Unleashed Its Media, Loves Wars, And Wants Us All Stupid
GLOBAL DEEP PLUTOCRACY AS NEOFEUDALISM
- Evil will play out, and we will describe it with relish. Elucidating the basic facts is what wisdom seeks first and we will do it better if we enjoy it.
INEQUALITY KILLS PROGRESS, THE FORCE WHICH GIVES US EVER MORE MEANING
PROGRESS IS HUMANITY’S ETHICAL CONTEXT:
The following sketch of the main forces of history is written with a maximally progressive motivation. That is only normal: HUMANITY IS PROGRESS PERSONIFIED.
Still the “Democratic” Party, in power most of the time in the last few decades, has been, overall, very regressive… This democratic regression is in plain sight, but imprinted minds cannot see it, because they have been imprinted not to see it. They can’t see the reduction of life expectancy consecutive to Obamacare, or the decrease in wealth and opportunity of 90% of the population, over the last 47 years of mostly “Democratic” rule, or GOP presidents’ laws passed by “Democratic” Congresses, etc.
For plutocracy to capture the minds of its subjects, until they cannot even imagine any alternative, is the most efficient way to rule: it happened in declining Rome for centuries, and in turn contributed to its decline, because captured minds are low quality minds. It happened in the European, Chinese and Japanese Middle Ages. It happened with the superstitious terror Roman Catholicism, and Islam, imposed on the populations they ruled…
In average historical societies, as Rousseau pointed out, a tiny elite of leaders becomes filthy rich and powerful, while the civilization they oppressed progressed very slowly, stagnated, and quite often, regressed. In the present-day USA, top professional politicians became filthy rich from their political careers. Corruption, in other words, that all should be able to see, but do not.
A serious problem has been that the Democratic Party pretends to be on the left, defending “We The People” but actually the Democratic Party passed, all too often, laws way to the right of what the Grand Old Party (the GOP) had fostered before.
An example is Biden’s regressive Crime Bill of 1994, passed by the Senate 97 to 3… so it was a GOP Bill, in a sense, although its author, Biden, pretends to be a “Democrat” (Biden now says the law was a mistake all the political establishment made… forgetting to add he, Biden, was the one who actually wrote the law! The GOP voted for the Biden law.)
The retort that the so-called “Democrats” give to this is that their policies were right wing because the “Republicans”, the GOP, forced them that way (by the way, I am a registered Democrat, I do not harbor rage against the “Democratic” Party, just against horrendous ideas and policies). This astounding reply is deeply disingenuous. For years, the Reagan policies were turned into laws by Tip O’Neil’s “Democratic” Congress. That was viewed then as very… civilized.
In the first two years of the reign of Obama, there were at least 72 days when the Congress and Senate were in session and Obama enjoyed a “Supermajority”. To pass a drastic law in such a context, one needs minutes, not days (the Senate supermajority imposes its agenda). But the truth is, during the reign of Obama-Biden, the single genuinely progressive law passed outlawed the exclusion of preexisting conditions in healthcare private insurance (and that was a part of the ACA that the GOP supports).
Obama had a supermajority, but he did not use it, because Obama and his Congress presented no law that the GOP would strenuously object to. The mind manipulators of the “Democratic” Party elite and their pundits later claimed Dems could present no law that was advanced enough because the GOP would have blocked it… The truth is the opposite. “Democrats” never envisioned any progressive law under Obama-Biden. Obama passed several laws that were such a give-away to the wealthiest families, through their banks, that the GOP would never have dreamed to try to pass them before, so outrageously pro-wealth they were. The result was that inequality increased under Obama, reaching heights never seen before. Worse: Obama’s lying methods of feeding the wealthy with the money of the poor were imitated throughout the world, so deep global inequality augmented everywhere, and was called the “hope you can believe in”..
Doesn’t Biden support equality? Well he talks that way, as the expert, professional liar that he is, but his record is clear, loud and strong: Biden’s record is the exact opposite of supporting equality to an extent which is astounding. Biden is the first candidate to the US presidency known to have fostered, during his long career, the financial plutocracy and collaborated in a crime against humanity (the killing of millions in Iraq)… to the extent he did. Biden’s state of Delaware is the world’s top tax haven. And he got away with it by lying throughout.
