to
children who do not engage in such activities. In addition to elite
tutoring, the income and achievement gap measured by SAT (Scholastic
Aptitude Test) is staggering. Here are two examples:
1) students from families earning over $200,000 per year – top 5% –
score
388 points higher than students from families earning less than
$20,000 per year – the bottom 20%; and
2) students whose parents hold graduate degrees (top 10%) score 395
points higher than students whose parents have not completed high
school – the bottom 15%.
Education stratifies. It does not unify, nor does it create equality.
The new elite simply out-educates the middle-class by more and more,
year after year after year. The outcomes of this system systematically
favour the new elite in many ways. The top twenty private high schools
as ranked by Forbes send 30% of their graduates to the Ivy League, Stanford,
and MIT alone.
These schools also send two-thirds of their graduates to colleges and
universities ranked in the top 25 in their categories.
Of course, the entire system is tilted toward the elite as 37% of all
college students now come from households in the top 25% of the income
distribution. In short, a college education is no longer for the
working class and the poor – if it ever was. The share of all
bachelor’s degrees handed out to students from that bottom quarter was
just 10% in 2014 – down from a meagre 12% in 1970. There is no
school-to-college pipeline for the poor – just a school-to-prison pipeline.
Across the Ivy League, Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and Duke, more students
come from families in the top 1% of the income distribution bracket
than from the entire bottom half. The clear-cut “wealth elite
university” link is mind-numbing.
The new elite will not go to prison. Prison is for the poor. Instead,
the rich attend the most selective private universities. At elite
universities, more freshmen have fathers who are medical doctors than
those with fathers that are hourly workers, teachers, clergy, farmers, and
soldiers combined.
Top universities are increasingly closed off to the middle-class.
Across the Ivy League, Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and Duke, more students
come from families in the top 1% of the income distribution bracket
than from the entire bottom half. The clear-cut “wealth elite
university” link is mind-numbing.
Once in an elite university, it gets even better for the already
privileged students. Elite colleges spend much more on training their
wealthy students than non-elite colleges spend on training for their less
rich students.
Additionally, for many middle-class students, an undergraduate
education is as good as it gets. However, for the new elite, their
elite undergraduate degree is merely an intermediate step towards
attending another elite university for their postgraduate education.
That is, elite universities, for most elite students, only serves as a
tool obtain a postgraduate degree needed to gain top employment as a CEO, CFO
or hedge fund manager.
At the same time, education becomes removed from a civil, if not, a
human right. It is no longer a civic duty of the state —
hyper-individualism reigns. Education is individualised and moved onto the
individual person.
Even companies and corporations ride the trend towards
individualization of education and training as the average US company
invests less than 2% of its payroll budget on workplace training.
Moving workplace training for elite jobs out of the workplace and into
elite universities alters the socioeconomic composition of people
receiving such training. Training and education become a factor for
the elite rather than the working class and increasing less for the
middle-class. Increasingly the focus is on training rather than
education. The difference between training and education is that you
can train a dog, but you cannot educate a dog. It moves elite
education towards the wealthy.
Much of this creates a cycle in which the new elite reproduces itself
by sending their children to the elite school, colleges, and
universities that they themselves have attended. Elite students
attending elite professional schools (business and law schools, etc.)
received their BAs at elite colleges. Their pipeline is somewhat
different from the poor’s school-to-prison pipeline.
These self-reproducing elite’s make up the engine that sustains the
privileged. It excludes poor and middle-class children from future
income and status. The system no longer promotes equality of social
and economic opportunity. As training and education become exclusive
rather than inclusive, elite children systematically outperform middle-class
children.
They outperform not just the poor, but the middle class and they do so
at each stage of their education.
In short, poor and middle-class students face more social,
educational, and financial obstacles to graduate from college than
students from elite families don’t. Such an unfair education system
means there are no longer enough high-achieving high school graduates
from outside the elite to make a positive impact at elite colleges.
The elite has effectively insulated itself. Non-elite students can no
longer compete with the thousands of hours and millions of dollars
invested in elite children by their elite parents.
Unlike the traditional elite’s land, factories, and inheritance, for
the new elite, education assumes the role breeding played in
aristocratic regimes.
Now, there is a new monopoly that elite families exercise over
pathways into income and status.
