Al Capone
here
Dissertation On First Principles Of Government
by Thomas Paine
"Wherever men (sic) hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise."
-- attributed to Reinhold Neibuhr
quoted here
Buddhist proverb
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges,
to beg in the streets and to steal bread."
- Anatole France
Or "profitability", to use the modern idiom.
-- Tacitus, Agricola, 30.
My gloss, closely following
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography
John Dominic Crossan, page 39 (trans. Crossan?)
"Karl Marx declares that freedom is a fatal danger to the weak,
and that consequently freedom is intrinsically not good."
"Ricardo's Law Of Association"
Progressive Calvinism, July, 1958
I don't think this is inevitably true. I don't consider myself a Marxist. But it's obvious that the powerful can always exploit the weak more than the weak can exploit the powerful. Where the freedoms of the weak and the powerful are equal, this means freedom of the rich to exploit the poor. Therefore, I believe the law should restrain the powerful.
Some forms of social power or control are wealth, respect, coercion (force or the threat of force), law.All societies tend toward oligarchy -- centralization of social power or control. This is the Weber / Michels"Iron Law of Oligarchy". If you have power in any of its forms, it's easier to get more -- both more of the same form, and of the other forms. (If you have gold, you can hire mercenaries. If you have mercenaries, you can take gold.)
"Plutocracy" is the concentration of power through wealth.
Many of the other avenues to social power have been de-emphasized since the Enlightenment -- we are less likely today to submit to someone's claim to a right to social control on the basis of religious election, or raw force, or ancestry, and those who seek power through these means are less likely today to succeed.-- "All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger C. Weightman , June 24, 1826,
on the fiftieth anniversary of American independence.
Wealth, however, is (with the exception of any remaining Marxists) still broadly accepted as a legitimate source of power(How many people do you know who seriously want to be a great religious leader or general?How many who'd like to be rich?), and plutocracy is thus a natural form of oligarchy for our society.
Those who have wealth in our society have power, and they will accumulate more.
"Money is power because money "empowers" people to buy and do the things they want – including buying and doing other people.... Money is the ultimate "political" resource.The economy "economizes" money – it tends to reinforce social hierarchy: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Moreover,the accumulation of wealth invariably corrupts political systems and is inherently 'unsustainable'."
-- and don't miss the "compare and contrast"
Of course, this is just a silly parody brought to you by
PosterNation / www.posternation.org
and has nothing to do with reality, right?
Hmmm -- check this out
The hidden rules of the game are these: Commonize Costs and Privatize Profits. The result we may refer to asthe "Double C-Double P Game," or even more briefly as the CCPP Game....
Enterprisers never broadcast the information that they are playing the Double C-Double P Game: it would notbe in their interest to do so.
(My emphasis -- ed.)
"Few people realize how extraordinarily concentrated the gains in wealth have been.Between 1983 and 1989 the top 1 percent of income recipients received about a third of the total increase in real income. But the richest 1 percent received an even bigger slice -- 62 percent -- of the new wealth that was created."
Don't miss -- good introduction
"... the wealthiest 400 Americans, as identified by Forbes magazine, are together worth nearly $800 billion. Out of the one-year, 1998 increase in their wealth alone (not their total wealth), these 400 Americans could have funded—according to the U.N. Human Development Report—the cost of universal basic education for all children, reproductive health care for all women, and adequate food, safe water, and sanitation for the entire "developing" world. And the wealth of those 400 families would still have increased by more than $80 billion in that one year!"
"A few hundred economists on H Street (Washington DC) are literally running the economies of 75 countries,something that is well beyond their competence even if they had the best of intentions. Imaginea team of economists from another continent moving into the offices of not only the FederalReserve, but also the President's Council of Economic Advisors, and the House Ways andMeans Committee -- wherethey proceeded to write memos dictating policy on interest rates, privatization, federal taxationand spending, and just about every economic decision that mattered.