What of Trump? Isn’t he a plutocrat? Yes, he is. But he is what has become a rare style of plutocrats, nowadays, the type who really builds things (as Eiffel used to in France). Plutocrats who build things use the financial plutocracy (because they need to borrow vast sums to build things), but they are not part of it. The financial plutocracy is dominant, and dominates the West (not China, which is under the Communist Party). When I was young and naïve, I used to deplore the connection between builders such as Trump and the banks. But then I came to realize, as I saw the housing crisis develop, throughout the West, that builders were not the enemy, and needed banks.
Donald Trump has a strong personality, and that led him to actively oppose laws and moods he disapproved of. He opposed fake racial preference laws, went to court over that, and always opposed the Global Deep Plutocracy, because he could see it destroying society. The Global Deep Plutocracy diverted too much of the essence of the economy overseas, and Trump could see it was all a big lie. Nobody can deny Trump’s originality: while Obama was busy snorting cocaine, Trump was loudly opposing Reagan, the GOP president who was exporting the US economy overseas… with the support of “Democrats” such as veteran Senator Biden.
In many ways, Trump is my opponent. I campaigned for Obama, a friend, for years. I can debate with my opponent. But I cannot debate with a fake friend who stabbed me in the back. The enemy of my greatest enemy should be my ally.
***
WHY DID PROGRESS STOP?
In 1874 Félix du Temple succeeded the first powered take-off with a man on board. 95 years later, humans landed on the Moon. In this short period air travel became routine, human life expectancy doubled and thermonuclear fireworks were lit. Poverty diminished considerably, everybody willing and able got a job, or a top quality free education.
Watch her Serene Princess Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein fresh from cavorting with kings of Arabia and Spain, getting tens of millions of dollars in money laundering (yes, Wittgenstein, like the philosopher, same family, and this per se shows where much famous philosophy is coming from, the GDP itself. Wittgenstein was a multibillionaire, no wonder he had many friends..) with Clinton, Princess Charlene of Monaco in between. Tax avoidance Delaware financial engineering style aristocracy: Neo-feudalism is already here…
More than 50 years ago a life form reached another celestial body, deliberately, probably for the first time in galactic history. So much progress in a few decades… And then… Fifty years of stagnation, or even decay: quality jobs vanishing, education, health care and housing getting too expensive, mathematics and reading scores going down, world ecology collapsing, religious madness growing, people getting killed for making jokes, unending wars… Why? What happened to the Western world which had led the scientific and industrial revolutions? Why did they slow down so much?
It was a tragedy: although it could have been avoided, by deploying existing technology in a timely manner, Earth’s biosphere started to suffer from a man-made mass extinction. To understand what happened one has to find the most significant indicators which tracked the tragedy. What could those be? Let’s take a sweep at history, on the grandest scale, to guess what the important notions were.
***
THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY DEFINES WHAT CIVILIZATION SHOULD BE:
For millions of years, human populations were tiny and remarkably diverse. The cause was great distances forced by the low productivity of the prehistoric environment. But then our human ancestors learned to invent technology. First stones and sticks. Then clothing, so that humans could colonize cold areas in Eurasia (as early as 1.8 million years ago in Georgia). Then came the mastery of fire, more than a million year ago (1.3 million years ago, in China). Fire was a force and capability multiplier: predators could be scared away, entire forests could be burned, creating the sort of savannah-park environment humans thrived best in. Otherwise inedible foods could be eaten, thanks to cooking.
However, communications stayed very difficult. 50,000 years ago, Eurasia still had at least four genetically different human species… They had long used crucially lifesaving technology (tools, weapons, clothing, massive cooking of otherwise inedible plants). But progress was slow. Still, they mixed up in mysterious migrations: present humans resulted from interbreeding those human species. Now there is only one human species.
Aside from fire, for millions of years human ancestors had only as much energy as what their muscles could deliver… but then humans got the idea of making friends. And, because humans had the power, those potential friends became very friendly. Humans helped wolves evolve into dogs: suddenly human capability was very significantly enhanced: two top predators collaborating, and soon guarding vast herds of friendly, domesticated ungulates.
10,000 years ago, the first cities appeared in Anatolia, where winters can be rough, and high productivity plants (wheat, etc,) could feed them. Great human concentrations brought debate fostering plenty of ideas and innovation. The impact of humanity started to grow exponentially. New methods of harnessing nature, such as hydraulics, and new species, were created.
To understand what being most civilized means, is revealed by time and location. The progress of humanity was concentrated in space and time, so it depends upon factors rarely present. The alphabet, the sexagesimal system, many crops, many democratic structures, and the first cities all appeared in an area less than 1% of the world’s continental mass… But smack dab in the Middle Earth, at the junction of Africa and Eurasia, where the trading of people and ideas was maximal, from Ireland to India. So we can see that global trade can be excellent for progress, and how powerful it is. Global trade is presently abused, it is far from intrinsically bad.
