At this delicate point, the rise of plutocracy is all about the details of its implementation. Once plutocracy has grown enough, it will be fully arrogant and call itself loudly an aristocracy (“rule of the best”).
Already in the USA, plutocrats say that they need more money and should pay less taxes, because they are the best, and ought to be rewarded, because they are the best. Topologically the argument is close to defending the notion of aristocracy, it establishes a mood conducive to aristocracy.
Plutocrats do not say loudly, yet, that they ought to rule. Instead, more humbly, they content themselves with ruling through their agents (most of them multimillionaires).
Naked Slave To Plutocracy
[Adapted by Karine Percheron-Daniels from the “Portrait D’Une Negresse“, by Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist, 1800, Louvre, Paris.]
Can you point to me what part of the Constitution of the USA created a “First” person? Right. Rome’s Octavian, called himself “Princeps” (“First”) informally introducing the notion. But he has been dead nearly 2,000 years.
The New York Times explains how Congressional aides turned lobbyists evade a law saying they have to wait a year, if they earned a bit more than $130,000. They just have non-governmental organizations, or individuals (such as their own Congressman!) paying their incomes over 130 K.
Says the New York Times:
“A top aide to a Republican congressman from Arizona helped promote a legislative plan to overhaul the nation’s home mortgage finance system. Weeks after leaving his government job, he reappeared on Capitol Hill, now as a lobbyist for a company poised to capitalize on the plan.
A former counsel to Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee left Capitol Hill a year ago. He, too, returned to the Hill just months later, lobbying committee aides on behalf of Wall Street giants like JPMorgan Chase and Bloomberg L.P.
And the chief of staff for the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee left his government salary behind in January 2012. Yet for months afterward, he continued to manage his boss’s re-election campaign, even while serving as a lobbyist for financial industry clients.
The experiences of the three Capitol Hill aides-turned-lobbyists — traced through interviews with political operatives and a review of public records — illustrate in new detail the gaping holes in rules governing Washington’s revolving door.
Federal ethics rules are intended to limit lobbying by former senior officials within one year after they leave the government. Yet even after the ethics rules were revised in 2007 following a lobbying scandal, more than 1,650 congressional aides have registered to lobby within a year of leaving Capitol Hill…
[these aides go] from government pay to six- and seven-figure private sector salaries.
In the three cases identified by The Times, the interviews and records suggest, the former House staff members did not violate the rules but rather seized on loopholes to lobby within one year.”
Seven figures means those aides earn more than one million dollar a year.
Loopholes everywhere, to serve the hyper rich and their plutocratic corporations. The largest loophole being the 90,000 pages Obama tax code (and growing!). (It was “only” 16,000 pages in 2006 under Bush, when democrats took control of Congress. Meaning that most of the growth in loopholes was accomplished by democrats.)
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, giving them ever more power to infuse the entire mood of civilization with the poisonous atmosphere they secrete as the lethal critters they are.
On Thursday, the first lady attended two Democratic National Committee fundraising events in San Francisco, a roundtable at a restaurant in Jackson Square and a reception in the Financial District. Closed events, plutocrats only.
The First Lady attended the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Women’s Lunch and VIP reception around 11:30 a.m. on the second day of her fundraising trip to San Francisco.
A small group of protesters gathered outside San Francisco’s Fairmont hotel late Friday morning as First Lady Michelle Obama joined lesser lady House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for a Democratic fundraising event. Pelosi is a second generation politician (her dad was mayor of Philadelphia).
Health care activist Joan Intrator, 86, a low lady of San Francisco, said she was sending the message to the First Lady and Commander In Chief Obama that there should be access to Medicare for all Americans.
A lone Occupy San Francisco organizer passed fliers against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a fast track trade agreement between a grand total of 36 officials from12 countries including the U.S., Japan, and Mexico, and more than 600 representatives of plutocratic corporations. 36 representatives of the Peoples, versus 600 Plutos: fair enough.
The downtown march from Secondary Lady Pelosi’s San Francisco office to Third Rated Lady Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s happened at 4:30 p.m. The crowd was boosted by a few gulls.
Friday morning’s DCCC event was sold out. According to the DCCC’s website, tickets cost from $500 to $32,400 per adulating and most grateful plutocrat. $32,400, that’s more than half of the median family income in the USA.
Just before 12:30 p.m., First Lady Obama’s motorcade crossed Market Street at Eighth Street on the way to the airport.
If Americans don’t get the message that the USA is ruled by an aristocracy, they are really dense. As far as plutocrats are concerned, the denser We The People, the better.