Increasingly, monetary wealth and educational achievement work
together. In that way, the wealthy and highest performing students are
now overwhelmingly one and the same. Unlike the traditional elite’s
land, factories, and inheritance, for the new elite, education assumes
the role breeding played in aristocratic regimes. Now, there is a new
monopoly that elite families exercise over pathways into income and
status. As any monopoly demands, their monopoly increasing excludes
others – poor and middle-class children are barred from elite training
and entry into high-paying work.
With their educational monopoly in place, the new elite can flaunt the
ideology of “equal opportunity” because it no longer exists. Equal
opportunity has become a mere ideology that sustains the elite. With
next to no chance in rigorous entrance examinations, the middle-class
is increasingly excluded. All the while, it is told there is an equal
opportunity, and hard work will pay off. Yet, these entry examinations
systematically favour well-prepared candidates. The majority of
admitted students now engage in so-called “test preparation services”
to help improve their scores. It comes at a price the middle-class
hardly, and the poor cannot afford.
Today’s elite children are exposed to a rather relentless, merciless,
and harsh system. They diligently study and doggedly train. They are
under constant stress to measure up to the next test, the next
admission competition, the next examination, and the next assessment.
All of these conditions prepare the elite to work in highly
competitive employment in adulthood. Before they know it, they have become
Excellent Sheep.
Since the seminal book Schooling in Capitalist America, things have
gotten worse. Today, the new elite’s children – just as working-class
and middle-class children at lower levels – are conditioned to accept
the domination of capital “before” even entering the workforce. Today,
the well-conditioned acceptance of hierarchy, domination, and
authority applies to elite children as well.
Much of this has rather dire consequences for the poor and the
middle-class.
Middle-class jobs are increasingly eliminated. Simultaneously, jobs
for the poor are made even worse. At work, managerial control is
smoothed and consistently move onto technology. The adjacent ideology
makes these technologies appear neutral, and if possible, even natural.
Meanwhile, middle-level managers are successively eliminated. The new
elite no longer has any use for them. Technological advances in
computing, the Internet, and algorithms – algorithmic management – in
measuring employees, surveillance, communication, and data analysis
gives elite managers immense powers of scrutiny and command over
workers. Such algorithms are indeed Weapons of Math Destruction.
Next to Amazon, one of the best-known examples using algorithms is Uber.
Uber’s use of algorithms furnishes the über-surveillance power of a
relatively small elite group of top managers. It enables them to watch
Uber’s thousands of employees directly. At Uber, algorithm coordinates
the work of hundreds of thousands of drivers. Most of these drivers
have never met a single Uber middle manager.
These elite managers no longer seek to automate line workers away, but
how to automate the middle manager’s job away. There is a rather
massive change already on the way. It consciously plans and
operationalises a massive corporate clean-out of middle managers.
Corporations such as Uber no longer require vast sections of middle
management to manage the link between business strategies set by top
management and the implementation of such a strategy that is assigned
to workers. In the very near future, the corporate restructuring will
eliminate or at least shrink middle-management substantially. It will
diminish unnecessary, unwarranted, and often rather incompetent
white-collar middle managers. With that layers of managers reporting
to managers will be gone.
Instead of this, elite consulting firms will tell elite managers in
large corporations how to use algorithmic management. These elite
managers no longer seek to automate line workers away, but how to
automate the middle manager’s job away. There is a rather massive
change already on the way. It consciously plans and operationalises a
massive corporate clean-out of middle managers.
This is made possible because of new managerial technologies capable
of culling middle-management. It is merely a surplus that is no longer
required. It is made redundant by new technologies. This has been the
case ever since the birth of capitalism. What is new is that it is set
to hit middle-management and inevitably, the middle-class.
Finally, corporate consulting firms, like McKinsey Global Institute,
have already predicted a dramatic shift away from middle-management.
It predicted that nearly one-third of the US workforce will be
displaced through automation and algorithms by the year 2030. These
are not manual production workers. Significantly, it will be
middle-management and mid-skilled jobs that are lost.
It is the new elite that is driving this process. This is a
self-reproducing elite based on elite training at elite universities
and business schools ready to find employment in elite corporations.
According to Daniel Markovits, this new elite operates with the motto,
we are all in this together, but some pigs are smarter than other pigs
and deserve more money.
Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell
Thomas Klikauer teaches MBAs at the Sydney Graduate School of
Management, Western Sydney University, Australia. Nadine Campbell is
the founder of Abydos Academy
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