All this concentration of innovation shows that the Middle Earth had learned to learn. Global trade helped. A more granular study shows that particular civilizations were highly innovative for often very short time, and then knowledge disseminated: Sumerian cities, Egypt, Crete, Phoenicia, Greek cities, Roman Republic…
What distinguished these particularly innovative societies? They have all one thing in common: the most innovative societies were more egalitarian, and less ruled as military dictatorships than their peers. Sumerian two chamber parliament cities, Cretan girl toreadors, the first dams in Yemen, with the first known queen, the proverbial queen of Sheba… Compare Sparta, the most racist, exploitative and iniquitous Greek city, which invented nothing, with Athens, the direct democracy which created an enormous body of knowledge, in a few decades. Equality fosters progress and the reason is obvious, as equality fosters debate, thus intelligence. Compare Biden in his basement, whom nobody can debate, and Trump’s too many tweets, which anybody can debate.
If one thinks a moment about it, one realizes that equality is a fundamental human quality: it enables intelligence, the core characteristic of humanity. So how did equality evolve in the history of civilizations? Equality went up and down. Most of the time, it was down, crushed by oligarchies, the rule of the few, and plutocracies, powers of evil. Egalitarian societies were rare, but when equality was up, progress was fast.
Nihilists say: ’Progress really? Oh, so naïve. What is progress?’, and they chomp on their privileges, while looking down on the less enlightened.
***
CITIZEN-SOLDIERS DEMOCRACIES: SMARTER AND MOST POWERFUL
Equality, as in ancient Greece and Rome already, was a virtuous consequence of war. In the ancient world, hoplites armies, made of middle class citizens, armed, dangerous and superbly trained, evolved into the most efficient type of military. The Greek city-state of Argos launched it, and became a great power, soon imitated by other Greek city-states.
A consequence of hoplites armies was that citizens were armed and dangerous, and could not be subjected to a military dictatorship… because they were themselves the military. So democracy was an immediate consequence of switching from a military based on an aristocratic cavalry, to a military centered on a hoplite army. King Servius Tullius made Rome switch to a hoplite army. Rome then turned into a de facto republic. As a bonus, its superior hoplite army defeated her aristocratic neighbors which had not armed the middle class. For the next seven centuries, Rome would be a hot bed of intellectual debates… Until the aristocratic system of Augustus, complete with a professional army (that is an army not made of citizen-soldiers) killed the Democracy, the debate. the Republic, tolerance and civilization (in this order).
Even when the Roman empire was transpierced by tiny invasive German armies, Roman plutocracy in the late empire, refused to do what would have saved Roman civilization: draft gigantic Roman armies of citizen-soldiers. Because by then, the Roman plutocracy wanted only subjects. It was better to make deals with the invaders.
Something similar to the military birth of Greco-Roman democracies happened in Europe and America in the first half of the Twentieth Century. To defeat racist German fascism between 1914 and 1945, the representative democracies, led by the French Republic, had to go all out and muster enormous armies of citizen-soldiers. In the period 1939-1945, 16.5 million men served in the US Army, 6.5 million in the French army, 3 million in the British army. Those men had been trained to kill in the name of democracy, equality, liberty … It would have been ill advised to deprive them of these afterwards (such a deprivation is actually how the Franco-Algerian civil war started…in 1945…).
Thus, the GI Bill, which provided America’s young, dangerous and idealistic men with all they could possibly want. Thus, massive socialist programs in Europe, such as universal free health care, universal free education, up to the university. Massive construction programs rebuilt destroyed cities, factories or railroads… or established freeway systems (US). The rivalry with the socialist paradise next door in the USSR helped along. This all led to an explosion of knowledge and capability… for thirty glorious years concluding with the visits to the Moon…
However, even then, young people in the most advanced countries realized they were submitted to exploitative oligarchies. In 1968, revolt spread, from San Francisco to Prague. The war in Vietnam showed that a small elite in the USA had conspired to make a war which killed three million for no good reason. That became a teaching moment, worldwide. Twelve years after the invasion of Hungary, the invasion of Czechoslovakia confirmed that the USSR, far from being a paradise, was a malevolent back-stabbing empire even worse than the USA. France also revolted, as young people there realized in May 68 that too many structures had more to do with encrusted privilege of an elite than anything else.