Imagine, too, that these foreign economists saw the U.S. economy as a fine place from which toextract raw materials -- lumber, grain, oil and natural gas. But they really didn't see much usefor American industry -- even computers, aircraft, or biotechnology. Wages are still too highhere, they said, although noting with approval that the US had now fallen to 13th place forlabor costsamong 17 industrialized countries (tied with Italy). And although they wouldn't say it out loud,they were also eyeing the high value-added sectors of our economy somewhat suspiciously aspotential competitors to their own industries back home.
It is not surprising that things keep getting worse for the less well-off countries of the world, who are quite literally subject to this kind of IMF control."
-- my emphasis -- ed.
"It's an undeniable fact that the few have been prospering at the expense of the many in America over the past couple ofdecades. Our nation has the most unequal distribution of wealth of any industrialized country in the world, with the top onepercent owning over 40 percent of America's total wealth."
"Unequal access to money creates unequal access not only to material goods, but to political power. Undue dependence on money can create siutations where we feel unable to speak out for fear of losing our economic livelihood.
Those who possess more than their share of wealth have the power to subvert justice. Their money gives them easy access to politicians, and lets their issues get more consideration. ... Most importantly, control of money means control of resources, the power to make decisions without input from those most affected by them.."
"Today, the private accumulation of wealth by a few is clearly and unapologetically regarded as the highest goal that our society can achieve."
"The great bulk of Americans are losing economic and political power, while the affluent are gaining both. This is not a recipe for social comity."
"In the top 15 industrialized countries, there has been a dramatic surge in economic growth since 1980, according to the UN'sHuman Development Report 1996. "Over much of this period, however, economic decline or stagnation has affected 100 countries, reducing the incomes of 1.6billion people," the report says.
- The poorest 20 percent of the world's people saw their share of global income decline from 2.3 percent to 1.4 percent in the past 30 years.
.- The assets of the world's 358 billionaires exceed the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people.
- During the last 30 years, the proportion of people with negative per-capita income growth tripled."
(All emphasis is my own. I have not seen the UN report.
This article has a Marxist slant, and claims the UN report does not.
I do not consider myself a Marxist.)
-- and see also The State of the World
by Stephen R. Shalom.
14 SEP 1999
"Runaway growth in consumption, which topped $24 trillion globally this year, is also wreaking havoc on the environment and the poor are bearing the brunt of environmental damage, the agency warned. ``All over the world, poor people generally live nearest to dirty factories, busy roads and waste dumps,'' it said. The report called for ``more sustainable '' patterns of consumption to spread the wealth and put the brakes on environmental damage. `"Though the rich create most of the damage, the poorest in the world suffer most of the consequences,"....
Illustrating the yawning gap between rich and poor, it said the 20 percent of people living in high-income countries consume 86 percent of the world's goods and services. The poorest 20 percent, by contrast, consume just 1.3 percent....
The 228-page report examined industrialized nations in a new ``human poverty index'' measuring the extent to which the poor have been left behind. Sweden ranked the best, with less than 7 percent of citizens living in poverty. Nearly 16.5 percent of Americans live in poverty despite the country's immense material wealth and generally high per-capita income....
"Poverty is not just a matter of not having enough income, but also of being robbed of opportunities to participate and contribute to the life of a community," said Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, a UNDP official. For the fifth consecutive year, Canada topped the human development index for enabling the ``average person'' to enjoy a decent standard of living, followed by France, Norway, the United States and Iceland. Five African countries -- Burundi, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra Leone -- rounded off the bottom of that list."
(All emphasis is my own.)
"Increases in income and declines in poverty were widespread in 1997. Forthe third consecutive year, households in the United States experienced an annual increase in their real median income.Between 1996 and 1997, median household income adjusted for inflation increased 1.9 percent, to $37,005 (that means thathalf of households had incomes above $37,005). In addition, the poverty rate fell from 13.7 percent in 1996 to 13.3 percent in1997. Despite this increase in income, however, the number of poor remained statistically unchanged -- the number of poor in1997 was 35.6 million people. In statistical terms, both median income and the poverty rate have returned to their 1989 levels.Finally, there was no change in income inequality from 1996 to 1997."