Not seeing what Michelle Obama is doing, selling her charms and influence, is an occasion to learn to become even dumber than before. But did not Obama propose to raise the minimum salary by 15% for a few thousand people, sometimes in the future? Will whine those who are stupid enough.
Yes. But why did Obama not propose to triple the minimum wage for everybody when he could, five years ago? That would have brought it to the old level (in constant dollars). Because Obama the Real has nothing to do with Obama the Charmer. They are antipodal.
Just as Obamacare is nearly antipodal to universal healthcare.
Prostitutes get motorcades, plotters make millions for all to see. And We The People is getting habituated to the increasing corruption. Progress, totally, from the point of view of the Demoncratic party. Yet, queens and corruptocrats have no place in a Republic.
But how to make the rabble understand this, in a country where supermen are steroid laden brutes whose loftiest ideal is to bang into each other’s brains at full speed, until they get neurodegenerative encephalopathy? While stuffing themselves with “superbowls”? First the brains get turned off, by First Persons, and other prostitutes, then the Republic will also suffer neurodegenerative encephalopathy. The fact People love that symbolically is no good omen.
Patrice Ayme’
Tags: Fund Raisers, Lobbyists, Loopholes, Michelle Obama, Motorcades, Plutocrats, Tax loopholes
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
February 3, 2014 at 12:27 am |
“But how to make the rabble understand this, in a country where…”
What other way could there be than by appealing to their sense of love for their children and their children’s future world/culture. I don’t think there is any other motivator that could ever be strong enough. But first, the wool must be pulled back. Thus, the question becomes — where, when, and how will the tipping point for that to occur be (be)reached?
What will the costs be? I think we have an idea. Who decides/how is it decided that it’s worth it?
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 12:58 am |
Make that (b)reached. This penultimate football game of the year can be so distracting…
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 2:20 am |
Hello Stevie J, and welcome to the comments! Indeed, love is the ultimate value, we all share it, it’s basically automatic, or we won’t be. So, when people realize that, by being supine, and accepting of their would-be lords, they are actually nasty to their children, they ought to react.
However, it’s not that simple. In truth, there is a race between indignation, revolution, and habituation and resignation.
For example the case of the Fall of the Roman State is instructive that way. Although Gaul had a long tradition of rebellion, when the state went down, People did not react too much (although they reacted to the Huns, ambushing them in Aureiianum/Orleans). Plutocracy and theocracy, intertwined ever progressed, and so did invasions… Finally the reaction came from the Franks, because the Franks, although a small minority, did not have the mood of victims. Instead they visualize themselves along the lines of “live free or die“.
There is a real danger that, should People not rebel soon enough, we will see the rise of a new aristocracy, complete with Michelle, Princess of Chicago, etc…
It is astounding that no so called “democrat” rise in fury against the fund raisers…
PA
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 4:00 am |
The Obamas’ are pragmatic politicians at best. They are Wall Street Democrats.
We should be training our guns on the big fish – the masters of the universe themselves.
The Kochtopus brothers are pretty menacing.
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 4:32 am |
Wall Street is the biggest enchilada. Kochs are fossils. Big bad fossils, right, but ain’t as bad as banksters and dark pool guys. Plus the entire process is corrupt. Times found 2,000 corrupt gov officials in like a year
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 4:52 am |
Agreed, it’s all about the biggest money. Obama views himself as friend to the Gates, Buffet (and his multibillionaire satellites), Walton family, and countless bankers. They brandish the Kochs in a fake way. Going to be fun, once Obama allows the XL pipeline…
PA
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 4:48 am |
Basically as GMax is saying, most or everybody going in politics is going because of the corruption. Kochs and the like have a sort of extra-political system, but the core problem is that the voting politicians and politicos with power, less than 1,000 people, the one in Congress during SOTU are corrupt so they prevent the passage of say, laws in politics.
I think the Senator of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren are not corrupt, but the big money is betting on Clinton at this point. To kill the masters of the universe, one has to go through the 1,000 corrupt politicians. Somehow force them.
That Obama was bought blindsided me. I am still not over that one. It’s not a question of pragmatism, he could have done whatever he wanted 5 years ago. But he deep down wanted to please the Financial Times.
PA
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 6:04 am |
Hilary is not the best choice for Democrats because of the Clintons’ strong ties with Wall Street gangsters.
Could we mount a unified campaign for Sen. Warren instead?
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 6:13 am |
This should be the hope. Although she is from HARVARD, she has enough intellectual pride to come clean. She took risks with the Obama crowd (who hates her). But I know for a fact that the Plutos are gigantically lining behind Hilary. I used to like Hilary, mostly because she was a woman, but now I am a bitter vengeful Tyranosopher. I will never swallow my Obama deception.
