Absolutely. I'm just doing the best I can, trying to figure out what is going
on, and accepting my limitations.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 4:54 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny
or Revolution
Well, all you say may be true, but I just cannot resist pointing out that a set
of facts can be presented in various ways, and sometimes what we hear now turns
out later to be vast exaggerations, or even outright lies.
Does that sound familiar?
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 4:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny
or Revolution
Yes, it was folks on the left who wanted to curtail the speech of someone on
the right at the University of California, and I didn't agree with them.
I'd just like to add that "the Left" is a very inexact term and it encompasses
a lot of people, some of whom I don't even consider to be on the left, and some
of whom who I do agree are on the left, I don't agree with.
As for Max Blumenthal's piece, it is a video of an interview with him and you
can find it on The Real News network website. Aaron Mahtai was interviewing him
about Facebook, perhaps two days ago. The interview was based on an article
that max wrote in Harper's Magazine. You can read the article, but when I found
it, it appeared that I had to subscribe to Harper's in order to read the
article. It is not in the issue of Harper's currently on Newsline.
You're obviously a pro business guy, but I have to admit that when I start
reading all these details about business risk and profit, my eyes glaze over. I
had a friend to whom I was very close, a man who was 22 years older than I, a
man who fought for his country in World War 2 and believed wholeheartedly in
its promises and its myths. I remember his repeating to me the rationalizations
for pharmaceutical companies continuing their patents, on medications which
kept the costs high. It was, he said, because of those tremendous risks they
took, all that research they did. That's why, just one of the eyedrops that I
use, a little bottle that lasts for about 6 weeks, would cost more than $200 if
I didn't have Medicare RX. I currently use 4 different kinds of eyedrops plus
pills for my eyes, plus several other prescriptions to control other medical
conditions. Well anyway, human nature being what it is, Capitalism easily gets
out of control because it doesn't remain a system in which people invest money
in businesses that will provide what everyone needs. Instead, it's a system
which devastates the environment in order to get more and more in order to
increase profit. It uses slave labor, if it can, or as close to slave labor as
it can get, in order to maximize profit. It adulterates food in order to
maximize profit. It uses financial shock therapy on countries and other
political entities when natural disasters occur, in order to profit from
people's suffering. Imagine insisting that Puerto Rico import food rather than
grow its own, and use imported energy from fossil fuels rather than solar
energy. Rid it of its population so you can repopulate it with wealthy people
from whom you can make a bigger profit.
Well, I will stop ranting.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 1:10 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny
or Revolution
I agree that universities have an obligation to allow, even encourage, all
kinds of speech, even if it makes some students uncomfortable.
By the way, in the university setting, it is not the uber-rich that is
attempting to curtail freedom of speech, but left wing students. The Milo
Yiannopoulos incident at Berkley last year is just one of the most famous
examples. There are plenty of others.
I didn't see the Max Blumenthal article you speak of here. I looked through all
the emails I've gotten from you through this list, and there is one message
where you mention an article by him, but no article itself. I did some Googling
and didn't see it either, but perhaps it's too soon for it to have been indexed
yet.
Yes, advertising is manipulative, and yes, many people are easily manipulated.
So what do you suggest? Should we add more regulation? Set up a government
agency to approve all advertisements before they are released?
Ban them outright? Something else? What do you advocate?
Concerning profit, it compensates the person who starts the business for the
risk he (or she) takes in starting it in the first place. Most businesses fail,
so it is a very risky enterprise. It can take a lot of money. Unless the person
is independently wealthy, (which I get the feeling that most people on this
list would consider that a bad thing, him or her probably having gotten it by
shady means), unless he is independently wealthy, or has wealthy relatives,
(also probably considered a bad thing by most here for the same reason), that
money has to come from somewhere else. He will have to borrow it or persuade
one or more people to invest in the business so he can afford to buy the stuff
he needs to buy to get started. That will almost certainly include office
space, supplies, i.e. computers, other equipment, and hire employees, and pay
them before he ever sees a penny of revenue.