"Since the 1970's, the top 1 percent of households have doubled their share of the national wealth to 40 percent. The top 1 percent of households have more wealth than the entire bottom 95 percent.
...The percentage of households with zero or negative net worth (greater debts than assets) increased from 15.5 percent in 1983 to 18.5 percent in 1995 -- nearly one out of five households. That's nearly double the rate in 1962....Nine years into the longest peacetime expansion in U.S. history, average workers are still earning less, adjusting for inflation, than they did when Richard Nixon was president....While the racial income gap is terribly wide, the racial wealth gap is even worse. According to Edward Wolff, the median black household had a net worth of just $7,400 in 1995 -- about 12 percent of the $61,000 in median wealth for whites....Hispanic households have even less wealth than blacks."
"U.S. home ownership is booming, reaching a record 66.3 percent in 1998...although continued price inflation has made it harder for marginal buyers to afford a home, researchers from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies found. According to Census Bureau figures, the home ownership rate was around 64 percent from 1985 to 1994.... Still, lower-income buyers have made substantial gains in home ownership..."The State of the Nation's Housing 1998
"Economics professors Richard Freeman of Harvard University and William Rodgers III of the College ofWilliam and Mary have been studying the labor market outcomes for non-college-educated young men during the 1990s.Their question: Has the good economy trickled down to these youths, or passed them by? ....The news is good."
"State Income Inequality Continued to Grow in Most States in the 1990s, Despite Economic Growth and Tight Labor Markets -- Income Gaps Between High and Low-Income Families Widened in 46 States Since the Late 1970s"
"Collectively, the wealth of the world's billionaires reached $2.2 trillion, up more than 57 percent over the last two years.Emphasis and links are mine -- ed.
Poverty is growing as well. Time reports that nearly half of the world's 6 billion residents are poor. Over one billion of them subsist on less than $1 a day. In the United States, according to the US Census Bureau, the number of impoverished Americans rose 3.7 percent in 2003. The number of children living in poverty rose 6.6 percent....
Tax rates have fallen (declined) on upper income citizens and corporations worldwide. Fifty years ago in the United States, the highest marginal income tax rate was 91 percent; today it is 34 percent. As recently as 1979, taxes on capital gains from the sale of stock, real estate and businesses were 35 percent; today they are 15 percent. Corporate taxes as a percentage of the US economy have shrunk from 4.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 1965 to just 1.5 percent in 2002. While corporate taxes have declined throughout the world, they have plummeted in the United States, leaving only Iceland among industrialized countries with a lower corporate tax burden."
"The combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans is a record-breaking $1.25 trillion. That's about the same amount of combined wealth held by the 57 million households who make up half the U.S. population. (In this type of comparison, that's normally the "bottom" half of the population in wealth -- i.e., the richest 400 Americans have about the same wealth as the poorest 57,000,000 -- though author Sklar doesn't specify that here.)
The economy is booming for billionaires. It's a bust for many other Americans.
A record 400 Americans are billionaires -- and a record 47 million Americans have no health insurance.
America has 400 billionaires -- and 37 million people below the official poverty line. ...
Wealth isn't trickling down. It's flooding up -- from workers to bosses, small investors to big, poorer to richer. ...
The pay gap between average workers and CEOs has grown nine times wider since the 1970s. ...
U.S. corporate profits increased 21 percent in the past year, Market Watch reported in March. 'Profits have been so high because almost all of the benefits from productivity improvements are flowing to the owners of capital rather than to the workers', said Market Watch.