Warren is a god sent…
PA
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 5:22 am |
Funding ALEC, intellectually corrupting our schools and universities, bankrolling the Tea Party, organizing against AGW, lobbying for TPP, defending the right to pollute, setting up right-wing propaganda think tanks and the Koch bros. are not as bad as the fat cats in Wall Street? C’mon.
I’d say old plutos and noveau plutos are made of the same thick crocodile mold.
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 5:53 am |
Answer in a separate comment. One has to differentiate jackals howling, Kocks out, and politicians in power, devouring The People, while claiming to be licking their wounds…
PA
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 5:42 am |
Politics is the art of the possible.
If we keep on sniping at our own plank instead of concentrating on the enemy out front, we’d soon be overwhelmed.
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 5:49 am |
Dear Lovell: I don’t know what ALEC is. For the rest: universities have long started down the corruption slope. They were fully on it 35 years ago.
The rest are pretty much distractions. The Kochs, like Fox, are nuisances, real irritations, but they never had the power of PLUTO Pelosi. Say.
The crux of the matter, that has gone worse under Obama than even Bush (and I would hate Bush if I did not despise him too much to find him less than funny) is INEQUALITY.
The 2008 crisis was basically a heist. Obama and the top politicos covered that up. Hence greater inequality.
To torpedo the Plutos, one has to start by extirpating money from politics enough. Far from doing that, the Obamas have been imposing the mood that big money was the best friend of progress.
Even Bush, whom I detest, never sank that low.
And the whole demoncratic party is behind that move towards more money as redemption (with exception of Warren, and Brown in California, although there may be more).
Just what I am saying is that one cannot go to war wit those back stabbers. At least, if Romney were president, they would be forced to fake opposing his policies… ;-)!
PA
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 6:43 am |
ALEC is American Legislative Executive Council. Organized by the Kochtopus, it aims to influence legislation and policy making on the state level. They draft bills on labor laws, education, environment, and others which are then adapted word for word by lawmakers in states controlled by GOP like Kansas and Michigan.
That they have actually been able to do exactly that is a positive confirmation that the Koch brothers are the real power behind the curtain, the puppet masters. The real capo di capi.
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 4:24 pm |
Thanks. That the Kochs are really really bad, I do not doubt. Yet they do not control as much money as the masters of the plutocratic corporations that Obama lauded in his SOTU. And all these pale relative to the trillions Wall Street and its associated TBTF banks control.
My real beef is that, as it is that the natural protest party is the Democratic Party, and, that, unfortunately, since 2006, at the very least, not to say BC, Before Clinton, is penetrated by the spirit of Rubin, that is, Goldman Sachs.
As long as people do not understand what that means, we will go down. The Koch’s fossil fuels are a climate catastrophe away from being outlawed, not so the private-public fractional reserve system.
PA
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 4:54 pm |
Absolutely agree on the wolves and piranhas of Wall Street raised and cultivated, in no small part, during the Clinton era.
But to say that the Kochs do not have as much money is somewhat misleading because they are way up there in the #3 and #4 spots of the Forbes list of richest Americans.
And they responded with zeal and dedication to the Powell Memo depicted in Heist by documentary filmmaker Causey and Goldmacher.
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 4:27 pm |
And there is still, of course, the Citizens United ruling.
If Scalia, Alito, et al., did not legitimized big corporate money in politics, there would have been no pimps and prostitutes on Washington streets and corridors.
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 6:50 pm |
Sure. The SCOTUS has been corrupt since before the Bush versus Gore decision. So they keep on pushing, ever more slowly. One of the most “liberal” “leftist” judges has a nice property in some Caribbean tax heaven, where he receives influential friends. No need to look at Scaglia unbearable mug to find the smell of money.
As far as the Kochs are concerned, I do not deny their mighty vicious influence. But one has to be careful, because other plutocratic families have dispersed their fortunes to hide their conspiracies. For example, the Waltons control directly well above 100 billion, and the Gates control more than 130 billions (although Forbes lists Bill at 72 billion, that excludes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and various off-shore holdings, say in Bermuda).
PA
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 5:27 pm |
We recently came across the organisation Move to Amend, see https://movetoamend.org
Any thoughts, Patrice? (And PA readers?)