Maybe he'll have to buy land, if he wants to build a factory. So, he uses his
credit cards, or goes to a bank and tries to persuade the loan officer there
that his business is worth taking the risk of lending him the money, or he can
go to a venture capitalist, (another bad person I imagine), or he can issue
shares in the company. All of this with no guarantee that he will see a dime of
revenue. If he starts out small, he almost certainly must, then he doesn't have
to risk a huge amount of money, but he still has to take the chance that he
will never see any revenue to repay him for the risk, or to repay the bank or
the venture capitalist, or to ensure that the shareholders don't lose their
investment. So, let's suppose he's successful and he sells a product or service
that people want to buy, (or are manipulated into buying, as you would probably
assume). If he makes a profit, he can use that money to expand his business,
which means, among other things, hiring more workers, buying more office space,
more equipment, and so on, which is good for the economy because it encourages
the businesses he buys from to build more equipment, hire more workers, and
create things that people need, or just would like to have, which improves
their quality of life and standard of living. He can also use that profit to
repay his loans, or give a stock dividend. So yes, profit is a good thing.
But like just about everything else, too much profit is a bad thing because it
indicates a lack of competetiveness in the economy, which means that consumers
are getting ripped off. That is called profiteering. That is occuring in some
sectors of our economy right now. But just because too much of something is a
bad thing, it doesn't follow that none of it is a good thing. Try living
without salt for a while and see.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 7:14 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny
or Revolution
Let's see if I can go into your email and answer some of it, not debate because
I'm not good at debating and I don't like it much. People right things and
those things cause me to think of stuff which, as you seem to have noticed,
isn't always precisely responsive. But here goes.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 4:50 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny
or Revolution
Okay, well I faulted Chris Hedges for not giving examples, so I definitely
should not follow in those footsteps. I was in a hurry though when I wrote my
last response, which is something I should know to avoid doing.
So Alex Jones. I think Twitter should have kept him on. Let him rant. But that
is Twitter's decision, and I would not take that right away from them.
As I said before, although not as precisely as perhaps I should have, freedom
of speech is the freedom to say what one wishes, it is not the freedom to force
others to provide a platform for that speech. He could go to Breitbart, if
they'll have him, or start his own website or podcast.
Same for Chris Hedges. He could certainly take the New York Times to court if
he wished. But it is overwhelmingly likely that the court would tell him what I
would tell him. That is, he has the freedom to say what he wishes, the NY Times
has the freedom to publish what they wish, which also includes the right to not
publish what they do not wish to publish. Freedom of speech is not a license to
force others to provide a venue for one's own speech.
I guess that I think that any public venue, even if it is privately owned, has
a responsibility to allow dissident voices to be heard. That means that
Universities, private or public, should allow people from both the far left and
the far right to speak. And certainly, any company that facilitates
communication among people, should do the same.
There's growing talk about regulating the tech giants more. They got a pass
early on because the government wanted to encourage that sector of the economy.
But they're big boys now and they need to be regulated more strictly than they
are now. Europe is ahead of us in that area.
Government and tech companies collaborating to spy on Americans is something I
care very much about, and something I am very much opposed to. But that was not
part of Hedges' article, which is what I was responding to.
No big corporation is controling what I say. Are they controling what you say?
If so, how?
No big company is controlling what I say because I'm not a journalist or a
person with a following. However, if you googled my name, I doubt that you
could find all of the things that I've written electronically since I got my
first computer in the early 90's. And at one point, I did find some things that
I'd written for an adoption magazine way before there was an internet as we
know it. Someone put my articles there without my knowing it or my permission.
Who has Facebook deleted on the advice of the government? Are they Russian
disinformation bots? I know about those, but those don't count, and they should
be deleted anyhow.
Facebook has deleted dissident voices with the excuse that they were Russian
bots when they were not, along with whatever real Russian bots may have
existed. I forwarded a piece from The Real News Network about this, perhaps
yesterday. If you listen, Max Blumenthal describes his latest experience with
Facebook and he's no Russian bot. He's the son of Sydney Blumenthal who was
affiliated with Hillary Clinton at some point. Max is a different kettle of
fish than his father, but no one would mistake him for a Russian anything.
As I recall, Google initially resisted cooperating with the Chinese government
on Internet censorship, but then they caved. They made the wrong choice. They
should have left. Not that it would have made any difference to the citizens of
China, who will be censored no matter what. But Google should not be
participating in it. If you want to count Xi Jinping, and the leadership of the
Chinese Comunist Party, as uber-rich, then I guess I'll have to give you that
one.
