By law, under the Republic, Individual Roman wealth was capped at the equivalent of a few dozens of millions. The reason why is that the Roman had great understanding of the reasons exposed below.
That capping of the wealth of families was the law for more than 250 years (before that, there simply were no Romans rich enough to make such a law necessary). A conservative Consul, and great general who had been elected dictator during the invasion of Rome by a Gallic army had the law passed around 380 CE.
That law capping wealth became ineffective when Rome conquered most of the Mediterranean. By then hyper rich Roman invested overseas. The hyper rich created the Republic Of Offshore, and avoided taxation all together.
That caused, first, enormous inequalities. Then, when righteous politicians tried to enforce the law a civil war that, thanks to buying politicians, and using political assassinations, the plutocrats won. After that, the Roman Republic declined and fell, until, in 400 CE, the Roman government, unable to pay the army, put the Franks in charge of the defense of Gallia and both Germania Inferior and Superior.
We are launched in the same exact same pattern nowadays. Plutocrat Tom Perkins’s loud claims that the Jews were the 1% in Germany is delirious. Just as his claim that the hyper rich are persecuted, same as the Jews were.
It’s actually plutocrats similar to him who created, financed, enabled, armed and fueled the Nazis. Let alone exerted undue influences on the Anglo-Saxon government to isolate the French Republic in its attempts to throw Nazism out.
American plutocrats’ influence on the Congress of the USA explains why the Congress, having legislated against France and Britain’s attack against Hitler in 1939, refused absolutely to give an ultimatum to the Nazis, and waited bovinely until Hitler declared war to the USA well after Pearl Harbor. Those years of infamy, were the years of gathering plutocratic strength in the USA, as American plutocrats carefully nurtured Hitler and Mussolini.
The immensely rich are intrinsically evil, for the good and simple reason that primates are just, and the hyper rich’s very existence is not. After all, money is power, and immense money is immense power. Power on whom? Other people.
Feeling their intrinsic evil, the hyper rich sink ever closer to Pluto, by using their power to pay politicians and media to distort reality ever more. We see it in Ukraine, in Russia, in Turkey. How much do we need to see here, before realizing that it is after civilization itself that plutocracy is?
Tags: Hyper rich, Perkins, Reality
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
January 31, 2014 at 12:11 am |
Excellent, Patrice, just excellent.
I was reading an article by Michael Young (author in 1958! of “The Rise of The Meritocracy”) that ran in The Guardian about 10 years ago on the fraud that is the “meritocracy” of the plutocrats.
Same as it ever was.
“So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.
Salaries and fees have shot up. Generous share option schemes have proliferated. Top bonuses and golden handshakes have multiplied.”
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
LikeLike
January 31, 2014 at 12:40 am |
and the wall street journal came out and supported this idiot perkins…..wealth will not be capped anytime soon. the ‘plutos’ are only growing more greedy, more powerful. following the’ path of rome’ , we will eventually have a civil war as well…..
LikeLike
January 31, 2014 at 6:41 pm |
Dear Aaron: Of course, the WSJ would support the Plutos, that’s their bread and butter. (Although, to its credit, the WSJ never, ever censored me, differently from the 1,000 + censored comments I suffered at the New York Times in the last 11 years alone!)
Although to celebrate his will-to-invade Iraq, I used to call Murdoch, Murderoch…
There will be civil war, indeed. The aim should be for the party of justice, of equity, fraternity to win. Unfortunately, under Obama, the Plutos became stronger than ever. That is because they were allowed to steal away with all the money they stole, the precise event that caused the 2008 crash.
Fuld and other multi-billionaires at Lehman were not prosecuted, because they knew where all the bodies were buried, and nobody wanted them to start singing.
At this point, it’s pretty clear that only civil, and maybe uncivil disobedience, a revolution as in Ukraine, will get things moving in the right direction. Attacks against Silicon plutocracy in the Bay Area is, hopefully, a forerunner. But people have also to solve their contradiction: in the Bay Area, people have been unwilling to have decent (governmental subsidized) housing to go up, so now houses in some parts, rat holes as I called them, because they would be determined unfit for human habitat in, say, France… cost a million.
But then people go into hysterics when a plan is presented to rise a high rise fit for plebs’ inhabitation…
The sooner people realize that force will have to be used, the greater the chance of not following the path of Rome. But when one sees that the Washington made wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan, let alone the Washington/CIA made Shiite regimes in Iraq or Iran (!!!!) are absolutely perceived as the exact opposite of what they were, it, indeed, does not look good.
Hitler was never as popular as towards the end, when anybody will judgment would have seen he brought catastrophe to Germany. Why? Because the German Volk had become collectively insane. Collective insanity is definitively a possibility.