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 7:00 pm |
Never heard of it, thanks Paul, I will look into it. Without changing massively the Constitution of the USA, there is no hope. However I got white senior Americans getting instantaneously enraged when I suggested this. I was told that, as long as I proposed such insanities, nobody serious in the USA would see nothing in me, but for an offensive clown, that ought to go back to wherever I came from, ASAP.
And that, BTW, from old time residents of the capital of alternative thinking, Berkeley, which I haunt like a real life Lucifer.
Amusingly, Dieudonne’
(see my https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/01/28/plutocracy-nazism-are-entangled/)
has just been interdicted entry in the United Kingdom… Lest the dangerous rebel contaminates the auspicious climate for plutocracy there, no doubt…
Meanwhile to see Dieudonne’ in Nyon, Switzerland, seats are selling on the Black Market for $500… The ministry of culture of the Canton de Vaud (VD) will record all the ten representations, and check if it’s… kosher.
PA
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 10:17 pm |
Move To Amend describes itself, thus:
Move to Amend is a coalition of hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of individuals committed to social and economic justice, ending corporate rule, and building a vibrant democracy that is genuinely accountable to the people, not corporate interests. We call for an amendment to the US Constitution to unequivocally state that inalienable rights belong to human beings only, and that money is not a form of protected free speech under the First Amendment and can be regulated in political campaigns.
Their motion that they seek all to sign is:
“We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and other related cases, and move to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.”
According to their website their Motion to Amend is signed by 327,865 and counting…
The website suggests the movement is widely spread across the Nation – https://movetoamend.org/map/groups
Still, would love your considered feedback on this movement.
LikeLike
February 4, 2014 at 12:37 am |
There are millions of pages written on what constitute a moral person, from Locke to Rawls to Denett. In my usual, Alexander (that means victory) inspired style, I would cut through the knotty complexity.
Corporations can’t vote, and are interdicted to vote, so they should not talk as if they have a right to vote. Corporations do not have voting rights, so they should not have isegoria. Same for money: can’t vote, so can’t talk.
Thus I would go exactly in the inverse direction of SCOTUS: I would actually INTERDICT corporation political speech, just as it is interdicted to the army.
PA
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 7:10 pm |
To consider that money is personhood, as the Supreme Court of the USA does, is a complete violation of isegoria, a pillar of democracy we have already lost.
The proposed amendment is as follows:“. . . corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”
~Supreme Court Justice Stevens, January 2010
LikeLike
February 3, 2014 at 10:29 pm |
The Wall Street Takeover:
LikeLike
February 4, 2014 at 12:46 am |
Thanks Lovell! Will listen to it when I have time (not now! ;-)!)
In 1933 FDR cracked down on Wall Street. In 2008-2009, Bush & Obama crawled down under Wall Street’s jackboot. Same crisis, opposed solutions. Now we are living the Final Solution, in full.
The difference? More than 75 years of increasing plutocracy, leveraging, gravity boosting off Nazism and the like…
PA
LikeLike
February 6, 2014 at 7:11 pm |
Seeing the local doctor costs 20€.
Just making the point that it’s not “free”. From what I have heard and read – but I haven’t studied this in detail – Obamacare was introduced on the basis of lies and is no real solution to the problem, which is that insurance companies and doctors are ripping off the people. Health care in the US is more expensive than elsewhere for inferior treatment. The French system is excellent (I lived in France for ten years), just unaffordable thanks to idiot politicians.
LikeLike
February 6, 2014 at 7:12 pm |
Chris: 20 Euros, that’s not even the average co-pay under the average Obamacare (and that can’t be reimbursed)
You have got the analysis of Obamacare down pat. Although you forgot the drug companies, which also rip off the patients. Obamacare is actually another lease on life of plutocratic health care, USA style. It was actually the old Republican solution to health care (“Romneycare”). I wrote extensively against it, way back. It’s indeed no solution, and the cost of health care should lift again imminently.
LikeLike
February 9, 2014 at 10:43 pm |
Alexi Helligar
What’s interesting is that the “rich” players not only became less humane, but they attributed their success to their own virtues and not to the random and rigged aspects of the game.
Does money make you mean?
ted.com
It’s amazing what a rigged game of Monopoly can reveal. In this entertaining but sobering talk, social psychologist Paul Piff shares his research into how people behave when they feel wealthy. (Hint: badly.) But while the problem of inequality is a complex and daunting challenge, there’s good news t…
LikeLike
February 9, 2014 at 10:44 pm |
Patrice Ayme: The more unfair the gain, the more Dark those who profit from it become. Why? Because they pile up obscurantism on top of the inequity they thrive from, to cover-up their malfeasance, and even more violence, to splurge some more.
PA
LikeLike