If you are dealing with a small group of people it is most efficient to
deal with them with a small organization. If you are dealing with a
large group of people that becomes very unwieldy and inefficient. Can
you come up with some criticism that goes beyond just that it makes you
feel uncomfortable? That sounds like an emotional reaction that has
nothing to do with reality.
_________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after
death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst
out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how
wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous
something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
On 10/24/2018 2:59 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
World anything sort of worries me. I feel like one of the problems we have this the large size of
systems and their impersonality. In my ideal world, we would be organized into small democratic,
socialist communities. I realize that somehow these communities would have to coordinate with each
other in order for things to work. But terms like "state socialism" or "world
communism", make me very uncomfortable.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On
Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 9:48 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny
or Revolution
Re: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny or
Revolution No, I do not undermine my whole argument. In a capitalist economy
for a business to stay in business it must make a profit. But I also said
something about a capitalist economy. I said that it is an organized system of
theft.
That is, not only is there something wrong with profit, but there is something
very very wrong with capitalism. I do not propose that businesses not be
allowed to make a profit and that capitalism be left intact. That could not
happen.
That would be like saying that we should do away with farming while allowing
farms to continue to operate. It just can't be done. What I propose instead is
the abolition of the whole capitalist system and replacing it with a socialist
system in which all workers can enjoy the fruits of their collective labor
collectively and democratically control the economy with the view of
establishing world communism.
_________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after
death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst
out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how
wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous
something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
On 10/23/2018 9:33 PM, Evan Reese wrote:
block quote
Well, no, actually. You undermine your own argument quite neatly, and I
quote:
"Ultimately, though, you have to make a profit in order to stay in business."
So, if this is true, and there's no profit, then businesses can't stay in
business, and the economy crashes. And that's why there's nothing wrong with
profit.
Evan
-----Original Message----- From: Roger Loran Bailey
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 8:38 PM
To:
blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
; Evan Reese
Subject: Re: [blind-democracy] Re: The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either
Tyranny or Revolution
Let me answer that question about what is wrong with profit. Suppose you have
an ideal slave. An ideal slave is a slave who does not require shelter, food
clothing or any other necessity of life. An ideal slave is an abstraction.
Slaves are forced to work. So suppose you force this slave to add his labor to
raw material that has little or no value by itself and the slave makes a
product that does have value. How do we determine how much value the product
has? We make that determination by selling it and its value is whatever we can
get out of it. In other words, that ideal slave has transformed the valueless
into the valuable and by selling it and keeping the sale price for yourself you
have stolen one hundred percent of the value of the slave's labor. What you
have stolen is also called profit. Now, suppose we make that slave a bit more
realistic. Slaves do need some upkeep to stay alive and healthy enough to
perform labor. So out of the sale price of the product you subtract the amount
it takes to keep the slave alive and productive.
This time the slave gets something back for his labor, but the slave owner
keeps the rest of the value of his labor as profit. That is labor value that
has been stolen from the slave. Now let's look at what happens if you are
dealing with an employee in a capitalist economy rather than a slave. You may
pay your employees wages and you may even grant them benefits. You might have
other overhead involved in running your business too. Ultimately, though, you
have to make a profit in order to stay in business. If you subtract the wages,
benefits and other expenses from the total sale price you have the amount that
is profit.
That profit is still the amount of labor value that workers put into making
that product that has been stolen. That means that profit is theft and the
entire capitalist system is organized theft. So now you have what is wrong with
profit.
_________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after
death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst
out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how
wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous
something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
On 10/23/2018 4:50 PM, Evan Reese wrote:
block quote
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
You should get some historical perspective. I'm telling you, our ancestors
would love to substitute the problems we're discussing right now with theirs.
Conversely, I wouldn't trade my life for any earlier period in history, not one.
Evan
-----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
block quote end
block quote end