For centuries, although they were living in dictatorship, the Roman People thought they still ruled Rome. In truth it was a collective of about 20 plutocrats, give or take, which ruled, and the best is that they reflected that this was the case, at a dinner hosted by Domitian himself!
They even added that was all kabuki, and, had they not stepped over the line of evoking the Republic with too much sincerity, some of them, ordered killed (nominally) by Domitian, would still be joining them at the dinner table…
PA
LikeLike
January 31, 2014 at 1:25 am |
Wow! Love it! High time to decapitate, indeed!
LikeLike
January 31, 2014 at 6:42 pm |
Timing is of the essence, before Plutos can engineer some potent distraction, like a nuclear strike somewhere…
PA
LikeLike
January 31, 2014 at 4:31 pm |
Switzerland (your darling direct democracy) is giving us a lesson in operating the distinction between the hyper rich and the merely rich.
It has agreed to finger to the French tax authorities French account holders with less than € one million net worth on their accounts. Those above the threshold still enjoy ferocious, dedicated tax protection. The rationale is one of profit for the account managers, but the message is there – to the hyper rich, the rich are proles.
There must be a moral in that (true) tale, I’ll let you draw it.
LikeLike
January 31, 2014 at 5:43 pm |
Dear Dominique: Excellent contribution! The moral to draw is obvious: people who have a million dollars think they are rich. However, they are just ten times (an order of magnitude) richer than the plebs. It gets worse than that: any medical treatment of the serious kind (something everybody goes through, except if they die accidentally) is worth millions (Obamacare is supposed to alleviate that, and it does, but not enough). In other words, they are not getting anything important the plebs is not already getting.
To buy a rat hole in San Francisco, you need a million. No million? You are still a rat, but without a hole. Those rats have been protesting, and Tom Perkins hates that, comparing it to the Holocaust.
Otherwise said, even small (multi)millionaires are part of the plebs, just part of the upper middle class.
Serious plutocracy is something else: families controlling above 100 billions (the Gates are an example, the Walmart family, another), or then the extremely connected (U2 Bono, Sherryl Sanberg, Larry Summers, etc.). The sort like Summers, Clinton, Putin have enormous influence, even if, technically they do not have billions (although Putin does; he is rumored to have [one of] the most expensive properties in Ramatuelle, Cote d’Azur).
So the Swiss are paying back the French in kind. It’s actually probably orchestrated by the likes of BHL, Pinault, Lagardere Fils, Bettemcourt, etc.:”Oh you people want to fight us, plutocrats? Why don’t you start by paying tax yourself!”
I have myself paid extravagant tax (up to 75%) for stuff I had earned, although I’m not rich… Meanwhile people I know, who inherited CASTLES, paid no tax whatsoever.
In the case of Switzerland, I know personally 3 people who inherited small bank accounts there (a few thousand Euros). Already years ago, they were hounded by the authorities and the bankers about their unlawful act (inheriting something they did not know existed, as it was legal to have such accounts in the past).
So it’s all kabuki. I just watched the movie Wolf of Wall Street, a true story… I will say more about it today. The small fry gets fried, the big predators out there, eat it. The hounding of the USA against Switzerland is, as I already said, all about market share. It’s a deliberate plot of the Obama administration, which destroys Swiss bankers, precisely because it acts CIA style, drone style, against them to replace them by their true friends, the giant bankers who will soon pay the bills of Obama and his friends (including the 15 million official dollar man, Eric Holder, Attorney General…)
PA
LikeLike
February 1, 2014 at 1:53 pm |
I find myself compelled to read this. But I wish in many ways that I could resist! I was born six months before the end of the Second War, a turmoil about me that I was unaware of.
My hope is that I will die without awareness of the turmoil that your words imply. My fear is that I will not.
LikeLike
February 1, 2014 at 3:32 pm |
Relax Paul! Personal death is worse. The present state of affairs is also steadily getting worse, while being unaddressed. If there was real trouble, it’s not clear that the army would obey as in the 1940s. During the French Revolution, the army refused to fire on demonstrators. True, it was commanded by Lafayette, who has a history of disobedience…
PA
LikeLike
February 2, 2014 at 6:28 am |
Commenting on NYT’s political aides turning into richly paid lobbyists overnight:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/law-doesnt-end-revolving-door-on-capitol-hill/?hp&target=comments#commentsContainer
Loopholes everywhere, to serve the hyper rich and their plutocratic corporations. The largest being the 90,000 pages tax code, and growing. Plutocracy is strong, and smart, We the People are dumb, and weak. Thus the Greater Depression will go on, as ever more money is deflected to those who have nearly all the power.
LikeLike
February 24, 2014 at 5:56 am |
Patrice Ayme says: “Austerity for We The People, splurging for Plutocrats. How? Plutocrats control the tax code, and the money supply.”
Paul Pieter Kruijmer I don t know. And no one knows anyways
LikeLike