Yes, we have an advertising industry. What's wrong with that? People know what
advertising is. Why shouldn't businesses be able to advertise their products or
services? Yes, it is often manipulative. Most people know that too, since we've
grown up with it. Are you saying that people have no control over their ability
to respond to advertising, that they have no wills of their own?
I'm saying that people are highly manipulatable. That's why the advertising
industry is so lucrative. That's why Citizens United was such a terrible
decision. If it weren't so easy to manipulate people, we wouldn't have so many
young men volunteering to go to war in order to fight battles which benefit
only the people with power in their countries. We wouldn't have people fighting
over religion because they wouldn't believe in all the various fantasies that
have been sold to them by their various priests over the centuries.
We have a marketplace. Not everything that it sells is needed by everyone.
True, a lot of stuff is made and advertised that people don't really need.
Yes, corporations sell stuff to make a profit. Again, what's wrong with that?
We can argue about how much profit is reasonable, how much indicates a lack of
competition, (we have a fair number of less than fully competetive markets in
the U.S. right now), but making a profit in and of itself is something I have
no problem with.
I'd be interested if you could tell us what positives there are in making a
profit. As far as I can tell, people don't benefit at all. What they benefit
from is having families and homes and food and leisure and art and exercise and
friendships and music and security and peace.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 3:08 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny
or Revolution
Evan,
The private companies that you're talking about are huge and powerful and they
are controlling, not only how we communicate, but what we communicate, and they
are working together with government agencies, sometimes to spy on us and
sometimes to control what we say. We're not talking about some nice little
company that employs you to answer the phone or sell shoes or something. Those
tech giants were built on technology that resulted from government funded
research. And they are rather ruthless. Google has agreed to all of the limits
on freedom that the Chinese government demands of it in order to work in China.
Facebook is agreeing to delete people because of the advice of our government
and private think tanks. I mentioned the Atlanta Council previously. My memory
is getting so bad these days but I think that along with NATO, Saudi Arabia may
be involved with it.
As for cars being safer, I don't know enough about the subject to agree with
that statement or disagree. I'm sure the advertising says that they are, but
I'd have to see statistics from an objective source before I believed that it's
true. But I think my point was that we have a financial system which benefits
the power elites or ruling class or whatever you want to call them, when people
are convinced that they need new things, different things, better things, etc.
because that's how corporations earn profits and that's how CEO's and share
holders make more money. Sometimes, our lives really improve. But sometimes,
they just become more costly and complicated and their quality isn't actually
better. The purpose of inventing all the new things is so that some people can
make a huge amount of money, not to make our lives better. The purpose of
advertising is to convince us that the new things are making our lives better.
I was born in 1937. When I look back through all those years, it's true that
some things are better now. But a whole lot of thins are not. There are many
things that were better fifty years ago and those things have to do with the
quality of the food we ate and the way in which people related to each other,
particularly the impersonal interactions between customers and owners of, or
workers in businesses. Computers may be more efficient for corporations, but
they've changed customer relations for the worse. They may make medical
institutions more efficient, but they've also made them cold and impersonal.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 1:42 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny
or Revolution
Okay, so why did you have to come up with the examples when Hedges was either
too lazy or didn't respect his readers enough to provide any?
But more importantly, freedom of speech does not give you the right to tell
private corporations what speech they can or should allow, any more than it
gives me the right to force you to say things you don't want to say. I can be
fired by my employer for numerous reasons. That's the system we work under, and
despite its flaws, nobody has come up with a better one yet. Once again, nobody
has the right to force their views on others.
Cars are much more computerized than ever before, but they are also much safer.
Wouldn't you agree with Ralph Nader that that is a worthy goal? How many lives
is being able to repair one's car worth?