The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans (minimum net worth $6 million) owned 62 percent of the nation's business assets, 51 percent of stocks and 70 percent of bonds as of 2004, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances -- which excludes the Forbes 400. That's way up from 1989, when the wealthiest 1 percent owned 54 percent of business assets, 41 percent of stocks and 52 percent of bonds.
Our growing economy is not producing a growing middle class, but a richer aristocracy. (sic -- "plutocracy" would probably be the preferred term here.) ...
In an economy where money is flowing up to the very top, even college-educated workers are going backward. Inflation-adjusted median household income was lower in 2005 than 1999 even when the householder had a bachelor's degree, master's degree, professional degree or doctorate.
The problem is much bigger than the rich getting richer, while the poor get poorer. The really rich are getting richer at the expense of most everyone else."
"These 400 possess an aggregate $1.25 trillion. Imagine how many Congressmen that will buy.
If the first 400 have that kind of money, it looks to me as if the first 4,000 rich people, which (also) includes all those at $900 million and $800 million levels, could presumably own and control most of the wealth in America. This is a disturbing snapshot of plutocracy. It could well be that a nation of 300 million people is run by about 1 percent of its population. ...
the income tax, which purportedly has been such a dead weight on entrepreneurial initiative, seems to have no effect on these billionaires. How, pray tell, did Bill Gates amass a fortune of more than $53 billion and Warren Buffett do nearly as well on a confiscatory tax system? (The obvious response is that [tax shelters and loopholes aside] Bill Gates' $53 billion would be $106 billion or $530 billion if he hadn't been so heavily taxed. I don't know the actual facts in these cases and I suspect that they'd be difficult to discover in detail [see "shelters and loopholes"].)
... if there ever were a class that had reason to band together and stick it to the rest of us, it is the billionaire class and its lesser millionaire allies."
"... part of the American work force -- I hesitate to claim it as my own, although it has certainly claimed me -- is rapidly stumbling into the third world. Reasonable working conditions and overtime are a myth for us. In time, companies won't have to move, they'll have ruined and degraded, ahem, created the labor force they need at home. And I see more and more workers willing, if not eager, for this kind of abuse. No benefits, no overtime, no security. No hope. A rosy report for the future of the American businessman, and an uneasy sense of doom spreading among once-proud workers."
"Joe Sixpack deserves more privacy than David Rockefeller, because Joe's simplelivelihood may be affected by Rocky's wheeling and dealing. Joe has moreof a right to know what Rocky is up to than vice-versa."
see also / Speech Free and Otherwise / Censorship, Media, and the Press / page on this site
see also / Privacy, Secrecy, Surveillance / page on this site
"The most obvious criticism of the New Overclass is that their political machine is undemocratic. Using subversive techniquesonce aimed at communists, and with all the money they ever need to succeed, the Overclass undemocratically controls our government, our media, and even a growing part of academia. These institutions in turn allow the Overclass to control thesupposedly "free" market. It doesn't win all the time, of course — witness Bill Clinton's impeachment trial — but it does scorean endless string of other victories elsewhere, all to the detriment of workers, consumers, women, minorities and the poor."
" '... in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income -- an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.'
That is the harsh reality obscured by the media's focus on celebrity gossip, sports rivalries and lotteries, situations in which the average person can pretend that he or she is plugged into the winning side. The illusion of personal power substitutes consumer sovereignty -- which smartphone to purchase -- for real power over the decisions that affect our lives. Even though most Americans accept that the political game is rigged, we have long assumed that the choices we make in the economic sphere as to career and home are matters that respond to our wisdom and will. But the banking tsunami that wiped out so many jobs and so much homeownership has demonstrated that most Americans have no real control over any of that, and while they suffer, the corporate rich reward themselves in direct proportion to the amount of suffering they have caused.
Instead of taxing the superrich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks."
"It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation's income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.
One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades -- and more -- has gone to those at the top.
In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow."
John "the Baptist" son of Zacharias
quoted in Luke 3:11