Nothing Changes With the Rich! You just can’t make this stuff up as a fiction writer (also, see below, at the end of this piece**). Demonic, but sturdy. Boring actuarial folk, or in this guy’s case, making loot illegally in the legal channel that is Illegal Wall Street: Thomas Peterffy became one of the world’s […]
The post Masters of Illusion: Sociopathy from the Very Rich on Down first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Sharing my love of these times was the late Joey Rothbard, wife of Murray. We used to talk about the Gilded Age all evening, particularly the culture of the times: the music, painting, architecture, and daily technology. She frequently recommended that I read Age of Innocence by the great American writer Edith Wharton. She told me that more than any other work, this book captured everything I needed to know. She kept asking me if I had read it yet. I was too busy with my head full of political economy so I never got around to it. Just recently, I found the movie version. It is amazing.
In a Constitutionally classless society like the United States, intellectual snobbery/elitism is often the default form of pervasive bigotry that is allowed to permeate society. Other forms of monetary and racial discrimination are more noticed and consequently more frequently criticised.
Baby boomers like myself remember urban Main Street America. In our neighborhoods of Brooklyn N.Y., we had the appearance of little villages. The main shopping avenues were lined with Mom and Pop retail stores. You wanted bread, we had Italian, Jewish and German bakeries. You wanted fruit, you went to the neighborhood fruit and produce store. Needed women’s wear — a ladies shop.
I wish I could say that of course Bernie is focused on the real issues of economic equality that plague most working families. After all, he went to James Madison High School in Brooklyn, just like Ken and I did. But that "of course" would be less than accurate. Norm Coleman was also a student there-- and so was Wall Street shill Chuck Schumer. At Madison the only kind of elitism that was encouraged was intellectual elitism-- not the kind of economic and social elitism that has since we all graduated pushed the U.S.