You can get a cheap flip phone that doesn't cost hundreds of dollars, and pay
as you go. I doubt that many people mourn the loss of pay phones.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 12:49 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny
or Revolution
Actually, I suppose that "freedom of speech" is a relative term. We can say
anything that we want to say on the Blind Democracy list and Hedges can say
what he wishes to say on Truthdig. However, neither he nor I can say what we
wish to say on any corporate media source, a source where we might be heard by
millions of people. You can talk to your family about your latest birthday
party on Facebook, but the pages of voices known to have dissident views are
being closed down with the counsel of organizations like the Atlanta Council (a
voice for many interests including NATO), at the behest of Congress. Groups
can physucakky protest only in approved locations, usually far away from the
sites they wish to protest. And remember, Hedges was fired from the NY Times
for making a speech of which the Times
disapproved. Michael Moore was speaking at an Oscar ceremony and when,
during the speech, he made a statement opposing the Iraq War, the mike was
turned off and he was ushered off the stage. So yes, I have the freedom to
write these words on an email list in October 2018 which will reach, perhaps
20 or so people, if there are that many on this list and you may choose to call
that freedom of speech. But Alex Jones was removed from Twitter because his
speech is considered to be extreme and he reaches a lot more people than
20 blind folks.
As for those technological inventions used for public benefit, well, yes we
benefit from them, but the greatest benefit is reaped by the very wealthy and
although we benefit, we are also greatly harmed. There's so much to this
subject that we, or I, just can't deal with it, certainly not in an email. But
what comes to mind is automobiles. Once upon a time, guys used to really love
repairing their cars. They liked doing it and doing it saved them money. Now
cars are manufactured with technology which is so complicated that no one can
repair their own car anymore. Actually, people often don't even own their cars
because in order to have a car in good condition, you need a new one every two
or three years. Financially, what is most feasible is to lease a car. That
means that you just keep making payments forever and ever. In that way, you can
afford to have a car that runs well which is a necessity in a country which has
made convenient public transportation unavailable. A long time ago, if you
were away from home and had an emergency or needed information from someone,
there was a pay phone nearby. It cost a dime, than a quarter. But now we are so
lucky because we have been conditioned to require a small computer wherever we
go in order to make contact with the rest of the world and it costs more than a
dime or a quarter. There's no exception if you're poor, if you earn $7.50 an
hour or are unemployed, no pay phones for you. You are still required to have a
mini computer, called a smart phone, costing hundreds of dollars with a
complicated pay plan. But yes, technology is wonderful.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2018 10:09 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny
or Revolution
First of all, let me say I generally agree with Hedges' description of the
character traits of the uber-rich. While I was reading it, I was thinking how
it reminded me of many monarchs, wealthy merchants, and inheritors of wealth
throughout history. But I do have a few issues with the piece.
Aristotle warned of the perils of rule by the uber-rich. So they've been around
for thousands of years, and somehow humanity has managed to survive.
Not only survive, but thrive. How is that possible?
Just a few quotes here:
"... the uber-rich make war on the “freedom of conscience, freedom of speech,
..."
Hmmm, war on freedom of speech? But here we are reading an article on how
pernicious they are. So they certainly haven't won, and after thousands of
years of effort! Imagine!
Another quote:
"The uber-rich, as Karl Polanyi wrote, celebrate the worst kind of freedom—the
freedom “to exploit one’s fellows, or the freedom to make inordinate gains
without commensurable service to the community, the freedom to keep
technological inventions from being used for public benefit, ..."
What technological inventions might those be? Are any specifics forthcoming?
Would it be too much work for Hedges to provide an example or two?
Apparently so.
Here we are, our residences full of technological marvels our ancestors more
than a couple of generations back wouldn't even understand, but somehow the
uber-rich are keeping unspecified technological inventions from us.
But here's the one that bugs me most:
"The dark pathologies of the uber-rich, lionized by mass culture and mass
media, have become our own. We have ingested their poison...."
Okay, so who is this "we" he refers to? Now, I've been a native speaker of
English for over 50 years, and "we" generally refers to the speaker, or the
author in this case, and one or more other people. So is he refering to himself
and an unspecified number of fellow ingesters of the poison of the pathologies
of the uber-rich? If not, then why is he using the word "we"? He certainly
doesn't speak for me, or most of the people I know. In fact, as I already said,
I generally agree with his characterization of the uber-rich Of course, once
again, we get a sweeping pronouncement, devoid of specifics, or any kind of
evidence.
