Is the United States becoming a plutocracy?
With the manifestly unqualified but immensely rich Donald Trump serving as the nation’s first billionaire president, it’s not hard to draw that conclusion. And there are numerous other signs, as well, that great wealth has become a central factor in American politics.
There are three fundamental issues that lie at the heart of our current economic malaise: the first is unearned income and wealth from land rent, second the creation of money by privately owned banks, and the third is rent-seeking that is used to juice profits out of intellectual property through copyright and patents.
But the political class, supported by lobbying, continues to avoid addressing these issues. So monopolies grow larger and larger, and as they do, more and more people are excluded from the economy.
When categorizing my class background I’ve invariably replied “working class” but in truth that was more aspirational than factual. My father was either unemployed or underemployed and died of a heart attack at age 46 while working as a night shift orderly at a veteran’s hospital in Fargo, ND. I was 12-years-old, with a 7-year-old brother, and thereafter our family income consisted of whatever my mother earned from doing infrequent odd jobs and the social security checks she received for her two boys. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, we had a small house.
If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.
— Michel de Montaigne, Complete Book of Essays, Book 11, Essay 12, Page 543
Plutocrats like to control the range of permissible public dialogue. Plutocrats also like to shape what society values. If you want to see where a country’s priorities lie, look at how it allocates its money. While teachers and nurses earn comparatively little for performing critical jobs, corporate bosses including those who pollute our planet and bankrupt defenseless families, make millions more. Wells Fargo executives are cases in point. The vastly overpaid CEO of General Electric left his teetering company in shambles.
Greta is able to see what other people cannot see. She can see carbon dioxide with the naked eye. She sees how it flows out of chimneys and and changes the atmosphere in a landfill.
— Malena Ernman, Scenes from the heart. Our life for the climate (mother of Greta Thunberg),May 3, 2019
If you want to be more ecologically minded, good for you. But don’t be under the bizarre American illusion that your individual action is a substitute for collective action, for systemic change.
— Umair Haque, Medium, May 2019
Consciousness is… from the very beginning a social product.
— Karl Marx1
The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.
— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx 1852
Thanks to the Gilets jaunes in France, a few astute social theorists are finally being heard on YouTube, despite mainstream resistance and diversion. They are finding words more lucidly than could be achieved in the absence of such revolutionary upheaval.