Symbolized by the revolt of 1968, a defiance of the governments installed itself. But it is important to realize that May 68 happened because the great egalitarian movement which had accompanied the Second World War was fully receding. Would-be soldiers, in the USA and France, had given signs of rebellion, so the mood of the elite turned to replacing citizen-soldiers by professionals.
***
STEALTHY GROWTH OF PLUTOCRACY, HIDDEN BY ARCANE LAWS:
May 68 was just a flash in the pan. Obvious irritants were removed. The elite pursued its ascending trajectory in a stealthier manner. In the USA, plutocrat Kaiser persuaded his friend President Nixon to use the government to help establish the private Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) system. (Just one man revered by the Democratic Party, Warren Buffet, made more than ten billion dollars from HMOs; his friends and collaborators made much more.)
The lesson the elite got from Vietnam is that war was good, be it only for its distracting element, as long as one could hide who started it. Under “Democratic” President Carter a deliberate ultra-secret plot launched a war in Afghanistan. Officially, that war aimed at destroying the USSR by forcing it to intervene in a war it could not win. But the real reason is that the US Deep State and its military-industrial complex wanted a war to extend the empire and replace the Vietnam War. Carter’s Deep State used proxies. The Machiavellian idea was to use Muslim Fundamentalism from Saudi Arabia and the ISI of the Republic of Pakistan to wage holy war against the secular republic of Afghanistan. It could be done cheaply by attacking little girls’ schools (the Prophet, who improved the condition of little girls, would not have been amused). The war in Afghanistan killed millions, and is still on, four decades later. But the USSR, which had been trying to reform itself, indeed collapsed. And ultimately, war was extended to Iraq, jacking up the price of oil, as US oil men and Wall Street behind it, wanted. Otherwise said, “Democratic” President Carter was the first “Neocon”.
***
WHEN THE WEALTHIEST HARNESSED FREEDOM:
The wealthy elite harnessed craftily the idea of freedom. It was going to be their freedom. Freedom would be found in private enterprises, a move led by Thatcher and Reagan. TINA, There Is No Alternative, they claimed. There was a lot of merit to the idea.
But profiteering could not be applied to unprofitable infrastructure. So, infrastructure went the way of the dodo when privatization was imposed. The psychiatric patients were released to the streets. Violent crime exploded. In reaction, 97 to 3, US Senators passed Biden’s Crime Bill, which was pitiless on people of color, sending millions to prison for nearly nothing (Biden recognizes it was a mistake). My spouse fought a year to get a father of four out of life in prison. He had got life, because of a little pipe in his pocket. Just a pipe. No drug. It required Obama’s presidential pardon, which was obtained (with thanks from the president and the AG!)
China, though, was not that stupid. China has invested in massive public infrastructure for 4,000 years, and China knew the importance of governmentalism, when the government actively steers the economy in the direction of maximal progress. China went on a rampage of industrialization, using lots of Intellectual Property gleaned from the West. Quickly, the wealthiest persons in the West, especially in the USA, realized they could make a business deal with China, similar to the deals they had made with fascists regimes after World War One. (Such deals are not in official versions of history; however, just on the question of oil procurement, Hirohito’s Japan, Stalin’s USSR, and all European fascist regimes, depended crucially on US oil men, their capital, companies or know-how.)
Top decision makers in the USA became mesmerized by a philosopher who told them that the secret of a successful society is the roaring individualist:
“[Dean] “My dear fellow, who will let you?”
[Roark] “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Anything was permitted, then. Nobody could stop them. Constraints on finance installed under Roosevelt in 1933, were removed by Clinton. The 1920s were back, complete with a crash (2008). The situation was worse, though, as Western bankers in the increasingly infernal trio of UK, US and France, mostly invested in bets with each other called derivatives.
Chinese bankers investing in derivatives, instead of material infrastructure, were encouraged not to pursue this, with a bullet in the back of the head.
Thus, May 68 only made the elite smarter. By then the elite had become fully hereditary protected by an arsenal of iniquitous laws (and not just in the US, led by Delaware: in France the hyper wealthy’s property is protected from otherwise punitive inheritance death taxes).
Inequality grew, helped by the partnership with the Chinese dictatorship. Inequality itself is a dictatorship, so its relationship with the Chinese dictatorship justified its own existence and reciprocally. This sort of growth of evil has happened many times in history, in all locales. Under its metastatic form, it is called as it should be, Evil-Power, Pluto-Kratia, where it penetrates all of society.
****
Share this: Please do share, ideas are made to spread and enlighten!
Like this:
Like Loading...