Just Hedges letting his hyperbole carry him away again.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2018 3:19 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny or
Revolution
The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny or Revolution
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
At the age of 10 I was sent as a scholarship student to a boarding school for
the uber-rich in Massachusetts. I lived among the wealthiest Americans for the
next eight years. I listened to their prejudices and saw their cloying sense of
entitlement. They insisted they were privileged and wealthy because they were
smarter and more talented. They had a sneering disdain for those ranked below
them in material and social status, even the merely rich.
Most of the uber-rich lacked the capacity for empathy and compassion. They
formed elite cliques that hazed, bullied and taunted any nonconformist who
defied or did not fit into their self-adulatory universe.
It was impossible to build a friendship with most of the sons of the uber-rich.
Friendship for them was defined by “what’s in it for me?” They were surrounded
from the moment they came out of the womb by people catering to their desires
and needs. They were incapable of reaching out to others in distress—whatever
petty whim or problem they had at the moment dominated their universe and took
precedence over the suffering of others, even those within their own families.
They knew only how to take. They could not give.
They were deformed and deeply unhappy people in the grip of an unquenchable
narcissism.
It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have
seized total political power. These pathologies inform Donald Trump, his
children, the Brett Kavanaughs, and the billionaires who run his
administration. The uber-rich cannot see the world from anyone’s perspective
but their own. People around them, including the women whom entitled men prey
upon, are objects designed to gratify momentary lusts or be manipulated. The
uber-rich are almost always amoral. Right. Wrong. Truth.
Lies. Justice. Injustice. These concepts are beyond them. Whatever benefits or
pleases them is good. What does not must be destroyed.
The pathology of the uber-rich is what permits Trump and his callow son-in-law,
Jared Kushner, to conspire with de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman,
another product of unrestrained entitlement and nepotism, to cover up the
murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whom I worked with in the Middle
East. The uber-rich spend their lives protected by their inherited wealth, the
power it wields and an army of enablers, including other members of the
fraternity of the uber-rich, along with their lawyers and publicists. There are
almost never any consequences for their failures, abuses, mistreatment of
others and crimes. This is why the Saudi crown prince and Kushner have bonded.
They are the homunculi the uber-rich routinely spawn.
The rule of the uber-rich, for this reason, is terrifying. They know no limits.
They have never abided by the norms of society and never will. We pay
taxes—they don’t. We work hard to get into an elite university or get a
job—they don’t. We have to pay for our failures—they don’t. We are prosecuted
for our crimes—they are not.
The uber-rich live in an artificial bubble, a land called Richistan, a place of
Frankenmansions and private jets, cut off from our reality. Wealth, I saw, not
only perpetuates itself but is used to monopolize the new opportunities for
wealth creation. Social mobility for the poor and the working class is largely
a myth. The uber-rich practice the ultimate form of affirmative action,
catapulting white, male mediocrities like Trump, Kushner and George W. Bush
into elite schools that groom the plutocracy for positions of power. The
uber-rich are never forced to grow up. They are often infantilized for life,
squalling for what they want and almost always getting it. And this makes them
very, very dangerous.
Political theorists, from Aristotle and Karl Marx to Sheldon Wolin, have warned
against the rule of the uber-rich. Once the uber-rich take over, Aristotle
writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution. They do not know how to
nurture or build. They know only how to feed their bottomless greed. It’s a
funny thing about the uber-rich: No matter how many billions they possess, they
never have enough. They are the Hungry Ghosts of Buddhism. They seek, through
the accumulation of power, money and objects, an unachievable happiness. This
life of endless desire often ends badly, with the uber-rich estranged from
their spouses and children, bereft of genuine friends. And when they are gone,
as Charles Dickens wrote in “A Christmas Carol,” most people are glad to be rid
of them.
C. Wright Mills in “The Power Elite,” one of the finest studies of the
pathologies of the uber-rich, wrote:
“
They exploited national resources, waged economic wars among themselves,
entered into combinations, made private capital out of the public domain, and
used any and every method to achieve their ends. They made agreements with
railroads for rebates; they purchased newspapers and bought editors; they
killed off competing and independent businesses and employed lawyers of skill
and statesmen of repute to sustain their rights and secure their privileges.
There is something demonic about these lords of creation; it is not merely
rhetoric to call them robber barons.
Corporate capitalism, which has destroyed our democracy, has given unchecked
power to the uber-rich. And once we understand the pathologies of these
oligarchic elites, it is easy to chart our future. The state apparatus the
uber-rich controls now exclusively serves their interests. They are deaf to the
cries of the dispossessed. They empower those institutions that keep us
oppressed—the security and surveillance systems of domestic control,
militarized police, Homeland Security and the military—and gut or degrade those
institutions or programs that blunt social, economic and political inequality,
among them public education, health care, welfare, Social Security, an
equitable tax system, food stamps, public transportation and infrastructure,
and the courts. The uber-rich extract greater and greater sums of money from
those they steadily impoverish. And when citizens object or resist, they crush
or kill them.
The uber-rich care inordinately about their image. They are obsessed with
looking at themselves. They are the center of their own universe. They go to
great lengths and expense to create fictional personas replete with nonexistent
virtues and attributes. This is why the uber-rich carry out acts of
well-publicized philanthropy. Philanthropy allows the uber-rich to engage in
moral fragmentation. They ignore the moral squalor of their lives, often
defined by the kind of degeneracy and debauchery the uber-rich insist is the
curse of the poor, to present themselves through small acts of charity as
caring and beneficent. Those who puncture this image, as Khashoggi did with
Salman, are especially despised. And this is why Trump, like all the uber-rich,
sees a critical press as the enemy. It is why Trump’s and Kushner’s eagerness
to conspire to help cover up Khashoggi’s murder is ominous. Trump’s incitements
to his supporters, who see in him the omnipotence they lack and yearn to
achieve, to carry out acts of violence against his critics are only a few steps
removed from the crown prince’s thugs dismembering Khashoggi with a bone saw.
And if you think Trump is joking when he suggests the press should be dealt
with violently you understand nothing about the uber-rich.
He will do what he can get away with, even murder. He, like most of the
uber-rich, is devoid of a conscience.
The more enlightened uber-rich, the East Hamptons and Upper East Side
uber-rich, a realm in which Ivanka and Jared once cavorted, look at the
president as gauche and vulgar. But this distinction is one of style, not
substance. Donald Trump may be an embarrassment to the well-heeled Harvard and
Princeton graduates at Goldman Sachs, but he serves the uber-rich as
assiduously as Barack Obama and the Democratic Party do. This is why the
Obamas, like the Clintons, have been inducted into the pantheon of the
uber-rich. It is why Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump were close friends.
They come from the same caste.
There is no force within ruling institutions that will halt the pillage by the
uber-rich of the nation and the ecosystem. The uber-rich have nothing to fear
from the corporate-controlled media, the elected officials they bankroll or the
judicial system they have seized. The universities are pathetic corporation
appendages. They silence or banish intellectual critics who upset major donors
by challenging the reigning ideology of neoliberalism, which was formulated by
the uber-rich to restore class power.
The uber-rich have destroyed popular movements, including labor unions, along
with democratic mechanisms for reform that once allowed working people to pit
power against power. The world is now their playground.
In “The Postmodern Condition” the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard painted a
picture of the future neoliberal order as one in which “the temporary contract”
supplants “permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual,
cultural, family and international domains, as well as in political affairs.”
This temporal relationship to people, things, institutions and the natural
world ensures collective self-annihilation. Nothing for the uber-rich has an
intrinsic value. Human beings, social institutions and the natural world are
commodities to exploit for personal gain until exhaustion or collapse. The
common good, like the consent of the governed, is a dead concept. This temporal
relationship embodies the fundamental pathology of the uber-rich.
The uber-rich, as Karl Polanyi wrote, celebrate the worst kind of freedom—the
freedom “to exploit one’s fellows, or the freedom to make inordinate gains
without commensurable service to the community, the freedom to keep
technological inventions from being used for public benefit, or the freedom to
profit from public calamities secretly engineered for private advantage.” At
the same time, as Polanyi noted, the uber-rich make war on the “freedom of
conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association,
freedom to choose one’s own job.”
The dark pathologies of the uber-rich, lionized by mass culture and mass media,
have become our own. We have ingested their poison. We have been taught by the
uber-rich to celebrate the bad freedoms and denigrate the good ones. Look at
any Trump rally. Watch any reality television show. Examine the state of our
planet. We will repudiate these pathologies and organize to force the uber-rich
from power or they will transform us into what they already consider us to
be—the help.
Chris Hedges
